The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Wednesday, wagging a finger at those who feared that President Donald Trump would insert himself into the election process and attempt to steal the 2026 midterms. Experts quickly shut down the editors.
Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, issued a takedown of the Journal’s efforts to downplay what Trump did to meddle in the election as “hyperventilating.” The Journal seems to think that everything went off without a hitch, conveniently forgetting the months of litigation that led up to the big day.
“The editorial’s chosen narrative requires a great forgetfulness about the actual record. It is clear that for the past 18 months, Trump has indeed been intent on messing with the midterms,” Olson said.
It began with Trump’s executive order in March 2025 that gave the federal government, namely the president, power over elections, which the Constitution outlines as the role of the states.
“The administration continued with Trump’s abortive plan to install his appointees at the US Postal Service as deciders of who would be permitted to vote by mail,” Olson continued. “And it further continued with his meritless last-minute litigation seeking to interfere with vote tabulation in California and certification in Alaska.”
He doesn’t even go into the FBI raid on the home of a Democratic member of Congress weeks ahead of the election. The attempt to force through the SAVE Act, which would have made voting significantly more difficult with added ID demands that require citizenship proof.
When Trump couldn’t get the SAVE Act passed, he tried another executive order. Then he tried to seize voter rolls so the Department of Homeland Security could “look for immigrants” who didn’t have the right to vote but were signed up. Several states fought that litigation for months.
Then, the White House decided it would use the Justice Department to target election workers for counting ballots that might be from undocumented immigrants. The DOJ threatened to begin arrests, which would require access to voters’ lists as well. Then, the Department of Homeland Security tried to claim it had a list of 20,000 illegal voters on California’s voter rolls. A simple spot check found dozens of citizens on its list. The DOJ’s own lawyer confessed the list was a catastrophe of inaccurate information.
Then they filed another lawsuit trying to stop the certification of the Alaska Senate election. That doesn’t even address the $5,000 checks he offered to voters if they voted Republican.
“As late as Monday, in a moment all the more devastating for its quietness, the US Supreme Court denied, without explanation, a call for response or noted dissent of the administration’s request to keep alive its absurd suit seeking to interfere with California tabulation,” wrote Olson.
He noted that almost none of this made it into the Journal’s mockery of Democrats’ fainting couches and pearl clutching. “Nor do the various other ways Trump set the stage, including relentlessly sowing doubt about the system’s honesty and issuing penalty orders intended to destroy law firms and particular lawyers who had previously bested him and his allies in court on election matters,” Olson added.
The Journal conceded that his mid-district gerrymandering was an effort to unfairly influence the election. But they mocked the fears that the administration would steal ballots. They ignored that the DOJ already has stolen 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia.
“The notion that Trump did not try to meddle improperly with the midterms is revisionist history that we should emphatically reject from the day it appears,” Olson closed.