Not Good

It appears that Donald Trump and some of his more unhinged supporters are considering meddling with the upcoming election with a martial law declaration. 

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.

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To head off a crisis, Trump’s White House and Cabinet advisers have been working for months to move Trump’s focus away from baseless theories of election fraud peddled by people like Ticktin, Root, and Peters. At the same time, they have authorized as-yet-unsuccessful efforts to uncover actual evidence that would make the conspiracies more credible: Trump’s advisers gathered once-classified documents that he could share on genuine foreign efforts to influence elections, set up a prime-time address where he again falsely suggested that the 2020 election was stolen, authorized the seizure of Georgia election records, and reviewed voting equipment used in Puerto Rico. None of these efforts has revealed the type of large-scale fraud that Trump has alleged, though they have allowed the president to keep the idea of election theft in the news. Meanwhile, Trump has failed to persuade Senate Republicans to pass legislation, called the SAVE America Act, that would restrict mail-in voting and impose new voter-ID and citizenship checks on ballot access, and the Supreme Court has rejected his effort to restrict voting by mail.

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But the prospect of Trump deciding to act on the demands of his most fervent election-denying supporters has remained a constant threat, one that even Trump’s inner circle admits remains possible. Such measures are broadly opposed by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and within Trump’s own administration, not least because they’re considered bad politics. Polling commissioned by Republicans earlier this year found that if the SAVE America Act passed, it was likely to increase Democratic enthusiasm and suppress Republican turnout, particularly in red states, such as Florida, that have long embraced mail-in voting, according to a person who has reviewed the numbers.

We need to make sure that local and state authorities are prepared for this.

We also personally need to be prepared to push back against this personally.