Trump keeps saying he wants to tilt the 2026 election for the GOP

President Donald Trump doesn’t need any invitation — or any evidence, really — to claim that an election is “rigged,” as he’s done many times over the last 11 years.

But just imagine for a second that, when his foes did something that Trump claimed amounted to rigging an election, they announced it by saying, “This is going to help us win elections!”

Because that’s what the president has now done, over and over again.

As he’s pushed a number of executive and legislative actions in recent months — from nixing the Senate filibuster, to requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship, to eliminating mail ballots — he’s repeatedly pitched them as ideas that will help Republicans win the 2026 midterm elections.

And this brutalist political strategy is getting less subtle.

Trump’s latest missive came on Sunday, after the Supreme Court ruled last week that Louisiana’s congressional map is an unconstitutional gerrymander and further chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, potentially allowing Republicans to redraw maps in the South a lot more favorably for them. That could tilt the US House map toward the GOP for years to come.

Trump urged his side to act post-haste.

He called on states — even those that have already begun voting — to quickly change their maps for the 2026 election to supposedly comply with the Supreme Court ruling.

“That is more important than administrative convenience,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The byproduct is that the Republicans will receive more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms!”

The first thing to note is that what he’s pitching was not demanded by the Supreme Court. While its ruling further diminished the Voting Rights Act, it applies only to Louisiana’s map. It will take time to figure out how it might apply to other states. And it’s not at all clear how it would be legal for states to invalidate votes that have already been cast.

Trump’s is an extreme proposal, to say the least.

But it’s hardly the first time he has pitched such a desperate ploy by invoking midterm gains for the GOP. At a conference of Republican lawmakers in March, Trump told his party that passing his much-prized “SAVE America Act” — which would force people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes — would “guarantee the midterms.”

Trump qualified that by saying, “I’m not doing it for this reason at all.”

And yet he keeps mentioning that reason.

In a late February speech in Georgia, he said that his voting changes would mean, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

Earlier that month, he told podcaster and former top FBI official Dan Bongino that Republicans should take over voting in specific jurisdictions.

“The Republicans should say — we should take over the voting in at least 15 places,” Trump said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” His comments came less than a week after the FBI had searched an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.

But notice that Trump didn’t say the federal government should take over the voting, but specifically that Republicans should do it. While the White House argued he’d been referring to the need for a national voter ID requirement, Trump later told reporters that “a state is an agent for the federal government” and that the GOP lawmakers standing behind him in the Oval Office “should do something about it” if a state “can’t run an election.”

In November, Trump said at a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that Republicans should eliminate the filibuster.

“And if we do it, we will never lose the midterms, and we will never lose the general election, because we will have produced so many different things for our people, for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose an election,” he said.

And long before the Louisiana ruling, Trump bluntly pitched his mid-decade gerrymandering push as being about helping Republicans win elections.

He told CNBC at one point that in Texas, “We are entitled to five more seats.”

After the Texas map passed, he told Republicans that if they gerrymandered more GOP-leaning seats in other states and eliminated mail-in voting and paper ballots, it would erase Democrats’ chances.

“If we do these TWO things, we will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Both parties gerrymander for political benefit. But generally speaking, lawmakers don’t pitch it as being expressly about that. Trump, though, has shown no compunction about discussing new maps in raw political terms.

And to be clear, what he’s proposing — on gerrymandering, at least — isn’t a matter of fairness; it’s about tilting the House landscape in the GOP’s favor.

While gerrymandering has reduced the number of competitive US House districts, the maps in use have at least produced results that closely reflect the national popular vote. Over the last four elections, both parties have won shares of House seats that have been commensurate with their shares of the national two-party vote.

The mid-decade gerrymandering push didn’t exactly pan out how Trump and GOP leaders had envisioned, given Democrats’ success in fighting back. But now Trump wants to press the advantage in another way after the Supreme Court ruling.

His latest idea is an extremely desperate partisan power grab that would invalidate votes already cast.

But whatever it takes to win an election, it seems.