It's almost a year since Trump openly embraced the idea of starting a war as a pretext for cancelling elections.
Even before that, as I warned in March 2025, he had put everything in place to "trigger a national crisis... and cancel all future elections."
This week, Trump signaled his willingness to invent a "national security emergency" in order to take over U.S. elections.
We're told repeatedly that Trump doesn't have the authority to literally cancel the midterms.
That doesn't mean he won't try to
We've already seen Trump do many things that he doesn't have the authority to do — from his illegal global tariffs to his attempts to eliminate birthright citizenship to demolishing the East Wing in order to build a 90,000 square-foot dictator ballroom.
We've seen that losing an election in a landslide didn't stop him attempting a coup.
We've seen that he's willing to start an illegal war to distract from the Epstein Files.
Now, as we head toward the midterms, Trump is facing one humiliation after another — an expensive, poorly planned war with Iran, soaring gas prices, ignominious missile shortages, desperate military morale, plus plunging approval ratings.
Who knows what extremes Trump will go to next? What kind of crisis might he initiate in the hopes of affecting the polls? What kind of "attacks" might he stage or encourage as a rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act? How might he engineer an election so tarnished by chaos and controversy that even the The Carter Center won't vouch for it?
Even if he doesn't go to the worst imaginable extremes, we already know Trump is doing all he can think of to make the election so rigged in his party's favor he can't possibly lose.
The idea Trump could engineer an election in which the votes in his favor are counted and the rest are thrown out may seem far fetched.
But that's what he's already doing with grand juries
In the latest video from LOLGOP Studios, Marcy Wheeler (aka @emptywheel) explains that Todd Blanche's DOJ has already delivered the message to all 93 U.S. attorneys that "Donald Trump is your chief client. And if you're uncomfortable with that, step aside for someone who isn't."
In the case of Chicago's "Broadview Six," Trump's DOJ has already been caught telling prosecutors, in effect, "if they can't get charges against defendants then to kick out the grand jurors who are fighting the charges... and to keep throwing people out of the grand jury... until you get that indictment that we want."
Judge April Perry said she was "incredibly shocked" by the prosecutorial misconduct that resulted in her being presented a case that was, as one grand juror described it, "a crock of shit."
That case has now been dismissed.
But Wheeler concludes by calling this "a very ominous moment," stressing how important it is that "people understand how terrifying" the situation has become. (Watch the full video on YouTube.)
Trump's war on dissent is being taken to chilling new levels
The "Broadview Six" case is not even the most egregious example of Trump's desire to criminalize protest, stage show trials, and curtail Americans' First Amendment rights.
In June 2026, Elizabeth and Ines Soto were each sentenced in federal court for "providing material support to terrorists" after someone was shot at an anti-ICE protest, despite the fact the shooting occurred after they had left the scene.
Before you start thinking the Sotos were actual terrorists, the "material support" they provided was printed zines which, as one lawyer noted, "are a foundational first amendment document," dating back to the Federalist Papers. The "explosives" they were prosecuted for bringing to the protest were fireworks.
Some of those charged in the case took plea deals and received sentences of 2 to 15 years.
The Sotos claimed their innocence, went to trial, and were sentenced to 50 years apiece.
The White House is now intimidating YouTubers by branding them "Media Offenders"
In June 2026, the Trump administration ramped up its intimidation of voices critical of the regime by expanding the "Media Offenders" section of the White House website beyond mainstream media and late-night comedians to include independent creators such as David Pakman and Brian Tyler Cohen.
Why? Because Trump and the vicious political operatives surrounding him understand that being put on such a list creates new dangers for these individuals.
"When Donald Trump targeted me," Cohen wrote on 10 August, "the harassment, death threats, and targeting online were instantaneous."
Cohen added:
I want you to know why the White House targets people with shoddy cases that are doomed to fail — like the ones against Jerome Powell, Letitia James, James Comey, the six Democrats who dared recite what the Uniform Code of Military Justice said about refusing to follow illegal orders, and even Sean Charles Dunn, the man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent.
They don’t bring these cases in good faith to secure a conviction. They exploit the legal system to crush these people: with astronomical legal bills, the anxiety and stress of dealing with a federal prosecution, and the full force of a mob of Trump supporters ready to do his bidding
These people are being made examples of. These cases are a signal to everyone else: fall in line, or you’re next.
In another example of targeted intimidation and harassment, Mike Nellis of Endless Urgency spoke out on 15 August about an ongoing investigation into his company by Trump’s DOJ and "the baseless right-wing conspiracy theory behind it."
As Trump adds new names to his "Enemies List," the forces of tech fascism are lining up behind him
This is indeed a very ominous moment.
With the likes of Elon "We Win or You Die" Musk and friend-of-Pete Hegseth Marc Andreessen once again firmly on Trump's side, who knows what shenanigans could happen?
We know Musk committed crimes to help Trump win in 2024. His young son confirmed as much on election night. The mother of one of his children now says Musk told her prior to the election that his plan to elect Trump included creating an "anomaly in the matrix."
We also know Musk masterminded "the most consequential security breach" in U.S. history in 2025, right around the time Trump suspended cyber operations against Russia, limiting our ability to pre-empt or mitigate Russian cyberattacks against America's energy, banking, and election infrastructure.
This moment is even more ominous because right now the future of humanity is at stake
One thing we know for sure is that no one knows exactly what the future holds. We're living at a moment in time when technological change is happening at a pace no one can fully keep up with.
Any promises being made by politicians and billionaires are worthless.
Trump promised us $2 gas. If you voted for him thinking he'd deliver that, you're now paying 103% more than you expected.
In the world Elon promised you, your fully self-driving car would already be 10 years old and mankind would have landed on Mars last year.
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, one of the novel's memorable slogans was "In Ford We Trust."
If that book were written today, the slogan would be "In Musk We Trust."
Can you imagine what America and the world would look like today if we had allowed Henry Ford — a man history now recognizes as a virulent racist and antisemite, a man who was so inspirational to Hitler that he kept a life-size portrait of him by his desk — to shape our national destiny?
Looking back, the idea that we could have let the richest titans of business from 100 years ago — men who made fortunes in cars, oil, tobacco, railroads, real estate and finance — simply run the country for their own benefit seems ludicrous.
For the same reason, we cannot put our trust in any combination of Musk or Altman or Bezos or Zuckerberg or Huang or Andreessen or Thiel.
Anyone worth a trillion dollars who would gleefully let the world's poorest people die of hunger and disease while saying his mission is to save humanity is not someone I would trust to know what humanity is.
Anyone promising "abundance" in the future while decrying affordable groceries and dismantling Social Security in the present is not someone I would trust to ever willingly share the wealth.
Anyone funding "corporate evil" and "religious zealotry" in an age when bad people are embracing evil and zealotry in the name of God and Mammon is not someone who can claim to be on the side of the angels.
This is an ominous moment.
The only way to survive it will be if Americans show up for the midterms — and demand an end to this madness — in numbers too big to rig.
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