Republicans warn Trump planning something 'spectacular' to 'break' the midterms

As President Donald Trump continues to lay the foundations to nationalize the 2026 midterm elections, a pair of conservatives warned during a Wednesday podcast that Trump is aiming to “break” the midterm elections using underhanded tactics.

“This is the first instance in which I could begin to believe that something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been,” Stephen Richer, a former Republican county recorder of Maricopa County when Trump attempted to steal the 2020 election, told The Atlantic during a podcast with centrist journalist David Frum. Richer recalled how, despite being a Republican, Trump and his supporters tried to intimidate him during the 2020 election when he refused to cooperate with their groundless conspiracy theories.

"I realized, ‘You don't want answers from me. You don't want me to investigate. You just want me to affirm what you want to believe to be true,’” Richer recalled. Frum worried that if House of Representatives elections are close enough that Democrats only pick up a handful of seats instead of dozens, Trump could sow enough doubts to convince people to overturn the result.

"If it's not 40 seats that are changing hands but just six, and you have an idea in the week before the election which those six are likely to be, could you do something then?" Frum asked. This method could be especially effective, Richer added, if Trump argues that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) should refuse to seat the victorious Democrats.

“Speaker Mike Johnson, the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections,” Richer said when describing the theory. While Trump may try to do this, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1969 case Powell v. McCormack that the House of Representatives may only refuse to seat a member if they do not meet all Constitutional requirements.

According to Richer, Trump supporters will not need proof in order to believe the elections were stolen. He cited his own experience dealing with his fellow Republicans when Trump tried to steal Arizona’s electoral votes in the 2020 election.

"Almost every single Republican that I spoke with after the 2020 election ... knew that there was very little to Donald Trump's allegations of a stolen election,” Richer recalled. “At best, they stayed quiet. At worst, they went full-throated along with it because they knew it was a path to political riches."

Frum also condemned Trump as someone who is conservative on certain issues because, as he put it, "when the president is acting like some kind of internet troll, some kind of Klansman with access to an AI machine, he discredits everything that his administration is doing that looks like something that another administration might also do."

Richer and Frum are not alone in warning that Trump will try to steal the midterm elections.

"For anybody who doubted that this administration is laying the foundation to interfere in elections, the deluge of activity over the last two weeks should lay those doubts to rest,” Wendy Weiser, Vice President of Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Vox. Another scholar speculated about a possible “nightmare scenario.”

"The nightmare scenario used to be that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and have the military seize ballots and machines from a swing state on election night,” Derek Clinger, Senior Counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative, University of Wisconsin Law School, also told Vox. “But Fulton County suggests a much more plausible scenario: one where the seizure of ballots is conducted with the appearance of a legal process. I think that approach is both more likely to happen and also harder to challenge in real time."

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