Trump’s secret plot to hold on to power forever ...Middle East

In the final days of his first term, Donald Trump made a phone call lasting 67 minutes to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the top official responsible for counting votes there.

“All I want to do is this,” said Trump in the call on 2 January, 2021, as he pressured the Republican to reverse Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia in the presidential election Trump had just lost. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”

Raffensperger pushed back, saying: “The data you have is wrong.”

Trump insisted that 5,000 votes had been counted from people who were dead on election day. Raffensperger replied: “The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.” He added: “We believe that we do have an accurate election … We have to stand by our numbers.”

That conversation is worth remembering as Trump returns to a theme that has dominated his private conversations and his public statements more than any other: his apparently sincere belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

In a podcast interview earlier this month with his former deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, Trump declared that he would like to “take over” the election process in some states.

The way to prevent another “stolen” election, Trump said on the podcast, was to let the federal government run the voting, taking the count away from states (which have traditionally run elections). “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over … We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalise the voting.”

Trump’s phone call to Raffensperger earned him one of the four criminal indictments he faced when he came to office in January last year. Georgia’s District Attorney, Fani Willis, brought a racketeering case against Trump, alleging a “criminal enterprise” to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result. Eighteen co-defendants stood alongside him, a motley collection of officials, advisers and lawyers who had had Trump’s ear on this issue and fed his fantasies and his anger.

This group included Sidney Powell, a Trump’s lawyer who had promised a “biblical” lawsuit against the state of Georgia. “I’m going to release the Kraken,” she told Fox News, referring to a mythical sea monster of litigation.

She possessed evidence, she said, that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez had funnelled “communist money” to Dominion Voting Systems – whose voting machines were used in Georgia – to get them to write software that would “rig” the election. It didn’t seem to matter that Chavez had been dead for seven years by the time of the 2020 election.

Unfortunately for Powell, Dominion obtained an email titled “Election Fraud Info” that she had forwarded to the Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo. It was written by one of Powell’s “sources”, a woman who said she knew about the election conspiracy because she could “time-travel in a semi-conscious state”. The woman went on: “Who am I? And how do I know all of this?… I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”

It was “pretty wackadoodle”, Powell wrote, but she still circulated the email as evidence. Dominion sued Powell for $1.3bn.

The lawyer was also one of four of Trump’s co-defendants who flipped, pleading guilty to racketeering charges and agreeing to testify against Trump to avoid jail. But Trump got lucky – as he so often has in his long history with the courts – and the case imploded. The DA, Willis, was disqualified from the case because she had kept secret an affair with the special prosecutor, who’d been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from the state. The charges were all dismissed.

The case had been brought in Fulton County, where a grand jury returned a 98-page indictment of Trump. So, it was a striking coincidence that in January of this year, FBI agents raided the Fulton County Election Hub. They seized 700 boxes of materials related to the 2020 elections – including ballots, printed records, electoral rolls. Trump called the FBI agents involved in the raid to personally congratulate them. Just before the raid, he had announced: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

One detail about the raid was particularly odd: Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, was photographed at the scene, and seemed to be overseeing the operation despite her seniority. There followed a flood of contradictory explanations from the White House and Trump administration about what she was doing there.

The Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, a former Trump defence lawyer, said it was a coincidence that Gabbard just “happened to be present in Atlanta” and so could easily travel to Fulton County to observe. Trump then told a National Prayer Breakfast at the White House that the Attorney General Pam Bondi had “insisted” Gabbard oversee the raid. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the media of getting “caught up with the semantics” and refused to say why Gabbard was there.

Eventually, Gabbard was more forthcoming. She wrote to Congress to say that her “presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyse intelligence related to election security, including counterintelligence, foreign and other malign influence, and cybersecurity.” Does this mean the White House is about to revive the conspiracy theory that Chávez’s Venezuelan regime helped steal the 2020 election?

All this is red meat for the Maga faithful, but will probably not lead to charges. The five-year statute of limitations for federal elections offences has passed. What, then, is the Trump administration up to? US media reports that the Department of Justice has been demanding “unprecedented” amounts of election data from states. Colorado got a sweeping request for “all records” relating to 2024 federal elections. Minnesota was asked to hand over voter rolls.

In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship in order to vote. The federal courts have largely blocked the order but the White House may be trying to find evidence to press ahead.

Stopping non-citizens from voting might be a good idea in principle – and certainly Republican strategists would like to stop the Democrats from building a new electoral coalition with the votes of those who have swum across the Rio Grande. But there are probably not as many votes at stake as Trump’s supporters think.

In October 2024, Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger announced that an audit had found “just 20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote in Georgia were not citizens, and only nine had ever voted”. A New York Times investigation found that of 49.5 million voter registrations checked by the federal government using a sophisticated software tool, only around 10,000 cases were referred for further investigation, just 0.02 per cent, and the Times said even that number may have been inflated.

Still, Trump said last month – in a New York Times interview – that he regretted not dispatching the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. It is – or ought to be – an important consideration that he is in the last of his two presidential terms.

While questions of voting in the next presidential election might appear irrelevant to his future, and therefore to both his supporters and opponents, there is another subject Trump often returns to, in public and in private: whether he could get a third term.

One of the reasons he advances is that the 2020 election was “stolen”. The US Constitution is clear that he cannot return to White House as president. But supporters such as Steve Bannon – his former chief strategist – have said they are working on how this could be accomplished. It might have to be done alongside a declaration of martial law, using the Insurrection Act or something like it.

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That alone shows how mad and dangerous talk of a third Trump term is – but people are taking it seriously. Garry Kasparov, the former chess grandmaster and notable Trump critic, is among those warning that America may face an authoritarian future.

He posted on X in response to news that ICE has spent half a billion dollars on buying warehouses across the country to convert into detention camps. This “massive US gulag” was not only being built for illegal immigrants, he wrote. In ICE, Trump had a federal paramilitary force as large as the Marines. He had billions of “unaccountable” cash from Venezuelan oil along with these “shock troops” and the detention camps. “This is not a drill,” Kasparov concluded.

Predictions of American authoritarianism have a long, and often wrong, history. But when someone of Kasparov’s experience with actual authoritarian regimes is raising the alarm – and when Trump himself talks of “taking over” elections – perhaps we should listen.

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