With Donald Trump’s declining popularity and the growing possibility it will lead to Republican defeats in the mid-term elections, his campaign to discredit and destroy the way we elect our leaders is in high gear. Trump is accusing others of trying to fix the election, which is the very thing he is trying to do.

If his candidates win, his allegations of rigged elections will go away, as we saw when he won in 2016 and 2024. But if his candidates lose, he will have set the stage for his false claims it was not a free and fair election, as we saw him do in 2020.

Retired federal appeals court Judge Michael J. Luttig is a leading conservative legal scholar who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Luttig recently wrote in The Atlantic, “Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections.”

Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman recently wrote on Substack that Trump’s “targets are not abstractions. They are the mechanisms that determine who votes, how votes are counted, who certifies the results, and how those results become final.” Litman says that Trump’s campaign “imperils the American experiment itself.”

One Trump gambit was his proposal to have Texas and other Republican states redistrict early so that more Republican House of Representatives candidates could run in favorable districts. That backfired when California and other Democratic states responded in kind — redrawing their congressional districts to give Democratic candidates the advantage.

Trump continues to call for an end to mail-in voting, which is remarkably popular across all parties and effectively used in many states and other countries. Without any evidence, Trump claims that mail-in voting is “a corrupt system.”

Trump has endorsed voter ID provisions that would require a birth certificate or passport along with other documents to register to vote. These are the kinds of documents that are not easily obtained and if required would disqualify millions of Americans from voting in federal elections. But Trump figures it will mostly impact the poor, elderly and working-class voters in our cities — Democrats.

Trump has not ruled out using the military or masked ICE agents to intimidate voters where his candidates may not do well on Election Day. Trump confidant and podcaster Steve Bannon recently said, “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.”

If they try that in Pittsburgh — and anywhere in America where the voters cherish their right to vote and their other unalienable rights — there will likely be a record turnout against them.

The best way to rig a national election would be to support Trump’s proposal to take control away from the states and nationalize our federal elections. According to our Constitution, our election infrastructure is scattered and fragmented by design — run by each of the states and delegated in large part to the counties.

Trump wants one big, centralized target under his own control. That would make it easier for anyone — inside or outside our government — to rig our elections. The Founders knew better.

And the Founders saw Trump coming. In his article in The Atlantic, Luttig described the Founders’ fear that a power-hungry individual would become president and refuse to abide by free and fair elections.

“Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would ‘pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.’”

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