How to prevent a midterm election: Cancellation, Suppression, and the Loyalty Machine

Summary

On July 26, 2024, Donald Trump stood before a room full of conservative Christian voters in West Palm Beach, Florida, and told them: “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” The room cheered. A minute later, he said it again.

He has said versions of that five times over six years. To Elon Musk. To Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. To Reuters. To House Republicans. And once on social media in 2020, when he suggested delaying a presidential election he was afraid he would lose. Every time, his people call it a joke. He keeps coming back to it.

In November 2026, every seat in the House and a third of the Senate will be on the ballot. For Trump, for Heritage, for the Christian nationalist networks and the donor families who have funded this project — losing Congress is an existential threat. It would mean subpoenas, hearings, and investigations into everything this season has documented.

So the question this episode asks is simple: if you controlled the White House and a free election could take Congress away from you — how would you make sure that election was never allowed to happen?

What’s in This Episode

This series covers how you rig a midterm in three phases — Prevent, Sabotage, and Nullify. Episode 35 is about Phase One: everything that happens before a single ballot is cast. An election can be preventing through: 

Cancellation: Trump has floated the idea of not holding elections five times across six years — to Christian voters, to a foreign president, to Reuters, to House Republicans, and on social media in 2020. His allies have already sketched the pretexts: war with Iran, large-scale unrest, a cyber emergency. Marjorie Taylor Greene — once one of his most loyal allies, now openly at odds with him — warned that Trump is “planting the idea” and normalizing it through repetition. Project 2025 supplies the mechanism: an executive branch with sweeping emergency powers and no internal resistance left to slow it down.

The SAVE Act — voter suppression as national policy: The House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — the SAVE Act — almost entirely along party lines. It would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and vote, eliminate online and automatic voter registration, and sharply restrict mail-in ballots. Trump has said openly that if it passes, Democrats will “never be elected again.” Project 2025 builds the enforcement infrastructure: shifting election prosecutions to the Criminal Division, requiring states to share voter rolls and DMV databases with the federal government, and eliminating registration programs that currently add 3.5 million voters to the rolls each year.

The Machinery: In 2025, Trump’s election-security adviser Kurt Olsen pushed a plan to have the Commerce Department declare Dominion voting machines a national-security risk — effectively banning machines used in more than half of U.S. states. The goal was to force a rushed switch to hand counting before the midterms, creating the kind of chaos that makes fraud claims easier to sell. A federal task force dismantled machines in Puerto Rico. They found no Venezuelan code, no foreign threat. The plan collapsed for lack of evidence. The Mandate for Leadership calls for stripping the Federal Election Commission of its independent authority and prohibiting the FBI from combating election-related disinformation.

The Loyalty Machine: None of the Prevent phase works without Republican cooperation. Trump has built a loyalty economy inside the party — where advancement depends on usefulness to the project of permanent rule. The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund was designed to reward loyalists and signal that compliance pays. A federal judge shut it down. The primary threat runs alongside the money: Republicans who resist face challengers, outside spending, and isolation. Schedule F installs the same logic inside government. Project 2025 supplies the rules and institutions that make both tracks permanent.

Why It Matters

Episode 34 showed what the surveillance infrastructure looks like when it has $170 billion, a monopoly contractor, and no oversight requirements. Episode 35 shows what happens when that same ecosystem turns its attention to the election itself.

The Prevent phase doesn’t guarantee Trump and his allies can’t lose in 2026. But it does everything possible to make a genuine contest less likely — to shrink the electorate, tilt the field, and pre-rig the infrastructure before anyone shows up at a polling place.

None of this is improvisation. Project 2025 laid out each of these strategies in advance — the voter suppression laws, the federal takeover of election machinery, the loyalty apparatus inside the party. What this episode documents is the blueprint being executed.

The question Episode 36 asks: what happens when the rules aren’t enough, and they move to break the election in real time?