Four weeks remain before Americans vote, on November 3, for a new Congress. In an ordinary year this stretch belongs to the candidates: their door-knockers, their pollsters, the people who sell their advertising. This year, according to a report USA Today published on Monday, much of it belongs to one office in Washington, and the man in it has reached for nearly every lever that touches the vote.

The inventory, as USA Today laid it out and Common Dreams then summarised it, runs as follows. President Donald Trump has promised $5,000 to every American if Republicans keep Congress. Common Dreams describes efforts to get the US Postal Service not to deliver ballots to voters. Republican-led states have been pushed to redraw their electoral maps in the middle of the decade. And in July the president gave a prime-time address in which, USA Today recalled, he claimed voting systems were vulnerable and warned that other nations could interfere in American elections.

Each lever comes with its own name and its own justification. Together they make a pattern.

“Almost all of those efforts”

Adav Noti runs the Campaign Legal Center, which USA Today calls a nonpartisan watchdog that has challenged some of the administration’s actions in court. He did not soften his verdict.

“I think the president is trying to use all of the powers at his disposal to control the election results, and almost all of those efforts are illegal, but that has not deterred the administration.”

He said nothing in the history of the office compares. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Noti told the paper. “The issue of the president of the United States using the powers of the presidency to try to control the election. That is a new development with this election.”

His wording is precise: illegal, yet not deterred. Here is a reflection, offered as no more than that. A ruler who does not expect the law to be enforced in time comes to treat it as a matter of scheduling. The courts move in months and an election comes on a single day, and the gap between the two can be very useful.

The official version

The White House sees no pattern, only a list of separate measures, each one defensible. According to USA Today, the administration and most Republicans have defended every step. They present the drive to purge noncitizens from the rolls and the limits on mail voting as election security. Another part of that purge rests on a federal database the Supreme Court has just revived. The administration calls its pro-Trump commercials “public service announcements,” not political advertising. White House spokesman Davis Ingle described the president as “the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party,” and said he “is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress.”

Seen from the other side, the commitment looks different. “I think he feels he is unconstrained,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, told USA Today. “I think he can and would try anything.”

The count

Marc Elias, the election lawyer, went further in an analysis published Monday by Democracy Docket. He warned that the coming weeks could bring more extreme steps, many of which the president has already mused about in public. “Trump is once again in power, and he is again telling us his plan,” Elias wrote. “He has weaponized the entire federal government—including the Department of Justice and the US Postal Service—to make voting more difficult.”

For Elias the greatest danger is not the campaign. It comes after the polls close: the counting, the tabulation, the certification. “Despite what the US Constitution says, he has repeatedly claimed the power to direct this process,” he wrote. “This is not a new idea. It has been his plan all along.” He also accused the American press of continuing to play down these attacks and of learning nothing since January 6, 2021, when a mob the president had incited stormed the Capitol.

This is the same autumn in which the defense secretary ordered the military to defend the midterms and Democrats began war-gaming election day. Both parties now treat the machinery of voting as contested ground.

The senator who is leaving

The plainest warning came from inside the president’s party. On Sunday, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired an interview between Ross Douthat and Sen. Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who is not running again. Common Dreams reported that Tillis had been asked about Trump possibly trying to overturn Democratic victories. The question in the CBS transcript was narrower. Douthat asked whether Tillis had “any concerns about how this same president, who you’ve been condemning for Jan. 6 will react if Republicans have a bad night in the midterms?”

The answer was short.

“I think there’s a risk. I really do. It would be another political unforced error if we do that.”

According to The Hill, Tillis warned that it would be a mistake for Trump to attack members of his own party or to dispute the results if Republicans lose badly. CBS reported that he still defended his vote to acquit Trump on the charge of inciting insurrection, arguing that Democrats had rushed the impeachment. In the same interview he warned that without checks on power, “we will have a sort of dictator king if we’re not careful.”

So the Republican senator willing to say this on national television is the one who will not face the voters again. His new book is called How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents.