With less than two weeks before some states begin mailing ballots for the 2026 midterms, there is plenty to worry about. Donald Trump is escalating his campaign to interfere with the machinery of American elections, demanding sensitive voter files, threatening state officials with prosecution and rewriting the rules for mail-in ballots. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the administration a procedural victory that could let parts of Trump’s mail-voting scheme move forward, and new litigation is already underway to stop it.

But looking past the daily torrent of alarming headlines reveals another story worth telling. The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters. Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project’s most enduring images.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda. The suit should have stripped “2000 Mules” of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it  claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago.

One of the supposed “mules” was Mark Andrews, an auditor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, who appeared onscreen in deceptively edited footage returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members before the 2020 election. The film treated a few seconds of surveillance video as license to publicly accuse an ordinary man of an election crime. D’Souza’s voice-over declared, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”

They weren’t. Andrews had done nothing illegal, and after Georgia investigators cleared him of wrongdoing, he sued D’Souza and others involved in the film. The settlement amount remains undisclosed. That is less satisfying than a jury verdict, but it is still a remarkable endpoint for one of the Trump era’s most consequential election-fraud narratives. It also follows D’Souza’s own acknowledgment that the whole project was a fraud. In December 2024 he apologized to Andrews, and Salem Media Group, which distributed the movie, also apologized and withdrew “2000 Mules” and its companion book from distribution.

While D’Souza’s unraveling took years, the next chapter of MAGA’s fraud theater is falling apart in real time. 

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Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O’Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing. With O’Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa, the pair walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state’s primary to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which lets a registered voter attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct. O’Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge. A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza. 

None of them actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy.

Falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law, punishable by up to five years. Misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony. Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, slamming the stunt, noted that fewer than 0.6% of the state’s 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71% of those were already registered voters simply updating an address. Local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than seven million times. O’Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt. He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now it looks like O’Keefe is left holding the bag.

That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.

Scott Presler and his political action committee, Early Vote Action, offer another version of the same schtick. The watchdog group Public Citizen recently filed a complaint alleging that Presler and his group failed to register or disclose spending related to their campaign to unseat three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices in the state’s 2025 retention election. Under Pennsylvania law, any committee spending more than $250 to influence an election, including a judicial retention race, must register and disclose its donors and expenditures. Presler’s operation reportedly ran a two dozen person paid field staff in the state, sent tens of thousands of postcards to Amish voters and texted more than 100,000 people in Bucks County alone, yet it never once showed up in the state’s campaign finance database. The complaint alleges that Presler and Early Vote Action sidestepped transparency laws meant to let voters know who is bankrolling attempts to hijack their judiciary. 

The justices Presler tried to unseat, all Democrats, were reelected anyway. Since then, he has become a prominent outside advocate for the SAVE America Act, pressing Senate Republicans to embrace the Trump-endorsed legislation’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification mandates. A separate Public Citizen complaint alleges that neither Presler nor his affiliated super PAC registered lobbying disclosures for activity promoting the measure on Capitol Hill.

The pattern here is unmistakable.

The Trump administration is building an extraordinary federal apparatus, backed by the Supreme Court’s blessing on at least part of it, to police an epidemic of noncitizen voting that its own Justice Department cannot document well enough to win a single voter roll case in 23 tries. The propagandists who manufactured the visual evidence for that epidemic, chief among them D’Souza, are settling defamation suits and apologizing to the private citizens they smeared. The stunt artists trying to manufacture a fresh round of viral fraud evidence are instead generating criminal referrals against themselves. And the MAGA media personalities raising money and influence around the cause of “election integrity” are themselves facing questions about whether they followed the disclosure rules that govern political spending.

The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump’s inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it. 

The midterms will bring more attempts to manufacture doubt with ominous warnings and baseless allegations of fraud. The lesson from 2020, despite Trump’s return to the White House, has not changed. Do not yield to MAGA’s performance. Fight back and protect the people who administer elections.

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Every president leaves a signature accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. Franklin Roosevelt rescued capitalism from itself. Donald Trump’s will be something no predecessor ever attempted: He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly. That dubious achievement belongs in the first line of his obituary.

On Oct. 18, “60 Minutes” reported that in the 21 months of his second term, Trump has said, “in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted — more than 150 times.” This is not the grievance of a defeated candidate. It is the drumbeat of a sitting president who won an historic election in 2024, controls the executive branch and still insists that the system that elected him is rotten.

The record is not hard to find. The day before his second inauguration, Trump told a crowd at a rally in Washington, D.C., that he would be president for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — which he would have missed had he won in 2020 — only “because they rigged the election.” In February and again in April 2026, he posted that “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” adding, “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.” In September, at the Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention, he told supporters, “I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” He doubled down on those claims earlier this month when he posted that vote counts “take weeks to rig, I mean, calculate. Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!” And on Oct. 16 in Georgia he declared that Sen. Jon Ossoff “lost that election [in 2020], but they gave it to him because it was a rigged election.”

But the centerpiece of Trump’s election lies came on July 16, when he used a primetime address to the nation from the White House to warn that our elections “were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” and that the system “falls catastrophically short.” He promised proof. He delivered heavily redacted documents that, according to election officials and security experts, showed vulnerabilities long known and studied, but included no evidence that any American election had been stolen. He cited only some fraudulent registrations in Michigan, which authorities flagged, and no fraudulent voter registrations were processed.

What it all adds up to is this: Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he failed to document a single illegal vote. 

I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and during that time I have testified as an expert witness in more than 100 voting rights cases. Let me be precise about where legitimate concern lies. There are serious reasons to question how congressional districts are drawn. Partisan gerrymandering, now escalating into mid-decade redistricting wars between red and blue states, lets politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. These are real problems.

“Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation,” was published Sept. 1, 2026.

But the accuracy of the count is not among them. Nearly every American jurisdiction leaves a paper trail for ballots. Bipartisan local officials tally them, audit them and, when margins are close, recount them. After the 2020 election, Trump’s own cybersecurity chief called it “the most secure in American history.” William Barr, his own attorney general, found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the result. Georgia, under a Republican secretary of state, counted its presidential ballots three times. More than 60 lawsuits failed, some before judges Trump appointed. Studies of non-citizen voting find it vanishingly rare.

Compare Trump with the presidents who came before him. In 1800, John Adams handed power to his bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, establishing the peaceful transfer between parties that defines our republic. In 1864, with the nation at war, Lincoln held an election he expected to lose and privately pledged to cooperate with his successor. Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 all lost as incumbents and accepted the verdict without a word against the count.

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Richard Nixon, a Republican, and Al Gore, a Democrat, swallowed razor-thin defeats in 1960 and 2000 rather than tear at the nation’s faith in its elections. Both graciously conceded despite having some basis for challenging results. Presidents have complained about the press, the courts and Congress. None of them made the American voter’s ballot the enemy — until Trump.

That is the damage he has caused. Democracy rests on a simple bargain: The loser accepts the result because both sides trust the count. Each time a president claims, contrary to the evidence, that the count cannot be trusted, he weakens that bargain. He also hands his supporters a ready excuse to reject any outcome they dislike, including the coming midterms. Americans should hold elections to the highest standard and fix what is genuinely broken, starting with how congressional districts are drawn. But they should not mistake a president’s endless repetition of baseless claims for proof of fraud. The evidence shows that America’s votes are counted honestly. The untrustworthy voice comes from the one who keeps telling them otherwise.

Trump has said he would accept the midterm results if they are “honest” — code for Republicans winning. He has already interfered with elections by suing Alaska to overturn results if having another Daniel Sullivan on the ballot allegedly defeats the Republican Senatorial incumbent with the same name. He has also sought to compel California to set aside the votes of 20,000 alleged non-citizens based on an error-ridden database and a dubious matching with registration rolls. 

As happened after Trump’s 2020 defeat, we can expect more lawsuits and pressure on Republican legislators and election officials to alter results.

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