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Sunday, November 15, 2026Nov 15

Times Opinion: Of course Trump will try to sabotage the midterms. But voters aren’t helpless

Photo by Saul Loeb via AFP/Getty Images/TNS / US President Donald Trump speaks with the media after signing a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, Feb 3, 2026. The US House of Representatives passed a spending bill on Tuesday ending the four-day partial government shutdown sparked by Democratic opposition to funding for the federal agency carrying out President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.
Photo by Saul Loeb via AFP/Getty Images/TNS / US President Donald Trump speaks with the media after signing a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, Feb 3, 2026. The US House of Representatives passed a spending bill on Tuesday ending the four-day partial government shutdown sparked by Democratic opposition to funding for the federal agency carrying out President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.

On Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump showed the world who he is: someone willing to undermine, interfere with and ultimately attempt to overthrow any election result that doesn’t go his way. And he’s been showing us that, again and again, ever since.

Trump’s escalating power-grabs will continue until a Congress is seated that’s willing to rein him in. This year’s midterm voters can make that happen, but only if they start — now — organizing, mobilizing and educating friends and fence-sitters about just how dangerous to democracy this president truly is.

The latest demonstration of that danger has come in Trump’s recent remarks about “nationalizing” America’s elections.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,'” Trump said in a podcast released last week. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

It’s unlikely Trump will or can follow through. Like his 2022 call for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in support of his phony election-fraud claims, this one would run headlong into the plain language of that document, which puts the states in charge of the ballot.