This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 3 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
We are nine months away from Election Day, and Donald Trump and his allies are already making moves to try to illegitimately take control of the American election system.
Trump does not want Republicans to lose the House and the Senate, for one big reason in particular. In remarks to lawmakers last month, the president told members of his party that if they did not win the midterms, Democrats would “find a reason to impeach me.”
It’s clear Trump is obsessed with keeping control of Congress, but he has no real plan to do it legitimately.
The whole thing made the gerrymandering war a wash.
Despite the bravado and the constant boasts about never being more popular, Trump and his administration actually understand they are in trouble.
It’s not just polling. In a Texas special election over the weekend, a Democrat flipped a red state Senate seat, winning by 14 points in a district the president won by 17 points in 2024. That is a 31-point swing — almost unheard of.
Democrats shouldn’t expect a blowout like that in November, when turnout will be much higher, but even a 10-point swing in the midterms would wipe out the Republican majority. Heck, a five-point swing would.
They can see the writing on the walls. They know they don’t have a path to winning a free and fair election. So Trump is exploring other options.
The first plan was to gerrymander congressional maps. Why leave it up to voters to choose Republicans when Republicans could simply choose their voters?
So Trump pushed red states to redraw their districts to be even redder. Texas did it. Missouri did it. Ohio still may.
But the president’s pressure generated a backlash among Republicans in Indiana who told him to take a hike. His plan also backfired when some blue states, such as California, defensively redrew their maps. The whole thing made the gerrymandering war a wash.
So now that the midterm election year is upon us, it’s time for Trump’s Plan B: fully seize the machinery of American voting.
Last week, the president and his allies started moving on this project in Fulton County, Georgia, where FBI agents raided the election office and left with nearly 700 boxes of ballots.
That raid happened under the watchful eye of Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Her spokeswoman told MS NOW that the president has ordered Gabbard to investigate election security nationwide, even though she has no domestic law enforcement powers.
Former officials say that is preposterous, and they fear it is part of a plan to steal the midterms.
You may remember that Fulton County was ground zero for Trump’s election lies in 2020 — lies pushed by people such as former Trump aide Roger Stone, who posted a photo of himself with Vice President JD Vance on Monday. Stone said they chatted but didn’t say what they chatted about.
Or remember the lies pushed by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell? She was seen just after the Georgia raid last week with Trump Justice Department official Ed Martin.
Former officials say that is preposterous, and they fear it is part of a plan to steal the midterms.
It was Powell, along with disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the former CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who marched into the Oval Office in December 2020 and told Trump to seize voting machines and declare victory.
Late last month, Byrne reportedly accepted an invitation to the White House, and over the weekend, he praised the Fulton County raid.
So why are the usual suspects from the 2020 election back in Trump’s orbit now?
On Monday, Trump appeared on Dan Bongino’s podcast and told his now-former deputy director of the FBI that, ahead of the midterms, Republicans “should take over the voting” in “15 places” and “nationalize” elections.
Last week, Republicans unveiled a “Make Elections Great Again” bill to put new limits on voting by mail and voter registration drives. They also want to mandate voter IDs issued by the federal government and new voter surveillance programs.
Meanwhile, masked, armed federal agents are disappearing people from the streets of multiple cities, terrorizing residents into staying home and shooting law-abiding observers — all while the administration tells blue states such as Minnesota and Pennsylvania that they’ll call off the dogs if they hand over their most private, granular voter data.
All of their eggs are in this basket. Trump and his allies are not planning on getting more popular before November. They are hell-bent on going farther than they could in 2020.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).