GOP Lies Ahead of Midterms Set the Stage for Another January 6 — or Worse

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With just over four months to go before Americans head to the polls, it’s time to talk not only about Donald Trump’s many attempts to rig the upcoming midterms but also about what happens after the votes have been counted.

This is going to take a moment, so please bear with us.

In a free and fair election, Republicans would be headed for a big-time thrashing, and it’s easy to see why.

While Trump isn’t on the ballot (which is a problem in and of itself because he can turn out hardcore MAGA voters when other candidates cannot), he is dragging the GOP down.  

Perhaps the biggest reason for the president’s historic unpopularity is that he has failed to deliver on his central campaign promise to reduce the cost of living. Instead of addressing the affordability crisis, which he calls a “hoax,” his tariffs and the reckless decision to go to war with Iran have pushed inflation above 4 percent again and resulted in higher prices that are crushing lower- and middle-class families.

While Americans are struggling, Trump is enriching himself, wants to lavishly reward those who committed crimes on his behalf (including the people who, in front of a horrified TV audience, assaulted cops on January 6), and plans to spend taxpayers’ money on vanity projects like his ballroom and triumphal arch.

But that’s not all.

While we cannot conceive how, voters in 2024 seemed to have forgotten about the chaos and dysfunction of Trump’s first term. All of that is back now and worse than ever.

There are his endless and clumsy lies, his obsessions with everything from his 2020 election loss to (most recently) the Reflecting Pool, and his claims that all his undertakings are the best this and the greatest that.

Reality tells a different story.

Americans firmly believe that the country is on the wrong track, and you can’t blame them.

It’s not just the affordability issue. There is a real element of cruelty to the things this administration does.

Citizens are gunned down in broad daylight by masked agents (and then accused of being terrorists). Immigrants who built lives in the US, paid taxes, and raised families are dragged out of their homes and shipped to squalid detention camps.

These are un-American things that are impossible to ignore — even for voters determined to tune it all out.

As is the war with Iran, which was clearly a disaster from the beginning.

Finally, there is Trump’s odd behavior when it comes to all things related to Jeffrey Epstein. Although, to be fair, it would only be bizarre if he had nothing to hide, which a majority of Americans doubt.

In all of this, the Republican-led Congress has been complicit.

GOP lawmakers have given the president a blank check, exercised zero oversight, and are defending anything he does.

Which is why they now find themselves behind in every single generic poll, and even their Senate majority, which was considered to be safe when Trump took office, is in jeopardy.

At least it would be… if the midterms were conducted fairly, so that a majority of voters actually decide who should be in control of Congress next year.

However, having seen the writing on the wall, Trump and his supporters have been hard at work to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Through an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting campaign, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the president’s attempts to federalize elections, Republicans have been tilting the playing field toward their own side.

Now, as we have pointed out, a lot of this is perfectly legal and doesn’t constitute election fraud, in the same way that a billionaire dodging taxes by using loopholes specially created for the wealthy isn’t a crime.

For example, apart from Florida’s effort, which clearly violates a citizen-approved constitutional amendment from 2010, all that gerrymandering may be odious, but it is lawful. A hyperpartisan Supreme Court has made sure of it. With decisions that are poorly argued and based on premises like “money is speech,” “corporations are people,” and “racism no longer exists,” the right-wing justices have slowly eroded voting rights and campaign finance laws to benefit Republicans.

Trump’s own attempts are different. He has been trying to seize control over elections with schemes that have largely been found to be illegal.

There is another thing that sets the president’s efforts apart: They are rooted in the Big Lie that he concocted to “explain” his loss to Joe Biden.

What Trump wants Americans to believe is that, while he was in the Oval Office — i.e., right under his nose — there was a massive criminal conspiracy involving Democratic and Republican election officials and millions of immigrants who risked imprisonment and deportation to illegally vote against him, and that this massive operation was so sophisticated that he and his supporters have never managed to produce a shred of evidence that it actually took place.

Oh, and those same people tried but failed to do the same thing again in 2024 when the Democrats were in power.

When you delve deeper into it, the Big Lie is even more ridiculous than that, but those are the CliffsNotes.

Based on this account of something that clearly never happened, Trump now wants to change the way Americans vote, for example, by largely doing away with mail-in voting, a “reform” he believes will benefit the GOP.

The crown jewel of this plot is the passage of the SAVE America Act, the perversely named voter suppression bill that he is trying to push through Congress with the help of like-minded Republicans.

They have been telling their gullible supporters, who are embracing the idea that the 2020 race must have been stolen from Trump, that the only way Democrats can win elections is by cheating, and that the only way to stop them is by passing this bill, which would disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

Mind you, they never back up their claims with facts (because those don’t exist). In fact, there is a mountain of proof, including that assembled by Republicans in Georgia and Utah and by the conservative Heritage Foundation, that in-person voter fraud (from citizens and noncitizens alike) is extraordinarily rare.

Still, that doesn’t stop Trump and top Republicans in the Senate and the House — like Sens. Mike Lee (UT) and Rick Scott (FL) or House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA) — from spouting their lies whenever the GOP loses another race, e.g., in California earlier this month.

If we don't secure our elections, we don't have a country.

— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) June 24, 2026

And that, finally, brings us to the big question regarding the midterms: What do you think will happen when the Democrats do win control of the House (as every poll indicates they will), which means that they will exercise rigorous oversight over Trump, the man who has been falsely claiming that any election he loses was “stolen” and who is in power only because the coup he attempted in 2020 wasn’t bloody enough?

Nothing good, that’s what.

In 2020, the Big Lie was largely spread by the president himself and other kooks. Who could forget Rudy Giuliani’s epic news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which exemplified the amateurish nature of the early effort to discredit Biden’s win in those days right after the election?

However, thanks to Fox News, which gave the Big Lie plenty of airtime (and literally paid dearly for its part in propagating it), it quickly became the GOP’s narrative. Two months later, and mere hours after Trump’s supporters stormed their workplace, nearly half of all Republicans in Congress voted against certifying Biden’s victory in either Arizona or Pennsylvania, thereby giving some credence to the lies.

Nowadays, none of them dare to suggest that the president lost, and his nominees frequently twist themselves in pretzels to avoid having to say under oath who won in 2020.

What we are saying is this: As things stand now, all that gerrymandering is not going to be enough to preserve the GOP’s House majority. And the Senate is now a toss-up as well.

And, when confronted with that reality, you can take it to the bank that Trump, who is facing another impeachment if the Democrats win control of the House, will give us Big Lie 2.0.

Only this time, his administration is stacked with loyalists who will do his bidding without questioning him, and Congress is full of Republicans who have been lying to their constituents about the prevalence of noncitizen voter fraud and Democrats stealing elections.

Within the GOP, these are “facts” that are now as accepted as the nonexistence of climate change, that foreign countries pay for the tariffs, and that those cognitive assessment tests they keep making Trump take are proof of the president’s supreme intelligence.

It bears repeating that these election deniers are hardly ever asked to provide evidence, and have never provided any when they are. But that’s not necessary, because accusing Democrats of election fraud feels right to Republican voters, who have been radicalized by Fox News and a well-oiled right-wing propaganda apparatus.

So, if all of the polls turn out to be correct and the GOP loses in November, we can be virtually certain that Trump will claim the midterms were stolen, somehow… once again on his watch and involving millions of people who managed to pull this off without even leaving a trace.

And while other Republicans may not frame it quite like the president, they will assert that outcomes were “suspicious,” and Fox News will amplify any unsubstantiated accusations.

When that happens, what will all of the people do who have been conditioned to believe these liars? Will they feel compelled to do something? Prompted by Trump, will they spring into action again like they did on January 6, 2021?

Will they turn on the “traitors” — i.e., the handful of Republicans who aren’t backing the SAVE America Act — the way they wanted to turn on then-Vice President Mike Pence?

And that brings us to something else that has changed since then: Those committing crimes on Trump’s behalf and at his behest now know that they are not only immune from consequences but may also be richly rewarded for committing crimes of violence — as long as those crimes serve Trump’s agenda.

All of this makes for a very troubling and potentially explosive mix. And if it ignites, then the blame this time falls not just on the president but on all Republicans for deceiving his supporters.