Trump doesn’t rule out using ‘national emergency’ to steal midterms
With the SAVE America Act going nowhere in the Senate, Donald Trump said in a recent interview that he might do an end run around Congress and use a “national emergency” declaration to disenfranchise voters unlikely to vote for him, and thus, steal the midterm elections for himself and the Republican Party.
Trump made his possible intentions known in a pre-taped interview aired on Real America’s Voice TV when he told host Wayne Allyn Root — a poster boy for the Trumpist talking heads in “conservative” media — that he could use a national security emergency ahead of the midterm elections accomplish what the SAVE America Act was intended to do (via CNN.com):
“If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections,” Root said. He added that “if you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship (for voter registration) and a limit to mail-in ballots.”
It’s at this point that Trump cut Root off and coyly suggested such an option was indeed in play. “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump said. “I’ll leave it at that.” (Emphasis mine)
Despite Root’s Trump-humping comments, it’s not all that clear that Trump can do such a thing. However, there have been plenty of signals over the years to indicate that Trump and the Republican Party have put exerting more control over elections high on their list of priorities. Let’s take a look at a little history.
When conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars.com, Alex Jones featured a story in 2016 about how Obama might use the illegal immigration problem to declare martial law and cancel the 2016 election, Republicans were willing to consider the possibility of such a scenario becoming reality based on Obama’s established reputation as an egomaniacal narcissist who possessed little regard for the Constitution. However, many eventually wrote it off as tin-foil hat conspiracy talk.
Fast-forward one year. It the summer of 2017, Donald Trump — a conspiracy theorist in his own right — spread unprovable stories about how millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, thus costing him the popular vote. While everyone not drinking the orange Kool-Aid saw this as another conspiracy theory, a frightening number of Republicans believed him. So many, in fact, that they were willing to allow Trump to do what they considered inconceivable under Obama.
In a Washington Post survey of over 1000 adults done at the time with an emphasis on 650 voters who were Republican or leaned Republican, 52 percent indicated support for postponing the 2020 election, if Trump declared it, until the imaginary illegal immigration voter problem could be fixed. The number increased to 56 percent if both Trump and congressional Republicans called for the postponement.
In the 2020 election, we were fed a boatload of attempts by Trump to openly steal the contest he had lost to Joe Biden. Here a few example I documented in an article I wrote prior to the 2024 election:
Mere weeks after the election, Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell called on Trump to “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” put the country under martial law, and “set up military tribunals” to investigate the election using the Insurrection Act.
A week prior to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a pair of memos were issued by then-Senior Legal Advisor to the Trump 2020 campaign, attorney to Donald Trump, and former Strident Conservative contributor Jenna Ellis, calling on then-Vice President Mike Pence to help Trump steal the election. Specifically, Ellis wanted Pence — who was constitutionally responsible for presiding over Congress’ counting of electoral votes on January 6 — to simply refuse to open envelopes from states where the election results were considered fraudulent because they went for Biden.
In December 2020, calls went out from the Trump cult calling for a military coup and/or secession from the Union to take place following a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting Trump’s attempt to steal the election via a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the outcome in four battleground states.
In an op-ed by the editorial board at the pro-Trump propaganda publication known as The Epoch Times, Trump was urged to launch a military coup, invoke the Insurrection Act, and seize voting machines to examine them for evidence of voter fraud in key states in order to provide a so-called transparent accounting of the 2020 election.
As we learned during the hearings conducted by the January 6 committee, the idea of putting the country under martial law and/or having Trump stage a military coup was receiving serious consideration by the wannabe dictator. For example, a few days after the January 6 attack, we learned that among the records Donald Trump’s lawyers attempted to withhold from January 6 committee was a draft of an executive order to stage a military coup that would have allowed Trump to remain in power. Under the order, the military would have been required to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” all voting machines, equipment, computers, records, etc.
Would the Republican Party do anything to stop Trump from issuing a national emergency declaration? Unlikely. Republicans in the House support Trump’s make-believe stolen election rhetoric and have already approved the SAVE America Act — TWICE — under the guise of “restoring election integrity” and preventing illegal voting. And the only reason it hasn’t passed in the Senate is due to the filibuster rules. With the Senate on recess for the rest of the month, the likelihood of its passage is slim-to-none, but it still enjoys Republican support.
And let’s not forget that Trump is already working with red state leaders around the country to rig the midterm elections in favor of himself and the Republican Party.
Abusing government power in a dictatorial fashion has been the calling card of Trump 2.0, as we have witnessed in places like Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Minnesota, Trump’s gestapo (consisting of ICE and the military) is essentially destroying the Constitution in the name of immigration enforcement, and he’s always flirting with martial law and invoking the Insurrection Act. The progression from liberty to tyranny is unmistakable.
As I document in my book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, the assault on liberty and the Constitution has been going on for the past one hundred years at the hands of Republicans and Democrats, but Donald Trump might be leading us to the breaking point if he declares a national emergency and steals the midterm elections . . . unless we stop him.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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