The Coming Election Takeover
They are telling you exactly what they are going to do. Believe them.
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We need to talk about November.
By now, you know the Trump cycle as well as you know the back of your own hand.
It runs like this, every time, with the metronomic predictability of a Swiss train: Trump floats an egregious thing. A “joke.” A musing. A Truth Social all-caps incontinence at 3:14 a.m.
The decent people of the republic react with appropriate horror. The MAGA media apparatus of Fox, Newsmax, CBS, the Twitter-poisoned podcast bros, and the MAGA Influencer-Industrial Complex fan out to tut-tut the horrified for being humorless scolds. He was kidding. You people are unhinged. Touch grass. Then, a beat later: well, he was kidding, but you have to admit he has a point. Then, a draft executive order leaks. Then it’s policy. Then it’s the law. Then it’s the new floor, and the next joke starts the cycle again, one rung lower.
We are now somewhere between phases three and four on stealing the 2026 midterms. And I want to walk you through, in plain Florida English, what is coming, because the political apparatus on our side keeps treating each new outrage as a one-off, when in fact it is a system, and the system has a name, and the name is the takeover.
The North Star is this: whatever they accuse the Democrats of, they are planning to do themselves. Always. It is a deeply reliable rule in MAGA politics, more reliable, certainly, than their spines. Rigged election? They are rigging it. Foreign interference? They are inviting it. Voter Fraud? You’re soaking in it.
Here is the menu they have already half-cooked.
Cleta Mitchell runs the operation. She already is, frankly, you just haven’t been paying attention. The 73-year-old Oklahoman who sat on the “find me 11,780 votes” call with Brad Raffensperger now runs the Election Integrity Network out of the Conservative Partnership Institute, and the EIN has become the connective tissue between the White House, DHS, and the entire 2020-denier diaspora.
ProPublica’s reporting from February laid it out: a 30-person summit convened by Michael Freaking Flynn, attended by White House lawyer Kurt Olsen and DHS “election integrity” official Heather Honey…who used to work for Cleta.
They sat in a room and openly war-gamed a “national emergency” executive order that would let Trump “get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states,” ban voting machines, kill mail-in ballots, and force everyone in America to re-register. Patrick Byrne, the Overstock weirdo, reportedly told the room Trump needed to do “the muscular thing.” That draft EO is sitting on someone’s desk right now.
Expect the DOJ to start indicting state election officials. Not maybe. Not eventually. Soon. The FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in January, based on a ludicrously thin affidavit that echoed Cleta Mitchell’s old 2020 fever dreams almost word-for-word, was the pilot episode.
Harmeet Dhillon at Civil Rights may likely become the legal showrunner. Expect grand juries in Maricopa, in Philadelphia, in Detroit, in Milwaukee. The point isn’t conviction. The point is to terrorize the clerks, the secretaries of state, the polling-place volunteers, the unglamorous but vital work done by middle-aged women and tired men in cardigans who actually run American democracy, until they quit or break.
Expect ICE and CBP at polling places. Mark Wayne Mullin, your new DHS Secretary, has pointedly declined to rule it out. Twenty-seven of 37 election experts in the recent Votebeat survey said federal law enforcement at the polls is “at least somewhat likely.” Steve Bannon has been publicly demanding it for a year. The chilling effect is the point …you don’t actually need to arrest anyone if the green uniforms in the parking lot keep the abuelas at home.
Expect the National Guard. Trump told the Times in January that his single regret of 2020 was not deploying troops to seize voting machines. He has spent the year since federalizing the Guard against governors’ wishes in Chicago, in Portland, in DC. The Supreme Court has narrowed but not closed that door. This is a dress rehearsal. In any red state with a compliant governor, expect Humvees within sight of polling places on November 3.
Expect the AI fake tsunami. Forty-eight hours out. Audio of Hakeem Jeffries “confessing” to ballot fraud. Video of Gretchen Whitmer “ordering” precincts closed. Synthetic robocalls in the voice of every Democratic candidate in every swing district. The 2024 fakes were the demo. 2026 is the product launch.
Expect more “emergency” redistricting, more stolen-election rhetoric pre-loaded for November 4, more Election Day “irregularities” surfaced by an RNC legal team that has spent four years training poll watchers to be performatively aggressive. The chaos is not a bug. The chaos is the deliverable.
A Word From Our Sponsor — And Pay Attention, Because This One Is Personal
Re-read that last section. The clerks. The Secretaries of State. The polling-place volunteers. The unglamorous people the Trump DOJ is about to spend the next six months trying to terrorize out of their jobs.
Now ask yourself: how do you think the Bannon-poisoned podcast army finds the home address of a 64-year-old county clerk in Maricopa? How do you think the “performatively aggressive” poll watcher at your precinct locates you afterward? How do you think the swatters know where to send the SWAT team?
I’ll tell you, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it for years now.
Have someone who doesn’t like you? They already know where you live.
The Independent reported this year on a woman who’d barely used social media. A stalker still found her home, her relatives, her workplace — all from a single name search on a data broker site.
These sites don’t ask why someone is looking. They just answer. Your address. Your family members. Your daily patterns. Available to anyone — an angry ex, a stranger, someone who just didn’t like something you posted.
If you are a poll worker, an election official, a reporter, a precinct captain, a Democratic donor, or simply a normal American who is going to vote in November in a state MAGA has decided to make a target, you have a problem. The threats don’t materialize out of thin air. They come from a $200 billion data-broker industry that has packaged your life and put it up for sale to anyone with a credit card and a grievance.
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Take yourself off the menu before November.
So what do we do? Lawyer up. Now. Not in October. Every Democratic governor, AG, and SOS should already have:
Pre-filed TROs ready to drop on the WH, DOJ, DHS, RNC, and the MAGA election fraud groups like CPI and EIN the minute any one of them sets a boot near a polling place. Have the judges on speed dial. Have the media briefed in advance. Have people streaming every interaction with the Feds.
A public, unambiguous vow from every Democratic governor that any federal agent, armed or otherwise, who attempts to interfere with the lawful administration of an election in their state will be arrested by state troopers on the spot and charged under state election-interference statutes.
Say it on television. Repeat it weekly. Make Trump back down or escalate.A 50-state shadow election-protection army. Give Marc Elias and the best election lawyers in every state a blank check and a go-order. Rope in retired judges, paralegals, and law students sworn in as deputized poll watchers, paired with veterans and clergy in every precinct. Make every act of intimidation visible, livestreamed, and federally documented within minutes.
A pre-built deepfake war room. We need a coalition newsroom funded by the major Democratic donors that exists for one purpose: to debunk AI fakes inside 30 minutes, with cryptographic provenance and a media response strategy ready to go.
A National Compact of Governors…we need Democratic and any honest Republican governors who will sign a public pledge to certify their state’s results based on the actual vote count, full stop, no matter what theater the White House stages.
We are not in a normal election cycle. We are in the part of the movie where the audience screams don’t go in the basement and the protagonist goes in the basement anyway.
Don’t be the protagonist. They are telling us what they are going to do.
Believe them. Then beat them.
Thanks again to Incogni for sponsoring this free post!
And let us not forget…turnout. It worked in Hungary despite Orban’s(and Trump’s, and JD’s) best efforts. Let’s make it too big to rig!
So how do we get these recommendations implemented?. Who’s in charge (because damned if I know)? Is there any sign that any of this is being done? Do the Democrats have a plan?