There is a central tenet to President Donald Trump's way of thinking that I've observed in two decades of writing about him: He assumes most people are corrupt – like him – and anyone who rejects corruption is a loser.
Expect Trump to put that contorted conception on display on July 16 – pegged to his obsession for lying about elections – during a scheduled national address from the White House. The president teased that address on July 14, promising "really big news."
"Our country has to shape up," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "It doesn't get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country."
This is why we must be concerned about November's midterm elections. In Trump's worldview – whether he really believes it or just relentlessly repeats it – Democrats always cheat.
It doesn't matter if that isn't true, or that Trump never offers real proof, or that Trump won two of the last three presidential elections, or that Republicans, in 2024, won control of Congress while a Democrat was president.
For Trump, that stated belief in rigged elections establishes a permission structure for him to cheat in elections.
President Trump isn't hiding his effort to control elections
Trump has been incessantly pushing for an autocratic federal takeover of elections, which are run by the states, according to the U.S. Constitution. But he lacks the Republican votes in the U.S. Senate to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, which would let him federalize election issues like mail ballots and voter I.D.
Trump presents this as a binary opportunity. He claims Democrats can only win elections if they cheat. And he promises that, if he is put in control of our elections, Republicans will never lose an election again.
The SAVE America Act is Plan A for Trump. But he's been working on Plan B for everyone to see, working to destabilize elections in the federal government and at the state level.
Trump on July 9 fired two members of the federal Election Assistance Commission who were selected by Democrats in Congress, while another member selected by Republicans resigned.
That agency, which is designed to be independent and bipartisan, helped states improve how they run elections and helped voters cast ballots.
Trump's White House justified the firings, less than four months before the midterms, by suggesting the commissioners "may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections." Translation: They may not have agreed with how Trump wants to control elections.
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The Department of Homeland Security on July 10 announced that more than $1 billion in grants were available for states to keep Americans safe – but with a serious catch. DHS said states would be docked 20% of those grants unless they moved away from using some types of voting machines.
DOJ repeats Trump's election fraud lies to get voter information
Trump's lies about election fraud often include unsubstantiated claims about voting machines being used to steal elections. He said in January that he regretted not having the National Guard seize voting machines after the 2020 presidential election.
Trump's administration has been demanding for months that states turn over their voter rolls, huge data sets filled with private, personal information about millions of voters. But federal judges in those states have consistently blocked this overreach.
How did Trump react? The Department of Justice recently sent a memo to the people who administer elections in all 50 states, and reinforced it with a July 8 social media post, warning that "knowingly encouraging noncitizens to vote" is a crime.
The people receiving that message are election administration professionals. They already know that. Noncitizen voting is a rare problem in our elections that often gets caught.
But Trump has claimed for a decade that noncitizen voting tilts American elections every cycle, while never offering proof. This Trump-corrupted version of the DOJ obediently swallows and then regurgitates his election lies.
Can you see the plan emerging here?
Republicans happily spread Trump's election lies
Trump has a MAGA chorus in Congress and his Cabinet, always eager to echo his false claims about rigged elections.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who will do or say anything Trump wants, claimed this in 2024: "We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections" before adding, "But it's not been something that is easily provable."
Todd Blanche, Trump's pick for his next attorney general, who has a July 15 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, aligned himself with some of Trump's fiercest election deniers during a private speech before them in April.
If Trump can cause enough chaos in the midterms, he'll try to declare the results null and void and decide the elections himself. And he has that team to back him up.
Remember, this is the guy who refused to concede his obvious loss in the 2020 presidential election, ignored his own attorney general's advice that he had lost, and instead sicced his supporters on Congress in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.
We've been here before. And not very long ago. And now we are here again.
To Trump, the tragedy of the riot at the Capitol is not the MAGA-fueled lunacy that created an international embarrassment at the seat of our federal government. The real tragedy for Trump is that his then vice president, Mike Pence, ignored his orders not to certify the 2020 election results so Trump could stay in power.
Trump suffered no real, lasting consequences for trying to steal that election.
He survived impeachment in the Senate in 2021. A federal criminal case against him was dropped not for lack of merit, but because he won the presidency again in 2024. He pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters for their crimes related to the Capitol riot.
Trump failed to stay in power in 2020, but he got away with trying to. Why wouldn't he try again in November's midterms, with Democrats eager to win control of Congress?
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump is trying to control elections right in front of us | Opinion