This Is How Trump Is Already Threatening the Midterms | WIRED

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President Donald Trump’s rhetorical war on elections has seemed to only get more serious with time.

Over the past couple of months, he’s 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.” And he told NBC he will only accept the midterm results “if the elections are honest.” On Truth Social, he slammed the Supreme Court because “they wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020.”

Members of Trump’s administration and Republican lawmakers have quickly dismissed criticism. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was asked about Trump’s comment about nationalizing elections, he claimed without evidence that election results in “blue states” like California “just look on [their] face to be fraudulent.”

Now, with Trump laser-focused on an anti-voting bill called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America, which would disenfranchise millions of Americans, what was already clear has become glaringly obvious: The Trump administration appears to be threatening the midterm elections. Trump isn’t even hiding the real reason why he wants the SAVE bill signed into law: “[Democrats] know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.”

As polls show that the Republican party could lose the House and the Senate, Trump and his allies are quite openly engaged in a concerted and widespread effort to undermine trust in elections and, seemingly, to lay the foundations for baseless claims of rigged midterm elections in November.

Trump’s campaign has included the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI, the undermining of laws designed to protect voters, the redrawing of voting maps to disenfranchise minorities, the installation of election deniers in key positions of power within the government, and the emboldening of election officials at all levels across the country to pursue an anti-voting agenda with impunity.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the ways the Trump administration is already targeting this year’s midterm elections:

The SAVE America Act

Many of the ways the Trump administration is working to undermine trust in November’s elections have been distilled into a single piece of legislation.

The SAVE Act is the Republican response to the conspiracy theory that millions of noncitizens are flooding polling stations every election. Although that claim that immigrants were voting was shared widely ahead of the 2024 presidential election, all the available evidence suggests that noncitizen voting accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of a percent of the votes cast, with one estimate in 2017 from the Brennan Center of a dozen states putting the figure at 0.0001 percent. (Apply that figure to the number of people who voted in 2024 and you get just over 15,000 votes—orders of magnitude below what conspiracy theorists claim.)

The first effort to pass the SAVE Act failed last year due to widespread opposition, but Republicans returned in January with a new version, this time referred to as the SAVE America Act. House Republicans initially released a version of the act that would require all voters to produce specific documentary proof of citizenship when voting. That restrictive provision was ultimately removed in an update published earlier this month. However, the new bill would still require every state to introduce laws requiring voters to show certain photo IDs when voting—instantly disenfranchising millions.

The bill would also require those registering to vote to produce a passport or birth certificate, documents that over 20 million Americans of voting age do not have access to. It narrowly passed the House but, despite over 50 Republican senators signaling their support, Democrats can still block its passage in the Senate using the filibuster rule.

”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,’” wrote Trump on Truth Social last month. More recently, he has connected the passage of the SAVE act with getting Transportation Security Administration workers paid during the current partial government shutdown.

There is, however, virtually no chance that the SAVE America Act will pass in its current form, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune has repeatedly ruled out changing filibuster rules in order to force it through.

Republicans are simultaneously pushing an even more extreme overhaul of election rules with the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, which would eradicate universal mail-in voting and would remove much of the control over election administration from states an