You can tell how a campaign thinks it’s doing by its closing argument in the final weeks. Candidates who believe they’re winning talk about their record. Candidates who believe they’re losing throw everything at the wall, including the kitchen sink.
Three weeks out from the US midterm elections, Donald Trump and his allies are in a state of extreme panic. His opponents are cautiously celebrating this apparent validation that the Maga movement is on the ropes. But I watched this US president lose up close, when I worked for him, which is why I see the panic as an ominous sign, too.
The first sign of despair came when he started throwing money at people. Last month, at the Republican Party’s first-ever “midterm convention” in Dallas, Trump promised every American adult a $5,000 (£2,656) cheque if his party keeps the House and Senate. Trump dangled it like a not-so-subtle bribe. Vote for us, and you’ll get your money.
Then he moved into full panic mode and started sending money out anyway. In a flurry before Election Day, the administration has mailed $500 (£378) payments to almost a million Americans (ostensibly for a healthcare programme rebate), but they’re hardly innocuous government refunds. The cheques come with a signed letter from Trump blaming his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden for economic hardship.
Meanwhile, Trump has blitzed the airwaves with ads touting his record. But rather than use campaign funds, he’s used taxpayer dollars from the Department of Homeland Security, where I was once chief of staff, to fund the promotional spots. This includes a near-identical copy of a 2024 campaign advert that now ends with the words “Paid for by the US Government”. A US judge just ordered a temporary halt to the ads, and said the plaintiffs who claimed they were an unlawful use of taxpayer money were likely to win.
Trump is also getting desperate as he watches Americans — including from his own side of the aisle — complain about prices at the pump. So days ago, Trump struck a surprise deal with one of America’s foreign adversaries, Vladimir Putin, to import Russian fuel into the United States, mere weeks after he signed sweeping sanctions against Russia’s energy sector as punishment for its war with Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the move a “gift” to Putin, while US analysts have noted that buying oil from our enemies will do little to lower gas prices, may be illegal (since Congress banned Russian energy imports in 2022), and will almost certainly embolden a cash-strapped Putin. Left unsaid by the White House is that fuel prices have soared because of his war in Iran.
The desperation has spread outside government, too, with the billionaires and smear merchants scrambling to pitch in to help Trump salvage an election that appears headed toward major defeat for Republicans. Elon Musk has reportedly spent $366m (£276m) to help the President’s candidates, with special attention on deep-red Texas, where the GOP shouldn’t be having trouble but is flailing. In fact, Democrat James Talarico has led Ken Paxton in nine of the last ten polls. When Talarico left the trail for ten days with the flu, Paxton demanded “proof of life” and the reality TV personality Spencer Pratt told followers his sources said Talarico was in a mental health facility. Talarico made an appearance at a country music concert days later.
None of this is how a confident party behaves. Trump’s approval is below 40 per cent in every major polling average, and Democrats lead the generic ballot by more than they did before their 2018 “blue wave” during Trump’s first administration, which sent him into a spiral. He can see what’s coming.
And that’s where the caution comes in. The last time Trump believed he was losing, he searched for any voice near him that was willing to whisper back reassuring lies that he hadn’t really lost. Indeed, in December 2020, Trump was in such denial that he summoned outside advisers Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne to the Oval Office to hear their pitch for seizing the voting machines from the election Trump had just lost. White House lawyers spent hours fighting them off. Weeks later, Trump spoke to a rally of Maga followers who then marched across town and stormed the Capitol – although he did not make a direct call for violent action.
These outsiders are what I call Trump’s “crackpots cabinet”. As his anxiety about the midterms swells, he’s consulting with these flunkies about his options. The one that has me most worried is Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk and conspiracy theorist convicted of election interference. Trump spent a year pressuring Colorado’s governor to let her out of jail; within weeks of her release, she was having lunch at the White House with the President. Last Monday, according to Trump ally Ed Martin, she was back in the Oval Office discussing election “plans”, which the White House won’t confirm or deny.
Why should that concern you? Well, her lawyer is a man named Peter Ticktin (a boyhood friend of Trump), and he’s drafted an executive order for Trump to declare an election emergency. This month, in fact, he described a plan to “seize ballots” across America and do hand recounts wherever the White House likes, warning that “Donald Trump is not going to relinquish control again.” Ticktin added that a “civil war” would be better for his side because they’re in power right now and hold the nation’s armaments. He told The Atlantic about one scenario in which the President could declare “martial law” on or around Election Day.
The White House says these people don’t set election policy, but I know better. I remember when people like that would call Trump at all hours of the day and night and do exactly that — shape his views on policy — because we’d get the phone call right afterwards when he’d order us to do something that they had suggested to him. Trump certainly seems to be signalling that he’s listening to the crackpots. In Dallas, he led supporters in raising their right hands in a mock pledge to “cheat like hell like they do” in the election. People laughed. I didn’t.
So I’ve been going across the country urging vigilance. Governors, secretaries of state and judges should decide now what they’ll do if federal agents holding badges and guns turn up at polling places demanding the ballots. And America’s allies, Britain included, should say in advance that they’ll recognise election results as certified by the states, not illegal hand recounts Trump wants to do himself.
Before the 2020 election, as the President’s desperation grew more apparent, I talked with my former boss John Kelly, who’d served as Trump’s chief of staff.
We talked about whether Trump might try to stay in office, unconstitutionally. At the time, his staff were scoffing at the idea and assuring everyone Trump would “concede gracefully” if he lost and hand over power peacefully. Kelly knew that was unlikely and had a different vision: “Nothing would please me more than if he chained himself to the Resolute desk, and they have to go in and cut the chains and carry him away in a straitjacket.”
The end result wasn’t far off.
This time, the people who’d happily hand him the chains are back in the Oval Office. They’re whispering in his ear again. And they’re telling him that desperate times call for desperate measures.