It has started. The specter of the federal government, weaponized at Donald Trump’s behest to subvert a free and fair election five months from now, is no longer conjecture in Ohio.

Not after more than 100 FBI agents raided an Ohio voter registration group that has been successfully registering racial minorities, the formerly incarcerated, and college students to vote for two decades.

Not after Trump leaned on Ohio Republicans to make voter ID a midterm issue in a state with one of the strictest state voter ID laws in the country — and GOP lawmakers did by rushing a pointless constitutional amendment to the Nov. 3 ballot to set that law in stone for purely political reasons.

Not after Trump’s Department of Justice intervened in a federal lawsuit to defend Ohio’s law requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) when they register — which voting rights advocates say will keep thousands of eligible citizens from casting a ballot. And that was just last week.

It has started. The federal government is being wielded as a partisan weapon to neutralize electoral threat ahead of the midterms.

In red Ohio. Where Trump won three times in a row with shapeshifter JD Vance, an Ohio U.S. senator for five minutes, as his running mate.

Where Republicans have a lock on every lever of power in state government from gerrymandered supermajorities in the legislature to all statewide offices and a 6-1 supreme court majority.

Conventional wisdom holds that the party in control of the White House is likely to lose seats in Congress in the midterm elections because those contests generally serve as a referendum on the president’s performance. But a solidly right-leaning, MAGA-loving Ohio should be in the bag for Trump, as well as those doggedly loyal to him, right?

Ask Ohioans who are paying up to 50% more for gas compared to last year, or more of their paychecks on food year-over-year.

Ask families squeezed by housing costs, out-of-pocket medical fees, steep hikes in electric bills, or the childcare crisis. 

Ask voters — who were promised a “golden age” of prosperity and peace (“no new wars”) from the Trump-Vance campaign in 2024 — about inflation rising to a three-year high on spiking gas prices caused by Trump’s futile war with Iran.

Maybe the reason the FBI raided the Cleveland-based Ohio Organizing Collaborative, seized its computers and phones, and showed up at the homes of its staff members across the state to interrogate and intimidate is because Ohio has emerged as a highly competitive battleground state in 2026.

A U.S. Senate seat, governor’s race, and newly gerrymandered congressional districts are suddenly in play.

Maybe that’s why Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor, wrote an opinion column and picked an issue that polls well (voter ID) to exploit, and got Republican legislators to collude with him by approving a needless voter ID amendment for the fall ballot in less than a month.

Maybe the DOJ completely reversed its decades-long defense of voting rights to support voter suppression efforts in Ohio with the documentary proof of citizenship law precisely to disenfranchise thousands of Ohioans who lack ready access to documents like birth certificates or passports.

Maybe a surprise attack by federal law enforcement on community organizers, a redundant voter ID amendment, and the DOJ’s intervention against voting rights are all of a piece to manipulate the outcome of one election.

Maybe anything goes in election subversion to minimize risk to the status quo in the midterms. 

Look, the president’s approval ratings are at record lows and getting lower.

Trump insists he “doesn’t care about the midterms” but he does care about his wings being clipped by a Congress with majorities that check his power and hold him to account.

So when the twice impeached, convicted felon isn’t falling asleep in the Oval Office, he is conspiring to undermine the midterms, laying the groundwork to contest legitimate outcomes that don’t go his way. Like he did in 2020. Trump amplifies the same evidence-free claims about “rigged” elections he made six years ago or invents fraud allegations about vote tabulations that take too long. 

The man who plotted to overturn an election he lost and incited a violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol with a lie that he won is determined to keep his unchecked supremacy with preordained midterm results.

Trump has made it clear he will do whatever is necessary to rig the rules and guarantee outcome. To that end he pressured Ohio Republicans to advance an election year voter ID gambit to boost turnout in the fall and even ram through last-minute legislation to suppress mail-in voting next year.

The pretext of disenfranchising voters through unwarranted restrictions is always (unsubstantiated) voter fraud. Trump lying about elections, with complicit Ohio Statehouse Republicans, is one tactic to sow baseless doubt before a single ballot is cast.

Targeting high-profile opponents is another.

But going after under-the radar groups, like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, doing the work of democracy, registering voters, speaking for disadvantaged communities, battling injustice, is a new level of noxious from an authoritarian regime. 

It stokes fears of more trumped-up crackdowns ahead of the midterms. It chills activists fighting to make sure marginalized Ohioans have access to the ballot. And it confirms that the specter of the federal government used as a partisan weapon in service to a malignant narcissist is no longer conjecture in Ohio. 

It has started. 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.