Trump moves to use the presidential power levers to help his party in the intermediate works of 2026

President Donald Trump has made clear in the last weeks he is willing to use the vast powers of his office to prevent his party from losing control of the congress in the middle of the period of next year.

Some of the steps Trump have taken to intervene in the elections are typical, but controversial political maneuvers, taken to their characteristic extremes. That includes pushing Republican legislators in Texas and other conservative controlled states to re -draw their legislative maps to expand the number of seats in the United States representatives favorable to the Republican Party.

Others involve the direct use of official presidential power so that they do not have a modern precedent, such as ordering their justice department to investigate the main liberal entity for fundraising, Actblue. The department also requires the detailed voter archives of each state in an apparent attempt to look for voters not eligible to a wide scale.

And on Monday, Trump published a diatribe full of falsehood in social networks that undertake to lead a “movement” to prohibit voting machines and vote by mail, the last of which has become a pillar of the Democratic vote since Trump pushed the Republicans to avoid it in 2020, before incline the issue before the presidential elections of last year.

Individual actions are added to an unprecedented attempt of a president in exercise to interfere with a critical election before it is celebrated, movements that have given alarms among those interested about the future of American democracy.

“Those are actions that are not seen in healthy democracies,” said Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, a non -partisan organization that has demanded the Trump administration. “Those are actions that you see in the authoritarian states.”

Trump has already tried to cancel a choice

Bassin said that the presidents routinely touch for their party in the mid -period elections and try to strengthen the holders through management and support projects to their districts. But he said that Trump’s story is part of what the alarm on couples is driving.

Via News

“The only thing we know with certainty of the experience in 2020 is that this is a person who will use all measures and try each tactic to stay in power, regardless of the result of an choice,” Bassin said.

He pointed out that in 2020, Trump was reviewed by Republicans chosen in Congress and the status that refused to bend the rules, along with the members of his own administration and even military leaders who distanced themselves from the defeated holder. In his second term, the president has blocked the almost total loyalty of the Republican Party and stacked the administration with loyal.

The party of the starting president normally loses seats in Congress during the mid -period elections. That is what happened to Trump in 2018, when the Democrats won enough seats to recover the House of Representatives, hinder the president’s agenda and finally lead to his two policies.

Trump has said he doesn’t want to repeat.

He has also argued that his actions are actually attempts to preserve democracy. Repeating fraud accusations, he said Monday during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that “you can never have a real democracy with tickets by mail.” Earlier this month, Trump said, because he easily won Texas in the presidential elections of 2024, “we are entitled to five more seats.”

An attempt to design republican control of the United States House

Republicans currently have a margin of three seats in the House of Representatives. Trump pressed the Texas Republicans again to draw their Map of Congress to create up to five new seats of the Republican Party and is pressing other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar measures to further accumulate the margin.

The Texas Legislature is likely to vote on its map on Wednesday. There is no guarantee that Trump’s gambit works, but there is also no legal prohibition against the violin with the maps in those states to obtain a partisan advantage. In response, California Democrats are moving forward with their own redistribution effort of districts as a way of counteracting Republicans in Texas.

The map settings of the decade in the middle of the decade have occurred before, although generally in response to judicial orders instead of the presidents hoping to manufacture more seats for their party. Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, said there is a possibility that the redesque of the camera districts is not successful as Trump anticipates, but could end up motivating democratic voters.

Still, Diamond said he is worried. “It is the general employer who is alarming and that the reason to do this is for pure partisan advantage,” he said about Trump’s tactics.

Diamond said that in 2019 he wrote a book about a “12 steps” process to turn a democracy into an autocracy, and “the last step in the process is to manipulate the electoral process.”

The Justice Department acts on Trump’s priorities

Trump has required the loyalty of all levels of his administration and demanded that the Department of Justice continue its directives. One of them was to investigate Actblue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in donations of small dollars for democratic candidates for two decades.

The site was so successful that the Republicans launched a similar company, called Winred. Trump, in particular, did not order a federal investigation of Winred.

Trump’s appointed in the Department of Justice have also demanded voting data from at least 19 states, since Trump continues to insist that he really won the 2020 elections and proposed a special prosecutor to investigate the vote count of that year. As before winning the 2024 elections, Trump has involved without foundation that Democrats can accumulate the next votes against him.

In at least two of those states, California and Minnesota, the Department of Justice followed the electoral officials last week, threatening legal actions if they did not deliver their voter registration lists for this Thursday, according to the letters shared with News. None of the states, both controlled by Democrats, has responded publicly.

Attempts to interfere with vote and elections

Trump’s threat this week to end the vote by mail and eliminate voting machines is only his last attempt to influence how the elections are executed. An executive order signed earlier this year requested a documented citizenship evidence to register to vote, among other changes, although much has been blocked by the courts.

In the days prior to January 6, 2021, an attack on the Capitol to reverse their loss of 2020, Trump’s allies proposed that the military seize the voting machines to investigate the alleged fraud, despite the fact that Trump’s own attorney general said that there was no evidence of significant irregularities.

The Constitution says that states and congress, instead of the president, establish the rules for the elections, so it is not clear what Trump could do to make his promises come true. But the electoral officials saw them as an obvious sign of their interests of 2026.

“Let’s look at this for what it really is: an attempt to change the vote in the middle of the tide because it fears that the Republicans will lose,” wrote Ann Jacobs, Democratic president of the Wisconsin Electoral Commission, in X.

The president has very few levers to influence an election.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said that the idea of confiscating voting machines in 2020 was a sign of how few levers the president has to influence an election, not his power. According to the Constitution of the United States, the elections are administered by the States and only Congress can “alter” the procedures and, even then, only for federal careers.

“It’s a deeply decentralized system,” Muller said.

There are less legal restrictions in presidential powers, such as criminal investigations and deployment of the application of the law and military resources, Muller said. But, he added, people are generally wrong to forecast catastrophes of elections.

He pointed out that in 2022 and 2024, a wide range of experts prepared for violence, interruption and attempts to cancel the losses of Trump’s allies, and serious threats were not materialized.

“A lesson that I have learned in decades of doing this is that people often prepare for the last elections instead of what really happens in the new ones,” said Muller.

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