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Listening to a recent Jason Stanley interview, he sounded like a sports announcer to the apocalypse.
“They’ve been taking over the military! They’ve been attacking the press! They’re toppling the universities! They’re using the courts to give draconian sentences to ICE protesters. They’re creating a private army. They’re doing everything! They’re doing all the things that if I were advising an authoritarian to do, if those were my values, I would advise. And so yes, they will try to use the military… but everyone’s got to stop them!”
The author of How Fascism Works was being interviewed about Yale University’s capitulation to the Trump regime over ‘ideological alignment’ but the above quote was in response to a question about the open escalation of threats against the US November midterm elections, the scope of which has not been sufficiently comprehended.
Stanley, a former Yale University professor of philosophy who left the US to work at the University of Toronto in Canada, pointed out what he called the “utterly obvious” fact that “Trump is not trying in any way to broaden his popular support.”
He said Trump’s “intention has always been to lock down power by bypassing elections.”
“I mean, it’s obvious! It’s been obvious. I’ve been writing about this for a year now. It’s just totally obvious. He’s not trying to broaden his popular support. So everyone has to realize they’re going to try to steal the elections!”
Whether or not they succeed is another matter, he said.
Stanley points out that Trump and his loyalists “are not very competent” but then adds: “There’s a much higher chance that whatever democracy we had is no longer existent on the federal level.”
Author Keir Giles reaches that same conclusion in his upcoming book, American Overthrow, where he documents the threats to the US midterms by looking both forward and backward.
As Giles reports:
“Election conspiracy theorists have been installed in key positions where they can influence both the conduct of elections and perceptions of their integrity. In 2025, the Department of Homeland Security appointed David Harvilicz, a campaigner to overturn the results of the 2020 election, to set policy on protecting election infrastructure. This includes ‘voting machines’, a category covering a wide range of systems in use for registering and counting votes in the United States.
“An ongoing campaign to cast doubt on the security of voting machines and the integrity of the results they report mirrors precisely the aims of Russian efforts during the 2016 and 2020 elections. These were not only directed at swinging voters behind Trump, but also sowing distrust in the US electoral system, including spreading hoax stories that voting machines were vulnerable to hacking.”
Big Lies
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term in January 2025, he’s threatened state elections officials; continued to spread the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him and relentlessly touted imaginary ‘massive voter fraud’. In January, his FBI led a raid on a Georgia election office. He’s claimed Chinese interference in the election without offering evidence, he has threatened to use ICE agents and the US military to intimidate voters and seize ballots, and he has openly floated the idea of declaring a national emergency to subvert the outcome of the elections or to even prevent them entirely.
The chaos Trump is stirring up, which also includes complaints about “rogue judges” out to sabotage elections, are designed to stir up violence by loyalists, as well as exhaustion and doubt from the general public over the reality of election outcomes.
Lest we forget: he already attempted one coup.
The So-Called ‘Save Act’
Trump’s efforts to undermine the midterm elections are complemented by attempts to coerce Congress to pass the so-called Save Act, legislation that would likely further disenfranchise tens of millions of voters.
The Save Act requires voters to show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. They would also need to provide photo identification from a specific short list of required documents for in-person voting. The legislation also curbs voting by mail and aims to force states to hand voter rolls to the federal government.
As Giles writes in American Overthrow, which focuses on the first 18 months of Trump’s second term and its grim resemblance to what happened in Russia at the turn of the century:
“The measures already taken in the United States can serve as preparation for a process familiar from authoritarian takeovers around the world: narratives about stolen or illegitimate elections, a declared emergency, additional executive powers to resolve it, and claims that only one leader can uphold legitimacy and restore order.
“In reality the only thing preventing Trump declaring he is entitled to continue as president past the nominal end of his second term is the text of the US Constitution, which… lacks an effective means of enforcement… The Russian-style, legalistic means of addressing the problem would be to amend the Constitution, as Putin did in 2021, to permit him to continue as president. The Trump-style method would be simply to ignore the Constitution altogether.”
Political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay told Byline Times: “There is no limit to what Trump will do to steal the election from American voters. The rule of law has broken down in the United States and Trump has gotten used to facing disorganized opposition from the courts to his countless illegalities.”
Like Giles, MacKay uses a Kremlinologist lens when analyzing Trump’s actions.
“Keep in mind that Trump is a Russian asset,” Mackay said. “Trump’s boss, Putin, recently had the Yabloko party barred from participating in upcoming elections. While it’s true elections in Russia have always been fraudulent - they’re merely affirmation exercises - Putin doesn’t want any outlet for the expression of anti-war sentiment.”
He added that “Trump has already cast Democrats as Communists and as ‘enemies of the people’” and “will use the excuse of national security to override state control of the conduct of national elections.”
“Trump will certainly not recognize any result that goes against him,” he said. “There is no effective constraint on Trump using organized government violence against the people. We’ve seen this with Trump turning ICE into an armed paramilitary force personally loyal to him and not to the US Constitution. Trump already uses ICE as a weapon against Americans who attempt to organize against his regime.”
Jason Stanley wants to see Americans collectively rally to their own defense.
“Everyone should figure out one thing that they can do to help the election,” he said. “One way they can bring their skillset to bear on helping the election and then devote themselves to that.”
And he wants people to remember that “authoritarians are always going to represent themselves as more confident than they are.”
He said defending the integrity of the midterm elections is going to require mass mobilization from “large pockets of resistance and pushback.”
“We are not dealing with a bunch of hyper-competent people here,” he said. “And we’re going to need Yale Law School to step up and provide lots of lawyers to defend against the charges that they’re going to bring across the country, against election officials, against people protecting the polls. We’re going to need essentially a mass mobilization of legal experts to defend the polls. We’re going to need police officers to enforce local laws and make sure that ICE is not doing things that violate the law. So whenever you have a paramilitary force like ICE that is working for an authoritarian leader, you’re going to need ordinary legal systems—the police, the lawyers, the judges to weigh in on the side of the law.”
Stanley admits “that’s problematic because… the police are obviously compromised in various ways in the United States”, but he says local police have to step up and “protect voters against what ICE may do. And everyone needs to make sure everyone’s registered to vote, gets out to the polls, that ICE does not intimidate voters from the polls, and that will require a community support of voters.”
“The main hope for Americans is that the Trump regime is incompetent and corrupt,” added Michael MacKay. “But they should not count on that. Citizens have to organize and unite and vote out the treason faction (the Republican Party) at every level. Votes may be stolen from them and fascism may prevail, but Americans have to fight every step of the way and never give up.”
The Real ‘Mail-In Fraud’
Trump, who has made restricting the ability to vote by mail a top priority of his administration, wrote in a 2025 post:
“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS… We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED… Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM… I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX..MUST END NOW!!!!”
This August, Trump voted by mail.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.