This Trump nightmare becomes more realistic with each passing day

I have a recurring nightmare, a nightmare that becomes more realistic with each passing day. It goes like this:

It is November 2026. Here in Georgia and elsewhere, the midterm polls have been looking bad for Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, but the ballots have finally been cast and are being counted. Tensions are high.

That’s when President Trump sends the National Guard or ICE agents to Fulton County, DeKalb County and other blue-trending areas, claiming massive fraud, seizing voting machines and voiding the election.

If it sounds too crazy to be plausible, I’d like to think so too.

But let me ask:

Is that scenario more crazy than what happened five years ago, when Trump summoned thousands of supporters to charge the Capitol, also in an effort to overturn an election? Is it more crazy than trying to seize Greenland by force? Is it more crazy than what is happening in Minnesota? Are we moving away from chaos, or hurtling at it?

And it’s clearly on Trump’s mind as well.

Last month, in a meeting with House Republicans, he expressed disbelief that Democrats might triumph in the midterms, suggesting it’s only because of fraud.

“How do we have to even run against these people?” he said. “I won’t say ‘cancel the election, they should cancel the election,’ because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”

And in a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump was reminded that in 2020 he had explored using the National Guard to seize ballot boxes in states where he had alleged fraud.

“Well, I should have,” Trump said.

Trump went on to tell the Times that he balked at using the National Guard in 2020 not because he lacked the authority, but because he didn’t think the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to pull it off. He had already tried to pressure the Department of Justice to seize state voting machines, but Attorney General William Barr had refused. Through Rudy Giuliani, Trump then reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to seize machines, but DHS officials also told him that they had no authority to do so.

Somehow, I think Trump’s request would get a very different response this time from the likes of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem.

Indeed, when asked by Times reporters whether he would consider such a step in 2026, Trump changed the subject.

In those previous requests to seize election equipment, Trump had reportedly focused his attention on a specific but unknown state, a state “that had used machines built by Dominion Voting Systems, where his lawyers believed there had been fraud.”

Georgia uses Dominion voting machines. Dominion was acquired by Missouri-based Liberty Vote in 2025.

In recent social media posts, Trump has continued to rail against voting machines, voting by mail, counting votes beyond midnight of Election Day and the use of QR codes, all of which are standard features of Georgia elections. He has even issued executive orders that claim to abolish such standard features of election operation. In his mind, apparently, that makes it illegal.

According to the Constitution, of course, states are empowered to run their own elections, but the Constitution as it is written on paper is often not the Constitution as recognized by Trump.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote recently on his social media platform. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

And what does the president of the United States tell them, “for the good of our country?”

He tells them:

“THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!”

So no, while I do not think it likely, I also do not believe it unthinkable that Trump might claim fraud and dispatch heavily armed, armored, masked federal agents to interrupt vote-counting here in Georgia, and in other swing states as well. Unthinkable things are happening every day.

• Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.
• Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.