Trump’s advisers have been working for months to move his focus away from baseless theories of election fraud. A group of outsiders is making that difficult.
Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers. In 2022, Ticktin helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. This year, he pushed Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk convicted of charges related to tampering with election equipment.
Which is why it might be worth listening when Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas. The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario. When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.
Trump has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local level. In February, he said Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 places. In August, when the television and radio host Wayne Allyn Root pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and other measures, Trump played coy: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.” Later that month, Trump posted a Root column on the topic, with a headline that described the plan as “foolproof.” Peters announced after meeting with Trump in June that the president “basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” In a prime-time address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump again repeated the false claim that he had won the 2020 election, and sarcastically encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” in the upcoming elections.
The first thing to remember is that we have never suspended, postponed, or cancelled an election, not even during the Civil War. That is a bright red line that has never been crossed, and should never be crossed.
The elections are run by the states. He can try and suspend them at the Federal level, but most states won't cooperate, including most red states. Especially if he tries to stop them at the last second, when they are already in progress. He doesn't have the authority to end elections, they'll just have them anyway.
MAGAs have ambitions, too, and they see Trump's days ending, and they want their chance. Everybody is just about fed up with protecting Trump's treasonous ass. Now the MAGAs are supposed to shelve their own ambitions to support an increasingly demented, dying, and irrelevant old pedophile?
And elections are about more than Federal offices. There are a lot of state and local elections that have to happen, too. Cancelling elections doesn't just prevent Congress from flipping, it gums up the governmental systems from top to bottom.
All that said, this is an indication that MAGA is on the verge of panic, and that makes them very dangerous. They have until 2028 to gain full control of the population, or the top people are going to prison, or worse. They are more aware of this than most citizens, who still believe that those at the top will face no punishment. They will, and they KNOW it. As one German general said, after hearing that the Soviet Army had defeated the invading Nazi army, and was now marching toward Berlin: "If they treat us half as bad as we treated them, we're in big trouble." That's what MAGA is thinking.
So they HAVE to stay in power, they simply have to. Anything less, means severe punishment, so they will have to get vicious to keep it, because they have no choice.
Get prepared, Citizen, the next two years are going to be like no other time in American history.