Say, Whatever Happened To All Those Claims That Trump Would Cancel The Midterms?

For years leading up to last week’s midterm elections, the public was treated to an endless supply of red alerts about how President Donald Trump was going to meddle in, subvert, or outright block the vote.

Now that Democrats have won resoundingly in an apparently trouble-free election, will they offer an apology to the public?

Tim Graham of the Media Research Center compiled a list of some of the dire forecasts issued by the left that go back years:

• Rachel Maddow said in October 2023 that “if he is put back in the White House” Trump will try to make sure “we don’t have another election after that.”
• Around the same time, Joy Reid, before she was fired from MSNBC, urged viewers to vote in 2024 because it “could be our last election.”
• This Januar, Joy Behar said, “I really worry about that Trump is looking for this kind of pandemonium to go on like you just described, so that he could declare martial law or something and also cancel the midterms.”
• In June, Rosie O’Donnell predicted, “we’re going to have an event here in the United States, maybe another ‘assassination attempt,’ and he’s going to declare that the elections are off.”

Graham’s list could have gone on for hundreds of pages. Our own cursory search turned up mountains of examples.

In August, for example, the Center for American Progress published a “fact sheet” titled “The Trump Administration Is Interfering in the 2026 Midterm Elections To Entrench the Imperial Presidency.”

That same month, the Brennan Center published a report about “The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election.”

In October, Reuters ran a story headlined “Nine ways the Trump administration could interfere with the midterms.”

The New York Times weighed in with “The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference.”

A group called Democracy Forward published a report condemning actions that it said “are reckless and run the risk of intimidating and disenfranchising voters.”

These warnings were never credible, and if they were coming from Republicans, would not have been taken seriously by any mainstream news outlet.

They were, however, meant to serve two functions. One was to stoke ongoing fear and hatred of Trump. But they were also designed to serve as fodder had the blue wave turned out to be a ripple. If Democrats had not done as well as the polls suggested, they would be running around the country claiming the elections had been stolen and rioting in the streets.

So what should happen now? As Graham put it: “Every conspiracy theorist who suggested the midterms were going to get canceled should … get canceled.”

Trouble is, no matter how many left-wing conspiracies turn out to be bogus, the proprietors never face any consequences. They just go on making up new ones.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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