The Washington Post reported that activists are working with the White House on an executive order to declare a “national emergency” over America’s elections and pave the way for a power grab.
“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting,” reported the Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf. “President Donald Trump has repeatedly previewed a plan to mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November’s midterm elections, and the activists expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue.”
Peter Ticktin, a MAGA activist in favor of the executive order, told the Post that “we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” and that “the president has to be able to deal with it,” including by banning mail-in ballots and certain voting machines.
Another article acting like the executive has any power over elections. They portray this as a warning, but all they’re doing is normalizing the idea.
The billionaire owned media is normalizing this on purpose.
Well yes. That’s the idea. They’re special and deserve more than one vote. Democracy is foul, to them. One vote per person undermines what they believe regarding themselves.
This is absolutely the most important thing to keep in mind here.
Remember, this is a memo being circulated by Trump supporters. It’s actual legal basis likely sits somewhere around “political fan-fiction.”
The same thing happened in 2020. Trump supporters invented completely nonsensical legal justifications for how Trump could sieze power. None of them held water.
Can Trump just ignore the law and declare shit anyway? Sure. Self-coup is always an option in any democracy. But he is deeply unpopular; I don’t really see that working out for him, although the process of it not working out certainly might be a very violent one.
Trump tried to self-coup in 2020, and the result absolutely fizzled. It was violent, and messy, and innocent people died, but in the grand scheme of attempted insurrections it was pretty fucking pathetic. He’s got a cult of personality, but he’s never actually done the work to build the kind of organized support he’d need for something like that.
I’m never going to tell Americans that the danger is over and everything is fine. There has probably never been a more dangerous time for American democracy. But don’t mistake that danger for inevitability. While Trump is carving a path of destruction through your government, norms and institutions, he’s also bleeding power every single day. You can win this.
ICE
ICE has 22,000 agents. They couldn’t even sieze power in Minneapolis.
Again, I’ve been very clear; he has supporters. A coup would not be defeated easily or bloodlessly. But having support and having sufficient support are not the same thing.
This is exactly the Project 2025 playbook. Doing things by the law takes time. In that time, they do as they please.
How is an executive order going to change anything about how state employees act? EOs matter for systems where federal employees make decisions, they’re not magic.
They’re emboldened. You’re assuming they care and people play by the rules. This is all about breaking political norms.
Let’s say, for example, Trump wrote an EO that said “State and Federal employees don’t have to marry gay people if it’s against their faith”. Remember Kim Davis? A person who did that unprompted by the POTUS. There’s plenty of asshats like her in important county positions around the country.
Given the success of recent Democratic elections, sometimes swinging districts by 20 points in previous Trump districts for the win…all it takes is some people in some key places to do some nefarious shit.
Everything he’s done besides for the budget has been by executive order.
Yes, and they’re all carried out by his own employees within the executive. If they didn’t do the thing, he fires them. They may get their jobs back eventually from the courts, but he has very real power over them until then.
Executive orders have zero power over people who can’t be fired by him. He’s got exactly as much power to dictate the jobs of state employees as he has over how I do my own job.
I understand that, but they’re going to go for it anyway. You know as well as I do that these red states can’t wait to turn over their elections to Trump. They’re just waiting for the signal. There can be no elections once that happens. I don’t see how the country survives at that point.
The issue is, his people have been selected based on their ability to tell him what he wants to hear, and that’s mirrored up and down the hierarchy. Everyone up and down the line is fudging what they can do or the reality of the situation, and that gets amplified as it travels up, and seemingly meaningful orders get diluted while traveling down.
Their understanding of their own capability and what options they have is massively distorted. They think they have more capacity and influence than they actually do, and what real power they do have will be poorly allocated when the time comes.
He and his people will absolutely try, and it’s going to create a bunch of messes, but, it’s like a toddler trying to fly a passenger jet, they can hit a bunch of buttons and switches, but the chances of that actually leading to the engines starting and the plane taking off are near 0.
Well, for starters, you don’t get to stay in office after your term is up.
That’s a good point; think of all the other things they’re normalizing this way as well.