Trump's Insane Plan To Steal Elections Leaked

The 2026 midterms are just around the corner and the president is starting to panic, as are his fellow Republicans who are facing terrible polls and historical swings in off-year elections. Not to worry, though. The president has a plan, and that plan is to make it really hard for Americans to vote. On February 4th, Trump went on Dan Bongino's podcast and announced that elections needed

to be nationalized. We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

A few weeks later, a PBS News reporter asked him about a 17-page draft executive order that would do just that.

Are you considering a national emergency around the midterm election?

Who told you that?

Who told you that? Not, there's no such document. Not, that's absurd. Trump didn't disavow it because he knows it's real. In fact, it's been kicking around Republican inboxes for almost a year now. For the past year, the Trump administration has been running an all fronts campaign to seize control of American elections through executive orders, FBI raids, Justice Department lawsuits against states, the systematic dismantling of election security Trump runs campaign to seize control of American elections through executive orders, FBI raids, Justice Department lawsuits against states, the systematic dismantling of election security

infrastructure, and a piece of legislation called the SAVE Act that cannot pass but won't quite die. Kind of like the lie about foreign interference in American elections, which can be used to justify just about anything. The Constitution's Elections Clause vests the power to run elections in two separate entities. It says the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in

each state by the legislature thereof, but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations. So the states run their own elections. State legislators set the rules and local officials carry them out, but Congress can override those rules, at least for federal elections, by passing an actual law. Note that the Constitution gives the president exactly zero role in administering or certifying elections, and that was not an oversight by the founders. They just fought a war to

liberate themselves from a monarch, and they weren't trying to empower a president to take control of elections and make himself ruler for life. So they gave states primary authority over elections and empowered Congress to step in as a check. And Congress has passed a few narrow statutes that give the executive branch some limited election-related authority, and crucially, every single one of those laws was enacted to make it easier to vote, not harder.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law after Bloody Sunday when police beat Congressman John Lewis and hundreds of other peaceful civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It gives the Department of Justice authority to sue states for racially discriminatory election practices which keep black Americans from the polls. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, sometimes called the Motor Voter Act, was

designed to increase civic participation by requiring states to register voters at the DMV. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 was passed in response to the chaos of the 2000 Florida recount. It created the Independent Bipartisan Election Assistance Commission to distribute federal funds for election modernization

and set voluntary equipment standards. But now the president is using those same laws to make it harder for Americans to cast their ballots purportedly to solve the non-existent problem of vote fraud. And Trump isn't too clear on the mechanism of that fraud. Maybe it's Chinese Bluetooth thermostats, or maybe it's undocumented immigrants flooding

the polls to vote for Democrats, or maybe it's nefarious algorithms infecting voting machines. But some sort of way, there's cheating going on, and he knows it, because how else could he have lost the popular vote in 2016, and both the popular vote and the Electoral College

in 2020. And counties are won by 2,750. Think of this, to 550. 2,750 to 550. It's becoming a very good count because it's accurate. You know, it covers the whole country. It's like a landslide.

But you're never going to have that again if you don't get these people out. These people were brought to our country.

And so Trump is doing what he always does, shout, emergency, and claim powers to accomplish by executive fiat what he cannot do by law. We are living through a very odd moment. So if you're concerned with the government playing fast and loose with everybody's private voter data, then now is probably a good time to wipe all your personal and private information off the internet. Your cell phone number, home address, email address, private social media accounts, and

tons of sensitive data are shockingly easy to purchase by anybody online. But malicious actors cannot hurt you if they can't find you, and so you can fight back and take control of your private information by signing up for today's sponsor, Incogni. Incogni wipes your personal data from the internet by searching and reaching out to data brokers and websites directly on your behalf and forcing them to remove your private info.

If those sites resist, Incogni will take care of that too, because Incogni fights back. But what makes Incogni truly powerful in taking back control of your privacy is the custom removals feature. It allows you to flag an unlimited number of sites where your data is exposed, and you can even have Incogni's privacy experts review and tackle the most uncooperative data brokers in people's search sites.

I've been using Incogni for a while now, and in that time, you can see I've been on hundreds of lists, some of which had a high sensitivity score, meaning the broker had tons of data on me. Luckily, Incogni has completed hundreds of takedowns for me. I could never do this myself, so thank you to Incogni for weeks of work in adding me to over 40 suppression lists. And Incogni will continue to conduct ongoing removals because even if the broker removes

your data once, they can collect it and publish it again. So if online privacy is important to you, give Incogni a try. If you scan the code on screen or click on the link in the description, you'll get 60% off their annual unlimited plan or try Incogni risk-free for 30 days. If you decide you want to keep it, you'll still get the 60% discount so long as you use our code LEGALEAGLE, all one word. So sign up for Incogni or we will see you in court. Trump's first salvo came on March 25, 2025 when he signed an executive order titled Preserving

and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. It directed the Election Assistance Commission, which Congress designed to be insulated from presidential control, to make fundamental changes to the way elections are conducted in America. It gave the Department of Homeland Security and the Dogebros access to state voter rolls to facilitate voter purges. It directed the EAC to withhold federal funding from states that count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after. And, crucially,

it purported to impose a requirement that Americans present documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The National Voter Registration Act dictates that the Federal Voter Registration Form may only require you to attest under penalty of perjury that you're a citizen, and when Arizona tried to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement in 2013, the Supreme Court blocked it. It's important to understand, though, that presidential proclamations, even when they're

executive orders, are not automatically binding on anyone outside the executive branch. I think a lot about this line from Shakespeare's play Henry IV. One character says, I can call spirits from the vastly deep, and the other says, why so can I and so can any man, but will they come when you do call them? The president can only do things the law empowers him to do.

He can't walk into your local polling place and say, don't count these ballots because they're laid or machine tabulated or whatever. Or he can, but it's effectively calling spirits from the vasty deep. You know, so can I and so can any man, but they will not come when you do call for them. Now the president does have control over the executive branch and so he could potentially order executive agencies

to change the mail-in voter registration form so that it would require proof of documentary citizenship. And so Judge Colleen Collar-Catelli of the US District Court in DC blocked the proof of citizenship requirement and changed to the national voter registration form.

She said, the framers of our constitution recognize that power over election rules could be abused either to destroy the national government or to disempower the people She said, But obviously, that wasn't the end of the story. Meanwhile, over in Congress, Trump's allies have been trying to pass legislation to codify his executive order into law with a statute that would secure our elections by making it a lot harder to vote. And let's not get it twisted here. There's no plague of voter fraud and the instances of non-citizen voting are vanishingly rare. A 2025 audit of Michigan's 7.2 million registered

voters in the 2024 election turned up 15 suspected non-citizens who actually cast a ballot. That's 0.00028%. Election officials in Utah reviewed 2.1 million registered voters and found one confirmed non-citizen on the rolls, and that person had never voted. The proposed solution to this problem will disenfranchise millions of American citizens. That's like trying to take out a mosquito with a rocket launcher. And if you tell me we got to disenfranchise millions of qualified American voters to protect

our election from a few dozen people who shouldn't be casting a ballot, I personally am going to assume that your real goal is to make it harder to vote rather than to secure our elections. So with that as preamble, let's talk about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, aka the SAVE Act. Under this law, you would need a U.S. passport, a military ID with service records showing U.S. birth, a real ID showing U.S. birth, or a photo ID plus a certified birth certificate if you want to register to vote. About 50% of Americans don't have a passport, and the University of Maryland's Center for Democracy

and Civic Engagement found that more than 21 million Americans would have a hard time getting their hands on documentary proof of their U.S. citizenship. And that problem affects some demographics more than others, because proof of citizen documents have to match your current legal name, and married women often take their husband's name, so their birth certificates don't match their real IDs. Congressman Chip Royce says it's fine, little lady, you can just show up with a copy of your marriage license along with your birth

certificate and your driver's license. We actually allow a failsafe that you go and you can sign an affidavit that says, this is my driver's license, my name is Sarah Jones on my driver's license, here's my birth certificate, Sarah Smith, I certify under penalty of perjury

that I'm the same person. And we allow that. I don't think you'd be so cavalier about 65 million married men having to schlep down to the courthouse in the city where they got married and fork over cash for a certified copy of their marriage licenses. And for some minority populations, naming conventions make the birth certificate match a real challenge. For instance, many Asian cultures use the last name first, and many Latino people have multiple last names. So you can see how names that don't slot cleanly into first, middle, last might produce discrepancies between identity documents. And under the SAVE Act, local election officials would have a huge incentive to reject any

registration where the documents don't match perfectly, because the SAVE Act makes it a crime for an election official to register someone who fails to provide documentary proof of citizenship. And it creates a private right of action, meaning anybody can sue an election official for a violation. So put yourself in the shoes of a registrar. Someone shows up with two documents.

One says the person's last name is Moreno Gonzalez, and the other says, Gonzalez, are you going to risk getting sued or even going to jail to ensure that the person gets registered to vote? And by the way, Kansas tried a similar documentary proof of citizenship law in 2011. It blocked 31,000 citizens from voting, 12% of all first time registrants before courts struck it down for being an unconstitutional burden on voting rights.

Arizona actually tried something similar in 2022 and got blocked by the 9th Circuit. The SAVE Act did pass the House in February of 2026, but it cannot get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. And Majority Leader John Thune has resisted calls from the president to blow up the filibuster to make the SAVE Act into law. So as of now, this bill looks to be dead in the water, but never fear, the president says he's going to make it happen anyway. On February 13th, Trump posted that there will be voter ID for the midterm elections,

whether approved by Congress or not. Half an hour later, he was up with an even longer rant saying, if we can't get it through Congress, there are legal reasons why this scam is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly in the form of an executive order." Election law expert Rick Hasson speculated that when the president said, I have searched the depths of legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the near future, he was talking about this bizarre conspiracy by a former hotel manager from Florida who

hunkered down in the public library with a microfiche of the Constitution and discovered a shadow which said the president is able to do everything but decree the outcome of an election, which would be an amazing sequel to National Treasure, but probably Trump was just talking about that executive order he was asked about by PBS and denied. The draft order, entitled Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States

Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference, was first published by Democracy Docket. It's dated April 12, 2025 and has been circulating among Trump's allies for months. It's not clear who's behind this memo, but the current top candidate is a Florida lawyer named Peter Tichton.

Tichton is a Florida lawyer named Peter Tichten. Tichten is a character.

His main claim to fame is having been teenage Trump's roommate at boarding school. He's also a poet of sorts. Here's one he wrote about lusting after a woman on the subway. And no, I do not get paid enough to read that on the air. We've met Tichten before on this channel. He was local counsel when Trump and his sparkle magic lawyer Alina Hava sued Hillary Clinton and James Comey in half of DC for doing the Rico and got themselves sanctioned to the tune of a million dollars.

Tickton has been suspended from the practice of law at least twice and is currently the go-to lawyer for MAGA delisters. He recently persuaded the president to issue a quote, pardon for Tina Peters, the Colorado election clerk who compromised her county's voting machines in an effort to prove there was electoral fraud in 2020. The president's pardon power is broad, but it does not extend to state crimes. So what spirits is Ticton summoning from the

vasty deep this time around? Well, this proposed executive order requires every ballot to be hand-marked on American-made paper, all votes hand-counted in public at the precinct, every voter must re-register for 2026 from scratch with documentary proof of citizenship through their county, voters must mail a reply to a postcard from the registrar every election cycle or be automatically unregistered, counties may not register anyone to vote in the 30 days before an election. Drop boxes are expressly prohibited.

It bans no-excuse absentee balloting and requires that anyone who wants to vote absentee get their ballot notarized. No ballot received after Election Day counts regardless of postmark. Election challenges must be heard in federal courts, driving jurisdiction over state law from the states themselves, and precincts would be capped at 1,500 voters each, which would require the creation of thousands of new precincts between now and November.

Obviously, implementing all that in six months is totally unfeasible as well as being completely illegal. The proposed order actually purports to supersede the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Voting Rights Act. The president can simply grab his ubiquitous sharpie and cross out any laws he doesn't like.

There's also a directive for the DOJ to investigate and prosecute, using civil and criminal RICO, anyone who served as an accomplice to help facilitate interference, provided false information to conceal such interference, or was involved in the prosecution, persecution, retribution, or silencing of other individuals attempting to expose any such interference. That is a threat against every official who ever pushed back on 2020 fraud claims, along with every Secretary of State who certified results, and every prosecutor who charged

someone for January 6th. All of which is bonkity bonkers, but the legal justification is even nuttier. The premise of this draft order is that foreign interference in elections is a national emergency which justifies a federal takeover. The EO points to a grab bag of emergency delegations of power from Congress, plus two executive orders signed by Trump himself and says somewhere in there is authorization to accomplish by

Executive Fiat what he can't do by law. In a separate memo shared with Democracy Docket, Tickton also threw in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, aka IEPA for good measure. But the National Emergency Act is just a framework for the president to declare emergencies. It doesn't actually authorize him to do anything. And none of the statutes cited in this executive order, not the Federal Information Security

Modernization Act, not the Defense Production Act, and certainly not IEPA, gives the president any authority over how states run elections. In the tariffs case, Trump pointed to general language in IEPA about regulating imports and said that it gave him the right to impose sweeping tariffs at will. And six Supreme Court justices said, no, you cannot read broad delegations of congressional authority into vaguely worded statutes.

Now, in that case, Trump was able to collect those tariffs for a year before the Supreme Court bothered to rule. And that was because the federal government is the entity that regularly collects tariffs. In the case of elections, though, the president does not control those levers.

So even if he signs this executive order as written, local election officials don't have to do anything about it. Oregon can continue conducting its all-absentee ballot elections and go about his business. As constitutional law professor Justin Levitt told Democracy Docket, the law doesn't require

anybody to file anything in court to stop the impact, it just requires not listening, which is both easier and quicker. And so Trump's Justice Department is taking some active measures in case the executive order doesn't accomplish what he wants. In the past year, the DOJ has sued at least 24 states to force them to hand over their complete voter rolls, including social security numbers and driver's license data.

The putative legal justification for this is the Civil Rights Act of 1960. That's probably not the Civil Rights Act you're thinking of. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The 1960 Act was a narrower law passed specifically to protect black citizens' right to vote. To prevent local officials from simply throwing out registrations imbalanced by black Americans,

it required registrars to preserve voter registration materials and make them available to the DOJ for inspection. Now the Trump administration wants to use that civil rights law as a tool of mass disenfranchisement. The plan here is to compile a master list of all Americans and use it to fine non-citizens on state electoral rolls. A proposed settlement agreement would require states to purge voters at the request of the Justice Department.

Historically, when states have tried to clean their voter rolls the way the DOJ wants to do it, they've wound up kicking off lots of eligible voters, particularly those whose names don't match American Standard First, Middle, Last. But also, state privacy laws bar election officials

from disclosing specific categories of voter information. And so, most states told the DOJ to pound sand. In Michigan, Judge Hala Jarbut dismissed the DOJ's lawsuit because internally compiled voter lists aren't voter registration materials for the purposes of the 1960 Civil Rights Act.

And in California, Judge David Carter ripped the Trump administration for perverting laws meant to protect the right to vote and turning them into tools of voter suppression. He said, should Congress want to enable the right to vote and turning them into tools of voter suppression. He said, should Congress want to enable the executive to centralize the private information

of all Americans within the executive branch, Congress will have to clearly say so. And he warned that the DOJ's request for the sensitive information of Californians stands to have a chilling effect on American citizens like political minority groups and working class immigrants who may consider not registering to vote or skipping casting a ballot because they are worried about how their information will be used. Similarly, in Oregon, Judge Mustafa Kasubai pointed to a letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the

immigration siege of the Twin Cities. Bondi offered to call off ICE if the state would allow the DOJ to access its unredacted voter rolls, which has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. The judge said that Bondi's letter casts serious doubt as to the true purpose for which plaintiff is seeking voter registration lists in this and other cases. And that's clearly been confirmed by what happened in Fulton County, Georgia. Fulton County includes about 90% of Atlanta and it has long been the focus of election

conspiracies. Trump insists he could only have lost the state due to fraud, although he's never cited any proof, and not for nothing, but Georgia has two Democratic senators who keep managing to get elected. On December 11th, the DOJ filed one of those 1960 Civil Rights Act suits, but this time against Fulton County, demanding that it hand over all the original ballots, voting machine

tabulators and absentee ballot envelopes from the 2020 election. Oddly enough, it also filed a subpoena for those same documents in state court, and it was negotiated over cost to copy and reproduce them. But then it apparently got tired of waiting. Because on January 28th, FBI agents descended on the Fulton County Elections Hub with a warrant and left with approximately 656 boxes of election documents.

That warrant was very weird. It claimed to be looking for evidence of violations of 52 USC Sections 20701 and 20511. Section 20701 requires election officers to preserve all voter registration records and records of any other act requisite to voting for 22 months after any federal election. Section 20511 criminalizes fraud in the voter registration process and tabulating ballots known to be fraudulent.

But both statutes have a five-year statute of limitations, which means it's pretty much impossible to charge anyone for crimes relating to the 2020 election. And the affidavit supporting that warrant was frankly bizarre. The witnesses included weirdos who downloaded their data from random sites like ZebraDuck, and they just regurgitated debunked election fraud theories from five years ago, like this one about pristine ballots, aka damaged votes, which are copied onto clean ballots so they

can be machine tabulated. But maybe the weirdest thing about that warrant was who was there to execute it. That is Director of National Intelligence, Telsey Gabbard, skulking around in a baseball cap. By law, the DNI has no domestic law enforcement authority, and that's not a technicality, it's a deliberate statutory limitation

because intelligence agencies have surveillance powers that wouldn't survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny if applied domestically. Plus, the administration can't seem to get their story straight on what Tulsi was doing there. Trump first denied she was president at all

and then said Bondi had insisted on it. Bondi's deputy said she just happened to be in Atlanta and Gabbard then said that the president requested her presence. And the New York Times reported that Gabbard patched through the agents conducting the raid

to speak to the president, who told them they were doing a great job. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, likened this to Nixon ordering the Watergate burglary.

And remember, many of the reforms that were put in place actually took place after the Watergate scandal under President Nixon.

Fulton County sued to get its stuff back, but even if they win, this episode shows a willingness to use the Justice Department offensively this time around to investigate election fraud, even in the absence of any real evidence. And it sends a clear message to every election administrator

in every competitive county in America that we have the FBI and we are not afraid to use it. At the same time, the Trump administration is removing the guardrails which would actually protect American elections from foreign or domestic interference. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, was created in 2018 to protect

critical infrastructure, including election systems, from foreign cyber attacks. It's supposed to coordinate with state and local officials to provide threat assessment and harden election systems to repel hacks and manipulation. On election day, it runs situation rooms to monitor attacks in real time. But in 2020, CISA Director Chris Krebs said that the election had not been hacked or plagued by fraud, and Trump has had it in for the agency ever since. In early 2025, the Trump administration fired CISA employees, froze all election security

activities pending an internal review, and cut all funding to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center. In November 2025, for the first time in years, CISA didn't stand up its Election Day Situation Room. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said election officials are now effectively flying blind.

And here's the thing. The administration's justification for that draft emergency executive order, the one that would give Trump control over the 2026 midterms, is that foreign interference in American elections constitutes a national emergency. But the agency specifically created to detect and counter foreign interference,

they gutted it. They fired those people, they shut down the Situation Room, and if you actually believe foreign actors were threatening American elections, you wouldn't do that,

unless the threat of foreign interference was never what this was really about. So can Trump actually steal the midterms? I mean, the honest answer is probably not outright. Courts have blocked that March 2025 executive order. No court has given the DOJ state voter rolls.

The SAVE Act is stalled in the Senate and state election officials don't work for the president. So they can more or less ignore his lawless edicts. But maybe that's the wrong question. You don't have to steal an election to corrupt its results. You suppress enough votes through aggressive purges and impossible ID requirements, and

you create enough chaos around absentee ballots and registration deadlines that legitimate voters give up, or maybe they get turned away. You defund the agency that monitors foreign interference while simultaneously claiming that foreign interference justifies emergency powers. And you sick the DOJ on local officials to scare the bejesus out of them with investigations of this non-existent vote fraud. And then, if the results don't go your way, you cry fraud, as Trump has done after every

election, even the ones he won. The last time Trump lost an election, we got January 6th, and unlike last time, Trump has now surrounded himself with an attorney general and an FBI director and a Homeland Security secretary and a DNI who won't say no. And the constitutional guardrails around elections were designed by people who assumed future presidents would follow the law and respect the will of the voters.

And we haven't had one of those for a while now. And that's the thing about guardrails. You don't notice how much you need them until the car is already going over the edge.

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