"This is how this happens..."

July 17, 2026

A mild Congressman’s impassioned warning about a Trumpian path to martial law

One way to lose a democracy is to do so incrementally, by a steady paring of freedom, justice, and transparency. The non-profit organization Freedom House has been keeping score on the U.S. and the other nations of the world since 1941, using metrics of liberty, justice, and democratic capacity to keep score, so to speak.

On a scale of 0 to 100, Freedom House lowered the U.S. freedom score from 83 to 81 this year. By comparison, the Freedom House score for Russia is now 12, and Canada’s is 97.

The President’s national address last night was promoted in MAGA circles as a bombshell of revelations about foreign-influenced vote fraud in the 2020 election—the election Trump lost to Joe Biden. But it was so bombshell-free and unpersuasive that even Fox News said it could not verify the allegations.

Perhaps the most significant news from the event was not staged. It came after Trump’s speech when journalist Vaughn Hillyard recognized John Solomon—a well-known MAGA spinner of vote fraud theories now advising Trump as a “special government employee.” Under questioning from Hillyard, Solomon was recorded as clearly stating: “All I can acknowledge is what the intelligence shows. I only know—the intelligence community has zero evidence that … a foreign power flipped the vote in 2020, ’22, or ’24.”

All told, it was as though Trump stepped on a rake, with the handle smacking his forehead and dislocating his hair.

Solomon’s admission and Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior would matter more if there were meaningful checks and balances. The President has been twice impeached, convicted of multiple felonies, and just paid E. Jean Carroll $5.62 million for sexual assault and defamation. And, yet, even this trail of conspicuous misbehavior has been normalized by the party that controls both houses of Congress, the White House, and a Supreme Court majority appointed by Republican presidents.

To be concise: the 47th president has been empowered not just with criminal immunity by the Supreme Court, but has faced no meaningful accountability from a compliant Republican Party and Republican-controlled Congress.

It is the lack of checks and balances on his powers that alarms many, and the most conspicuous alarm after Trump’s speech last night came from a member of Congress who—by his own admission—rarely raises his voice in anger or alarm. But he did so last night. He is Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut who is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight” members of Congress who get regular classified briefings from the heads of the nation’s intelligence services.

With alarm in his voice he made the point last night that Trump is well-positioned to attempt the seizure of ballots and voting machines this fall if he senses the mid-term elections are not going his way. This how his interview with MS Now’s Lawrence O’Donnell unfolded last night, following Trump’s speech—

Himes: “(B)ecause this is so important and because I don’t believe it’s only about the SAVE Act, let me not put any fine point on this. The President of the United States lied to the American public today. It was a bald-faced, 180-degree, obviously provable lie. Why do I say that? I have reviewed all the intelligence the President supposedly declassified, and there is absolutely nothing in that intelligence that substantiates what he was saying. That Venezuela was doing this, that Russia and China and China were doing this. The conclusion of the intelligence community under Director of National Intelligence, John Radcliffe. John Ratcliffe, his guy who’s at CIA right now, was that there was no meddling. You can look at it. This is a public report. There was no meddling... Meddling meaning interference. No screwing around with vote totals, with voter lists, with machines, etc.

Yes, Russia wanted to re-elect Donald Trump. That is in there too. And yes, Iran didn’t want Donald Trump to win. And so they put out propaganda, they put out misinformation, but there is nothing in the record to suggest that anything that the President said tonight was true.

And the reason I’m animated about this... By the way, for anybody out there who thinks that this is an MS NOW, you know, Lawrence O’Donnell Democrat talking, I want you to go to WhiteHouse.gov and I want you to open up the section on China. I’ve reviewed every single one of those documents, but you can’t do that. And the reason you can’t do that, and do it right now, Do It Right Now, and you will see that every single one of those China documents is almost entirely redacted. It is black line after black line after black line. You can’t read anything. There’s individual words. There’s maybe 20 words in 30 documents.

“And what do you think happens? I know what happens because I was stuck in the chamber on January 6, 2021, when a mob of thousands of people motivated by the President stopped, tried to stop the transfer of power.”—Rep. Jim Himes

“By the way, if those documents did anything to prove the President’s case, do you think they’d be redacted? No. You would have more than 12 words. Look at the Venezuela report. Please, go to WhiteHouse.gov right now and look at the Venezuela report, and what you will see is an old report that says, hey, Maduro and Chavez before him, they wanted to influence, here’s the key word, Venezuela elections. Right. But the President of the United States says, look, Venezuela wanted to influence elections.

And so what the President did tonight was lie. And the issue I’m going to take with you, Lawrence, is that yes, maybe it’s partly about the SAVE Act, which is a ridiculous solution to a problem that does not exist. Foreigners do not vote in U.S. elections. That’s the fact.

But what worries me, and the reason you hear some emotion and some passion right now, is because here’s the scenario. Election day is going poorly. John Ossoff has been clearly reelected. In Michigan, a Democratic senator has [too]. So the House of Representatives is about to change hands to a Democratic majority and maybe even the Senate. And what do you think happens? I know what happens because I was stuck in the chamber on January 6, 2021, when a mob of thousands of people motivated by the President stopped, tried to stop the transfer of power. So when Donald Trump sees that those are the results, which are likely, he’s going to say, remember, remember in July when I told you that the Venezuelans and the Chinese, that’s exactly what happened. So what we’re talking about here is not about the SAVE Act, which is an abomination, but it is about setting the stage for Donald Trump to reject the results of the upcoming election. And every American citizen, and I know it’s hard to read some of the President’s most closest acolytes because I work with 220 of them in the United States House of Representatives. That’s the Republican conference. But this is a moment for the American people to say, what is going on here? Look at WhiteHouse.gov. Look at the China section and look at document after document after document, which is nothing but black lines of redaction. That tells the story.

Please support this project with a paid subscription to The Daily Rhubarb at the link below..—tjc

Lawrence O’Donnell: …Take me to that election. Now we’re after the election. In the scenario you just came up with, we’re counting votes in Georgia. And you said Donald Trump will reject the election. And do what?

Rep. Himes: Here’s what happens. Senator Ossoff, who you just had on tape there, has clearly won. We know how the President feels about Georgia. You ran the clip. When he lost Georgia, did he concede? No. He called up Brad Raffensperger, Republican Secretary of State. ‘Find me 11,000 votes.’ Clearly corrupt. No one can look at that and say that’s anything other than criminal, but also corrupt. Right? So when John Ossoff wins, this is just one example. And remember, there’s a Senate race in Michigan. There’s a Senate race in North Carolina. Donald Trump looks at that and he says, ‘my people in Venezuela, because remember, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are running Venezuela, have found secret intelligence. Secret intelligence that shows that in Caracas, Maduro’s cousin manipulated voting machines in Georgia.’

This is how this happens. [emphasis added} This is how American democracy goes away. Now, a lot of people know me. I’ve been in this position for some period of time. I’m not an alarmist. In fact, I get a lot of guff for being a little overly optimistic and overly calm. But understand what happened tonight. The president was setting the context. He was setting the basis for him to turn around at midnight on Election Day and say, I warned you. I warned you back in July that the Chinese were doing XYZ and the Venezuelans were doing XYZ and all this terrible stuff. It happened tonight. I am deploying federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security to seven states. They will be seizing ballot boxes in those states because we know that lots of undocumented aliens voted in those states. So we are seizing ballot boxes. Now, Lawrence O’Donnell, what happens when all of a sudden we’ve lost the chain of custody of 70 ballot boxes? That is the moment in which American democracy dies.”

—tjc