2026 Midterm Elections

President Donald Trump is acting like a man who does not believe it matters whether what he does hurts his party in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, according to a recent report.

"Fourteen months into a second term defined by the president's heightened ambition and a dearth of dissenting voices, Trump remains in what can only be defined as YOLO mode,” wrote Politico journalists Alex Gangitano, Eli Stokols, and Megan Messerly on Monday. “But the lack of restraint from an executive who won't have to face voters again has put his party in danger of losing the House and possibly the Senate too."

On Iran, Gangitano, Stokols and Messerly pointed out that Trump’s handling of the conflict is disliked by roughly six out of ten voters, and yet he is still proceeding undeterred. As a result Trump's "unconventional approach could make his fears about a Democratic-controlled Congress in the final two years of his term something of a self-fulfilling prophecy."

One person close to the White House, granted anonymity, bluntly told Politico that "so many of the calculations that the administration is taking are not political... It doesn't seem like they're operating or executing the administration's policies with an election on their mind."

Meanwhile a second anonymous source close to the White House admitted, "The House is not saveable, most likely. The president doesn't admit that publicly, but he certainly knows that it isn't." Meanwhile an individual close to Trump’s senior team warned the GOP in Politico that “Republicans were always going to be in a difficult situation in the midterms. But he's taking it from a difficult situation to being almost impossible for Republicans."

Last month conservative columnist George F. Will warned in a Washington Post column that Trump had a long history of trying to steal elections by falsely claiming they had been stolen from him. He falsely claimed that the 2016 GOP Iowa caucuses were stolen by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) when he lost; that the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election was stolen from him because he lost; and that he was cheated in the 2020 presidential election when he lost.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will then wrote, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Similarly, conservative historian Robert Kagan warned CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in February that President Donald Trump is likely to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections so that he will not have to worry about losing power.

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan said. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

Speaking to NPR earlier that same month, Kagan pointed out that Trump has repeatedly said he would like to be a dictator, and fears Democrats will impeach him if they take the House in 2026.

“It's clear that he has no intention of allowing the elections to play out and allow a Democratic victory,” Kagan said. “And I think it's important to understand his motives here. He knows perfectly well that, in effect, his presidency will be greatly diminished once the Democrats take either one or both of the Houses.”

He added, “He himself is saying right now that he'll be impeached, and that is why he wants to prevent the Democrats from taking power.”

A Democratic candidate is being exposed as a possible "GOP plant," CNN's KFile reported Monday.

A Trump-voting pastor could be the one who stops Democrats from being able to take control of the U.S. Senate. Only two filed for U.S. Senate in Nebraska and one is a Donald Trump-supporting far-right pastor calling himself a "free thinker."

William Forbes, who is just slightly younger than the eldest president, entered the Democratic primary before the March deadline. The Democratic Party in the state is supporting the Independent candidate Dan Osborn. The goal had been to clear the field, but Forbes jumped in at the last minute.

Another candidate, Cindy Burbank, has also filed, but Republicans are challenging her candidacy.

“I saw that there wasn’t any Democrat on the ticket. … I’m the only Democrat, and the Democrats are going for Dan Osborn," said Forbes, who wants to campaign on morality.

He supports Trump and even "attended a leadership summit in January sponsored by the Nebraska Republican Party," said KFile. His excuse is that he's "trying to get information from everybody.”

“They want clones and I’m not a clone,” Forbes said. “I think for myself. I’m a free thinker.”

The statement was made in one of his sermons, which has since been removed from Facebook. He announced he's deleting the page and is rerouting people to the church's Facebook.

Democrats are backing Osborn after he had a "surprisingly competitive performance in 2024," the report said. While he still lost, CNN explained that it was "a closer-than-expected race." So, they tried something new, putting the party's weight behind an independent. Now Forbes could upset all of that.

For voters who aren't aware of who Forbes is, they could enter the booth on Election Day and mark the Democrat out of habit, not knowing that Forbes is anti-choice and pro-Trump.

Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said, "William Forbes is not running to serve Nebraskans. He is running to trick voters. Forbes wants to ban all access to abortion – an extreme position that makes life more dangerous for women and babies. Forbes is using the Democratic ballot line to deceive voters who deserve better."

She also called it "a political maneuver engineered by Pete Ricketts to split the opposition vote and protect his Senate seat."

Election administration isn’t what it used to be.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

When Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon first took office in 2015, he used to have to explain to people what the duties of his office were.

Not anymore, he says, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump.

Simon, a Democrat, and former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, joined Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine Wednesday to discuss the ways the Trump administration has been reshaping elections and what impact it could have on the 2026 midterms.

If you missed it, you can catch a rerun of it here, but one of the main takeaways was that, while ordinary citizens know a lot more about elections than they used to, the nuances of how they work — including the laws surrounding them, and the balance of priorities that running them well requires — aren’t at the forefront of the conversation as much as they should be.

“That’s the most important thing that has happened, is that the president has brought what many had considered a mundane, almost perfunctory task into light,” Merrill said.

Trump’s second term began much in the way his first term ended: with the president intent on reshaping electoral procedures to his liking. This time around, that’s taken the shape of his March 2025 executive order and his aggressive push to get Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which seeks to implement aspects of the executive order that courts have halted, like requiring registering voters to provide proof of citizenship.

Simon said Minnesota was one of a number of states that sued over the proof-of-citizenship requirement in the president’s executive order, and the states won by pointing out that — merits of the policy aside — the Constitution simply doesn’t give the president authority over elections.

“Our Founding Fathers delegated the authority for elections at the state level to our individual member states,” Merrill said. “That’s where it should remain.”

However, it may be that the White House understood the executive order was on shaky legal ground, Simon speculated, but is trying to test the limits of election law and the Constitution through these actions.

And the executive order is not the only way the administration is trying to involve itself in how states are administering elections. The Justice Department has sued 29 states, including Minnesota, for unredacted versions of their voter rolls, ostensibly to see if the states are properly complying with the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration.

Many states, like Minnesota, are arguing that privacy laws prevent them from handing over the records. So far, no court has ordered a state to turn over its voter rolls, although one state (Oklahoma) last week consented to handing over the data as part of a settlement agreement. Three of the cases have been dismissed, although appeals are working their way up the court system.

The day after the Votebeat event, CBS News also reported that Simon’s office had received a subpoena from the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security ordering it to turn over the records of more than 125 Minnesota voters.

But regardless of whether a proof-of-citizenship requirement is ultimately enacted or the Justice Department succeeds in its lawsuits, the federal government is already leaving its mark on how the 2026 midterm elections will be administered. States have followed Trump’s lead and passed their own proof of citizenship requirements (a new state, South Dakota, joined the rapidly growing list last week) and rolled back mail voting options. (Simon also noted that a lawsuit over the legality of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, which the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in last Monday, shared a lot of DNA with Trump’s executive order.)

States are also girding themselves for other ways the Trump administration may try to interfere in elections in ways that go beyond lobbying for the president’s preferred policies. Simon said election officials are always preparing themselves for a myriad of possible disruptive scenarios that may never materialize — everything from bomb threats to weather events. Now, part of that list is federal agents showing up at voting locations, a scenario he said had a “nonzero chance” of happening.

“We’re gaming out what in our heads could that look like,” Simon said, adding that his office has been reviewing Minnesota laws regarding law enforcement at polling places and whether they apply to federal agents.

“We believe the answer is yes and we’re prepared to enforce that.”

He isn’t alone. Responding to those same concerns, New Mexico recently passed a law outright barring federal law enforcement from voting locations.

But, as Simon noted, election officials are having to thread a needle. How do they prepare for this possible interference, and inform the public, without being alarmist and discouraging them from voting?

“We want to call it out and name it and not avoid it but in the same breath tell people what the workarounds are,” he said.

In general, it’s a positive that as a result of Trump more people are paying attention to election administration issues, Merrill said. But what’s missing from that conversation is knowledge.

Merrill expressed frustration that some of the loudest voices weighing in on election administration issues have had no interaction with the electoral system other than as a voter.

“They’ve never worked in the polls and they’ve never been part of the process and understanding how it’s set up, how it’s broken down, what the individual procedures are.”

To fix that, people should contact their local officials and see the process for themselves, Merrill said. He’s found that, when people do that, they often see how well the system runs.

There’s certainly no lack of need for election workers, and perhaps if more people followed Merrill’s advice, there would be less friction in the wheels of democracy.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

For the first time in a decade, President Donald Trump did not attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), his absence apparently consumed by the ongoing war in Iran. Without the president to provide closing arguments, the annual gathering of MAGA faithful in Grapevine, Texas, became a stage for airing deep anxieties about the conflict and exposed significant fractures within Trump's movement.

The central tension dominating CPAC discussions was how a president who campaigned on ending wars could find himself considering a ground invasion of Iran, according to a new report in The Guardian. The debate revealed sharp disagreements among prominent figures about the war's trajectory and wisdom.

Erik Prince, former CEO of the Blackwater mercenary group, counseled strongly against escalation. "You will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks," he warned, suggesting most people are unprepared for such consequences.

In contrast, former Navy SEAL Jason Redman argued the U.S. cannot stop now that military operations have begun, citing concerns about future conflicts. "I have my first grandchild coming. I don't want my grandchild to have to fight Iran in 20 years," he said.

Trump administration diplomat Ric Grenell took the opposite position from Prince, praising the president's wisdom in entering the war and predicting that within months, Americans would look back and be grateful the Iranian regime was eliminated. Republican former congressman Matt Gaetz offered a more cautious view, warning that a ground invasion would make America "poorer and less safe," though he acknowledged trusting Trump's judgment more than his own.

Steve Bannon, Trump's bombastic former adviser, attempted to unify the fractured audience by urging attendees to set aside their concerns and back the MAGA project regardless. "We have the right policies. We just need the resolve to see it through," he said, dismissing explanations for absent figures as merely being "tied up running wars."

The disagreements at CPAC reflected real political vulnerabilities. Outside the convention center, Trump's approval ratings are at historic lows, and the war is polling poorly. Gas prices have climbed to their highest levels in four years. With November midterms approaching—a time when the party in power historically struggles—Republicans face headwinds. Democrats already demonstrated readiness to capitalize, with their candidate flipping a Florida state house seat that includes Mar-a-Lago.

Significantly, CPAC exposed a generational divide within the conservative movement. Older attendees, including supporters of Iran's former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, embraced the military campaign as religiously ordained or as settling long-standing scores dating to the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis. "It's biblical," said 87-year-old Deanna Averett. Others saw economic opportunity in controlling oil resources.

Younger Republicans, however, expressed fear and skepticism. Eighteen-year-old Gary Polakoff worried about a potential draft and predicted the gas price spike would worsen Republicans' already poor midterm prospects. John Christy, 19, sympathized with Iranian people but opposed "forever wars," arguing such conflicts contradict Trump's "America First" agenda. Stephan Norquist, 21, found the Blackwater CEO's argument against escalation more convincing, reasoning that "getting your foot in the door doesn't necessarily mean you should want to go all the way."

Even some Trump supporters expressed unease. Lisa Musket, 60, said she hadn't expected her candidate would "embroil the country in a war" but stated she would trust Trump to navigate it correctly, despite voting for his anti-war platform.

Attorneys representing Fulton County faced off against the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court Friday, seeking the return of more than 650 boxes of 2020 election records that FBI agents seized from a county elections warehouse in January.

The hearing, which was held in a federal courthouse in Atlanta, was scheduled last week after the judge announced that attempts at mediation had been unsuccessful.

Justification for January’s raid, which was authorized by Magistrate Judge Catherine M. Salinas, relied heavily on recycled claims of irregularities during the 2020 election, which critics say have already been adjudicated or debunked in the nearly six years since the election took place.

Fulton County, which is home to much of the city of Atlanta, was also at the center of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen in Georgia and other swing states.

Abbe Lowell, who represented the county, argued Friday that an affidavit used to justify the raid relied on inaccurate testimony, with witnesses who “completely misstate each of the alleged problems.” He also argued that Salinas was given incomplete information about the significance of documents like ballot images and double-scanned ballots, and that she may have reached a different conclusion if she had been given more accurate information.

Expert witness Ryan Macias, an election technology expert who served as an advisor for Fulton County during the 2020 election, also testified that the events outlined in the affidavit include routine mistakes and were not indicative of any intentional misconduct.

But attorney Michael Weisbuch, who represented the federal government, argued that federal agents who drafted the affidavit did include opposing perspectives and that the raid didn’t amount to a “callous disregard” of the county’s rights.

He also argued that Fulton County has access to copies of the election records and that county officials have yet to produce a compelling reason why they need the original documents returned.

Judge J. P. Boulee, a Trump appointee, did not say when he would issue a ruling in the case.

Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts expressed concern about the Trump administration attempting to take control over elections, and said the federal government could use similar tactics to seize election documents in other states.

“There is no doubt in my mind that this is a blueprint,” Pitts said. “If they’re successful here, in Fulton County, they will take this show on the road, and that’s why we’re going to fight fire with fire. We’re going to fight like hell to make sure that that does not happen.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2026 midterm elections is in trouble, at least if the most relevant election results are to be believed.

“After Democrats snagged a likely House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February, the GOP was furious,” The New Republic’s Finn Hartnett reported on Thursday. “Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.”

Then when Republicans tried to use a local referendum to overturn the gerrymandered district, it “flopped,” although the results were close, Hartnett added. Despite spending $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering” and exceeding the 141,000-signature threshold by almost 30,000, “the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.”

In addition to boding poorly for Utah Republicans, the failure also has ominous implications for Trump overall.

“Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri,” Hartnett explained. “Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah. Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses.”

Hartnett concluded, “We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.”

Veteran journalist and author Michael Wolff also argued during a Wednesday episode of his podcast for The Daily Beast that Trump is intentionally sowing misinformation about the election and trying to pass unnecessarily restrictive legislation because he knows that it will help him discredit any results that do not work to his advantage.

“It’s just what is to his advantage is just the narrative that the election system in the United States is broken,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “And chaos is to his advantage, and to create a bubble of uncertainty and controversy around that, no matter what happens, reverts to his advantage.”

Wolff continued: "Let’s assume this [bill] is not going to pass. So why is he doing this? The reason he is doing this is to set up and to continue the narrative when he loses the midterms. This then becomes the reason he lost the midterms, and he lost the midterms illegitimately… we’ve set up the enemy here."

Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him has been definitively discredited. A conservative think tank called The Heritage Foundation tracked election fraud cases for more than two decades and found a rate of 0.0000845 percent, with no cases of ballot fraud ever changing a result. Similarly a 2022 report by eight conservatives — including two former Republican senators, a former Republican solicitor general, three former federal appellate judges and two Republican election law specialists — examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed by Trump and his supporters during their 2020-2021 coup attempt. He only succeeded in .016 percent of those cases.

President Donald Trump “defends the Epstein class” and is taking the entire Republican Party down with him, warned a former Republican lawmaker and ex-staunch Trump supporter on Wednesday.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Wednesday slammed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Mark Levin, Laura Loomer and other Republicans for what she called “leading Republicans into the slaughter before the midterms.”

“I never changed,” declared former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on a social media post on the platform X. “Trump and the GOP betrayed their voters and took in the trash we threw out of the party.” Singling out supporters of the Iran war like influencer Laura Loomer, radio host Mark Levin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Greene said they “are the BEST political consultants the Democrat Party could ever imagine!!!”

Mentioning that Florida Democrats recently won a special election in a Republican district where Trump himself happens to live, Greene added that overall Democrats have flipped 12 state legislative seats in special elections throughout 2025 and 2026. When Greene resigned from Congress to protest Trump and what she claimed was his destruction of the Republican Party, she said that she would not “fight for Trump and the Republican Party that defends the Epstein class, wages pointless foreign wars, and pursues America LAST.”

Earlier this month Greene told CNN’s Pamela Brown that Trump had committed a “complete betrayal” of his MAGA base by going to war with Iran.

"It makes absolutely no sense, Pamela, going into midterm elections," Greene argued. "Let's remove Donald Trump out of it. Let's just put any president in there. Why would an American president lead his political party into the midterms, waging a full-scale major war, completely unprovoked on Iran, on behalf of Israel? And that's the way most Americans see it. They see this is for Israel, not for America."

Greene concluded: "Why would an American president do that, which is forcing gas prices to hike right here going into spring break, where families are going to be driving out of town, going into summer? Declaring and waging a major full-scale war that seems to have no end in sight. That is not de-escalating. It's escalating every single day. And it just doesn't make sense... I went to, I can't even tell you, countless rallies all over the country for President Trump, campaigning for him and Republicans, because we wanted to win. And we said on every single rally stage, no more foreign wars, no more regime change. It's time to put America first, and this is a complete betrayal of those campaign promises."

Greene is not the only MAGA Republican to claim Trump abandoned the values for which he stood during the 2024 election. In February Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told NOTUS that he too is loyal to the values Trump ran on in 2024 rather than what he has done since starting his second term.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie argued. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

Similarly, after Trump invaded Iran in March, right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan admitted that a lot of Trump supporters felt “betrayed” by his flip-flop on the issue of staying out of wars.

“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan argued. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

President Donald Trump does not have many Republican critics left in Congress — but one of the few who remains recently told The New York Times that he views his upcoming primary as a “litmus test” for his own party.

“He told me that he thinks if he wins, it will embolden his colleagues to oppose Trump on policy issues they truly care about,” the Times’ Catie Edmondson told Katie Gleuck in a Wednesday interview. Edmondson was discussing her recent interview with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been an outspoken critic of Trump for invading Iran and concealing files related to the late convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “That being said, and what I hope came through in the piece, is that Massie, and his relationship to his district, are unique. Even if he wins, I’m not sure how many of his colleagues would rush to follow his lead given how much outside money is being spent against him.”

Massie is not alone among Republicans in Congress who stand up to Trump, although he belongs to an increasingly rare breed. Edmondson observed that in Louisiana, incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy is being primaried by Rep. Julia Letlow because Cassidy voted to convict Trump over his conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

“I remember talking to Cassidy right after he cast that vote and being struck by how angered he was by the violence he witnessed at the Capitol that day,” Edmondson said.

This is not the first time that the Times has profiled Massie for his stance against Gallrein. Earlier in March, reporter Tim Balk interviewed Massie over his willingness to stand up to Gallrein on issues like Iran and Epstein.

In an article published on March 8, the New York Times Tim Balk stresses that a GOP congressional primary battle in Kentucky — one that finds incumbent Massie up against Trump loyalist Ed Gallrein.

"My Republican colleagues, over and over, are being forced to choose between President Trump's position now and his position on the campaign trail. And I'm sticking with his positions on the campaign trail,” Massie told Balk.

The Kentuckian also told Reason Magazine in February that he believes in the near future, people currently holding office will be judged on where they stood on the Epstein issue.

"The question a few years from now will be, 'where were you on the Epstein issue?'" Massie said. "... Were you for releasing the files, or were you calling it a hoax, or were you just too chicken to come out and say anything?"

He continued, "And I think unfortunately, a lot of the politicians right now who are being considered the future of the GOP are either in the category of agreeing that it's a hoax, or just keeping their mouth shut, because they don't have the courage and the political will to do the right thing. And so I don't think you should trust those people later."

Also in February, Massie told NOTUS that he is loyal not to Trump’s second term agenda, but the platform on which he was reelected in 2024.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie said. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

Since losing to Joe Biden in 2020, now-President Donald Trump has been relentless in his assertion that the election was “rigged,” pushing all manner of conspiracies relating to voter fraud regardless of the fact that numerous studies have proven it vanishingly rare. But although voter fraud is exceptionally uncommon, there have been a few cases over recent years. Ironically, they tend to be committed by Trump supporters.

The latest example comes out of Wisconsin, where today conservative activist Henry Wait was found guilty on two counts of misdemeanor election fraud and one count of felony identity theft. The head of a group dedicated to promoting Trump’s claims of election fraud, Wait admitted to requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

His intention, he explained, was to prove that the state’s election system was vulnerable to fraud. In total he requested as many as eight illicit ballots, all of which were flagged by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for fraud.

“I tested the system and the system failed,” Wait said, ignoring that the fraudulent votes had, in fact, been recognized as such, and the irony that he had actually proved the system works.

Wait isn’t the only MAGA supporter convicted of such actions. In 2024, another Wisconsin resident — former Milwaukee election official Kimberly Zapata — was found guilty of using her work-issued laptop to obtain three military absentee ballots using fake voter information. Earlier this month, Trump voter Matthew Laiss was convicted of voting in both Pennsylvania and Florida after unsuccessfully arguing that he should receive immunity under Trump’s pardon of those involved with attempts to overturn the 2020 election. And in 2024, Ohio resident and monthly Trump donor James Saunders was convicted of double voting in two different elections: voting in both Ohio and Florida first in the 2020 presidential election, then the 2022 midterms. While Saunders tried to argue that he’d done it by mistake, the judge didn’t buy that he would repeat the same mix-up twice.

Currently, Trump is fixated on passing the SAVE America Act, an election reform bill that he claims will prevent voter fraud, but that critics argue is an attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters. Trump is desperate to pass the bill before the November midterms, in which the GOP is forecasted to face major defeats.

On Monday, the president pushed congressional Republicans to work to pass the legislation through Easter if necessary.

“Make this one for Jesus,” he said.

President Donald Trump is so unpopular, even his donors are unpopular — as evidenced by a Democrat who recently won in a crowded primary in part by linking his challengers to a pro-Israel lobby that is also full of MAGA mega-contributors.

“Since late summer/early fall, it became clear that AIPAC [a pro-Israel lobby] had a candidate in this race, and I was clear that I was not prepared to sign on to a no-strings-attached blank check of military aid to Israel,” Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss told conservative commentator Lauren Egan from The Bulwark to discuss his win in a crowded Democratic primary for Illinois' 9th Congressional District. “That's their litmus test.”

Biss went on to describe how AIPAC set up a shell super PAC with a benign name, Elect Chicago Women, that “spent something in excess of $7 million on the campaign, which basically dwarfed the amount of money that everybody else was able to spend” to stop Biss. Even though Biss is Jewish and descended from Holocaust survivors, his refusal to be entirely pro-Israel was initially a liability — until his campaign decided to turn it into an asset, in part by shining a light on the groups behind the shell super PAC.

“We made a decision pretty early on that we were going to make this the issue,” Biss explained. “We were going to lay the groundwork to explain what AIPAC was doing and who they were. So to say: hey, this is money from AIPAC and Trump donors — because there's a lot of Trump donor money mixed up in all that.” Additionally, Biss pointed out that these donors wanted to give a “no-strings-attached military aid” package to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which is unpopular in America, and that they were doing this secretly.

“All three of those stories together really helped make it the issue,” Biss said. “And then, amazingly, by the time Election Day came, their preferred candidate finished a distant third. My predominant opponent on Election Day — the person who came in a close second — was someone who is actually much more anti-Israel than I am.”

Trump donors are particularly unpopular right now as they align behind the president’s agenda while the rest of the country moves away from it.

"Determined to get a piece of the action, the very wealthy are lining up in droves," pundit Thomas Edsall wrote in a recent New York Times editorial. "Despite Trump’s having lost ground in almost every demographic during his second term, one group stands firmly in the president’s camp: the superrich who have their wallets open."

As of 2026 Federal Reserve data showed the top 0.1 percent now holds 14.4 percent of U.S. wealth, up from 8.6 percent in 1989. Concurrent with this recent data point, wealthy donors shifted sharply toward Republicans in the 2024 election, with critics attributing the trend to Trump's economic policies exacerbating income inequality.

"Contributions by the very rich to Republicans grew from roughly $300 million in 2022 to just under a billion in 2024, while donations to Democrats fell from roughly $300 million to less than $200 million,” Edsall wrote.