Donald Trump is determined to subvert the midterms. All that can save us, if he succeeds, is a national strike.
By Chris Hedges
Sep 17, 2026
This article was read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.
Text originally published August 31, 2026.
Full Text:
The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.
Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.
If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections.
The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.
Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican.
Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.
Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.
The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition.
Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.
Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
When Volodymyr Zelensky — whose presidential term ended in May 2024 — informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night.
Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”
This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.
I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security.
These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.
Power — as in all dictatorships — is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.
The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs.
Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education — from kindergarten to graduate school — will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.
Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”
Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”
“The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:
The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.
FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”
This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November.
Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.
First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations.
“At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”
The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.
We can only save ourselves.
This means shutting the country down.
Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.
Photos
Federal Agents Descend On Minneapolis For Immigration Enforcement Operations
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA – JANUARY 23: Demonstrators participate in a rally and march during an “ICE Out” day of protest on January 23, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Community leaders, faith leaders and labor unions have urged Minnesotans to participate in what they are calling a “day of action” as local businesses are expected to close during a statewide general strike held in protest against immigration enforcement operations in the region. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
TOPSHOT-US-IMMIGRATION-ICE-SHOOTING
TOPSHOT – Protestors clash with federal agents outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on January 8, 2026. A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed an American woman on the streets of Minneapolis January 7, leading to huge protests and outrage from local leaders who rejected White House claims she was a domestic terrorist. (Photo by Octavio JONES / AFP via Getty Images)
Protesters Demonstrate Outside Of Chicago-Area ICE Facility
BROADVIEW, ILLINOIS – OCTOBER 03: Federal law enforcement agents confront demonstrators during a protest outside an immigrant processing and detention center on October 03, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. The site has been the target of frequent protests as federal law enforcement agents continue Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area, an operation designed to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants living in the area. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Pam Bondi Interviewed Behind Closed Doors For House Epstein Probe
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 29: Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon speaks to reporters after former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testified at a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill on May 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. Bondi was asked about the federal government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and release of related files to the public. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Pam Bondi Interviewed Behind Closed Doors For House Epstein Probe
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 29: Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon speaks to reporters after former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testified at a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill on May 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. Bondi was asked about the federal government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and release of related files to the public. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump Hosts Visiting Ukrainian President Zelensky At Mar-a-Lago
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA – DECEMBER 28: U.S. President Donald Trump greets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at his Mar-a-Lago club on December 28, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump invited Zelensky to his private club to work on the U.S.-proposed peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, as the conflict approaches four years since the sudden full-scale invasion by Russia on February 24, 2022. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
European Leaders Join Ukrainian President Zelensky For White House Meeting With Trump
WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 18: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on August 18, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump is hosting President Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House for a bilateral meeting and later an expanded meeting with European leaders to discuss a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Republican National Convention: Day Four
CLEVELAND – JULY 21: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a speech during the evening session on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio as shown on a television screen in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
2024 Republican National Convention: Day 4
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN – JULY 18: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump and members of the Trump family celebrate after Trump officially accepted the Republican presidential nomination on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Christian followers of American Evangeli
Christian followers of American Evangelical Pastor John Hagee chant slogans in support of Israel as they wave Israeli and US flags during a rally downtown Jerusalem on April 07, 2008. Several hundreds of Evangelicals, from the Christians United for Israel movement marched in Jerusalem in solidarity with the Jewish state. AFP PHOTO/GALI TIBBON (Photo credit should read GALI TIBBON/AFP via Getty Images)
TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-JUSTICE-COURT-OBAMA-SOTOMAYOR
TOPSHOT – US President Barack Obama and Justice Sonia Sotomayor laugh during a reception in her honor at the White House on August 12, 2009. Sotomayor was sworn on August 8 in a public ceremony as a US Supreme Court justice, becoming the first Hispanic justice on the nation’s highest bench. AFP PHOTO/Jewel SAMAD (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD / AFP) (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images)
President Trump Holds Press Conference With Elon Musk in White House’s Oval Office
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 30: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump listen to a question from reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Musk, who served as an adviser to Trump and led the Department of Government Efficiency, announced he would leave his role in the Trump administration to refocus on his businesses. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Trump Holds Summit With Technology Industry Leaders
NEW YORK, NY – DECEMBER 14: (L to R) Vice President-elect Mike Pence looks on as President-elect Donald Trump shakes the hand of Peter Thiel during a meeting with technology executives at Trump Tower, December 14, 2016 in New York City. This is the first major meeting between President-elect Trump and technology industry leaders. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Uber, X and The Free Press host Inauguration Eve
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 19: (L-R) Bari Weiss, The Free Press Founder, Peter Thiel, and Matt Danzeisen attend Inauguration Eve hosted by Uber, X and The Free Press at Cafe Riggs on January 19, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press)
Bitcoin 2022 Conference Draws Cryptocurrency Industry Professionals And Investors To Miami
MIAMI, FLORIDA – APRIL 7: Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida. The worlds largest bitcoin conference runs from April 6-9, expecting over 30,000 people in attendance and over 7 million live stream viewers worldwide.(Photo by Marco Bello/Getty Images)
Gubernatorial Candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco Event
Los Angeles, CA – March 24: Gubernatorial Candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco speaks at an event in downtown on Tuesday, March 24, 2026 in Los Angeles, CA. (Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Ike & Dulles From The White House
During a radio and television broadcast, US Secretary of State White House John Foster Dulles (1888 – 1959) (left) speaks with US President Dwight Eisenhower (1890 – 1965) in the Oval Office at the White House, Washington DC, August 3, 1956. The men were discussing the recent nationalization of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian government. (Photo by Abbie Rowe/PhotoQuest/Getty Images)
TOPSHOT-US-IMMIGRATION-ICE-SHOOTING
TOPSHOT – Protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) march through the streets of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 25, 2026. On January 24, federal agents shot dead US citizen Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, while scuffling with him on an icy roadway, less than three weeks after an immigration officer shot and killed Renee Good, also 37, in her car. His killing sparked new protests and impassioned demands by local leaders for the Trump administration to end its operation in the city. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images)
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