In preparation for the midterm elections in November, Trump is beginning a two-pronged attack on his political opponents. With his approval ratings in the mid-thirties, he's launched a campaign to designate anyone slightly to the left of the most moderate Republican as a communist, and therefore, according to a book published in 2024, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), non-human. The book, by the way, has a foreword by Steve Bannon and an endorsement by Vice President JD Vance. Trump is well aware of the consequences if the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in November. He and others in his administration will likely face impeachment and possibly jail terms.
In a speech at Mt Rushmore on 3 July, Trump said, “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty” as if Marx and Lenin had been resurrected in Washington and were openly advocating the overthrow of capitalism. He mentioned the word communism or communist 14 times in a 30-minute speech.
The State Department last Thursday opened what they call a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” and in opening remarks by Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it’s specifically about “extremist violence from the political left.” Trump's malign Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, claimed that “the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence.”
The 'left' gets 45 mentions while the right doesn’t get one. Apparently, protesting about the erosion of civil rights is now seen as terrorism.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, where charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign influence activity, and how those entrusted with stewardship of these organizations have instead enabled violence.”
The administration is going after the left in America in a serious, concerted effort.
Meanwhile, the State Department has issued a tender calling for non-profits and private groups to bid for $4.9 million in funding for “proposals to strengthen and develop democratic resilience, rule of law, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the defense of human rights in Europe through research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society to address national sovereignty, migration, censorship, and lawfare challenges in line with shared political philosophy, law, and our common Western civilizational heritage” (my emphasis).
This is in something called NSPM-7 or the National Security Presidential Memorandum titled "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”
It follows some $12 million in grants already allocated by the USA to organisations in the UK founded by the former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, according to the Guardian. So, while America is going after foreign influence from left-wing organisations in the US, they are simultaneously funding right-wing organisations in Europe. The hypocrisy is off the charts.
The second prong is to finally destroy what little faith his MAGA supporters have in the integrity of US elections.
In a speech to the nation, last week, Trump raised the prospect of election interference in the coming mid-term elections in America, in what the media is describing as a series of “outlandish” claims in a typically rambling, low-energy effort about previous elections. It was mainly a whinge about the one he lost six years ago but refuses to accept. It was also a warning about what he intends to do this November to avoid a wipeout in the midterm elections.
He would like to manufacture a crisis as an excuse to take over election management in America.
To back up his claims, he released thousands of heavily redacted pages of classified intelligence documents supposedly showing “vulnerabilities” in US election processes. The so-called vulnerabilities have all largely been debunked and have been known about for years. He claimed China was behind attempts to rig the 2020 election in favour of Joe Biden and the “deep state” had covered it up. This was while he was President.
The first five minutes was spent in self-praise about a fantasy US that exists only in his deranged mind. He said the nation is safer and wealthier than ever before, and claimed the US is “the hottest country in the world right now” although he wasn’t talking about climate change.
The president alleged that there were “shocking vulnerabilities in election infrastructure” and claimed the US “election system” is “dangerously” exposed to “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.”
US elections, he claimed, fell “catastrophically short” of being safe and secure and the documents he published contained what he called “critical intelligence” revealing these "vulnerabilities" that had been “hidden from the American people.”
This is in a country where Republicans in 2024 won the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. In fact, the intelligence was heavily redacted, and most of what was visible was already publicly available and had been for years. It did not show what he claimed. The Murdoch owned WSJ reported that the US intelligence community has already confirmed China did not interfere in the 2020 election.
Remember, Trump has never accepted the result of the 2020 election. He instigated an insurrection, and he and his allies launched over 60 legal challenges to election results, where he had multiple opportunities to expose election fraud but failed to convince one judge that any of the outcomes had been altered by fraud. Even his own adviser admitted there is no evidence supporting Trump's repeated assertions about "rigged" elections.
Ironically, what the document release did show is that Russia certainly did interfere in 2020 to try to help him win. He actually confirmed their “authenticity.”
Trump released documents that confirm Russia tried to interfere in the 2020 election to hurt Biden. It says Russia tried to "orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal" and push narratives about "voter fraud resulting from mail-in balloting" pic.twitter.com/fURVaa74do
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) July 17, 2026
We already know from the Mueller report that Russia helped him win the 2016 election by hacking Hilary Clinton’s emails and leaking the embarrassing stuff via Julian Assange and Wikileaks. There were also numerous contacts between Trump’s campaigners and supporters with various Russian figures in the run-up to the 2016 election.
For all we know, they may well have done the same in 2024. But Trump didn’t mention Russia once.
He also hit out at US voting machines, which were “exposed” to hackers and subject to potential manipulation, seemingly unaware that Fox News has paid one manufacturer, Dominion Voting Machines, $780 million in damages for suggesting the same thing.
Trump called for “urgent action” to address these frauds which were apparently so devious and clever they couldn’t be detected by audits, which US officials (but only in the deep state), were somehow aware of but took no action and didn’t tell him. It was a total, unbelievable fantasy with no basis in fact whatsoever. He did not give details of what this 'urgent action' might consist of.
Notably, the only election results he ever questions as fraudulent are the ones he loses.
Indeed, if anyone is committing fraud, it's Republicans. The Election Truth Alliance (ETA) has conducted serious research and published several reports about potential election anomalies, all of which favoured Donald Trump. I haven’t seen any serious analysis that implicates Democrats. It was Trump who called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger in 2020 to demand he ‘find’ 11,780 votes to allow him to ‘win’ the state that he had lost.
In America, the states control their own elections for state officials and for the presidential election. The US government doesn’t have any direct role. Trump’s Department of Justice has made multiple failed attempts to obtain voter rolls from various states, which it alleges have allowed illegal votes by unregistered voters to be cast, something the states absolutely deny.
Trump has recently forced out the last officials from the Federal Election Commission, the body charged with overseeing election administration, accrediting testing laboratories certifying voting systems, and maintaining the national mail-voter registration form.
Last year, Trump cut about a third of the staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government's top cyber defence body protecting U.S. election systems. Nearly 1,000 CISA personnel — or about one-third of the agency's workforce — had left or been removed from active service by mid-2025.
Trump has also spent the last year “slashing” 500 staff at the National Intelligence Agency, the very body responsible for election security and has scaled back the Foreign Malign Influence Centre, responsible for tracking foreign disinformation campaigns.
These are not the actions of an administration concerned about outside, foreign interference; they smack of a government intending to rig an election.
I think it is quite obvious that this is what he intends to do this November. He wants to take over the apparatus so he can manipulate the results. With his approval rating falling further every week and for him and many in his government, the stakes couldn't be higher.
