The Trump Ratchet and 2026. Of course he’s trying to steal the election.

by Rick Wilson - Aug 27

I’ve described this mechanism in pieces for years without branding it properly.

Let me fix that. It’s the Ratchet, and it is one of the most reliable ways to understand how Trump has broken American politics. It is running right now on his plan to steal the 2026 election, and we are not early in the process.

We are at or near the last click.

You know the pattern by now:

Trump says something monstrous, racist, blisteringly stupid, authoritarian, corrupt, or simply deranged. Normal Americans react with shock, because they are normal.

Then the machinery engages first with either explicit or quiet White House talking points, then escalates to social media, then to Fox and the rest of the MAGA Mediaverse.

Click. Haha, libs. He triggered you again. It was a joke.

Click. That’s just Trump being Trump. Delivered fondly, the way you’d describe an uncle who pockets the silverware or fondles the maid.

Click. Fine, he was joking, but the underlying issue is deadly serious.

Click. Surely we can at least talk about it. Why won’t you talk about it? Why won’t the Democrats address this? What are they hiding?

Click. It becomes real when a bill from some hairsprayed MAGA backbencher named Ed Bob Billy Joe Jackhole from Crotchitch, Alabama looks up from his Grindr app and puts it on the floor for a vote. Trump tweets his approval and delight. If it’s too blatantly illegal and unconstitutional even

for the Stephen Miller types, or moving too slowly for Trump’s taste, we get an executive order from the Resolute Desk, and the punchline becomes federal policy.

One day it’s a joke, the next day it’s the SAVE Act. (Which is still a joke in itself.)

Every click of the Trump ratchet is small, and individually deniable, but the pawl never lets it slip backward. It’s also a psychological trick for Trump’s shrinking base; nobody ever has to defend the finished product because they’re having such transgressive fun with the process.

You’ve seen it before, over and over.

December 2015. Trump stood at a podium in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The reaction was exactly what you’d expect from a country that still had a functioning moral gag reflex. Republicans I worked with for two decades called it disqualifying, in public, with their names attached.

Then the clicks started. “He’s just being provocative.” “He’s making a broader point about screening terrorists, libtard.” By the summer of 2016, the phrase had been laundered into “extreme vetting,” which sounds like the official energy drink of American fascism.

By the Fall, it was a serious policy conversation on Sunday shows. Rudy Giuliani went on Fox and cheerfully explained that Trump had asked him how to do the ban legally, which in a normal, sane presidential candidate would have been the first question.

January 27, 2017: Executive Order 13769. A revision in March. A proclamation in September. And on June 26, 2018, John Roberts wrote that a court examines the four corners of the order and the joke became constitutional.

Thirty months from punchline to precedent. That is the Ratchet lubed up and running clean, and every Republican operative in Washington watched it happen and learned the lesson. Democratic operatives mostly wondered why no one was reading their 971-page climate action plan or latest gun control bill.

Fast forward.

August 2025: Trump announces on Truth Social that he’ll lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines. Absurd on its face. The president does not administer elections. Cue laughter.

January 2026, at the House Republican retreat at the Kennedy Center: “I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election,” followed immediately by a preemptive whine about being called a dictator. Weeks later, he tells Reuters flatly that we shouldn’t even have an election. Karoline Leavitt goes to the podium and says he was “simply joking,” “speaking facetiously,” and snaps at a reporter for asking whether the president finds canceling elections funny.

That is, click one and click two, executed within a single news cycle on live television.

March 31, 2026, the Postal Service mail-in ballot executive order hits. The Postal Service is directed to deliver ballots only to people on a federal list of eligible voters, a list that has never existed in the history of the republic: twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sue. Judge Talwani enjoins it as to the November election.

August 24, 2026: the Red Supreme Court, 6-3, lifts the stay on procedural grounds without touching the screamingly obvious constitutional question. Sotomayor notes in dissent that the ruling merely postpones adjudication. Jackson accuses the majority of taking its eye off the ball. States begin mailing ballots in weeks.

Meanwhile, Harmeet Dhillon, the Janine Pirro of Lindsay Halligans, announces that the Civil Rights Division will field roughly one thousand federal election monitors in November. In 2024, the number was 714. The same division has lost better than seventy percent of its career staff to resignations and early retirement.

So ask the only question that matters: who exactly are the other several thousand bodies going to be, and whose lanyards will they be wearing when they stand in a church basement in Detroit at 7 a.m.? Hint: it’s ICE. It’s always fucking ICE.

Add the letters DOJ sent to all fifty states threatening election officials with criminal exposure over noncitizen voting. Add the redistricting arms race. Add a president who talks about the Insurrection Act the way other men talk about the weather.

We are at click six. The bill has been dropped. The order has been signed. The Court has cleared the runway. Expect the worst.

One massive failure mode in society’s response to The Ratchet is that American political journalism covers the Ratchet tooth by tooth and never covers the tool and the process of its use.

Each click gets its own discrete story, written as if it emerged from nothing. “Trump suggests.” “Critics say.” “The White House angrily denies.” “Some Democrats allege...”

Every one of those stories is defensible in isolation, and every one of them is a lie by omission, because the real story is the end goal of the process, not the coverage of each click.

The second failure is treating the “he was joking” defense as a fact to report rather than a stage of a bigger, more pernicious plan. When Leavitt (or her replacement) says facetiously, that is not a White House response. That is step three of an eight-step process, and the lede should reflect that, with the last four examples listed underneath.

Here is a rule any editor could adopt tomorrow: never report the joke without reporting the destination.

Enough diagnosis. You’re going to ask, “But what do we do if he tries to steal the election?” First, he’s going to try.

Hare are some operational answers:

Bank the vote early and in person.

Most mail ballots can also be dropped off at your county supervisor of elections. If the Postal Service starts its trickery, take that extra step. If your state offers early in-person voting, use it, and use it in the first week, not the last. Votes already in the box cannot be litigated out of existence by an emergency application filed on October 28th.

If you vote in person, absolutely stay in line. Do not provide ID to anyone other than the election workers. Record any interference. Don’t hesitate to call 9/11 if Federal agents of any flavor threaten or intimidate.

Every campaign needs a Plan B voter contact program running now.

Not October. Now.

Assume the rules change twice more before Election Day. Voter contact should include making sure your voters know not to be intimidated away from the polling place. Set up election-day mechanisms for supporters to report any interference to the campaign. Post it, boost it, log the hell out of every detail, because the court is going to need it.

Secretaries of state and attorneys general: concede nothing.

Use the power of your state position and laws. Arrest people trying to interfere with the voting process, including ICE, DHS, BORTAC, or whatever other Federal agency steps over the line. Seek restraining orders against them. Get them in court before Election Day.


No handing over voter files because a letter arrived with threats on DOJ stationery. No “cooperative” pre-clearance with a Justice Department that has already told you it thinks your voters are criminals. Make them go to court for every inch and make them do it on a clock they can’t beat. I’m not an attorney, but I can think of 20 more things, and I’ll bet smart lawyers can think of 100 ways to push back on Trump’s interference.

Deploy lawyers and cameras at outside precinct with a federal presence. Document and confront. A monitor who behaves lawfully is a nonevent. A masked, armed monitor from a Federal immigration agency who doesn’t becomes evidence, and evidence gathered in real time is the only thing that moves a court in November emergency hearings.

Build the margin.

All of this friction is engineered to shave a point or two off turnout in specific ZIP codes and Congressional districts. The countermeasure isn’t some secret sauce: it’s volume. Win by more than they can steal, and make the cost of the theft visible to the people who’d have to sign their names to it.

The Ratchet works because everyone agrees to be surprised on schedule. It requires our shock, our fatigue, and our willingness to relitigate step one while they’re already executing step six.

Stop being surprised.

Start reading ahead.

And vote these bastards into the dustbin of history so we can be done with the ratchet once and for all.