Reclaim the American Dream

by Hedrick Smith

     The plot-line of the 2026 mid-term elections has been signaled for months in President Trump’s steadily sinking approval ratings. The wild card this year is not some unexpected 11^th hour swerve in voter sentiment but the threat of Donald Trump’s fierce, fantasy war against our election system.

        Never before have we had a president who has set out so brazenly to disrupt, discredit or demolish the very system that twice put him in the White House and armed him with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

        Trump is fixated on a phantom problem. There is no evidence of significant voter fraud in recent U.S. elections by the testimony of scores if not hundreds of Republican as well as Democratic election officials. But Donald Trump gins up a rampage about cheating by his opposition whenever he sees defeat looming ahead.

      Trump and his MAGA cabal have dreamed up a multitude of schemes. Their efforts to suppress the vote, to intimidate election officials, and to sour public confidence in elections is a multi-layered, multi-pronged plot. Some of his ploys have already been blocked by Congress, bitterly fought by the states and even killed by the U.S. Supreme Court. But that hasn’t tempered Trump or moved his agents back to more normal political combat.

     The homestretch of the campaign promises to be the most perilous time of all. Will ICE agents show up at election precincts? Will Trump declare martial law? Will the ballots be honestly counted by local officials or seized by federal authorities? For a quick rundown on the prospects and dangers, join me on this video.

    And if you want to get an idea of where we are likely to be headed after the election, I’ve got a new book that deals with the road ahead, coming in early 2027: THE ROAD TO AUTOCRACY: How We Lost – and Can Recover- Our Democracy.