The Trump Administration is Coming for ActBlue.

File under: "will the United States continue to hold free and fair elections?"

Will the United States continue to hold free and fair elections in 2026 and beyond?

From a strategic perspective, this might be the single biggest question we face right now. Do Trump’s opponents just need to resist him for two years and then kick his governing majority out of office, like they did in 2018? Or do they need to approach this as a crisis, with the institutions of electoral democracy themselves at risk?

This question comes up every time I speak with a reporter. How we interpret and understand contemporary events hinges on whether we think these are still normal times.

And the trouble is that this isn’t quite a yes-or-no question. It’s a matter of degrees.

Will an election be held on November 3^rd, 2026? Yes, I think that is highly likely.

But will Democratic voters have been strategically removed from the voter roles? Sure seems likely. Elections where the ruling party gets to pick their electorate are less free-and-fair than elections where every citizen gets to vote.

Will Democratic candidates face fabricated investigations from the FBI, designed to influence close races through manufactured controversy and public uncertainty? I don’t know for sure, but just examine the profile of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. They are the sort of people an authoritarian would appoint if he wanted to weaponize law enforcement against his political opponents.

And will Democratic candidates be able to raise money and deploy funds to compete in those elections?

Russia holds elections as well. But they ain’t free. They ain’t fair. And no one beyond state media believes otherwise.

---

That’s how we ought to read Trump’s latest Executive Order, singling out ActBlue.com for investigation. Trump has directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ActBlue.com over alleged “illegal ‘straw donor’ and foreign contributions in American elections, following reports and congressional investigations regarding potentially unlawful activities through ActBlue and other online fundraising platforms.”

ActBlue provides simple, flexible tools for raising money for progressive/Democratic campaigns and causes. It’s a donation platform, simple as that. They’ve been around for over 20 years. I wrote about the organization in my first book, The MoveOn Effect, describing it as “netroots infrastructure.” that helped facilitate effective political campaigning.

ActBlue has taken proactive steps to limit the ability of foreign actors to donate through their platform (via prepaid gift cards, etc), but Congressional Republicans insist this isn’t enough, because the “general attitude towards fraud prevention is unserious.”

Ah. Right. We’re directing major government resources at the “general attitudes” of opponents now. This is fine.

Just to state the obvious: this investigation has nothing to do with reducing foreign contributions in American elections.

Trump’s Executive Order directs Bondi to investigate ActBlue, but not WinRed, the equivalent fundraising platform on the Republican side. This is despite the FTC receiving seven times more complaints about WinRed (803) than ActBlue (120) in the most recent election cycle.

WinRed also has a documented history of, shall we say… lax attitudes toward fraud prevention.

Trump has no interest in reducing the flow of foreign money into American politics. Literally just yesterday, he announced that he would be hosting a Gala Dinner for the top 220 holders of his personal crypto token, Trumpcoin ($TRUMP).

As Molly White pointed out in her Citation Needed newsletter yesterday:

the second entry on the leaderboard is a wallet that purchased 400,000 $TRUMP shortly after the announcement for around $5.3 million.¹ Another later purchaser achieved the #3 spot by purchasing over 650,000 $TRUMP for a whopping $8 million — interestingly, funded by a Binance account, suggesting that the wallet holder is not based in the US.

His interest is in reducing the flow of any money toward his opponents. CNN’s Fredreka Schouten notes the pattern:

The memo marks the latest effort by Trump to use his office to single out individuals and organizations he views as acting counter to his interests – ranging from law firms that have represented Democrats to Chris Krebs, a former Trump administration official who rejected the president’s claims that widespread fraud contributed to his 2020 election loss.

It might be tempting to think “well it’s 2025. ActBlue is just a payment processor. If he manages to shut down ActBlue, surely Democrats can find an alternative.”

That line of thinking would be true if this was just narrowly about ActBlue. But let’s not be suckers. If Trump’s DOJ can hound ActBlue out of operation, then it can and will do the same to any smaller, less-experienced alternative that takes its place.

So file this latest Executive Order under “will the United States continue to have free and fair elections in 2026 and beyond?”

If they implement their plans, the answer is surely no.