US President Donald Trump delivers remarks at the National Memorial Day Observance at the Memorial Amphitheatre in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, on May 26, 2025.

With a combination of executive orders, legal maneuvers and staffing decisions, US President Donald Trump has already put in motion his next effort to subvert upcoming federal elections in 2026 and 2028.

Since taking office, Trump has installed loyalists who follow his orders into key positions at the Department of Justice, issued executive orders centralising decision-making within the White House, attempted to unilaterally change state and local election laws, demanded unprecedented access to voter data, dismantled election security protections, threatened elections officials and workers, law firms and others who have historically stood up to protect elections and defended, hired or pardoned those involved in previous efforts to subvert elections.

All of these actions combine into a “concerted strategy” to undermine federal elections, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit that advocates for voting rights. The report highlights how these actions are being used together to set the stage for future lies about election integrity and attempts by the White House to try to change the outcome of elections altogether. It also details how they are being fought by states, election officials and voting advocates.

“We are seeing this as an unprecedented intrusion by the White House into the way that our elections work in a way that really makes us concerned for our elections moving forward,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center.

President Donald Trump has made subversion of elections central to his political agenda.

Trump has made the subversion of elections central to his political career, which he launched by questioning whether President Barack Obama was eligible to be president. He has claimed every election since 2012 that did not go Republicans’ way was rigged with illegal votes and fraud, even claiming that his 2016 win would have been bigger if not for alleged fraud. This false campaign culminated after his 2020 loss when he illegally attempted to remain in power and sparked an insurrection aimed at stopping the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

That effort was “haphazard and desperate,” according to Morales-Doyle, but with four years of planning and an even more supine Republican Congress, Trump returned to office with time to put a similar plan into place.

“What we are witnessing now is that Trump, from day one of this administration, has started putting the wheels in motion to undermine elections and to make sure the people who would be carrying out that plan won’t say ‘no’ this time around,” Morales-Doyle said.

The most important change from his first administration is that Trump has shied away from hiring experienced eminences into key posts in the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Defence and instead appointed toadies who follow his orders.

After the 2020 election, Trump’s attempt to steal the election was hamstrung by his appointees, including Attorney General William Barr, who refused to seize voting machines at Trump’s request, and other DOJ officials who fought Trump’s efforts to appoint Jeff Clark as acting attorney general in order to issue a letter saying the election was marred by fraud.

This second Trump administration is instead staffed with people who helped Trump lie about the 2020 election, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Ed Martin, a right-wing attorney who now leads a Justice Department task force on the “weaponisation” of the federal........

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