For MAGA, 2026 will be payback for 2020.
Donald Trump greets a child during a Halloween event on the South Lawn of the White House, on October 30, 2025.
(Aaron Schwartz / CNP / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Donald Trump, a man who loves nursing grievances and plotting revenge, has never gotten over losing the 2020 presidential election. To this day, he refuses to admit that he was defeated fair and square, preferring the comforting fantasy that the election was stolen.
The 2020 myth has become central to Trump’s political identity. It fueled his efforts to overturn the election results leading to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His posture as a noble victim of injustice helped keep the MAGA movement together during the Joe Biden years. And it allowed him to frame his victory in 2024 as nothing less than a triumph over political evil.
Now, with Trump in the White House and both Congress and the Supreme Court currently in supine Republican hands, the president has immense power in Washington. But his desire for revenge has not been satiated. Nor has his desire to permanently control the political system.
The most serious possible threat to Trump’s power is the 2026 midterms, which could lead to Democratic Party control of the House of Representatives and, if they’re especially lucky, the Senate. And Trump can’t abide that.
On July 26, 2024, at a rally in Florida, Trump made a remarkable promise to his followers: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.” Now that he’s back in office, Trump intends to make good on that promise. He continues to talk about how he was robbed in 2020—and to push for changes in the election system to prevent a recurrence of this supposed travesty. But as is so often with Trump, his accusations contain more than a whiff of psychological projection: The real goal of his vaunted election reform is not to prevent stolen elections but to allow Trump to be the one doing the stealing.
Some of Trump’s attempts at fixing the system so his supporters don’t have to worry about voting have been thwarted by the political system. On March 25, Trump signed an executive order with stringent new election rules, including much higher proof of citizenship requirements and restrictions on the use of mail-in ballots. Less than two months later, federal judge Denise J. Casper struck down this unilateral move, noting, “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over [voting rules].” Legislative efforts by Republicans to enact Trump-friendly electoral reform are stalling in Congress, where Republicans can’t overcome the filibuster in the Senate.
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But Trump still has wide latitude in terms of appointing officials involved in election oversight, directing federal law enforcement agencies, and deploying the National Guard. And there are many signs that this president is interested in using these powers to shape the outcome of the midterms.
Far more than in his first term, Trump has been actively appointing hyper-loyalists in his administration, many of whom adhere to the myth of the stolen 2020 election and want to use executive power to prevent Democrats from winning in 2026. One of the faithful is Heather Honey, whom Trump appointed in August to be the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the Department of Homeland Security. Her main qualification for that role is that since 2020 she has been a vocal election denier, heavily promoting the false claim that there was fraudulent voting in Pennsylvania that tipped the state to Biden.
The New York Times reports that in March, prior to her appointment, Honey spoke to a group of right-wing activists and argued that the White House should declare a “national emergency” as a way of changing election rules.
Honey went on to say, “And therefore, we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now, and therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.” She did add that this plan might not be “feasible.”
Honey is part of a larger trend, as the Times notes:
In the past few months, Mr. Trump has elevated multiple proponents of his fraud claims into high-level administration jobs. Now, as government insiders, these activists could wield their newfound power to discredit future results or rekindle old claims to argue for a federal intrusion into locally administered voting systems.
The flip side of elevating figures such as Heather Honey is firing and punishing those who prevented Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. One example is Chris Krebs, who, in his capacity as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, affirmed the security of the 2020 election. For this, Krebs was fired by Trump and stripped of his security clearance. Trump also pushed the Department of Justice to investigate Krebs.
And Trump could go much further in his authoritarian quest. Writing in Mother Jones, Ari Berman outlined a possible scenario of military intervention whereby
Trump’s mass deportation agenda could evolve into a vast election policing apparatus deployed against his political opponents. That could include the president federalizing the National Guard (like in Los Angeles and Washington, DC) and ordering the military to patrol the polls, demanding citizenship checks at polling stations, authorizing ICE raids in Democratic areas in the runup to the election, and arresting political leaders who don’t comply with his policies.
In the runup to the midterms, the department will likely undertake high-profile investigations into alleged voter fraud and lean on states to adopt restrictive policies that could include removing eligible voters from the rolls, challenging mail-in ballots, and targeting Democratic election officials. Indeed, Project 2025—the infamous conservative blueprint for the second Trump administration—went so far as to call on the department to use one of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan Acts to prosecute election officials who issue guidance Republicans disagree with.
One Trump crony who seems to be on board for this policy is Steve Bannon. As Berman notes, in August Bannon said, “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s gonna be ICE officers near polling places. You’re damn right.”
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If Trump does try to steal the midterms, how can he be stopped? Two writers who have investigated the matter—Berman in Mother Jones and David Graham in The Atlantic—both point to the courts as a likely check. It is true that in the federal courts, where most election litigation is settled, Trump usually loses. Sending troops to polling places would be wildly illegal—maybe even illegal enough for the Supreme Court, which has mostly not been inclined to check Trump’s power.
The problem is that Trump’s pattern has been to brazenly break the law and let the slow legal rebuke come later. With the prospect of troops interfering in elections, a quicker remedy is needed. The one path that remains is mass mobilization for civil resistance.
Earlier this month, Ezra Levin, a “No Kings” organizer, told Semafor, “If they subvert the election results next year, you’re going to want some kind of response that doesn’t allow society to move on.” Everything we’ve seen in Trump’s second term shows that he is willing to steamroll through the political system unless he meets opposition. In terms of stopping his plans to steal the 2020 election, it may well be that the steamroller has to be stopped by bodies on the street.
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