Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

ProPublica reports on Trump's efforts to reshape federal election machinery, documenting how roughly 75 federal officials who resisted pressure to overturn the 2020 election have been replaced by approximately two dozen Trump-appointed officials, many with ties to the election denial movement. The article details specific institutional dismantling: CISA's election security unit was gutted, the FBI's public corruption and foreign influence task forces were disbanded, and the Justice Department's voting rights and public integrity sections were substantially gutted or deprioritized. ProPublica's reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials, most on condition of anonymity, and includes the previously unreported December 2020 meeting between Attorney General Barr and federal cybersecurity experts that helped convince Barr to resist Trump's pressure—a concrete narrative anchor that demonstrates journalistic access. The independent search results corroborate the article's core claims: Reuters and NYT report on Trump's mail-in ballot executive order being challenged in court, and Democracy Docket's polling data aligns with ProPublica's characterization of public concern about election interference, though the search results lack the institutional depth and source-based reporting of the ProPublica piece itself. Watch for the 2026 midterm elections, which experts quoted in the article describe as an "unprecedented stress test" of election integrity, and for ongoing court challenges to Trump's election-related executive orders, which judges have already blocked in part.