Conversation
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PROOF EXCLUSIVE: Ten More Ways Trump and His Agents Are Rigging the Coming Elections
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Introduction
A Proof reader of Part I of this series commented below that report, “This is scary on an unprecedented level.”
And it was. The report exhaustively outlined twelve unprecedented ways that Donald Trump is rigging the 2026 midterm elections.
But for as scary and without precedent as that Proof report and its contents were, this author and many readers suspected that it detailed only a fraction of the story. It was clear—even when that report was published on September 21—that a Part II, Part III, and maybe even parts beyond that would eventually become necessary, even urgent.
Why? Because no president or political party has done more to try to rig a federal election than Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing right now in 2026, a fact made all the more grotesque by the fact that it’s these same entities who have spent the last decade crying wolf about supposed election theft as a justification for their own election crimes.
But this isn’t the first election Republicans have tried to steal. Or second. Or fourth.
In 2000, bussed-in Republican operatives led by Trump friends including Roger Stone staged a fake riot—the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot—to stop all vote-counting in Florida just as Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was about to pull ahead in the state.
A plainly right-leaning Supreme Court then implicitly blessed that riot as dispositive by insisting that vote-counting in the state of Florida stop, though (a) there was time to complete it, and (b) it was the role of the Florida Supreme Court, not SCOTUS, to determine and when and whether Florida state election laws had been violated. To aid the Republican theft of the election the Court had to develop a new definition of the Fourteenth Amendment that it immediately opined would never ever be applied again.
In 2004, as discussed in much greater detail below—so it won’t be belabored here—an Ohio elected official linked to far-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (and his wife Ginni Thomas, who informally ran White House personnel decisions for Mr. Trump in his first term) orchestrated a conspiracy to disenfranchise just enough Black and poor and college-aged Ohioans that that’s likely what gave the Republican George W. Bush victory in the election by a mere 50,000-vote swing in the Buckeye State. It goes without saying that just as there was no punishment, and indeed much reward, for Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s rigging of state election protocols for Mr. Bush in Florida in 2000—Republicans soon gifted her with a seat in Congress to better underscore the party’s dedication to premeditated election-rigging—Ohio’s Kenneth Blackwell was granted ever more and more power in the Thomases’ circle once it was clear that he would steal the franchise from hundreds of thousands of his fellow Black Americans.
In 2016, scores of unreported collusive contacts between the Trump campaign—run by a Kremlin agent Trump well knew was a Kremlin agent when he hired him, Paul Manafort—dovetailed beautifully with the Kremlin’s own micro-targeting operations, a “British” micro-targeting operation devised by a Russian and overseen by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, and a foreign policy quid pro quo involving proposed Trump Organization business in Russia negotiated by Trump fixer Michael Cohen at Trump’s explicit behest. The collusion, most of it never investigated by Robert Mueller (for all that Trump fans pretended it had been) was so comically obvious that it saw Manafort handing over proprietary campaign polling data to a known Kremlin agent in Manafort’s personal and professional circle, Konstantin Kilimnik, in Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s favorite New York City cigar bar; not just one Donald Trump son but two (Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner) meet alongside Mr. Manafort with multiple Kremlin agents in Donald Trump’s own house; and Trump’s eldest son Don trying (as did Trump adviser Roger Stone) to coordinate secretly with the Kremlin-asset WikiLeaks operation—a clearinghouse for the criminally stolen Democratic files Donald Trump had on national television successfully urged his Kremlin friends to try to get access to.
All this strategic dovetailing may well have turned the tide in a tight election.
In 2024, Trump ran for president while a private citizen, making it virtually impossible to track all the promises he made to would-be foreign election interferers to try to get them to help him. Suffice to say that we know this much: Donald Trump stole highly classified documents from the American people across months and months of federal criminal conspiring in late 2020 and early 2021, and his own subsequent statements—which focused on his right to sell such materials as he claims former GOP president Richard Nixon did—make clear that he intended to distribute those classified materials, which include his secret plans for a future war in Iran, to the highest bidder.
The point here is a fairly simple one: since 1988—when George W. Bush’s father beat Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who’d been leading him for almost the entire election season—by agreeing to air what at the time was the most racist television ad the American electorate had ever seen, the Willie Horton Ad, the Republican Party has had no demonstrated ability to win a popular vote in the United States. The Willie Horton Ad was created by the business partner of Trump pal Roger Stone, Lee Atwater, and Trump friend Roger Ailes, confirming that the nihilistic and diabolical thinking of Trump and his circle has infected American life for decades.
Indeed, for 38 years now the GOP—and now MAGA—playbook has been to suppress the vote, conspire with foreign agents, spread mass disinformation, wrongly purge citizens from voter rolls, call in bomb threats, stage violent riots and rebellions, and engage in other more esoteric but equally illicit conduct that easily meets at least the ordinary definition of treason in order to win elections. Democrats may well pander cynically to their base, and may rightly work diligently to especially ensure that their base is able to vote easily, but only Republicans have become known more for feckless “election ratfuckery” than even attempting to develop a policy agenda American voters are interested in.
These are historical facts—not partisan spin. And they’re the backdrop for this report.
Ten More Ways Trump and His Agents Are Rigging the Coming Elections
