Trump's talk of canceling elections is a sign of desperation
He wouldn't be talking this way if his numbers weren't terrible.
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Donald Trump hates voting. He has cast doubt on election results virtually every time he’s run. He does this even when he wins, and even before ballots are cast. If it were up to him, he would simply declare himself dictator.
So it’s not especially surprising — though it is of course disgusting — that he has been openly musing about canceling the 2026 midterms.
On January 6, during a speech to House Republicans at the Kennedy Center, he wondered of Democrats “how we have to even run against these people” and added, “I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator!’”
Then in an interview with Reuters last week, Trump claimed of the midterms that his administration had been so successful that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Asked to explain those comments, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the president was “simply joking” and “speaking facetiously.” After a reporter followed up by asking if the president really found the idea of ending democracy “funny,” Leavitt attacked the questioner for being the sort of boring, serious person who thinks the president of the United States maybe shouldn’t get his chuckles by imagining himself shredding the Constitution.
There’s little doubt that if Trump could, he would in fact simply declare himself ruler for life, bequeathing the presidency after his death to one or more of his large adult sons. Since that’s not an option, he will instead try to undermine elections in any way he can.
That’s grim — but it’s not hopeless. We know the methods Trump will employ to taint the vote, and Americans who care about democracy have already started organizing effective resistance to many of them.
There is no “cancel election” button
Karoline Leavitt is a fascist propagandist, and the reporters who pressed her on Trump’s comments are correct — it’s alarming that the president, a man who already launched one coup attempt, is amusing himself by contemplating a second.
But the fact that Trump thinks he has a big button on his desk labeled “Cancel Elections” does not actually mean that such a button exists, nor that he can flex his tiny fingers and press it. Elections in the US are controlled by the states; congressional elections are certified by Congress.
As NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Bluesky, “the question to ask about this is, okay, he wants to cancel the midterms. how does he get the VA state board of elections to cancel the midterms? how does he get the georgia board of elections to do it? how does he convince republican house members to quit their jobs and give up their paychecks? what does he do about the fact that in most states midterms and statewides are on the same cycle, so ‘canceling the elections’ might mean that tennessee doesn’t have a governor next year.”
These are all excellent points. And somewhere in the dim, festering orange passageways that make up what we must reluctantly refer to as Trump’s brain, he himself knows that he cannot in fact answer them. Or at least, some of his leech-like advisors know he can’t answer them. And so those leech-like Trump whisperers have already started to try to rig the elections that they can’t cancel.
Gerrymandering
Trump’s main strategy for stealing the House is an unprecedented and grotesque binge of mid-decade gerrymandering.
Usually district lines are redrawn at the end of each decade when the census is taken. But Trump began pressuring state Republican parties in red states to redistrict now. Texas immediately leaped to take advantage of the Constitution-shredding Republican Supreme Court and its attack on the Voting Rights Act to draw a brutal gerrymander disenfranchising Black voters en masse and create five new safe Republican seats.
Missouri gave Trump another seat; North Carolina gave him two. Ohio passed a map with some bipartisan support which may give Trump a couple seats, or may not if there’s a blue wave.
And then things began to go south for Trump’s dictatorial agenda. Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Democrats pushed a successful ballot initiative to create a retaliatory gerrymander which would flip five seats to Democrats. Virginia Democrats are also moving forward on a redistricting effort which could net as many as four new Democratic seats. And in a shocking reversal, Indiana Republicans refused to redistrict despite a slew of primary threats from Trump and death threats from his vigilante goons.
ABC News estimates that after all this jockeying, Republicans may have gained a net of around three seats. As a benchmark, Democrats flipped 41 seats in the 2018 election. They’re unlikely to repeat that, but only because the Republican majority is so much narrower. Democrats only need to pick up around five seats — a pittance in a regular midterm year, and less than a pittance when the president is as unpopular as Trump currently is.
Florida and Louisiana are still waiting on a Supreme Court decision which could shred the last of the VRA protections and net the GOP a few more seats; Kansas (red), Maryland (blue), and Illinois (blue) all have contemplated redistricting, but look like they probably won’t at this point.
It’s also possible that Democrats will win by such a large margin in November that they may overcome some gerrymandered seats. Pollster G. Elliott Morris has Democrats at +4 on his congressional ballot aggregator. Democratic ID is now +8 and Trump’s approval is actually lower than it was in 2017 before the historic 2018 Republican wipeout. Elliott says he thinks that given historic trends, Democrats will probably be at somewhere around +7 on the generic ballot before the election. Democrats are also dominating special and off year elections. Last year they ran 13 points better on average than in 2024, flipping 25 of 119 races (federal, state, and local). Republicans flipped none.
In short, Trump’s dream of gerrymandering his way to victory has stalled out because of Democratic resistance, Republican resistance, and overwhelming resistance from voters, who hate Republican gerrymandering, support retaliatory Democratic gerrymandering, and are showing up in huge numbers at the ballot to reject the GOP.
Violence at the polls
The other less open anti-democratic Trump scheme is intimidation, or actual violence, at the polls.
Republicans have spent years falsely claiming they only lose elections because millions of undocumented immigrants vote illegally. Far right fash podcaster and Trump advisor Steve Bannon has floated the idea of sending ICE and/or the National Guard to liberal cities to prevent illegitimate voting — that is, voting by non-white people or Democrats. In the months before the 2020 election, Trump pledged to send sheriffs and law enforcement personnel to polling places to back up poll watching operations.
The problem for Trump is that “both federal and state laws explicitly prohibit the federal government from carrying out these implied threats,” according to the Brennan Center. The president doesn’t have any emergency powers that allow him to override these laws, and voting intimidation is a crime in every state, which means a sheriff or ICE agents at a polling place dispatched by the president could be arrested. That’s presumably why Trump did not actually send federal agents to terrorize state voters in 2020.
It’s certainly possible that current ICE deployments are in part intended to intimidate voters and build momentum for attacks on elections. If that is the goal, though, it is backfiring spectacularly. Public opinion has turned radically against the agency, especially after the vicious murder of Renee Good by an ICE agent earlier this month. For the first time abolishing ICE entirely had plurality support in a new poll.
Politically, this shift in public opinion has empowered Democrats and made Republicans flinch. Progressive Dems are coalescing around a bill introduced by Rep. Jimmy Gomez which would redirect $175 million in ICE funding to affordable housing. Meanwhile, Trump has reportedly acknowledged that ICE’s occupation “looks bad,” and is worried that enforcement is too unpopular. This doesn’t mean a radical shift in policy, but it does suggest Trump and the White House don’t at the moment have the stomach for a radical escalation involving open attacks on polling places.
If they do, though, they will meet resistance. There has been sweeping and effective grassroots pushback to ICE in every city where it has operated, reaching a crescendo during the brutal occupation of Minneapolis, with groups of residents following ICE in cars, honking horns, blowing whistles, protesting outside hotels where federal agents are staying, and organizing know-your-rights meetings.
These networks would certainly be activated if there were an effort to deploy ICE to polling places. People aren’t intentionally building capacity to defend elections, but that is certainly one thing they are doing.
Trump can try
Trump and his hench-fascists in the Supreme Court are working on other ways to undermine elections. They’ve been targeting mail-in ballots, for example, in an effort to make voting more difficult in the hopes that this will disenfranchise more Democrats than Republicans. They’re also trying to exclude student IDs as identification for voting, because young people tend to vote for Democrats. The GOP targets Native Americans for voter suppression for similar reasons.
These initiatives are all despicable attacks on the rights of voters and strike at the heart of our democracy. They are also part of a long history of Republican efforts at voter suppression. These can be effective in swinging close elections at the margins, especially when Republicans are more motivated and more likely to go to the polls.
However, as we’ve seen in specials and in the 2025 elections, Republicans are not currently more motivated or more likely to go to the polls. It’s quite possible that some of the GOP’s tactics — like the attack on mail-in voting — could backfire. Others, like the federal SAVE Act, intended to institute voter ID requirements that would keep millions of American citizens from voting, have stalled out. The bill passed the House last April, but has so far been moribund in the Senate.
Trump can do what he did in 2020 and try to declare that elections are rigged and that this or that Democrat should not be seated. Again, though, there’s no mechanism for canceling results wholesale, and contesting individual results will mean lengthy litigation. The one big Republican effort to steal a North Carolina Supreme Court seat after the 2024 election took six months and then failed.
Trump and Republicans notably did not try to dispute results in New Jersey and Virginia in 2025. Maybe they will in 2026, but their track record is bad, and it’s very difficult to see how they would overcome what looks like a powerful blue wave.
None of this is to say that our democracy is healthy, because it absolutely is not. Our president jokes about canceling elections and threatens to send armed thugs to election places to intimidate voters. Our Republican Congress and Supreme Court rush to aid Trump in his partisan attacks on the Constitution rather than attempting to restrain him. Things are dire.
But it’s important to recognize that Trump’s attacks on the Constitution are often flailing and have been sharply contested by many courts, by many Democratic politicians, by some Republicans, and by the public. His efforts to manipulate elections during his second term have so far been strikingly unsuccessful. His wistful “jokes” about canceling the election are an admission on his part that, in 2026, in this particular venue at least, he is going to lose, and we — the people and the Constitution — have the upper hand.
That’s it for today
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Noah, your optimism about institutional resistance is refreshing, but it misses the broader strategic picture I’ve been mapping in my World Ahead 2026 series.
Yes, Trump can’t literally press a “cancel elections” button. You’re absolutely right about that. Elections are state-controlled, Congress certifies results, and the mechanics matter.
But you’re analyzing this as if the goal is to successfully cancel elections. It’s not.
The goal is to delegitimize them.
Here’s the game theory from my behavioral lens:
When an authoritarian repeatedly “jokes” about canceling elections, unsuccessfully attempts gerrymandering that generates Democratic counter-gerrymanders, threatens ICE deployment to polling places that backfires in public opinion, and contests results through failed litigation, the point isn’t winning those specific battles.
The point is establishing that elections are contested terrain where outcomes are negotiable.
Every “joke” about canceling elections normalizes the idea. Every gerrymandering attempt (even failed ones) reinforces that electoral manipulation is standard practice. Every threat of ICE at polling places signals that voting is dangerous. Every lawsuit contesting results demonstrates that certified outcomes aren’t final.
Trump first jokes about canceling elections, attempts fail, resistance succeeds. The public becomes habituated to the idea that elections might not happen, electoral legitimacy becomes partisan rather than universal, trust in democratic processes erodes incrementally
When the actual crisis comes (contested 2028 results, declared emergency, whatever mechanism), the groundwork for acceptance has been laid.
This connects directly to the institutional collapse I also have detailed in my analysis.
When institutional resistance is probabilistic rather than guaranteed, authoritarians probe for weakness. Every failed attempt teaches them where the constraints are. Every successful pushback that’s partial rather than total shows them the limits of opposition.
I’m watching what happens when America’s allies observe:
A president openly “joking” about canceling elections
Gerrymandering so aggressive it triggers retaliatory gerrymandering (destroying any pretense of democratic norms)
Threats to deploy federal agents to polling places
ICE occupying cities and murdering residents
Supreme Court blessing ethnic profiling and dismantling Voting Rights Act protections
Our allies are not asking “will he succeed?” They’re asking “is this a reliable democratic partner?”
The answer is no. And they’re building alternatives.
This is what institutional collapse looks like. Not immediate authoritarian victory, but the breakdown of shared norms requiring constant crisis-mode resistance to prevent worse outcomes.
That’s not hopelessness. That’s realism about what happens when institutions prove unreliable even if they haven’t completely failed yet.
— Johan
Former foreign service officer who’s watched this pattern before
Karolyn Leavitt confused “facetious” with “fascist” in her ongoing propaganda to continually lie about most things this administration does.