Knowing what we know now about Donald Trump’s willingness to interfere with adverse election results on January 6, 2021, the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections feels ominous in a familiar way. If anything, the 47th president is more adamant than the 45th about the impossibility of legitimately losing an election and has the benefit of past experience in dialing up havoc to ensure the “correct” outcome.

Trump has done about all he can to rig the midterms, most notably by encouraging a wildly unprecedented and mostly successful wave of hyperpartisan gerrymandering of U.S. House districts. It’s possible something will yet come out of his monomaniacal push for the enactment of the SAVE America Act, which would throw preparations for the midterms into total chaos and dramatically reduce turnout among pro-Democratic voting groups. But for now, the odds remain high that his party is about to lose control of the U.S. House and with it the trifecta control of the federal government that makes it possible to enact pure party-line legislation like last year’s landmark One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

All his flailing around in support of conspiracy theories about massive noncitizen voting has predisposed his MAGA base to defend or even demand a GOP refusal to accept defeat in November. As David French noted last week in a New York Times column, there is little doubt about Team Trump’s willingness to conduct another, more successful version of January 6. So the question is, French says, what is the “actual mechanism for reversing the election?” What is the current counterpart to John Eastman’s strategy for getting Mike Pence to reject Joe Biden’s certification as president during the congressional counting of electoral votes?

To be clear, the situation isn’t at all identical, as legal beagle Jeffrey Toobin points out in a subsequent Times column. Under the Eastman scheme, the constitutionally established........

© Daily Intelligencer