Trump’s election rhetoric is getting more direct

President Donald Trump’s ongoing attack on elections has not exactly mellowed with age. If anything, it has gotten more explicit.

Over the past few months, Trump told podcaster-turned-FBI deputy director-turned-podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans “should take over the voting” in 15 places and “ought to nationalize the voting.” He told Reuters that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.” He told NBC that he would only accept the midterm results “if the elections are honest.” On Truth Social, he went after the Supreme Court because “they wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020.”

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was asked about Trump’s comment about nationalizing elections, he responded by claiming, without evidence, that election results in “blue states” like California “just look on [their] face to be fraudulent.”

Now Trump is concentrating on an anti-voting bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, America Act, which would block millions of Americans from voting. He has also made it clear why he wants it: “[Democrats] know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.”

With polls suggesting Republicans could lose control of the House and the Senate, Trump and his allies are building a broad effort to weaken confidence in elections and, it appears, to set up the same old excuse for November if the results go against them.

That effort includes weaponizing the Department of Justice and the FBI, weakening voter protections, redrawing maps to dilute minority voting power, installing election deniers in government, and encouraging election officials across the country to push an anti-voting agenda without consequence.

Here is a look at the main ways the Trump administration is already targeting the midterms.

The SAVE Act is the policy version of the conspiracy theory

A lot of the administration’s election strategy has been packaged into one piece of legislation.

The SAVE Act is the Republican answer to the conspiracy theory that millions of noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. That claim circulated widely before the 2024 presidential race, but the evidence says something far less dramatic. Noncitizen voting appears to account for a tiny sliver of ballots. A 2017 Brennan Center estimate across 12 states put the figure at 0.0001 percent. Applied to the number of people who voted in 2024, that works out to just over 150 votes. Not exactly the electoral fraud apocalypse people keep auditioning for.

A previous attempt to pass the bill failed last year after broad opposition. Republicans came back in January with a revised version, now called the SAVE America Act. The House initially released a draft that would have required all voters to provide specific documentary proof of citizenship. That requirement was later removed in an update earlier this month. Even so, the bill would still force every state to require certain photo IDs at the polls, which would immediately block millions of people from voting.

It would also require new voter registrations to include a passport or birth certificate. More than 20 million Americans of voting age do not have access to those documents.

The measure narrowly passed the House. More than 50 Republican senators have signaled support, but Democrats could still stop it in the Senate through the filibuster.

Trump has already signaled that parliamentary rules are just a detail. “We are going to have the Save America Act, one way or the other, after approval by Congress through the very proper use of the Filibuster or, at minimum, by a Talking Filibuster, à la ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’” he wrote on Truth Social last month. More recently, he has linked the bill’s passage to getting Transportation Security Administration workers paid during the current partial government shutdown.

In practical terms, the bill is unlikely to pass in its current form. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has repeatedly ruled out changing filibuster rules to force it through.

Republicans are also pushing an even harsher rewrite of election rules through the Make Elections Great Again, or MEGA, Act. That proposal would end universal mail-in voting and shift a large share of election control away from the states and toward the federal government.

The SAVE America Act is also meant to turn Trump’s March 2025 executive order on elections into law. That order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” includes many of the same provisions, but goes further by requiring states to give the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and the Department of Homeland Security access to unredacted voter rolls. The Justice Department is now suing states to get that same information.

Last October, a court already signaled that Trump’s order was a major overreach, partly blocking implementation and ruling that Trump does not have the authority to rewrite the election process on his own.

Even if the bill stalls in Congress, there are still plenty of people inside the administration working to undermine trust in elections from the inside.

Election deniers have found jobs inside government

People who spent years peddling false claims about ballot mules, noncitizen voting, and other election conspiracies have landed in government under Trump.

Kari Lake, the former TV presenter who lost recent campaigns for governor and the Senate in Arizona, was appointed by Trump to oversee the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Lake has spent years promoting baseless election claims and has kept doing it after taking the job.

In August, Heather Honey, an activist whose work fed election denial claims and who has worked closely with former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, was named to a senior role at the Department of Homeland Security, where she will oversee election integrity.

In December, Gregg Phillips, cofounder of the election denial group True the Vote and a key figure behind the debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules, was appointed to help lead the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The White House has also leaned on prominent figures from the election denial world. In May of last year, Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain who has become one of the movement’s better-known names, said in a Substack post that he had briefed “one of President Trump’s most critical staff members and his own key staff, someone who undoubtedly interfaces with the President daily.”

The White House did not answer questions about those meetings. An official who was not authorized to speak on the record told WIRED at the time, “The White House does not comment on mysterious meetings with unnamed staffers.”

At the same time, Trump has tried to rewrite the post-2020 record by protecting people who helped him try to overturn the result. Last year, he issued “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to a group of people who had tried and failed to reverse the 2020 election.

He has also pressured Colorado Governor Jared Polis to release Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who became a cause célèbre on the right after helping facilitate a security breach during a software update to her county’s election system. Peters was convicted of four felonies. Trump has claimed he “pardoned” her, even though he has no power to pardon state charges.

Pressure on Election Day is being floated out loud

Trump has not formally announced a plan to send troops to polling places or seize voting machines. But his administration has gone out of its way to suggest those ideas are not off the table.

In January, Trump complained that the National Guard had not seized certain voting machines after the 2020 election. In early February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that she had not heard Trump discuss the issue specifically, but she could not “guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November.” That remark came after former White House adviser Steve Bannon said, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again ... We will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Earlier this month, during his confirmation hearing to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Senator Markwayne Mullin said he would be willing to deploy ICE to polling locations if there was “a specific threat.”

The effect of all this is predictable. Election officials in states across the country are already game-planning what happens if ICE or the National Guard shows up at polling sites.

Michael McNulty, policy director at the nonprofit Issue One, also points to the Justice Department’s decision to send monitors to oversee elections in New Jersey and California in November, even though no federal elections were taking place there. “The concern is that this could become a massive deployment of, quote unquote, observers by the DOJ in 2026 who might do something more, whether it's intimidation, whether it's interfering with local election officials, to get data to confirm conspiracy theories,” McNulty told WIRED.

The FBI is still chasing the 2020 election

On January 28, the FBI raided the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes and voter rolls tied to the 2020 election.

The search warrant affidavit, unsealed a few weeks ago, shows that the FBI relied on work by Kurt Olsen, a lawyer appointed by the administration in October to investigate election security. Olsen has long worked with major election deniers including Patrick Byrne, Mike Lindell and Kari Lake. His claims are based on conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that have already been debunked and investigated.

The raid also drew attention because Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was there. According to The Guardian, she is running a parallel investigation into the 2020 election, apparently with Trump’s quiet approval.

Election deniers, unsurprisingly, were thrilled even though they did not seem to know why the FBI had shown up. “You. Are. F*cked,” Lake wrote on X to a Fulton County election commissioner after the raid. Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and a major funder of election denial efforts, said he was “very excited.” Trump ally Sidney Powell said, “It’s about time.”

Dax Goldstein, who directs the election protection program at the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, said the raid relied on “long-debunked conspiracy theories about what happened in Fulton County.” He added, “But nonetheless, DOJ is continuing to use its immense power to advance tired lies. And that causes real harm, because DOJ has unique tools that run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists don’t.”

On March 5, the FBI widened its focus with a grand jury subpoena tied to its investigation into the widely discredited Cyber Ninjas audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The administration is demanding access to state voter rolls

Since May, the Trump administration, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, has been demanding unusually broad access to state voter rolls, without clearly explaining what it plans to do with the data or who will see it.

So far, the effort has had mixed results. Ten states, representing about 37 million people, have handed over records that include driver’s license information and partial Social Security numbers. When states refused, the Justice Department sued them. So far, 24 lawsuits have been filed.

In late January, just days after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal immigration agents, Bondi used the moment to demand that Minnesota turn over its voter data. A lawyer for the state called the request a “ransom note.”

States that did hand over their data also had to sign a confidential memorandum of understanding. It says the Trump administration planned to “test, analyze, and assess” the data and direct states to remove specific voters, which is a fairly dramatic rebrand of how elections usually work in the United States.

“This is a 180-degree turn,” Goldstein told WIRED. “Instead of taking a perspective of enforcing federal law and protecting individuals' rights to vote, the [civil rights] division is really focusing on executing on the president's priorities, which are fueled by conspiracy theories and anti-voting groups' narratives.”

The states that signed the agreement are given only 45 days to remove voters identified by the government, even though doing so would likely violate the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to wait two federal election cycles before removing someone from the rolls.

Local election officials have also started moving in the same direction. In September, the Republican-controlled head of North Carolina’s election board wrote to the state DMV demanding access to full Social Security numbers held by the agency.

In January, the board said it planned to label some voters as “presumptive noncitizens” using unreliable federal database data, which could lead to them being purged from the rolls. The board also voted to remove early voting sites from three North Carolina universities, despite major protests.

Mail-in voting is still a target

Trump has relied on mail-in ballots himself and even encouraged his supporters to use them before the 2024 election. That has not stopped him from spending years claiming the system is broken.

Last August, he made his goal explicit. “We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

This week, he again called mail-in voting “cheating,” only days after voting by mail himself in a special election in Florida.

His claim rests on the same old theory that Democrats use mail ballots to rig the vote. In reality, Republicans are less likely to vote by mail, in part because Trump has spent years treating the process as suspicious. That means mail ballots often arrive around election day and create a visible surge for Democrats once they are counted. The horror.

The Supreme Court also heard arguments this week in a case brought by the Republican National Committee asking that mail ballots that arrive after election day, even if they were postmarked before election day, not be counted. That change would affect hundreds of thousands of voters. The court’s conservative majority appeared open to siding with the RNC.

Redistricting is being used as a midterm weapon

Trump administration officials have pressed Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to keep Democrats from winning back control of Congress in the midterms.

When the effort began last June, Trump was hoping it would net a dozen or more seats. But court challenges and Democratic countermeasures mean the gains are likely to be smaller. Extreme gerrymanders can also create their own problems by putting some incumbents at risk.

States like Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have gone along with the administration’s demands. But any gains there could be offset by Democratic states, including California, which has carried out its own redistricting efforts.

The law that is supposed to stop discriminatory map-drawing is the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965. The Supreme Court weakened it in 2013 by eliminating federal oversight of election rules, and the court now appears poised to go after the act again. The conservative majority, shaped by Trump’s appointments, seems ready to effectively wipe out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which would sharply reduce the voting power of minority communities and give Republicans much freer rein to draw district lines as they wish.

DOGE and a “voter fraud” group

In a court filing in January, the Social Security Administration said that a DOGE employee had signed a “voter data agreement” with an unnamed “political advocacy group.” The agreement would give the group access to SSA data. The group wanted to find “evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.”

Several news outlets speculated that the group was True the Vote, since it had appealed directly to DOGE employees around that same time to help with exactly that kind of project. But Catherine Engelbrecht, True the Vote’s cofounder, later denied in a newsletter that the group was involved.

The Justice Department’s voting section has been hollowed out

Within months of Trump returning to office, the Justice Department’s voting section was given a new mission: stop focusing on ballot access and start chasing alleged voter fraud.

According to an internal memo obtained by AP, the change matched the priorities in Trump’s executive order and relied heavily on conspiracy theories tied to the 2020 election.

Since then, most of the attorneys in the voting section have left. Sources familiar with the situation told WIRED that experienced lawyers with decades of federal election-law experience were replaced by attorneys with no federal court background.

Many of the new hires reportedly have ties to election denial groups or have worked to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf.

The acting head of the section is Eric Neff, a former Los Angeles County prosecutor who led a case against the CEO of Konnech, a software company that conspiracy theorists falsely claimed had links to the Chinese government. Neff was placed on administrative leave in 2022 after concerns were raised about “irregularities” in how the case was presented. He later told the Los Angeles Times he had been cleared of wrongdoing in an internal review.

Taken together, the pattern is not subtle. Trump is not just complaining about elections in the abstract. He is staffing agencies, pushing bills, pressuring states, and floating tactics that would make the midterms easier to contest after the fact. If the results go badly, the groundwork for the next claim of fraud is already being laid, carefully and loudly, which is apparently the modern version of preventing surprises.