President Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to claim the 2026 midterm elections are rigged—even before voters head to the polls—according to his biographer Michael Wolff, who argues the president’s aggressive push for the troubled SAVE America Act represents a calculated strategy to provide cover for anticipated Republican losses this November.
Wolff, who co-hosts The Daily Beast’s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, told co-host Joanna Coles on Tuesday that Trump knows his signature voting reform bill lacks the votes to pass Congress—but that’s precisely the point. The biographer contends Trump is pushing the legislation to establish a preemptive narrative: when Republicans lose seats in November, he can blame Democrats for blocking election reforms.
The SAVE America Act, currently being debated in the Senate, would mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote, largely eliminate mail-in ballots, ban transgender women from women’s sports, and prohibit gender-affirming surgeries for minors. Research from the Brennan Center shows more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to the documents the bill would require—meaning nearly 10 percent of voting-age Americans could face significant new barriers to the ballot.
Despite the bill’s dim prospects of clearing the 60-vote Senate threshold, President Trump has made its approval a central demand in ongoing negotiations to reopen the Department of Homeland Security following a partial shutdown now in its 40th day. He insists that DHS funding—including salaries for unpaid TSA staff facing historic callout rates—be tied to the SAVE Act’s passage.
Multiple polls show the 79-year-old president and his party deeply underwater in approval ratings. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 36 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, down from 40 percent the previous week. The Silver Bulletin average shows Trump’s net approval at -15.3, a new second-term low. Democrats hold a 6-point lead on the generic congressional ballot, and with the out-party typically gaining ground as midterms approach, forecasters project Republicans face real risk of losing House control.
Contributing to voter dissatisfaction: Trump’s war with Iran—launched on February 28 in coordination with Israel without congressional approval and now entering its fourth week—along with the ongoing DHS shutdown that has left 100,000 federal employees unpaid, the deployment of ICE agents to airports, and internal power struggles between Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner over Middle East policy.
Just before 2 a.m. on Tuesday, Trump revived his long-debunked claim on Truth Social that non-U.S. citizens vote in American elections on a massive scale. “Democrats are desperate to keep illegals, no matter how bad or dangerous they may be, in the Country. They want them to VOTE!” the president wrote at 1:48 a.m.
State-level audits tell a different story. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger identified just 20 noncitizens registered to vote during an October 2024 audit of 8.2 million registered voters—and only nine had ever cast a ballot. Michigan’s Department of State found 15 instances of non-citizens voting in the 2024 presidential election, representing 0.00028 percent of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast.
Wolff argues Trump’s persistence on the voter fraud narrative serves a strategic purpose beyond policy: “It’s just what is to his advantage is just the narrative that the election system in the United States is broken.”
The Trump biographer suggested the president has deployed this playbook throughout his political career. When Coles observed that Trump considers the system perfect when he wins and rigged when he loses, Wolff replied bluntly: “Yes, but he’s not going to win. So the system is going to be rigged.”
The White House pushed back with a statement from Communications Director Steven Cheung: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s— and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
As the 2026 midterms approach, Wolff’s analysis suggests Trump is preparing not for electoral victory but for a familiar post-defeat strategy: claiming the system was rigged against him. The SAVE Act, whether it passes or fails, appears designed to provide the president with ready-made talking points when Republican losses mount this November.
With mounting crises at home and abroad—a war lacking clear objectives, gas prices up nearly a dollar per gallon since last month, and federal workers going unpaid—voters will decide whether they accept another round of election denial from a president whose claims of widespread voter fraud have been repeatedly debunked by officials in his own party.