A growing number of news analysts, political commentators, and prominent Democratic politicians are predicting that President Trump is setting the stage to intervene by force in the 2026 U.S. congressional elections to ensure that he will retain control of the House of Representatives. This will allow him to continue implementing his program to dismantle the welfare state and the democratic advances achieved by the Black civil rights and other social movements over the last seven decades.
This should not be a surprise to anyone, given Trump’s tenacious insistence that he defeated Biden in 2020 and mobilized a mob to invade the U.S. Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results. He failed, but the U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by a 6 to 3 conservative majority, and the Republican Party, purged of anti-Trumpers, saved him from being tried and convicted for organizing an insurrection.
Not deterred, the preparations for a coup seem ominously underway.
In all directions, Trump is attempting to consolidate his power. He has weakened the U.S. government bureaucracy by firing hundreds of thousands of employees. He has gutted or dismantled important federal programs and replaced hardworking civil servants with loyal sycophants. At the same time, he has bullied many universities, legal firms, and media corporations into submission and silence by threatening to cut off federal funding, punish opponents with lawsuits, or block business transactions that require federal approval.
He has managed to intimidate faltering Republicans into steadfast obedience by promising to support MAGA loyalists in Republican primary elections against those who dare to question his policies. As pointed out in my last column, he has pressured Republican-controlled state legislatures to redraw district electoral maps that parcel out traditional Democratic Party voters into areas that will ensure that Trump’s candidates will win elections to the U.S. Congress. After having successfully changed the Texas electoral map, Trump is now pushing the Republican-controlled state legislatures of Indiana, Missouri, and Florida to follow suit.
By pardoning more than 1,500 people involved in the January 6, 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol building, he has potentially consolidated a loyal army of followers, willing to carry out violence on his behalf with the understanding that he will pardon them if they commit crimes following his orders.
Under the pretext of fulfilling a campaign promise to deport violent undocumented immigrants, his Republican supporters in Congress have enacted legislation to boost the size of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers so that its current $27.7 billion budget is larger than that of most armies around the world. Unidentified masked ICE agents now systematically sweep into areas where traditionally undocumented workers congregate to seek jobs or carry out their day-to-day activities and arrest anyone in their path to achieve a nationwide quota of 3,000 arrests per day.
All of this has become familiar to those who follow the news of the Trump presidency. Although different judges have blocked some of these measures, most are temporary orders that will be appealed to the Supreme Court, which to date has largely failed to stop his arbitrary actions.
While all the evidence points to a march toward authoritarian rule, the recent decision to deploy the National Guard, first to Los Angeles to “assist” ICE agents in arresting undocumented residents, and now to Washington, D.C., supposedly to rid the city of a crime wave, has most clearly revealed his strategic plan to undermine U.S. democracy at its core.
In the United States, the National Guards are state-controlled military forces, usually composed of soldiers who have served in the U.S. armed forces. They are mostly employed in civilian occupations and sign up for this part-time job as a way of supplementing their income. Their commander-in-chief is the governor, and they are generally deployed to respond to emergencies, such as forest fires, floods, and earthquakes. However, they may be used to restore order in the case of civil unrest.
The President of the United States can federalize these forces for declared national emergencies, and this was the basis of Trump’s deployment or 4,000 National Guard in Los Angeles in June “to protect federal property” when citizens of that city—many sons and daughters of undocumented residents–protested the wave of arrests against immigrants. Both Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass opposed the president’s measures. He ignored their wishes and instead deployed 700 active-duty Marines to “protect” ICE officers during raids to arrest immigrants.
Legal scholars and Trump’s political opponents claim that his orders violate a federal law, known as the Posse Comitatus Act (1878), that prohibits the use of the military to enforce laws within the boundaries of the United States. Still, Trump has established a precedent and has naturalized the use of the federalized National Guard in domestic situations, preparing the way for future similar deployments.
Then on August 11, Trump issued an executive order to send the District of Columbia National Guard to the nation’s capital due to a “crime emergency.” Because Washington, DC is under federal jurisdiction, the president is the Guard’s commander-in-chief. Trump can carry out this measure for 30 days although an extension would require congressional approval. Republican governors from five other states have also sent their National Guard troops to assist.
Critics contend that Trump’s justification is fallacious since crime statistics in Washington are significantly down. Nonetheless, Trump used a recent violent incident against a prominent DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) operative to justify his measures. Because a majority of the residents of Washington, D.C. are Black, he also has played on a deeply embedded racist trope associating people of African descent with crime and violence.
Rather than sending the National Guard to neighborhoods where crime is higher than in other areas of the city, they were deployed to tourist sites, where they would be more visible to the national media. Many ended up caring for lawns on federal property and cleaning up trash around the nation’s monuments, given the fact that Trump slashed the budget for the National Park Service, which is currently significantly understaffed. The Washington, D. C. District Attorney also ordered that residents should be arrested and charged with the stiffest penalties for any imaginable crime—including possessing an open can of beer in public– in order to show that Trump is promoting law and order.
Trump is now announcing that he intends to do same to Chicago, Illinois and Baltimore, Maryland, two Democratic-leaning cities with majority Black populations. He uses the same argument that they are crime-infested and need to be cleaned up by federal intervention, even though Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore and Mayor Brandon Johnson, both Black, oppose a federal intervention. Similarly, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, also Black, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a successful white businessman, have adamantly argued that federalized National Guards are not welcome.
So how do these measures lead to a coup against the 2016 congressional elections where the control of the House of Representatives is at stake?
In 2020, Trump filed 61 unsuccessful lawsuits arguing that the election results were fraudulent and that he had won. Judges appointed by both Republicans and Democratics during different administrations threw out the fictitious claims of election fraud, which led to an eleventh-hour effort to invade the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the day that electoral votes were counted by the Congress.
Clearly Trump is worried about the outcome of the 2026 elections, as his popularity in the most recent polls is at an all-time low. In a June 2025 Gallup poll, 79% of U.S. adults indicated that immigration is a good thing for the country. In an August Gallup poll, 37% of those polled support his economic policies. Only 40% of those questions in the same poll offered overall support for how Trump is conducting his job. That number reflects the backing of his base. It is not enough to win elections.
Historically, the president’s party loses seats in Congress in the midterm elections between presidential races.
Without control of the House, Trump will be forced to compromise with the Democratics and will be unable to carry out many of his policy measures. California is already planning a plebiscite to change its voting districts to weaken Republican candidates, and Illinois and Maryland are considering similar redistricting measures.
In response, Trump has threatened a national executive order prohibiting citizens from voting by mail, which had been popular among Republicans prior to Covid-19, but it has become increasing used by Democrats who want to avoid waiting in long lines on election day. However, the Constitution explicitly designated that the states regulate voting procedures, making Trump’s proposal merely a means to argue that mail-in ballots are somehow tainted and shouldn’t be counted.
In closely contested elections when the outcomes are narrow, Trump is legitimizing a strategy that failed in 2020. If results are close in specific districts across the country, but especially in states with Democratic governors or mayors, it has become increasingly clear that Trump intends to declare a national emergency, federalize and then mobilize the National Guard to seize ballot boxes, tamper with the results, and declare the Republicans victors in the elections.
During the 2024 elections, Trump ambiguously stated that if he were elected, there would be no necessary for future elections. Last week, he stated: “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’” He then retreated by commenting: “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
Yet, it seems that he is planting a seed, first to his base of supporter and then naturalizing the idea to the population at large.
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