In less than a week, two former liberal cable news stars who were essentially discarded by their former networks this year floated conspiracy theories that President Donald Trump will rig next year's midterms.
Ex-CNN anchor Jim Acosta and ex-MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who were among the media's sharpest critics of Trump's refrain about not really losing the 2020 election, openly speculated next year's midterms won't be on the level.
"I don’t think Trump intends to leave office," Reid told far-left writer Wajahat Ali on his Substack last week. "I’ve been very clear about that. I think he intends to stay in office like Putin till he dies."
"Whenever Democrats say to me, 'this is the reason we have to coalesce for 2026,’ I always add to the end of their sentence, ‘Yeah, assuming we actually have free and fair elections,'" Reid also said in the segment. "I think it’s insane, honestly, to just assume we’re going to have normal elections next year."
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Reid, disparaging the Republican "big, beautiful bill" as a "bulls--t bill" in line with Democratic National Committee talking points, cited House Republicans who supported Trump's legislation in spite of their reservations about it. She claimed their behavior suggested they weren't worried about being re-elected next year.
"The way Trump is behaving, he’s not acting like somebody who worries that his party will lose power or that even if somehow we had normal elections and Democrats took control of either the House or the Senate, he’s not acting like somebody who’s worried about the consequences of that," she said.
Last Tuesday, Acosta wondered aloud to Democratic strategist James Carville if the 2026 midterms could be rigged by Trump or adviser Stephen Miller.
"In the short word, yes," Carville said in response to Acosta repeating a viewer of his Substack show asking whether they believe Trump will end up "tampering" with the midterm votes. "In the longer words, very."
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"I don’t put anything past him — nothing — to try to call the election off, to do anything he can," Carville added. "He can think of things like that, that – that, you know, we can’t because we’re not accustomed to thinking like that. We always assume there’s going to be an election."
"This is scary s--t," Acosta chimed in at one point.
"President Trump has taken more action to restore the integrity of our elections on behalf of the American people than any president in modern history. According to the Democrats, voter fraud doesn’t exist – but clearly they are already searching for copouts preparing to lose big again in the midterms," a White House spokesman told Fox News Digital in response.
The far-left Reid was abruptly fired by MSNBC in February; in November 2022, she said only Democrats accept election results when they lose. Acosta quit CNN in January after he was asked to move from dayside programming to a midnight show. He once mocked Trump's 2020 election claims as "the big cry."
Last month, former CNN host Don Lemon didn't dismiss comedian Kathy Griffin's suggestion that the 2024 election was also fixed.
"I’m Kathy Griffin and I do not think Trump won in a free and fair election," Griffin said. "I believe there was tampering. I don’t know if it was the Elon [Musk] connection. I don’t know if it was just a few good old boys in the South who didn’t do, you know, I mean what they accuse us of."
"You’re not far off," Lemon said. "I mean I won’t say that I disagree with you… But I’m an evidence person. I’d like to see the evidence. I think something was off, and especially when someone said, ‘oh, we’ve got this.’ And, you know, how do you know that? How do we know we’ve got this? How do you know, or ‘I don’t need your vote’ or anything like that. It’s a little bit odd."
In the past two midterms, the sitting president's party lost control of the House. In 2018, during Trump's first term, Democrats won back control of the chamber for the first time since the GOP Tea Party romp in 2010. In 2022, President Joe Biden's Democrats were widely seen as overperforming but nevertheless lost control of the House to the GOP.
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