Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow warned in a scathing segment.
According to Maddow, Trump isn’t just planning to win — he’s planning to rig the game entirely. He is already pressuring Republican lawmakers in key states like Texas, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and South Carolina to redraw congressional maps in a way that locks in GOP control — regardless of how people vote.
But redistricting is only part of the plan.
“Trump also appears to be trying to establish a pretext for nullifying or delaying the midterm elections everywhere, demanding a new census and claiming the old one shouldn’t count,” Maddow said.
Calling for a brand-new census in the middle of the decade isn’t just unusual — it’s practically impossible. It would take years to organize and process. Maddow argues that Trump knows this — and that’s exactly the point.
“The census is how we get congressional districts,” she wrote. “If Trump can nullify the existing census by, for example, blaming the counting of immigrants or some other factor, he can lay the groundwork to claim that all the existing congressional districts in the country are somehow wrong and can’t be used — and therefore, we can’t have congressional elections using the districts we now have.”
In other words, Trump may try to cancel the elections entirely by claiming the voting maps are invalid.
And he’s not stopping there.
Trump now says he wants to ban mail-in voting nationwide, using an executive order. Maddow points out that this idea may have come from an unsettling source: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump claims Putin told him that “no other countries allowed mail-in voting” — and now he’s using that as a reason to cut it off in the U.S.
“Now, I would caution you again — as always — to watch what he actually does here and not just what he says he is going to do,” Maddow warned. “But if Trump is taking tactical advice from Putin about how to hold something that looks like an election but is not actually an election, that doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy.”
Watch Maddow explain what’s at stake in 2026 in the MSNBC video below.
