(ThyBlackMan.com) As a teacher of History absorbed in Christian values one must admit there is always a warning before destruction, America, consider yourself warned!
Signs have multiplied in recent months that parts of President Donald Trump’s political base are laying the groundwork to interfere with or discredit U.S. elections from 2026 and even stretching into 2028 if he becomes some sort of shadow president. As detailed in a comprehensive long form piece from People’s World, the goal of the plan is to reshape democratic institutions, centralize power in federal agencies and subvert the independence of election oversight.
The article points to efforts to install loyalists in the place of career officials and wield influence over the Justice Department and state election boards, as well as an effort to change voting laws under the guise of “election security.” Critics say this could in effect centralize power over the holding of elections to a system compatible with the views of one political party or cause.
This isn’t speculation. It’s a gambit — premeditated, deliberate and risky. “And if we don’t call it what it is, it will continue to rule our lives.”
The Road to 2026: A Playbook on the Move
When I read the analysis detailing Trump’s plan to impact the 2026 and 2028 races, one line stuck with me: “He doesn’t want to win the system. He wants to own it.” That is a sentiment that distills the essence of this impending danger.
Trump’s writ long after the inauguration is on quiet march to build political and institutional muscle at both the state- and federal-levels, multiple reports indicate. The strategy isn’t about getting out the vote or campaign messaging — it is about capturing infrastructure. Replacing civil servants with loyalists. Politicizing agencies. Appointing figures to key administrative positions who will “do what needs doing” when results do not redound in his or his allies’ favor.
This rhetoric may sound familiar on its surface, and surely approaches the same language associated with every election year. But this time there is a target: Blue States.
Targeting Blue States: Undermining the Essence of Democracy
It’s no coincidence that Trump is now most viciously attacking states like New York, California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — places that represent the backbone of the nation’s economy, culture and population. This is where diversity, innovation, progress has thrived — and the place that his brand of politics is most firmly rejected.
By painting these states as corrupt, fraudulent or “out of control,” Trump is not just firing up his base — he’s paving the rhetorical way to contest their legitimacy if they vote as a bloc in future elections. The more of his followers believe that Blue States are the enemy, the more okay it feels to disenfranchise their votes.
It is a playbook straight from the autocrat’s guide to strongman rule: Delegitimize the opposition and then rewrite the rules to your own advantage.
Citizens United: The Model for Re-Legalizing Corruption
To understand how we came to this point, though, we need to look backward — not at Trump, but at the decades-long conservative legal cause that has brought us here.
The 2010 Citizens United decision was not an ordinary case; it was the end point of a half-century conservative crusade to corrupt democratic governance. Its handmaidens were not its marching soldiers — they didn’t march in the streets or occupy legislative offices; they sat in cool, carpeted conference rooms well out of the sun, by deliberate and cynical design, no video cameras lurked — They typed memos they knew nobody would read (don’t kid yourselves) but landed on the desks of judges who think money is free speech and corporations are people.
By stating that money is speech, and corporations are people, the Roberts Court opened the flood gates for corporate influence that continues to drown our democracy now. It was their permission slip to the billionaires and multinational corporations to purchase our elections, parties, and politicians —–all under the guise of “free expression.”
And now, as the Vance case winds its way up through the courts, we’re looking into the face of the next part of that plan — a “kill shot” to what is left of any constraints on campaign spending. If the conservative justice’s rule in favor of unlimited coordination between candidates and party committees, they will have turned every political party into a front for laundering money on behalf of billionaires.
It is the last bit of a puzzle that was put together years ago: to build a system in which democracy is extant on paper but in practice power belongs to those who can purchase it.
The Corporate Takeover of Democracy
When such a monster ruling came with the floodgates thrown wide open, it didn’t just change how elections were financed — but who they were for. Billionaires became kingmakers. Corporate PACs became shadow governments. What had previously been a matter of popular support for policy agendas could now be simply bought straight up.
Now consider what happens when that level of financial control is combined with Trump’s authoritarian instincts. Money always chases power, and Trump’s is the best deal on offer: He has no limits on his political influence, while receiving one quality guaranteed in return — complete loyalty.
No wonder America’s richest donors still bankroll him, despite his escalating legal troubles. For them, Trump is not chaos so much as a field of possibility — an instrument for smashing the last of the guardrails that stand between their own wealth and full and untrammeled political power.
Weaponizing Distrust
But money alone isn’t enough. To remake a democracy, you have to persuade people to lose faith in it.
Trump’s best political talent has never been in governing, anyway; it’s persuading by polarizing. He has turned distrust of institutional authority into a movement, effectively, since 2020. Every election loss becomes “rigged.” Every investigation becomes “corrupt.” Any journalist, jurist or academic who challenges him is “the enemy”.
Through a relentless practice of repainting the Blue States as corrupt, liberal voters as fraudulent and journalists as liars, Trump has built up an emotional infrastructure of anger that is nearly immune to penetration — especially when you come speaking in the dialect of threats to how so many White people have been trained to view their cultural inheritance. It’s not about facts anymore — it’s about faith, the capacity to believe the unbelievable.
A Peek into the Party’s Future
In case there is any doubt where this movement is going, it should be apparent that the recent racist group chat controversy among young Republicans isn’t an anomaly; it’s a preview of what the next generation of party leadership is beginning to normalize. The hate-filled, racially venomous leaked messages were not shrugged off by fringe figures but laughed off by prominent ones including JD Vance, who blew off the bipartisan revulsion as “overblown.”
That reaction speaks volumes. This is not a stand-alone embarrassment but instead a window into what the future Republican establishment could very well be like — angrier, more exclusionary, and perfectly O.K. with prejudice as political currency. It is Trumpism as a cultural complement to Trump’s institutional strategy: erode decency, discredit empathy and substitute trolling for actual policy debate.
This is the party of the future that the 2026-28 plan seems to be nurturing — one that measures unity not by shared ideals but by shared enemies.
A Nation at a Crossroads
Blue States — home to most of America’s universities, tech hubs and diverse populations — soon became the face of this fight. This part of the message is couched in threats to “traditional values,” the progress they make is turned into elitism. Their votes are scrutinized before they are even cast.
If this story goes unchallenged, the 2026 and ’28 elections might be a tipping point — not for who wins, but whether anyone is even remotely capable of believing that the results are legit.
For Harvard’s Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, democratic breakdown seldom arrives in the form of tanks on the street. It arrives with a slow erosion of norms, a gradual rewriting of rules and, eventually, a timid population resistant to push back. The risk is exactly what is before us now.
The Cost of Complacency
The fact is, democracy is tiring. It requires engagement, vigilance, and patience. It is more convenient to throw up our hands and give in to the belief that corruption is inevitable or that our votes don’t matter, or both sides are equally at fault.
But cynicism is exactly what authoritarians rely on. It’s the sedative that anesthetizes a nation before it is consumed.
And if the bad guys get away with their scheme to sabotage free elections — through court rulings, disinformation, and selective law enforcement — what will follow won’t be an immediate dictatorship. It will be worse: a system that is formal democracy but in practice oligarchy. Where elections are decided by votes, but the vote count never changes because it was already bought and sold long before Election Day.
The People’s Firewall
I do not, however, believe that the story ends very triumphant. The country that survived slavery, civil war and McCarthyism is strong enough to survive this too — so long as its citizens recognize the risk.
The fight ahead is not one that belongs only to Democrats or Republicans, but for the principle that every citizen — no matter how much money someone has got, or whether politics runs through their veins — deserves a fair hearing. That principle — feeble, flawed and troubled as it is — is the distinction between democracy and oligarchy.
We are going to need more than outrage to defend it. It will take education, organization, and participation. We’ll need judges who don’t shop for their own political party and refuse to peer into the darker corners of democracies or cater to the whim of dictators; reporters who tell us the truth even when it isn’t convenient; voters who keep turning up yet again after disappointments.
And yes, we are going to need accountability — from corporations and billionaires, not just politicians. For there can be no democracy in the dark corners of unaccountable money and unchecked power.
The Final Word
So with the next election cycle looming, it’s not a matter of whether Trump will run again — it’s whether America can see past taunts in cable news and understand that when it comes to campaign rallies hyped up on steroids and such, there are even bigger games being played.
This blueprint was sketched out a while back, well before Trump ventured into the political realm. He is, if you will, the most aggressive executioner of a decades-long design: to remake democracy as a product and sell it to the highest bidder — with many people’s actual rights reduced to something that amounts to more of an ineffectual suggestion box than anything else.
But here is the reality that many of those billionaires and political strategists overlook — democracy is still ours if we fight for it.
And if there is one thing history has proven repeatedly, it’s that the American people do not surrender their rights easily. The “No Kings” march throughout America for justice on October 18, 2025 was an excellent example of peaceful, progressive, and effective protest this writer was so elated to be a part of… real the solution. Not this year Mr. President.
Not in 1776.
Not in 1965.
And not definitely now.
Associate Editor; Stanley G. Buford
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Also his email addy is; StanleyG@ThyBlackMan.com.
