Democrats warn of Trump taking power. What is really happening?

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Democrats are reaching DEFCON Level 1 alarm over President Donald Trump’s efforts to influence the upcoming election.

“All signals are flashing red,” David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and CNN political analyst, wrote in an article on X.

“On the square, the @GOP would be defeated this fall, largely because of Trump’s unpopularity,” Axelrod said. “So he comes up with Plan B: Do whatever you need to do to win. Anything. Anyone who says ‘Well, he wouldn’t do THAT’ hasn’t been paying attention.”

In other words, use your imagination and don’t be surprised by what Trump does in the four months before Election Day.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, told CNN’s John Berman on Friday that people in her overwhelmingly Democratic district are scared about what might happen in November.

“For the first time in my entire career, John, I have voters telling me that they are worried that the president will overturn the election, that he will declare martial law. There are people who have told me that they are worried that we won’t even have an election in November,” Wasserman Schultz said.

She said she was trying to reassure her constituents about their most alarmist fears.

Wasserman Schultz is running in a redrawn congressional district as part of a broader GOP effort to adjust the maps to their advantage before November. Democrats have fought back with new maps of their own in states like California, but Republicans have had more success in the courts and could pick up as many as 10 seats in November thanks to new maps drawn during the redistricting war, according to CNN’s most recent assessment.

In the United States, states are responsible for running their own elections, but Axelrod listed a litany of actions taken by the Trump administration to influence them.

The most recent example was Trump’s firing Thursday of three of four commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, an agency created by Congress in 2002 as an independent bipartisan resource to distribute federal funds to help states run secure elections. It’s not the only election-related entity being hampered. The Federal Election Commission, which handles campaign finance issues, also does not have a quorum of commissioners to function.

The EAC dismissals are just one piece of evidence offered by Axelrod. I’ve added context to each of his points below.

… Add to that the odious appointment of political hack Pulte as DNI;

(Trump temporarily appointed Bill Pulte, a wealthy businessman turned housing official, as director of national intelligence. While overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he controversially targeted Trump’s political opponents with accusations of mortgage fraud. Pulte lacks intelligence experience, but has deep ties to the GOP. CNN reported that Trump wants Pulte to focus on election security issues, a nontraditional mandate for the intelligence chief.)

…election deniers in the most sensitive checkpoints;

(An election denier is president, after all, and he has appointed people who share his views on the 2020 election, which he refuses to admit he lost, to the US government.)

…Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting and the potential use of the Postal Service as a weapon of subversion;

(Trump has attempted to take control of states’ mail-in voting in several key ways, including creating a national database of voter registrations. States on both the right and the left have fought the effort, however, and a court this month rejected his attempt to order the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to states that had complied. The legal battle will continue on several fronts leading up to Election Day.)

…his pathological prioritization of the SAVE Act, which would be the most powerful tool of voter suppression in generations;

(Trump has complained loudly about Republicans’ failure to pass an election security bill that voter integrity groups say is unnecessary. He asked senators to waive a filibuster to pass the bill, but Republican senators refused. This week, Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill, stung by lawmakers’ failure to pass the election bill, which he calls the SAVE America Act. The bill election law will continue to languish and the housing bill will become law without his signature.)

…and his persistent and baseless claims of voter fraud, which he uses to justify extraordinary federal interventions.

(There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, but there is indeed concern that Trump will use the fraud allegations, perhaps aired by Pulte at the DNI, to do something extraordinary before November. Mullin was asked during his confirmation hearing about the possibility of sending ICE agents to polling places and he did not reject it out of hand. But there are no concrete plans made public to do anything like that.)

Last year, CNN reported how the Trump administration, as part of so-called government efficiency efforts, had worked to starve or dismantle election security networks through which the federal government helps states.

This latest move – firing the EAC commissioners – likely won’t have much impact on the upcoming elections, according to watchdogs and good-government groups. But this nevertheless worries some of them.

“Even though the EAC does not play a direct role in running elections, we should view this as part of a broader set of efforts to centralize control over election administration and tip the scales,” wrote Michael McNulty, political director at Issue One, which describes itself as a “cross-party political reform group.”

McNulty, who has worked in overseas elections, warned that Trump’s efforts amounted to a slow-moving electoral takeover playbook that everyone should be on guard about.

Trump’s efforts to exert influence over the upcoming election have been clear, but they have also been proven wrong. The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of states that count mail-in ballots postmarked on time but received after Election Day, for example, the highest-profile election loss for Trump and his allies in court.

Many other obstacles have been thrown at Trump by the lower courts.

States take matters into their own hands

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten recently wrote about efforts in blue states to pass laws protecting their elections from federal interference, either by banning the sharing of voter registration data or barring the presence of federal law enforcement.

Despite Trump’s best efforts, Americans need to be confident that the next election will be wise, according to David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

What he means is that people will be able to vote and those votes will be counted accurately.

“I’m not even sure that layoffs are among the top five election-related topics this week,” he said of the EAC layoffs. “A Trump-appointed judge quashing the DOJ subpoena seeking to collect sensitive personal information about election workers had much more impact, for example.”

Read CNN’s story on this legal loss for the Justice Department.

The EAC layoffs, Becker wrote, are indeed excessive, but “we should not overemphasize the effect this will have on elections, this year and beyond.”

Elections are still run by the states, as required by the Constitution, he argued, “and they execute that mission exceptionally well.”

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