Trump speaking on July 16.

On Thursday (July 16), Trump gave his speech that was promised to be a “bombshell” expose of election fraud. Two days later, the Wall St. Journal editorial board critiqued his speech. They cited one declassified document from which Trump had quoted and wrote: “But since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t. ‘Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,’ it says. ‘The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.’ Achieving it across many jurisdictions ‘would be difficult’ and ‘audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.’” They continued: “Trump had talked about how voting machines in Venezuela had been tampered with.” The WSJ editors replied, “Sorry, the state of Georgia, which Mr. Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024, isn’t Venezuela, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger isn’t Nicolás Maduro.”

The concerns of the WSJ editorial board are two fold: First is that Trump’s efforts would backfire. They wrote: “Unfortunately, the message from Mr. Trump and others has been that America’s elections can’t be trusted, and the only hope is the SAVE America Act. Aside from being untrue, this is a political backfire for the GOP. If Republican voters believe it, and the bill falls short, then why waste time going to the polls in November? Has the GOP already forgotten how Mr. Trump’s fraud outbursts cost them two Senate seats in the 2021 Georgia runoffs?” (emphasis added) In 2020, the WSJ editorial board was furious with Trump because his campaiging in Georgia had discouraged Republican voters from voting, thereby facilitating the victories of the two Democratic candidates, Warnok and Ossof , for US Senator.

The WSJ editorial board is also concerned about possible election chaos, which is not good for profits. They wrote: “it’s reckless to sow generalized suspicion that American elections aren’t honest. In fact, the intel memo Mr. Trump declassified warned this is what a U.S. adversary might do. ‘Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering US elections,’ it says, ‘which could allow false narratives to gain traction.’”

Trump is desperate to maintain control over the House and the Senate for two main reasons: He doesn’t want either body to look into his money making White House schemes, the latest of which is to sell advance notice of “Truth Social” posts. This would enable purchasers to engage in inside trading in the stock market and on predictive betting markets. Trump is also desperate to avoid either house to press the DOJ to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Trump is finding out the hard way that his little venture in going to war against Iran cannot work out as he had hoped (and as Netanyahu had assured him it would). He went to war expecting another quick Venezuela type outcome. Within weeks, the price of oil shot up, and nothing matters to most US voters more than the price at the gas pump. (The price of eggs, steak and bread runs a close second in importance to them.) So Trump beat a hasty retreat, making peace with Iran on their terms. He quickly ran into another problem: He started to look weak, and second in importance to gas prices to Trump voters is his strong man image. It’s a bit like the emperor’s new clothes effect. Once he’s exposed as not being all-powerful, his true nakedness is at risk of exposure. So he flipped back to war against Iran, whereupon gas prices immediately started to rise again.

SAVE Act
Realising that he can’t come out ahead with his war, he now appears to have moved more decisively towards the third option: steal the midterm elections. His SAVE Act is crucial for that strategy. There are several versions of this act, but all of them require federal i.d. to registr to vote. Many voters, especially poor ones, don’t have such i.d. The Brennan Center explained: “Though all versions of the SAVE Act would block millions of American citizens from voting, the new bills each contain unique additional obstacles. One new SAVE Act bill, the SAVE America Act, directs states to hand their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to run through the agency’s flawed citizenship verification tool (confusingly named the SAVE program).”

They also explained that the rush to make it effective so soon would cause election chaos. That is exactly part of Trump’s strategy – to create so much chaos that nobody really knows what is happening.

It seems that this act will not pass. Even Republican senator Murkowski of Alaska wrote a column in the Wall St. Journal opposing it and explaining that it would mean major swaths of Alaskans would be unable to vote under that bill’s provisions. Whether it passes or not, however, Trump’s campaigning for it helps stir the pot.

Salleigh Grubbs, one of the three MAGA election deniers who sit on the 5 member Georgia election board.

Election deniers in power
Another element of Trump’s strategy has been to install election deniers onto voting boards. In Georgia, which is now becoming a key swing state, three of the five members of the GA election commission are election deniers. They will do everything they can to muddy the waters and if possible miscount votes and in general create chaos.

National Guard
This would open the door to calling out the National Guard. Recently, the NY Times reported: “in January, Mr. Trump said he regretted not heeding advisers who urged him to order the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states that he lost in 2020.” He could not do that back then because key administration officials opposed it. That included his Attorney General Bill Barr and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Now, Trump has the ultra Trumper Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, and he’s trying to appoint Todd Blanch as attorney general. In the Senate judiciary committee hearings on that appointment, Blanch slipped up and said he was Trump’s personal lawyer. That is how he actually views himself.

Unprecedented repression

Steve Bannon interviewing disbarred lawyer Jeffrey Clark

Already the dangers of the current situation are unprecedented, at least since the U.S. Civil War. If Trump outright steals the November elections, it will heighten those dangers many times over. In fact, it will quickly go beyond mere danger. Steve Bannon warned about this when he said “we’re heading towards a national security emergency, because obviously our election process is a complete and total joke.” A wave of repression would likely follow that would dwarf anything that happened during the McCarthy era of the 1050s. Terrorist attacks, including from the far right, would spur repression on. In June, the FBI arrested five people out of a group of some 20 far right conspirators who were planning a terrorist attack on Trump’s birthday celebration UFC fight on the White House lawn. Had that attack succeeded, Trump would have unleashed a round of repression against the left. If he succeeds in stealing the upcoming elections, that is certainly what he’ll do.

The far right will help create the chaos. That is what Steve Bannon expressed.

The opposition to Trump
Yet the Democrats are proceeding as if all we have to do is get them elected in the upcoming election as if it will be a normal one. There are a few comments, even speeches, here and there but no attempt to really sound the alarm. As for the union leaders, they are silent once again. And as for the left – both socialist and otherwise – they have learned absolutely nothing from their disastrous blunder of failing to at the very least warn about the dangers of Trump and MAGA in the 2024 election. A google search for DSA election denial plan gets the following AI response: The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) does not have an ‘election denial plan.’ Instead, the organization focuses on expanding democratic access and fundamentally reforming the U.S. political and economic system.” 

In my district in Oakland, for example, Nate Adams is the DSA candidate for city council. He is running as what appears to be just a somewhat more liberal Democrat. It’s as if what Trump is planning at the national level won’t have disastrous effects on every aspect of life here in Oakland, and as if as any candidate for office has no responsibility to use his campaign to build a resistance at the ground level. Others even further to the “left” tend to ignore the attacks on the institutions of capitalist democracy because, after all, they’re capitalist too. As if democratic rights vs. dictatorship doesn’t matter; it’s all just capitalism, after all. That’s their view.

Either the union leadership or DSA could be calling meetings across the country to discuss this serious danger and plan how to combat it. In the case of DSA, they would have to abandon their method of having such meetings be entirely top-down with little or no room for open discussion. But there is no indication that either of them has any plans to vary from their past approach. So, the best hope is that there will be a renewal of a working class movement. But it will have to be spontaneous, because there is no conscious organizing center to build an independent, working class movement to stamp its imprint on society. But yet, that is more necessary than ever before in U.S. history.

Trump speaking on July 16.