The Big Picture

08/14/2025

If Donald Trump learned anything from the 2020 presidential election, it was that our democracy is vulnerable and that elections can be undone. You just have to put the right plan and the right people in place. And that, alarmingly, is what he has been doing since taking office for the second time.

There are popular theories flying around the internet about how Trump and Musk colluded using Starlink and hacked voting machines to steal the last election. These conspiracy claims, though impassioned, have no grounding in the data, which show that the election results aligned more or less with exit polls. Last I checked you can’t rig the latter, nor can you hack machines to only change, say, Latino and young male votes while leaving Black and LGBTQ+ support more or less unchanged.

But Trump won’t need to hack machines or switch votes to steal the midterms next year. That’s because he understands how to rig the system in advance, how to suppress voter turnout, how to undermine faith in the results, and how to use the entire power of the federal government to back up bogus claims of election fraud.

Trump won’t have to cancel the elections. He can just force the results he wants—unless we stop him.