Joshua Scheer
When Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 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.”
An election can be stolen long before the ballots are counted. This searing address from Chris Hedges warns that the Trump administration is assembling the machinery to discredit unfavorable results, intimidate voters and turn claims of election fraud into a justification for federal intervention. The danger, the speech argues, is a government preparing to make its hold on power permanent.
But the indictment reaches beyond Trump. Decades of corporate domination, bipartisan betrayal of working people and the hollowing out of democratic institutions have prepared the ground for authoritarian rule. If the elections are subverted, the speaker argues, defending democracy will require mass organizing, nationwide strikes and sustained public resistance from people whose own future is at stake.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist
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Full Edited Transcript
Edited for readability from the supplied text transcript. Timestamps, filler and false starts have been removed, and obvious transcription errors corrected.
Thank you. Thank you, Scott. The Trump White House is attempting to put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress, if these mechanisms are enacted, will not save us. The courts will not save us. The Democratic Party will not save us. Our only hope, should the election be rigged or stolen, is nationwide strikes, Our only hope is to [words missing in supplied transcript] the machinery of commerce and government. Although this militancy will be met with severe state repression, otherwise we are doomed. There will be no exit. The Trump administration has not succeeded in implementing all its election demands, but it has not abandoned the possibility of declaring emergency powers or martial law to order federal agents to confiscate election materials and ballots.
The Trump administration has already seized ballots from previous elections. The FBI in January raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records claiming voting irregularities. The Supreme Court in September blocked a Trump administration plan to use the U.S. Postal Service to heavily restrict mail-in voting and deny mail services for ballot delivery in states that refused to comply. But there are numerous other measures being enacted by the Trump administration that should make us deeply concerned. First and foremost is the creation of a federal database that will potentially disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to required documents, naturalized citizens, or even married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.
The League of Women Voters responding to the Supreme Court ruling that authorized the restrictive Trump electoral database warned that it puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted.” The Trump White House is leaving open the option to deploy the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with $113.5 billion in additional funding around polling stations which have a traditional Democratic majority. A move designed to intimidate voters and perhaps block them from the polls. It has even suggested augmenting these ICE agents with military units. The Republican majority in the House, regardless of the vote, is being pressured to certify the Trump vote count and perhaps refuse to seat newly elected members of the opposition.
Overseeing this effort to carry out massive fraud are loyalists seated by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices. There is at least one state official with election oversight who embraces Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen in 20 states. Hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been assigned to identify noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters. Agents going through voter rolls which are managed by the states are using dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers to invalidate voters. In some cases, the New York Times reports, investigators posing as individual voters plug in their names and personal information into public-facing websites run by state election officials.
This despite the fact that many of these sites state they are only designed for individual use. The government is calling this massive effort the unlawful voter initiative and has been reassigning hundreds of agents from other duties including investigating human trafficking and terrorism. It is well documented that there are very few cases of voter fraud. A database managed by the Heritage Foundation, for example, found about 100 instances of non-citizen voting over a quarter century. But in the fact-free world of the Trump White House, hundreds of thousands of non-citizens cast ballots in 2020, securing Trump’s defeat in what Trump calls “a crisis of election security.”
There is a method to Trump’s madness. These spurious and unverified charges are being weaponized not only to impose sweeping voter restrictions, but to discredit the integrity of the election process. If the elections go badly for Trump, as many polls indicate, all of these charges will be used to order the Department of Homeland Security, which asserts that 278,000 non-citizens are registered to vote across multiple states, to seize ballots and invalidate vote counts, especially in districts where Democrats appear to defeat Republicans. This discrediting of the election process is accompanied by a slew of other even more fantastical conspiracy theories.
Trump, for example, contends that thousands and thousands of crooked votes were cast in the 2020 election in Wisconsin nursing homes, facilitated by nursing home aides who changed the votes of their hapless patients. This outlandish claim saw the Department of Health and Human Services issue guidelines for nursing home voting. It is buttressed by the charge that election workers tampered with ballots, late-counted votes were changed as Trump charged in June. And the California election system, in Trump’s words, are rigged, a charge he made after the candidates he endorsed for governor and mayor of Los Angeles lost. The Supreme Court’s order permitting the Trump administration to merge sensitive and personal data, including from the Social Security Administration along with passports and state driver’s licenses, has handed the government a powerful tool to designate voters as non-citizens or render them ineligible if, for example, their name does not appear on Social Security Administration records, millions of which are out of [words missing in supplied transcript].
Many people originally registered with the agency as non-citizens have since been naturalized. The agency did not begin to maintain citizenship information until 1981. The Supreme Court ruling does not compel states to use this database, but it is almost certain to be employed in Republican-controlled states, purging voters who traditionally vote for Democrats. A centralized federal database violates protections in the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits formal or de facto national databanks or centralized federal information systems built from sensitive personal data. It also infringes on the constitutional role given to the states to administer elections independently of the federal government.
Trump and his allies at the same time are questioning the reliability of ballot marking voting machines which Trump calls vulnerable and easily compromised. Tina Peters, who was convicted of tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election, recently met with Trump, who pardoned her, to call on Trump to seize voting machines because they, according to her, have foreign-made components. She demands hand counts, which not only prolong vote counting and are less efficient, but allow unscrupulous Trump ballot counters to invalidate votes. Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security Secretary, has asked the Justice Department to examine whether these voting machines, which tally votes through barcodes or QR codes, create “a reliable record for a manual audit.”
Ballot marking devices print ballots from a touchscreen computer. The ballots which designate a voter’s choice in text form or in barcode or QR code are then fed into a separate machine that reads the information. Voting machines, we should be clear, cannot be connected to the internet. The Trump administration has also removed the independent members of the Election Assistance Commission which oversees the certification of the voting machines. Mullin has asked the Justice Department to investigate a multi-state partnership called the Electronic Registration Information Center or ERIC. ERIC is a database sharing consortium that helps states ensure that people vote in only one location.
While Trump has so far been unable to directly assert federal control over the elections, this does not mean that the administration cannot manipulate or steal the vote. The multi-pronged assault on the machinery of elections is designed fundamentally to create uncertainty and mistrust to justify federal interference and fraud. The Trump administration, I expect, will cite its spurious findings if it senses defeat to seize or confiscate ballots and voting machines. There will most likely not be one dramatic intervention to overturn a single election, but a series of federal intrusions, investigations, legal challenges, and interference to disrupt the certification of numerous results, especially in closely contested races.
This disruption will give Trump allies the tools and most important the time to fix the vote. The Trump administration, as it did in 2020, will pressure election officials and legislators and state officials to reject certified results or delay certification based on charges of fraud or foreign interference. His administration has unsuccessfully sued states that have so far refused to turn over voter data. Trump, of course, has a history of challenging unfavorable election results. He tried to overturn the 2020 election results when he lost to Joe Biden. He asked Georgia’s top election official to “find” enough votes, 11,780 to be exact, to reverse his loss.
His lawyers and allies also pressured lawmakers in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania to overturn election results. He urged supporters to attend a rally on January 6th that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol. But it is very important to note that these were frantic and last-ditch efforts as Trump, it appeared, was certain he was going to win the 2020 vote. This time around, he and his allies are building an infrastructure to ensure victory well in advance. Trump said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost. He openly ruminates about defying the Constitution to serve a third term.
He has also floated the idea of cancelling the upcoming election, telling Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” When Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 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. In September at a Republican party convention, he told supporters to “Cheat like hell, whether they’re registered or not.” The Justice Department has sued the state of California, seeking to temporarily block the state from counting the mail ballots of 20,000 people it claims are “likely noncitizens.” The Justice Department normally deploys federal monitors to election sites to protect the civil rights of voters, but federal monitors in this election will most likely be used not to oversee elections, but to interfere with them.
The Justice Department sent letters in July to every state’s chief election official warning that state and local election officials could face prosecution if federal authorities determine that they have allowed non-citizens to vote or failed to keep them off voter rolls. This threat opens up the possibility of federal subpoenas, long court cases, demands for records and documents, and lengthy questioning. It will also, of course, delay vote tallies as the Trump administration rigs the system to ensure victory. During Wyoming’s primaries this August, the New York Times reported two Justice Department monitors tried to interview voters and examine voting machines at polling places.
Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, called their actions “aggressive, unexpected, disruptive,” saying, “It certainly didn’t seem to show respect for the state.” The Justice Department plans to station 1,000 monitors in every state for the midterms. And the NAACP has sued the Justice Department seeking information about the instructions issued to these monitors. Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in the elections in his national address in July when he charged that the elections are dangerously exposed to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo directing the military to work with the Department of Homeland Security to protect the midterm elections from foreign interference.
U.S. Cyber Command, the military cyberwar unit, and combat support agencies will, the memo stated, “deploy advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities to identify, disrupt, and neutralize foreign interference in the U.S. democratic process.” Trump’s inner circle, as I mentioned, are urging him to declare martial law. And Trump has stated that “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” When Trump was asked by PBS in May whether he would send the military or ICE agents to voting locations, he replied that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.” Trump in an interview with Time magazine in October left open the possibility of declaring a national emergency around the midterm voting, saying, “I don’t rule anything out or in.” The decay of democratic institutions, including an electoral process that with huge infusions of dark money from corporations and the billionaire class, is little more than legalized bribery began long before Trump.
Trump is simply capitalizing on a system already crippled by massive corruption, gerrymandering, and a two-party system and two political parties that are each subservient to corporations and billionaires and which crush the efforts by independents including Bernie Sanders or third parties to participate. Trump has also capitalized on the betrayal of the working class carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties which include de-industrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations including the healthcare industry, the wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation, and despair.
This toxic brew feeds an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions that have been deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. Fascism is always the product of a bankrupt liberalism. And Trump, as Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, is “fascist to the core.” Reuters, in a special report headlined “Nine Ways the Trump Administration Would Interfere With the U.S. Midterms,” and the New York Times, which has run a series of recent reports about the elections, have done a good job at detailing the very real threat we face.
Trump and his coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, and court sycopants play the role of the Snopes clan in William Faulkner’s southern Gothic novels. The Snopes filled the power vacuum of the decayed South. They ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality are fictional representations of the degenerates elevated to the highest levels of the Trump administration. They embody the moral rot unleashed by neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized name, cutthroat capitalism.
“The usual reference to amorality, while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them as they should be placed in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopes. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards. The creatures that emerge from the devastation with the slime still upon their lips. Let a world collapse in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom. Men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible.
Sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairman of party regional committees and later a trifle slicked up. They muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition. They need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society. They need only learn to mimic its sounds.” Trump, who emerged from the devastation with the slime upon his lips, is following the familiar playbook used by all authoritarian and fascist regimes to extinguish democracy, including the regimes of Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In India, in a show of force we may soon have to emulate, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest the deletion of 130 million names from the voter rolls, most of which are believed to be Muslims opposed to Modi’s BJP party. Security forces, including paramilitary and police, are detaining thousands of protesters, including lawyers, journalists, and opposition leaders. Modi’s security forces have blocked caravans of protesters from entering the capital Delhi. They have suspended public transportation including cancelling trains into the capital and shutting down metro stations. Internet service has been terminated. Power as in all dictatorships is to be permanent.
It is to be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, which have made at least $2.3 billion from their cryptocurrency ventures [wording unclear in supplied transcript] since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations tolerate the relatively minor corruption that enriches Trump, his family, and his cronies, as well as the gross incompetence and ineptitude. This billionaire class pays little to no income tax and it obliterates oversight and regulation as it ruthlessly exploits the citizenry and pollutes and poisons the air. Dissent as in all dictatorships is being criminalized. The media is being transformed into an echo chamber for the rich, the powerful and Zionists.
Education from kindergarten to graduate school is becoming indoctrination. Culture is being reduced to its lowest common denominator. Sentimental Christian tropes, iconography and symbols are employed especially in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire while demonizing those especially women and people of color who traditionally have been marginalized and persecuted. Trump already has 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 the court’s decision created a law-free zone and transformed the president into 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 believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that freedom and democracy are not compatible. Thiel is sweeping up all of our information gleaned from government tax, medical, and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for federal control and corporate profit.
Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago [as stated] to make technology in his words an alternative to politics. “The populace get the MAGA anti-woke hymnbook,” 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.”
Presidential emergency action documents, they’re called PEADs, which are pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland, await only a decision and signature to become operative law by necessity, Medish and McCleary point out, 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 56 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 machine, including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, make these institutions in a time of crisis unreliable. They can no longer intervene to protect us from the absolute power sought by Trump and his allies. We can only save ourselves. This means, if Trump succeeds in subverting the elections, shutting the country down. It means millions must take to the streets. If we fail, the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.
Thank you.