President Trump doesn’t hide one of his greatest fears: losing Republican control of the U.S. Congress on November 3, which would possibly lead to a third impeachment trial. Yet his response is a chaotic mix of measures to stave off a stunning defeat that could actually bring his nightmare scenario to life. What are his plans for an electoral victory, and what are the conditions he has set up that might lead to his political demise during his last two years in power?
Polls consistently show Trump’s overall unpopularity at 65% and approval hovering at 35%, largely his loyal MAGA supporters. The two main issues for voters remain inflation—with rising food, fuel, fertilizer, and housing costs—and the Iran War, with no discernible positive outcome for the Trump administration in sight. Congress’s current composition gives Republicans a razor-thin, four-seat majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning any slight shift in voter preferences could tip power to Democrats in the November elections.
Plan A: Redrawing the U.S. Electoral Map
Trump’s initial plan to defeat Democrats was to pressure Republican majorities in several states’ legislatures to redraw electoral district boundaries to favor their party by reassigning likely Democratic voters to different districts with Republican majorities, diluting their strength at the polls. At the same time, the six Republican-appointed members of the U.S. Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the historic 1965 Voters’ Rights Act. They ruled that considering historic patterns of racist discrimination against Black voters no longer justified measures that would protect the weight of African-Americans in elections in southern states.
Given the recent political polarization in the United States, in which most Congressional districts have been drawn to favor one party over the other, current measurements show at least 49 districts where there is a real dispute between Republican and Democratic candidates over who will represent that constituency in Congress. Polls also indicate that, nationwide, Democrats have a 6% to 7% lead over Republicans, meaning they will likely win control of the House of Representatives.
The Senate is more complex, as Democrats will need to reelect several incumbents and win seats in states that have supported Republican presidential candidates in recent decades: Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and Maine, although polls currently favor Democratic candidates by slim margins.
Plan B: Cutting Voters from the List
After failing to secure a potential Republican majority by redrawing district maps, Trump’s next strategy has been to issue executive orders designed to suppress the vote of those likely to support Democratic candidates by taking federal control over the national electoral process, a responsibility clearly assigned to individual states under the U.S. Constitution. The pretext is alleged widespread voting by non-citizens, which conveniently dovetails with Trump’s decade-long aggressive campaign against immigrants. However, all credible investigations into possible illegal voting by non-citizens reveal an infinitesimally small number of people who have actually violated the law. It has never caused a candidate to win or lose a given race.
Third Measure: Pressure Democratic Governors
Trump’s third effort has involved demanding that governors of Democratic-leaning states turn over voter registration information to the federal government so it could determine which registered voters were eligible to vote. This would give the Department of Homeland Security unlimited power to declare who it deemed a legitimate voter and who, in its view, was not eligible to vote. So far, Democratic governors have refused to comply and Trump’s order is blocked in court.
Plan No. 4: Demand More Documents to Vote
Concurrently, Trump has tried a fourth way to tip the election to Republicans through a proposed congressional bill, known as the Save America Act, that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship with a birth certificate or a US passport. In the United States, no national identification card indicates citizenship status, and an estimated 21 million potential voters don’t have passports or easy access to their birth certificates. This provision would provide additional complications for those who have married and changed their names. Even some Republican senators see the bill as an onerous demand on potential voters and have refused to back it, meaning it will not become law.
Fifth Target: Voting by Mail
A fifth effort has been to block voting by mail, a means currently used by one-third of the U.S. electorate to participate in elections. Although Trump himself has voted by mail in two recent Florida elections, the Save America Act and a new set of guidelines by the U.S. Postal Service would grant the agency the power to determine which recipients have the right to receive a ballot to vote by mail, based on voters’ records compiled by the federal government. The Supreme Court will likely consider challenges to the U.S. Postal Service guidelines in the next two weeks. If the conservative majority backs Trump’s plan, it will be an unprecedented reinterpretation of the Constitution by concentrating power in the hands of a branch of government that has been explicitly excluded from participating in the organization of elections.
Trump has never recovered from his 2020 electoral defeat and continues to insist that the elections were stolen. However, he lost 62 court cases that found no basis for his allegations. This led to his desperate effort to prevent Biden from being sworn in as President by mobilizing his supporters to invade the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2023. Since then, hundreds of Trump loyalists have been elected or appointed to state and local electoral boards, where they will likely attempt to push the final electoral results toward Republican candidates if there is a challenge to election results.
Plan No. 6: Supervising the Elections
Trump’s sixth move has been to dispatch election observers to states that have recently held elections to build a case for federal oversight (and possible interference) in tight races. In 2020, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, blocked the president’s attempt to seize election voting machines in Arizona. In this election cycle, the Department of Justice has announced that over 1,000 agents are being prepared to oversee the election in key states. They would, no doubt, be welcomed by the hundreds of election deniers who oversee elections in different states. Trump could declare a national emergency and order the commandeering of machines to question unfavorable election results and manipulate them in favor of Republicans.
Seventh Plan: Communist Witch Hunts
Trump’s seventh measure has been to launch an aggressive campaign against Democratic candidates, especially those with democratic socialist leanings, claiming that they are radical communists. Although this discourse may seem like an anachronistic flashback to a bygone Cold War era, it seems to resonate with Trump’s base. Some moderate Democratic leaders have fueled this discourse by arguing that Democratic Senate nominees Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Angela Nixon of Florida are too far to the left to win independent voters in these two key races.
Measure No. 8: Pretend the Iran War Is Over
To respond to the ongoing high price of gasoline and its ripple effect throughout the economy, in an eighth measure, Trump has tried to manipulate the market by declaring that the Iran War is over and his “mission accomplished,” a bizarre reference to President Bush’s claim in the Iraq War, when that conflict continued for several more years. An announced all-out economic sanction campaign against Iran also seems doomed, as it would require the unlikely cooperation of China, which currently imports 80% to 90% of its oil from Iran.
Plan No. 9: If They Don’t Have Sirloin Steaks, Let Them Eat Ground Beef!
In a feeble attempt to bring down prices, Trump’s ninth action has been to announce that the United States will import 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef and lean beef trimmings over a 90-day period, presumably from Argentina, and sell it on the U.S. market at a quarter of the cost of domestic meat, dramatically undercutting national producers. This proposal has drawn strong pushback from conservative-leaning farmers in key states, who in turn may help determine who controls the Senate. Trump has also touted a possible agreement with Venezuela in which the Pentagon would partner with a Venezuelan firm to access the country’s oil for the next hundred years, even though any significant new production would take years to influence the international price of oil.
Idea No. 10: A Multimillion-Dollar Self-promotion Campaign
Trump’s tenth action to influence the election outcome has been the promise to spend some of the $400 million in campaign funds he controls to produce national election advertisements touting his major accomplishments over the last two years, turning the election into a referendum on his governance. This could have the opposite effect, reminding voters in key congressional races how few of his 2024 electoral promises Trump has kept.
At the same time, and for no apparent logical reason, Trump has decided to wage a tariff war with Canada, the United States’ most loyal ally and an important trading partner. The threatened 50% tariffs on Canadian goods will not only raise prices for U.S. consumers but also devastate the economy of states bordering Canada—Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri—where Democratic and Republican candidates are in closely contested races. Trump’s outlandish decision to order changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, merely to annoy Canadians, only adds fuel to the conflict between the two countries.
Rather than reassuring his potential supporters that he is doing everything possible to end the war in Iran and lower prices, Trump has spent the last month focusing an enormous amount of time on his vanity projects even when judicial orders have blocked his efforts. He refuses to give up on his efforts to add his name in some way or other to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He has forged ahead in building his golden ballroom at the White House. He refuses to admit that a contractor’s incompetence caused damage to the Washington Mall’s reflecting pool, and he has not given up on building a 250-tall arch to tower over Washington, D.C.
Rather than portraying his presidency as a daily commitment to improving the lives of ordinary people and ending overseas adventures, Trump seems to be increasingly involved in finding ways of enriching his and his family’s fortune, along with the 1% who own 31% of the country’s wealth. If this is a wave election, Republicans will lose control of the House and possibly the Senate. If the results are a tsunami in favor of Democrats, Trump might not necessarily face a third impeachment trial in 2027, as Democrats will not garner the 2/3 of the votes to declare him guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but he will certainly encounter a deluge of investigations into his corruption and misgovernance.
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