In November, the US will have what are called its “off year” or mid-term elections that take place in the middle of a president’s term. At stake are one third of the seats in the upper house, US Senate, and the entire lower House of Representatives, and up to 36 of 50 governorships. Many states also elect their state legislatures, and several municipal elections are also held.The Trump Administration goes into the elections with the President’s standing in the country at a historic low. His approval rating, according to The Washington Post last week, stands at 37% – identical to what it was in April, and roughly the same rating he held when he left office in 2021. The coalition holding him up has narrowed to its hardest core. Trump is unpopular across a range of groups, including men and women of every age, education, income and racial group.What Make America Great Again (MAGA) influence remains shows up in the internals: his approval stands at 50% among rural adults, 53% among white men without college degrees, 57% among white Catholics, and 70% among white evangelical Protestants.What this means is that Trump goes into the mid-term elections with a deep handicap. The worst-case scenario for him is for Republicans to lose their majorities in either the Senate or the House, or both. This would effectively make him a lame-duck President. His ability to push legislation, appoint conservative judges, cabinet members and administrative officials would be blocked.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Worse, Democrats would gain the chairs of various committees and launch aggressive, sweeping investigations into the Trump Administration’s activities, executive orders and the leadership of various government agencies. Indeed, Trump’s nightmare is that he and some of his cabinet colleagues could face impeachment proceedings.Trump’s counterattack is based on shoring up his two flanks, one abroad and one at home, and the two are more closely linked than they first appear. The first is a high-risk effort to “win” the war with Iran through a renewal of military action – a move that, if it goes badly, could hand Democrats a rallying issue but that Trump appears to be betting will instead let him claim a decisive foreign policy win before November.The second is a set of considerably more dangerous domestic moves that could culminate in a January 6, 2021-style situation, with Trump and his followers questioning the results of a November poll that goes against him. Read together, both strategies serve the same end: manufacturing a story – of strength abroad, of fraud at home – that Trump can fall back on regardless of what the actual vote count says.The renewal of the Iran war is already touching countries across the region – Jordan, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Attacks on Iranian infrastructure could prompt Tehran to respond with similar strikes across the region. The Iranian regime is unlikely to surrender to US demands on the Strait of Hormuz, and so the only option it sees for itself is escalation. That is not to say Iran seeks war by choice – there has been support within Iran for the MoUs signed with the US, and the release of a US prisoner last week was another peace offering of sorts.But the intensity of US attacks on Iranian civilian and military infrastructure suggests they could be shaping the front for a ground invasion – in the north-west through the Kurds, and in the south-east adjacent to Hormuz by US forces themselves.What the end goals of the American action are is not clear, but an actual ground operation would be highly risky from the point of view of the election outcome. An expanded conflagration in the Gulf which includes a blockade at Bab-el-Mandeb by the Houthis, could trigger a spike in oil prices and roil a global economy that has considerably less resilience to deal with the situation than it had in April, when the ceasefire began.The China FactorThe other leg of the Trump strategy has been to raise questions about the fairness of US elections. Last Thursday (July 16), in a prime-time speech, Trump said the American election system was “under siege,” riddled with vulnerabilities that foreign actors like China were exploiting. Trump and US elections have a fraught history – he has infamously contested the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden.In this 25-minute speech, he claimed there was “raw” intelligence to suggest China had carried out the “largest compromise of election data in history” during the 2020 election, by obtaining 220 million voter files and creating “ballots for Biden.” In fact, a large portion of this voter registration data is legally available for purchase. A Chinese national did acquire this publicly available information, but to argue it was used to fix elections is a leap too far since not a shred of evidence provided for the allegation and not the least because the download by the Chinese individual took place in 2022, two years after the election in question.Trump also accused the intelligence community – the so-called Deep State – of withholding documents that would prove his case against China in 2020. He had nothing to say, however, about the fact that the current Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director, John Ratcliffe, was the Director of National Intelligence at the time – the very official who would have been withholding evidence from him.Trump’s remarks also run up against the Intelligence Community’s own assessment that there were “no indications” of foreign interference that altered “any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” There were some 60 court cases in which judges – several appointed by Trump himself – examined the evidence in 2020; none supported his claim of widespread fraud.Indeed, in December 2020, while Trump was still president, his own attorney general, William Barr – one of his most ardent allies – said the Justice Department had uncovered no evidence of voter fraud that could change the 2020 result. The bottom line here bears repeating: the 2020 election took place while the Trump Administration itself was in power.What should alarm us more is that it was Trump who egged on his supporters to try to overturn the election result on January 6, 2021. His own vice-president, Mike Pence, who had the constitutional duty to certify the results, was himself targeted by Trump supporters that day.And perhaps what gives the biggest lie to the election allegations is this: since 2020, Trump has gone on to win the presidency again in 2024, and Trump-leaning Republicans have captured both the House and the Senate.The real aim of the speech is the November polls. There are worries that, given his past conduct, this narrative-building could lead to gross irregularities – or worse – around the election itself. He alleged that nearly 300,000 unauthorised immigrants were on the voting rolls in several key states, but presented no evidence that any of them had actually cast a vote.He also warned of growing cybersecurity threats to election infrastructure, even as his own administration has imposed deep cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – the very body that helps local authorities protect voting systems. He has called on states and local authorities to work with the federal government to purge ineligible voters from their rolls. That could be the thin edge of the wedge in rebuilding a “stolen election” narrative ahead of November.Trump is possibly taking out insurance against defeatFor its part, China said on Friday (July 17) that it has never interfered in US elections and has no interest in doing so, calling on Washington to stop making “groundless accusations.” Chinese Foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said the US allegations were “entirely fabricated” and aimed at vilifying China. He did not directly answer a question on whether the allegations could affect President Xi’s planned visit to the US.This also raises the question as to what kind of relationship Trump intends to build with Xi, given that he is simultaneously accusing Beijing of large-scale interference that, in his telling, cost him the 2020 election. And at the same time seeking to enhance US-China ties through an exchange of visits that saw him in Beijing in April, and will see Xi on a return visit to Washington DC in September.Taken together, it points to an administration less interested in winning the election on its record or ideology, and instead focusing on pre-emptively discrediting the verdict it may not win. Trump is not building a case for re-election but possibly taking out insurance against defeat. But what it is also doing is creating a general suspicion of the American electoral system which could only add to the false narratives already rife among the MAGA faithful. Neither the war in the Gulf, nor the attack on elections is good for the US, or for that matter, the world.The writer is a distinguished fellow with the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. 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