The Election Deniers Surrounding Trump

Pay attention to the people doing his bidding

Looking ahead to the 2026 midterms, we should be deeply concerned not only about what Trump himself will do to subvert them, but what the people around him will do to enable him.

We can already predict that Trump will likely:

• Issue more executive orders undermining elections and suppressing voters through new administrative hurdles and identification burdens;

• Pressure red state governors and election officials to purge voter rolls and disenfranchise minority voters and women;

• Enable and encourage mass citizen challenges to ballots;

• Threaten to, or actually attempt to, deploy the military or armed federal agents at or near voting booths in Democratic strongholds; and

• Claim widespread election fraud in order to delay or invalidate the results.

But if the polls and special election results are a measure of voter sentiment, Trump acting on his own won’t be enough to stop a blue tsunami. To do that, he will need to enlist the help of other key players in government. Looking more closely at who will be in decision-making roles this November, a highly troubling pattern emerges: In many of the most critical roles, Trump has in place extremist election deniers. These individuals have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to challenge or reject the election results and do whatever they can to stop the Democrats from retaking power.

Let’s name them and game them out so that we have our eyes where they need to be come fall.

Kurt Olson: Director of “Election Security”

Kurt Olson isn’t a name known to most Americans, but his appointment may win a prize for “most Orwellian.” Last year, Trump named Olson to lead “election security and integrity” in his administration. That position gives Olson the power to refer criminal investigations to the Justice Department. Olson recently used that power to launch the recent FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, resulting in the seizure of voter roll data and millions of ballots from the 2020 election.

Olson is an election conspiracy theorist and was a central figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. On the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Olson, who represented Texas in its long-shot lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election results, spoke directly to Trump multiple times.

Since then, Olson has continued to champion long-debunked lies about that election, including many that formed the basis for the FBI affidavit used to obtain the Fulton County search warrant. This includes false claims of fraudulent or duplicated ballots and missing tabulator tapes or ballot images. These are all routine administrative discrepancies that election officials regularly reconcile, but which Olson portrays as evidence of system fraud.

In 2024, Olson told Trump it was imperative to preserve voting machine data in the swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia in advance of the elections. Trump wasn’t in power then and didn’t have the FBI at his disposal to seize such voting machine data. But we should assume he would have done so if he could, and that he will do so in 2026. Indeed, Trump has said his failure to order the voting machines seized back in 2020 was a mistake.

Heather Honey: Olson’s deputy who previewed the Fulton County raid

Olson’s deputy, Heather Honey, is also a worrisome figure. Per reporting by the New York Times, last October she spoke with a group of election officials from around the country, who had gathered to discuss safe-guarding elections. Instead of conveying this information, she used her time to amplify election denialist rhetoric. She claimed that her department’s cybersecurity experts, whose role is to combat misinformation about elections, had “strayed from their mission.” She repeatedly cited a debunked report often used by election conspiracists to claim voting machines were rigged to help the Democrats.

Even more troubling, in light of what we just saw in Fulton County, in a separate call with right-wing activists last March, Honey suggested the White House could declare a “national emergency,” then dictate “new rules” to state and local governments, all based on an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a “manipulation” of the vote.

“And therefore, we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” she said in March, “and therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”

She added, “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”

Based on the playbook Honey laid out to those activists, we should expect an “announcement” from the White House that the Fulton County, Georgia ballots were manipulated, and therefore the country is in a state of “national emergency” regarding its elections, justifying additional presidential powers that circumvent Congress and mandate state “action.”

The declaration of emergency powers based on false narratives is a classic fascist move, our very own Reichstag fire moment using “election fraud” as a way to undermine or overturn democratic elections.

Bondi, Patel and Johnson: the three-headed election denial hydra

In late 2020, when Trump began his quest to hang on to power, he faced institutional hurdles from within his own Justice Department and Congress. Bill Barr had told him that his claims had no evidentiary basis, and that it was Speaker Pelosi’s House.

Today, very different figures occupy those roles.

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi earned Trump’s favor by promoting lies about the 2020 election. As the Senate Judiciary Committee found in January of 2025,

On multiple occasions, Pam Bondi has shown a willingness to override the will of the American people at the behest of Donald Trump. In a press conference the day after Election Day in 2020, Bondi falsely claimed that President Trump won Pennsylvania (he lost by more than 80,000 votes) despite only 87 percent of ballots having been counted.

Mirroring Donald Trump’s threats to election officials, Bondi sicced MAGA election deniers on a local election official—a Republican—for simply engaging with poll observers from both parties. Seth Bluestein, the election official, later said he immediately began receiving antisemitic harassment and threats to the point he and his family required police protection.

During his confirmation hearing, Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel repeatedly refused to state that President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Patel also had published a children’s book that included false “deep state” conspiracies around a stolen 2020 election. Last year, Patel amplified unverified claims that the Chinese Communist Party had interfered in the 2020 election by mass-producing drivers’ licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme.

And it was Speaker Mike Johnson who led a campaign within the House in 2020 to overturn the election results through a legally dubious court challenge. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted,

Johnson was the congressional architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, advocating an interpretation of the Constitution so outlandish that not even the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority could swallow it.

Johnson had argued that state legislators, and not the state courts, are the sole state-level decision-makers in federal elections—the so-called “independent state legislature” theory. He claimed that no other bodies besides state legislatures (many of which were controlled by the GOP at the time) could exercise any form of oversight to administer an election. Johnson also pushed hard to decertify the results in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And he even pressured his congressional GOP colleagues to sign on to his plan and warned that Trump would be “anxiously awaiting the final list” of members to review.

The combination of Bondi, Patel and Johnson, working with the election deniers in the “Election Integrity” unit of Homeland Security, is insidiously dangerous. Here’s just one example. Based on conspiratorial claims from Olson and Honey about election machine rigging, Patel’s FBI could seize voting data, just as it did in Fulton County, Georgia. Bondi’s Justice Department could then charge people criminally to lend a veneer of legitimacy to false claims of fraud. The White House could declare a “national emergency” of election fraud and order machines and data seized. And Speaker Johnson could use all of this as a pretense not to seat duly elected representatives.

I lay this out to shed stronger light on each distinct actor in this increasingly frightening play. They have already shown us what they are capable of, and we would be foolish to think they won’t try it again—or aren’t planning it now.