Trump Overhauls Intelligence Leadership, Election Officials Brace for Ballot Seizures, and GOP Convention Puts Trump Center Stage

25 Years After 9/11, Trump Guts the 'Deep State'

The 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks arrives this week, and the intelligence apparatus built to prevent a repeat is being torn apart and reassembled by the man who now runs it.

John Sipher spent nearly three decades at the CIA, much of it hunting Russians, before 9/11 forced the agency to retool for terrorism, according to NPR. That retooling produced real wins: the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the dismantling of ISIS, and a Department of Homeland Security that now employs roughly a quarter-million people, the second-largest federal agency after the Pentagon, NPR reported. By most measures, the U.S. has not suffered anything close to another 9/11 on home soil since.

Trump wants to blow that structure up and start over. "We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them," he said in laying out his second-term plans, according to NPR.

Author Tim Weiner, who wrote last year's "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century," told NPR the president has "deliberately swung a wrecking ball through American national security" and dismantled systems built after World War II. Weiner argues Trump's picks — Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Kash Patel at the FBI, John Ratcliffe at the CIA — are "sycophants" who "will tell the president what he wants to know rather than what he needs to know."

Every president stocks agencies with people he trusts. That's not new, and career bureaucrats resisting an elected president's direction isn't automatically a virtue either. Trump's argument, that entrenched officials worked against him during his first term, is a real grievance shared by plenty of voters who don't buy the "deep state" label as conspiracy theory. Whether Hegseth, Patel and Ratcliffe are competent is a separate question from whether Trump has the authority to pick them.

Steven Cash, who held posts at the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee and DHS, resigned as Trump's second term began, telling NPR he couldn't stay. Despite the turnover at the top of the intelligence and defense agencies, officials say core operations have continued to function, even as critics like Weiner warn that the long-term effects of the leadership overhaul on national security readiness remain to be seen.

Judges Bracing for Ballot Seizure Fights

A second, related fight is unfolding in election law. Voting officials and legal experts are preparing for a scenario that would have sounded absurd a decade ago: federal agents seizing ballots or election equipment during an active count, according to Wyoming Public Media.

One state election official, granted anonymity by NPR, said their office has run three statewide trainings this year preparing for the FBI or DOJ to show up at a county office demanding ballots over suspected fraud. "They could do so much damage if they did that," the official said, warning that a seizure mid-count could break the chain of custody and leave no way to verify how many ballots were cast or whether seized ones were tampered with.

The concern isn't hypothetical. Search warrants have already been executed this year in Fulton County, Georgia, and Riverside County, California, both involving ballot seizures, per Wyoming Public Media. Trump has said he regrets not pushing harder to seize election equipment after 2020.

UCLA's Safeguarding Democracy Project, led by election law scholar Rick Hasen, put out a guide this year to help judges evaluate search warrant affidavits tied to voting materials. "Lots of things that were off the table are now on the table," Hasen told NPR. He said the Fulton County warrant "confirmed some of our worst fears" because it was based on what he called discredited fraud claims.

Investigating suspected fraud through a lawful warrant, signed off by a judge, is not the same as a lawless ballot grab. Retired federal judge Philip Pro, former chief judge for the District of Nevada, told Wyoming Public Media the judiciary has "their antennae up" and will be prepared. That's the actual safeguard in the system. A magistrate has to approve any warrant before agents can touch a single ballot. No charges, indictments, or successful large-scale seizures tied to a live vote count have been reported. Voters wanting election security and voters wanting protection from federal overreach aren't opposing camps. Both want a transparent, auditable process, and the courts remain the check either way.

A Convention Built Around One Man

The third piece: Republicans opened a two-night "Trumpapalooza" convention today in Dallas, a term RNC Chairman Joe Gruters has repeated relentlessly, according to KGOU. Trump headlines both nights alongside Vice President Vance, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — whom Trump endorsed for Senate over the sitting Republican incumbent and who now faces a campaign cash deficit — also on the bill.

Midterm-year presidential conventions aren't normal. Democrats dropped the practice after 1982. Trump's rationale, delivered at a recent rally, is that his coalition doesn't turn out when he's not literally on the ballot: "Pretend, please, that I am on the ballot. Just come and vote. It's so important." That's a real and testable claim about turnout patterns. Midterm drop-off among low-propensity voters is a documented phenomenon across both parties.

The contrast with past midterm strategy is stark. Then-President Biden joked in 2022 about campaigning "for him or against him, whichever will help the most" for a struggling Democratic senator — the opposite instinct. Polls cited by KGOU show Democratic voters more energized heading into these midterms than Republicans, and a Trump-aligned dark money group, Securing American Greatness, is airing ads that feature slow-motion Trump footage but never mention the Republican candidates actually running.

What's Unresolved

Whether the loyalist reshuffle at CIA, FBI and Pentagon produces the security failures Weiner predicts, or simply a more responsive chain of command, won't be clear until there's an actual crisis to test it. Whether any 2026 election sees a real ballot-seizure attempt, and whether a judge blocks it, remains an open question with no precedent yet. And whether making Trump the face of a midterm he isn't running in actually drives turnout for Republicans down-ballot will be answered on Election Day in November.