To understand the true threat to the 2026 elections, look first at the man behind the plan
Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:
Before last week’s “election security” speech, Donald Trump had teased the announcement for days, promising revelations about foreign interference in our election. His 25-minute address wound up being, as Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen called it, “an underwhelming announcement delivered with low energy.” David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research also pulled no punches. As Democracy Docket reported, Becker noted, “They’ve had 18 months in total control of the federal government and they have found nothing that would support President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election,” adding “so they are just trying to grab as much garbage and throw it up against the wall, and it’s not sticking.” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s verdict, delivered to reporters at a secretaries of state conference in Rapid City, was blunter still: “That was some bullshit.”
Trump may have delivered a nothingburger speech, but it was nefarious in a different, less understood way. Hidden within the garbage he threw at the wall lies a trap, one that could undermine the 2026 midterms in two ways. First, as Trump’s advisers have already begun to argue, American election systems are so compromised that they justify sweeping federal intervention. That could include new mandates on voting machines, forced access to state voter rolls and new executive orders — or even “national emergency” decrees — built on the “shocking vulnerabilities” outlined in Trump’s address. Second, the vulnerabilities of our systems could become self-fulfilling. Trump’s speech fed a narrative of security failures in our election systems, but notably only after he spent a year and a half hollowing out that very election infrastructure. Our measures no longer fully deter or halt foreign interference; Trump’s actions are akin to throwing the vault doors wide open while decrying that robbers now have full access to everything. But Trump isn’t clever or nimble enough on his own to make all the pieces come together for a full-blown election steal. For that, he turned to someone well-known to Washington insiders but whose face and name most of the public does not yet recognize. He is John Solomon, and wherever he turns up, something dangerous is usually already in motion. His decade-long record of conspiratorial political shenanigans reveals how the White House’s election playbook will likely operate: by building stories with enough innuendo to survive scrutiny, just long enough for the regime to leverage the false claims into something far larger and more dangerous.
The Solomon method
Solomon’s reputation for manipulation preceded Trump’s rise to power. In 2007, the Columbia Journalism Review warned that Solomon was part of a class of reporters able to “churn out a steady stream of mediocrity, with little consequence.” It cited a run of front-page Washington Post stories, including one the paper’s own ombudsman said left readers looking in vain for the actual scandal.
The pattern repeated at scale a decade later. While working at The Hill in 2017, Solomon co-reported on an alleged Russian bribery scheme tied to the so-called Uranium One deal. His reporting fed into a broader claim, pushed by conservative media and later by Trump himself, that Hillary Clinton had approved the sale of American uranium rights in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. But FactCheck.org found no evidence of that underlying quid pro quo. In 2019, Solomon moved from insinuation to apparent coordination. According to ProPublica’s reporting, Solomon worked directly with Lev Parnas, then an associate of Rudy Giuliani, who was later convicted on campaign finance charges, to build the case that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine into firing a prosecutor investigating a company tied to his son. Parnas helped arrange Solomon’s interview with then-Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and watched it live from the control room of The Hill’s TV studio. Solomon shared files with Parnas and sent his own lawyers, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, an advance copy of one of the resulting stories.
None of it held up. Lutsenko backed off his own allegations within a month, and the State Department called the underlying claim an “outright fabrication.” Solomon’s defense at the time pointed to Parnas: “No one knew there was anything wrong with Lev Parnas at the time,” he argued. But the sequence mattered more than the accuracy, and the damage was done. Solomon’s columns ran, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was recalled within a month of the series starting. The storyline then grew into the first Trump impeachment inquiry.
A weasel inside the White House
The Bulwark has since traced Solomon’s rise from conservative media into the White House. After the Ukraine debacle, Solomon regrouped and spent the next several years building Just the News into a small media network. Its parent company acquired The Post Millennial and Human Events, with Solomon serving as board chairman and chief strategy and content officer, while helping run a funding operation linked to an undisclosed network of conservative outlets, including his own. None of that would matter much if Solomon were still just a political commentator. But in June 2026, Trump made Solomon a “special government employee,” a status that allows him to serve without pay for up to 130 days. He was asked to help run a task force alongside newly installed acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte. Their role was to decide which classified election documents to release to the public.
It wasn’t Solomon’s first time inside the classification process. Trump had already designated him one of his two personal representatives at the National Archives in 2022, a role that gave Solomon access he later used to publish the Crossfire Hurricane files in 2025. Solomon’s current assignment reaches beyond declassification into the prosecutorial process itself. He told conservative commentator Benny Johnson in April that the documents his task force was releasing “will help this prosecutorial team in Miami,” referring to a grand jury effort staffed in part by his team of Ukraine-era lawyers, diGenova and Toensing. The goal was to help Trump pursue and prosecute his perceived enemies. Even inside the White House, Solomon’s credibility problem persists. Conservative Treehouse, a pro-Trump blog, added a bolded caution to its own preview of Trump’s July 16 speech: “Caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content.”
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Preparing for incoming attacks
Solomon, along with his supporters like Bannon and Pulte, doesn’t need China to have flipped a single vote. Indeed, when asked by MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard whether any votes had actually been changed in 2020, 2022 or 2024, Solomon admitted, “The intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign power flipped the vote.” Solomon only needs enough raw material — a stack of partially declassified documents, an unverifiable number from an unreliable database, a “vulnerability” that was never secret in the first place — to plant a false flag justifying a national emergency declaration by Trump.
That White House decree could target machines the states already securely operate. It could ban millions of mail-in ballots Americans regularly and safely use to vote. Or it could exploit an actual foreign adversary testing the security gaps the White House itself created. The outcome serves the same purpose: a midterm election that Americans can be talked into mistrusting, decided in the end not by the votes cast but by who gets to say which ones counted. Trump knows that a national emergency declaration requires a paper trail, something his press secretary can wave at a podium or that radical Supreme Court justices can point to when the inevitable lawsuits arrive. Solomon has spent his career building exactly that kind of “report” through partial documents, selectively released, but presented with enough urgency that the underlying weakness gets lost in the breathless reporting and right-wing media amplification.
Jay Kuo wrote a solid piece on the dangerous and toxic influence of right-wing media hack John Solomon’s efforts to sow doubts into the election process.
