With the midterm elections upon the country — the contests held midway through a president’s term that will determine which party controls the next Congress — the atmosphere is tense. Political analysts, writers, and resistance organizers are jittery and wary, aware that their efforts may not be enough. Readers who look beyond the headlines understand that the United States stands at a fork — a pivotal moment that will take the nation in one direction or another. They also know that an adjudicated insurrectionist who assembled an armed mob in an attempt to cling to power the last time he lost is at it again — and that this time he is more dangerous.

The January 6 tinderbox, the article argues, has grown larger and more flammable thanks to congressional inaction, because the insurrectionist now commands the U.S. military and has formed his own Praetorian Guard (a nod to the elite Roman unit that protected emperors and, at times, decided their fates). A looming unknown remains: what percentage of U.S. service members would take their oath to the Constitution seriously enough to refuse illegal commands? How many would fire on protesting Americans if the Secretary of Defense gave the order?

An early fraud narrative

A master of reality television, President Donald Trump manufactured an early fraud narrative with no supporting evidence to blunt his expected midterm losses. Claiming that immigrants and Democrats are fraudulently voting, he then instructed his own supporters to cheat — and to vote whether or not they had registered.

Democratic control of one or both chambers of Congress, as is now projected, would check the administration’s corruption from all sides. A Democratic majority, the author writes, would quickly investigate the billions the Trump family has pocketed, curtail Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sweeping remake of the military, and rein in oligarchic self-dealing. It is no mystery, then, why Trump has dialed illegal election interference up to the maximum.

A multi-pronged assault

Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the midterms have exhausted voters who were already too tired to keep track. His multi-pronged assault ran the gamut of un-American tricks: bribery, seizing ballots, threats to deploy armed agents, attempts to change mail-in voting laws, gerrymandering, threats to imprison election officials, relentless lawsuits and, looming large, election disinformation. Even though the Constitution grants control over elections to the states, Trump cannot stop reaching for that power — and, the piece warns, his instincts will get worse before they get better.

The Justice Department has been converted into an election interference pit bull. After the Supreme Court rejected his efforts to control mail-in voting, Trump attacked the justices and sued individual states. Last week, the DOJ sued to preemptively block certification of Alaska’s Senate race — but only if Trump’s candidate loses a close race to Democratic candidate Mary Peltola.

Peltola’s emergency motion to dismiss points out that the DOJ is interfering on Trump’s behalf, “raising issues governed exclusively by state law that were (already) resolved by the Alaska Supreme Court months ago.” As of this writing, the motion remains pending and is expected to be granted.

Trump similarly tried to force California and Washington State to disrupt their vote counts by seeking to “set aside vote-by-mail ballots from persons identified by the Federal Government likely to be noncitizens.” An appeals court dismissed the California suit on October 26, and Washington officials refused the request on October 28 — in part because the “lists of ineligible voters” were inaccurate by the DOJ’s own admission.

The constitutional framework

Courts have blocked most of Trump’s efforts to insert himself into the midterms. The primary source of constitutional authority to regulate congressional elections is the Elections Clause, found at Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution. That clause empowers states — not the federal government, and not the president — to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding elections. The same clause also reserves Congress the authority to “make or alter such Regulations” by law — a division of power in place since the founding that leaves no comparable role for the presidency over state-run elections.

In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment — ratified in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War — protects the fundamental right to vote, barring states from imposing substantial burdens on that right unless the burdens advance free elections. Laws requiring people to register before voting, or to vote at assigned places, are deemed reasonable under the Elections Clause. A president seizing state voter lists would not be reasonable, because there is no foundational authority under which the executive branch can control state-run elections in the first place.

Trump’s DOJ nevertheless began demanding states’ voter registration lists and confidential voter data in May 2025. States controlled by both parties refused to turn them over, and the DOJ sued. As of September 30, the initial cases against Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin have all been dismissed.

Preparing for confrontation

Across the United States, tens of thousands of volunteers, poll workers, and concerned citizens have stepped forward to help protect the midterms. For the first time in the nation’s history, election officials are teaching them what to do if armed federal agents or soldiers show up — even though their presence at the polls is prohibited under federal law. That prohibition has roots in Reconstruction-era laws written after the Civil War to keep armed troops away from polling places. On top of threats to send armed ICE agents and the military to polling places, the DOJ is dispatching an unprecedented number of agents — more than 1,000 — to “observe and monitor” voting in high-population areas in every state, and election workers are preparing for the moment agents try to intimidate voters, as recently happened in Wyoming.

As Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows recently observed: “This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections. It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

It does not just seem that way, the author contends. Trump does not recognize state authority over elections or anything else, just as he does not recognize congressional authority, Supreme Court authority, or the law of the land.

There was a time when states’ rights were the holy grail of limited federal power on the American right. Now, the article argues, conservatives have sacrificed that principle to the pursuit of unchecked power, and states’ rights have become a quaint memory.

The only solution, for now, is to vote — and to make sure everyone you know does the same. What happens next will be determined by the outcome, and by how a cornered administration reacts to it.