Trump 'overshot so badly' that midterm election gambit may backfire spectacularly: opinion

Recent developments have sparked fears that the Trump administration is plotting to “engineer” its ideal outcome for the upcoming midterm elections, but journalists Greg Sargent and Gillian Brockell argued Tuesday that the administration had “overshot so badly” that its 2026 plot may end up backfiring spectacularly.

Last week, President Donald Trump’s FBI – controversially accompanied by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard – raided an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, which remains at the center of Trump’s longstanding false claims that he won the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration raids have sparked concern that they could suppress voter turnout among nonwhite Americans. And on Monday, Trump openly called for Republicans to “take over” the voting process in a number of states ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

Coupled together, Sargent and Brockell argued Tuesday in The New Republic’s “Daily Blast” podcast that the Trump administration’s recent actions and comments demonstrated a clear intent to create an "atmosphere of crisis” in an effort to help Republicans electorally. The problem, they both concurred, is that the Trump administration had bit off more than it could chew.

“[Trump] is just gonna try to use ICE in some sense to create the sort of disruption that potentially foments a crisis atmosphere, voter intimidation,” Sargent said.

“And then, also creating an atmosphere of crisis in particular jurisdictions, maybe where there are competitive House contests, a crisis that sort of favors Republicans in some sense. Although I’ve gotta say, at this point, I think that they’ve overshot so badly that any sense of crisis that they create works against them, I think.”

Brockell, an independent journalist who wrote for The Washington Post for more than a decade, warned Sargent to “not count our chickens before they hatch,” but conceded that in her opinion, Republicans were almost certainly in for an election walloping.

“The midterms are likely to be such an overwhelming win for Democrats that, even if they can disrupt a couple of congressional elections – probably blue districts in a red state – it doesn’t seem like they can actually really stop this wave that is coming at them that they created through their own cruelty, through their own fascist behavior,” Brockell said.