GUEST COLUMN: The Pretextual President

The following guest column by Helio Fred Garcia was originally published on CommPro.biz on November 2, 2026.

The disinformation playbook is pretty straightforward. It has four stages:

• Stage 1: Invent and publicize a provoking incident, a pretext. 

• Stage 2: Exaggerate the incident, its significance, and the threat or risk that the incident represents. 

• Stage 3: Position the response as necessary, honorable, even noble. 

• Stage 4: Continue to lie to justify continued pretext-driven response. 

  
  

The United States used this playbook to get the nation into the Vietnam War and the two Gulf wars with Iraq. Russia used this playbook to justify its invasion of Ukraine. 

And Donald Trump has used this playbook consistently since he began his run for president in 2015. In the 2018 midterms, he used it to justify mobilizing the military to protect the southern border against an “invasion” by a “caravan,” purportedly funded by George Soros and “globalists” – a dog whistle to white supremacists. He used it – and continues to use it – to justify going to war against Iran. He uses it now to justify performative brutality in the name of protecting the nation from immigrants.

Trump used it to justify his call to invalidate the 2020 presidential election and to activate supporters to the violence that took place on January 6, 2021. And he is using it again to create conditions to declare the 2026 midterm elections illegitimate. Because he always uses the same playbook, we can anticipate what is likely to happen on election day 2026 and beyond, and we can predict the moves he and his supporters (and his government) are likely to make as this election cycle’s equivalent of January 6 approaches: the January 3 convening of the next Congress. 

The 2020 Playbook

Trump began conditioning the electorate to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election as early as April 2020, when he started to disparage the validity of mail-in ballots. After months of discrediting the validity of those ballots, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he should lose: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it.”

Just before election day in 2020, former White House senior advisor and 2016 Trump campaign chair Steve Bannon briefed a group of Chinese journalists on what to expect Trump to do: Just after the polls close, Trump would unilaterally declare victory. Bannon said, “He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.” 

Bannon and Trump were counting on the so-called “Red Mirage,” the phenomenon that more Democrats than Republicans vote by mail. Most states count in-person votes first, and mail-in votes afterward. So the Mirage occurs when early counts show a Republican lead, but later updates see that lead evaporate.

In his election night speech, Trump did exactly as Bannon had described. He called for counting to stop, to lock in the Mirage: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election… So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment.”

2026 Playbook

Just as in 2020, Trump began discrediting the validity of mail-in ballots early. But he has also created other pretexts. He claims that there is an epidemic of non-citizen voting and has threatened to prosecute state election officials who facilitate such non-citizen voting. 

The Secretary of Homeland Security has said that nearly a quarter million non-citizens are registered to vote in four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But those claims quickly disintegrated. Just two examples: 

• The Department of Justice provided California with a list of more than 20,000 names of people it claimed were possible non-citizen voters. But a UCLA analysis found that more than 42 percent of those names were not registered to vote. And the list included voters who were in fact U.S. citizens. Multiple judges rejected the federal government’s demands. Last week the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to California election officials requiring them to testify to a grand jury the morning after election day.

• The Department of Homeland Security claimed that 16,000 non-citizens had registered to vote in Nevada. When asked for proof, DHS provided 185 names. When Nevada checked, it concluded that every single person on that list was a U.S. citizen. 

  
  

Trump called for Alaska’s Democratic Senate candidate to be prosecuted, and the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit requiring Alaska officials to stop the certification of a possible Democratic win.  

Trump has also threatened to deploy law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, to monitor voting, which Denver’s chief election official Paul Lopez called “authoritarian tactics.” He said, “It is absolutely illegal per U.S. law for any federal agent or any troop or anybody trying to intimidate voters at the polls. If somebody violates that and refuses that order, they will be arrested.” 

The non-profit group Protect Democracy noted, “For the first time in modern history, the greatest threat of election interference is coming from the federal government itself.”

Will January 3 Be the Next January 6?

However robust and multi-faceted the attempt to influence the election itself may be, the likelihood is strong that Republicans will not win enough seats to retain control of either the House of Representatives or the Senate. But Trump’s attempts to retain control will not stop with the election results themselves. Rather, the pretexts he has created are prelude: they are fuel to justify preventing those who win seats from taking office.

Esteemed conservative retired appellate judge Michael Luttig noted that the patterns of recent years suggest that the real challenge will be similar to what happened on January 6, 2021. Trump tried to change the electoral outcome, and when his many attempts did not succeed, he inspired a mob to attack the Capitol. The key date in this election cycle is January 3, 2027, when those elected would be sworn in. The Constitution notes, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.”

Democracy Docket, which litigates against the Trump administration, including on voter integrity issues, notes, “Some democracy advocates have worried that if Democrats win enough seats to narrowly retake the House, a Republican member could challenge the seating of some Democrats, likely citing concerns over illegal voting. The clerk could potentially then order those challenged members to step aside, and could proceed with the speakership vote and swearing in of other members. A majority of the current GOP-controlled House could ratify those actions and refuse to seat the challenged members.” 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked whether he would prevent seating Democrats if that would change the balance of power in the House, called the idea “absurd.” But he also told Fox News that despite polls showing Republicans in a tough spot, Republicans will likely not lose their majority this midterm. “I’m sure that people will be upset with the election outcome on the Democrat side when we beat them on Election Day. But we’re going to maintain the majority, I’ll be the Speaker of the House administering the oath, and we’re gonna do it according to the law, as we always do.” 

Judge Luttig expressed the same fears but noted also that such an act would be only one element of the pattern: As in 2020, Trump would call on the Supreme Court to decide. “[O]n and after January 3, if congressional Republicans were to determine that a Democratic member-elect was elected because of fraudulent voting and refuse to seat him or her, that determination would be scrutinized by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.” 

Luttig does not place high confidence in this Supreme Court. He argues, 

“This is the court that… placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named ‘shadow docket,’ without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.”

Judge Luttig warns that January 3 could be the final battle for America’s democracy. Record early voting numbers suggest that the government’s attempts to suppress voting and voter turnout are unlikely to succeed in materially changing the election results. But the disinformation playbook is in full force:

• Stage 1: Invent and publicize a provoking incident, a pretext. Trump and his government have created multiple such pretexts. 

• Stage 2: Exaggerate the incident, its significance, and the threat or risk the incident represents. Trump and his allies continue to make increasingly dramatic false claims in the absence of evidence, even in the presence of evidence refuting those claims. And they ignore judicial rulings against them.

• Stage 3: Position the response as necessary, honorable, even noble. Trump and the federal government continue to sound alarms that only aggressive preventative and retaliatory actions can solve the purported threats. 

• Stage 4: Continue to lie to justify continued pretext-driven behavior. Trump and his allies continue to insist that he won the 2020 election. Expect similar insistence that Republicans won the midterms, whatever the actual outcome. The actions leading up to election day, while unprecedented, are a prelude. Just as January 6, 2021 was the last resort after all else failed, January 3, 2027 will be one of the last resorts to overturn the election results.