Emergency Declar Potus BS
PRIMARY 9 25 KIRK SHOOT
estb 4 25 tentative not just fema nat dis
see state of exception // XO memoranda less law?
SEE GOP STEAL ELECTION // RUBIO INTL TERROR, MIKE j 350b TO FIGHT DOMESTIC COMMIES
// nat’l sec bs
SEE CLETA BANNON BIG LIE ELECTION BS
SEE MARTIAL LAW INSURRECTION
SEE FASCISM ~ RULE OF LAW SCOTUS 4
SEE XO DEFENSE PROD ACT NATL SEC
SEE VOTER SUPPRESS XO IF NOT EMERG?
trump calls to pull BS end run on rule of law; // withholds in disaster to punish blue states
new doj rev dr exxon liar: May 21, 2025 — Robert Levy serves as Executive Counsel at ExxonMobil, where he leads the company's legal strategy on advocacy and civil justice reform.
li post
am looking forward to the Federalist Society’s May 21st Regulatory and Transparency Project program: Energy Emergency: Executive Power and the Future of U.S. Energy where I will give the keynote address. https://lnkd.in/gHuh_5-M
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Energy Emergency: Executive Power and the Future of U.S. EnergyEnergy Emergency: Executive Power and the Future of U.S. Energy
fedsoc.org
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10/19/2026 rww
- Will Bunch @ Inquirer: Are the secrets to a Trump postelection coup locked in a White House safe?
What two ex-high-ranking U.S. government officials fear about a presidential emergency should terrify all Americans.
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Election denial movement sets stage for chaos on Election Day and its aftermath
So-called election integrity activists are calling for Trump to declare martial law, mandate hand-counting of ballots, seize voting machines, and refuse to certify elections at a whim
Written by John Knefel & Sophie Lawton
Published 10/20/26 2:17 PM EDT
Updated 10/20/26 4:58 PM EDT
The election denial movement has spent months trying and largely failing to subvert the midterms, and now some of its major figures are articulating their plans to attempt to disrupt the vote on Election Day and sow chaos in the weeks and months that follow.
Their proposals include calling for President Donald Trump to declare martial law, sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the military to polling places, forcing officials to count ballots by hand, demanding the federal government seize voting machines, and working to stop the certification of some elections.
The main figures pushing at least one or more of the above measures include former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, her lawyer Peter Ticktin, and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, among other election denial and right-wing media figures.
These developments follow months of activity from right-wing media operatives who have pushed for the implementation of various anti-voting rights measures, many of which have been thwarted, have stalled, or never came to fruition. A MAGA media effort to convince Trump to declare a national emergency seems to be dead in the water.
Even as many of these pre-Election Day efforts have faltered, new conspiracy theories continue to emerge. Mitchell, who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has claimed without evidence that left-wing organizations are illegally harvesting ballots from nursing homes, for example.
But as the election draws near, some figures have set their sights on the day itself and what comes after.
Pushing for chaos on Election Day
Noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare occurrence
Right-wing media figures in the election denial movement are pushing to make Election Day confusing and chaotic on the pretext of preventing noncitizen voting — a vanishingly rare occurrence.
Forcing hand-counts
Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, and her lawyer Peter Ticktin, a personal friend of Trump’s, have been pressing Trump to attempt to force officials to hand-count ballots, sometimes instead of machines and sometimes in addition to them.
In July, Peters released a “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” that would require officials to “apply the ‘Bank-Teller Method’: independently hand-count every ballot for federal contests before certification and reconcile that count with the tabulator result.”
Then in August, Peters claimed the administration already had the “authority” to “issue immediate cybersecurity guidance and assistance to transition all counties to hand mark paper ballots,” and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had the duty to interfere in how states use voting machines.
Peters has also allegedly met with Trump on at least two occasions since her release from prison on election-related charges — once on June 30 and again on October 5.
Ticktin, meanwhile, has taken a slightly different approach recently, acknowledging that eliminating machines at this point is not feasible. On September 29, Ticktin said, “We could still have an order that requires — not hand-counting and get rid of the machines, because there’s no time for that — but let the machines do the count, but before the count — but then let us commandeer and get the ballots. If we have the ballots, we can count them ourselves.” He added that “it would be done after the election, but before certification."
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From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
Ed Martin is another proponent of this unnecessary and counterproductive measure. On Bannon’s War Room episode on October 6, Martin claimed that any election officials who want to “switch out your state and stop using the Chinese compromised machines, you can do it, and you can just ask [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne] Mullin for the money and he can help you pay for more people, pay for hand-marked paper ballots and counters and everything else.” He also noted that “Tina Peters met with Trump” recently.
Cleta Mitchell has long been on crusade to limit the use of voting machines, and, like Peters, has demanded that Lutnick interfere in state election processes based on an incorrect interpretation of an obscure federal regulation. Mitchell said that Lutnick should order “mandatory, pre-certification manual confirmation hand counts of ballots in 5% of the precincts and central count for each jurisdiction in the country.”
Stationing ICE and other federal officers or the military at polling places
Calls for ICE or other federal officers at polling places aren’t new — Steve Bannon has been making the demand since at least August 2025 and has continued to do so throughout the midterm election cycle — but they have become more widespread. As recently as August, Bannon said: “I think ICE agents belong at polling places."
Mike Davis, a frequent guest of Bannon’s, said on September 1: “I would have ICE agents and other federal law enforcement at every polling place across America. And that should only scare away noncitizens.”
YouTube streamer Tim Pool said in July that “at the bare minimum, we expect something like we will have federal law enforcement agency at polling locations in states that do not cooperate” with the Department of Homeland Security.
Jerome Corsi, former employee of Alex Jones, took an even more extreme line in calling for Trump to send the military to polling sites under the guise of a national emergency. “Donald Trump can take control of the elections,” Corsi said on September 12. “He can have the military or National Guard go in and make sure the elections are done legitimately.” Corsi claims to have been involved in drafting a proposed “national emergency” order.
Several other right-wing pundits have endorsed the idea of having ICE at polling places over the course of the year as well, including The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Fox News’ Jesse Watters.
The right-wing media figures plotting to sow doubt and contest results after the midterms
Declaring martial law and involving the military in recounts
Ticktin is the most vocal election denial activist to suggest that Trump invoke martial law after the midterms.
On September 19, Ticktin said during an appearance on Real America’s Voice, “Either we’re going to fix this thing before this election or we’re probably going to see martial law after this election.”
Then during an appearance on The Alex Jones Show on September 29, Ticktin said that if the election is “stolen from us because of their machines,” then Trump will “have to declare martial law.”
“I didn’t say declare martial law for the elections,” he added, “I’m saying in the event that the elections are stolen, what other options are there?”
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From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
A few other prominent figures in the election denial movement have also called for Trump to declare martial law. These voices include MAGA “prophet” Julie Green and Douglas Frank, one of Ticktin’s fellow travellers.
On September 15, Green claimed that an impending declaration of martial law would lead to the mass arrests of politicians, judges, and lawyers. “It’s not just an election. There has to be a political reset,” Green said, “During the martial law it will not just be politicians tried for treason. So will judges, AGs, lawyer, prosecutors, who are against this nation."
On August 22, Frank said of Trump, “I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he declares martial law and we have the National Guard come out and we have to redo the election.”
MAGA fantasies about involving the military after the election extend beyond these calls for martial law as well. Where Corsi wanted the military to take over election systems, others in the movement have called on the military to intervene in the counting or recounting of votes.
Seizing machines or ballots
Beyond suggesting the president declare martial law, Ticktin has concocted a plan for the government to seize ballots or election machines in order to “count them ourselves” and prevent supposed fraud. Ticktin predicted on Alex Jones’ show that Trump would “seize the machines” in order to protect himself from prosecution by the Democrats if they win the House and Senate.
QAnon influencer and election denier Juan O. Savin said in an interview streamed on Rumble that any election machines with foreign components could “be seized as evidence and investigated and canceled.” Savin pushed for Trump to delay the election, but argued, “If you need the public to turn their brains on and become engaged, don't pause it then. Let it run the distance and then go seize those machines” after the election is over.
Right-wing media figures have previously supported the seizing of election materials, such as when the FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and when Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots in Riverside County, California. Real America's Voice host Wayne Allyn Root said of Bianco’s efforts, “I guarantee you he was going to find that all or most of them are filled with fraud and filled with illegal aliens,” and called the court’s order to return the ballots “a disgrace."
Trump himself has reportedly said that he “regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election,” according to The New York Times.
Pushing for Trump to delay the election
Juan O. Savin is not the only figure who has suggested Trump delay the elections in order to investigate voting machines or other election infrastructure. In an interview with David Nino Rodriguez on Rumble, former Overstock.com CEO turned election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne called on Trump to “delay things."
Byrne's plan includes Trump putting former U.S. Agency for International Development employee Tim Meisburger in charge of elections countrywide and making it a one-day affair in which “you have to show an ID” and “there's no technology used.” He further suggested Trump “delays them and then puts this guy in charge of the election. And he could do a national security order, do something like that, and we could have an election like they run it in Burma.”
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From an October 15, 2026, stream by David Nino Rodriguez uploaded to Insights 21 channel on Rumble
Demanding Trump or other officials not certify elections
In an early October interview, Juan O. Savin claimed Trump has indicated “that we're going to fight hard to not allow them to certify the election after the election for reasons that we raise between now and Election Day,” citing voting machines with foreign-made parts as the “reason."
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From an October 6, 2026, stream on YouTube by Michael Jaco
Later in the interview Savin referenced Byrne's conspiracy theories on election machines (Byrne suggested Trump seize the machines following the 2020 election) and asked, “How can you certify a vote that was done with uncertifiable — uncertified machines?” Savin then reiterated, “So what's Trump going to do? He can't certify the election. He lets it go forward, and let's have the food fight after the fact."
What comes next when “the core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election.”
The election denial movement has not accomplished many of the key goals it’s set for itself. The SAVE America Act has no apparent path to become law. Trump has yet to issue a national emergency declaration or an executive order to take control of state election systems. The administration’s many efforts to uncover supposedly widespread noncitizen voting haven’t produced any tangible evidence of its existence.
These are real losses, but Trump and his media allies remain dedicated to subverting elections in the United States. As Bannon recently said to CBS News, “The core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election." That load-bearing lie continues to animate Trump’s movement, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different on Election Day or in the days after.
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AN ATL MO 9 26 EMERGENCY MART LAW
On Wednesday, new reporting revealed that many in President Donald Trump's orbit believe he will declare "martial law" to seize control of the midterms. This is according to the Atlantic, which spoke with several people close to Trump who asserted he is likely to claim a "national security emergency" to justify efforts to "seize control of the federal elections."
For example, attorney Peter Ticktin -- who went to school with Trump when they were teenagers, helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton, and pushed the president to pardon convicted election equipment tamperer Tina Peters — said there are three possible outcomes in November. As the Atlantic writes, he asserts that, "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." Or in Ticktin's words, "Either martial law, or step aside." When the Atlantic raised the possibility of riots if Trump were to overturn the election results, Ticken said he was not concerned, asserting, "Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are."
Trump has not been shy about signaling his intention to meddle in the midterms. As the Atlantic explains, "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."
And MAGA literally applauds such plans. Speaking at a recent conference for election deniers, Root described a "nightmare scenario" in which Democrats won, flipped Congress, then impeached the president. He received a standing ovation after assuring attendees that, according to research done by a friend, the election would be upended if Trump were to declare a national-security emergency."
Trump is so adamant about these efforts that, according to the Atlantic, "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 ... 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."
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MMA
Steve Bannon’s guest admits that a national emergency declaration on elections would likely be overturned by the Supreme Court
Brian Kennedy threw cold water on a central pillar of MAGA’s efforts to subvert the midterm elections, the latest setback for the movement and a sign they don't believe they'll get an emergency declaration before the midterms
Written by John Knefel
Published 09/16/26
A guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast acknowledged on September 16 that if President Donald Trump is going to declare a national emergency and try to seize power over election systems, the order would definitely be challenged in court and would almost certainly be overturned.
Brian Kennedy, senior fellow at MAGA-aligned think tank the Claremont Institute and frequent War Room guest, argued that Wayne Allyn Root, another Bannon favorite, was wrong in claiming that a national emergency declaration would be unreviewable by courts.
“With all due respect to Wayne Allyn Root — I myself have said we need very firm executive action, I’ve said it last year and I said it this year — but I always thought it would be challenged legally and taken to the Supreme Court,” Kennedy said.
“And Wayne Allyn Root and that national security emergency memorandum would almost — excuse me, would certainly — certainly be challenged by the Supreme Court,” he continued. “There's no mechanism by which the president has unilateral authority over this."
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From the September 16, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room.
Bannon later returned to Root’s theory — including a reference to Peter Ticktin, a lawyer aligned with Root — only for Kennedy to repeat his earlier analysis of the flaws to their approach.
“Wayne Allyn Root — the underlying thesis of him and Ticktin and these people is that if the president declares a national security emergency and lays out his reasons for it, that’s virtually bulletproof in the courts,” Bannon said. “You don’t buy that?”
“No, I think they misread the underlying court case that justifies their position in doing so,” Kennedy replied.
“Doing a national security emergency declaration like this would immediately cause one state to sue another state, or states to sue the federal government in combination, and that would immediately go to the Supreme Court,” Kennedy added. “And we saw what the Supreme Court did with Brett Kavanaugh. He said there wasn’t time."
“The court itself is not on the side of the president,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to take the side of the states in this regard. This is something that needed to be hashed out over the last 18 months, and waiting until the last, you know, six weeks before the election is simply — is reasonably speaking not going to be enough time, the court is going to argue, for this to happen."
Kennedy concluded: “I applaud Wayne Allyn Root and Peter Ticktin for their overall thrust here, but when it comes to the actual application of the law here I think the other side is going to win out."
Bannon and guests seem resigned that Trump won’t issue a national emergency declaration before the midterms
For months, Bannon, Root, Ticktin, and others have been openly plotting to subvert the midterms by falsely claiming China has interfered in U.S. elections, then using that manufactured evidence as justification to declare a national emergency and seize control of election systems.
Kennedy’s remarks are the latest evidence that the election denial movement is faltering and appears to be pivoting to a new tactic: preemptively blaming the courts for any future Republican losses. After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to limit mail-in ballots, election denier Cleta Mitchell acknowledged the headwinds her movement faced on Bannon’s September 15 episode.
“I don't see that there's anything that can be done on a broad scale before this election, unfortunately,” Mitchell said, adding: “There's so much wrong with this, but honestly I'm pretty tired of these weenies on the U.S. Supreme Court who keep siding with the Marxist girls."
Bannon sounded a similar note in closing out his September 16 episode, following his interview with Kennedy.
“We’ve got to get maniacally focused on this because November could be a wake-up call,” Bannon said. “We’ve just got to be honest with the people at the coalition — all of it, all these hard workers about voter integrity — we didn’t get the voter integrity that we want. So November is going to be what November is, and we’re going to have to live with it and deal with it after that.”
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President Donald Trump is struggling to keep Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections — and, for that reason, reports indicate he has plans to steal them even if the courts find Democrats prevailed.
"Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules," The Washington Post's Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler reported on Sunday. "The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote."
Trump replied to Root, “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”
Even though it is likely courts would not uphold Trump abusing his emergency authority, the concern among legal authorities is that he could act in ways that impair the elections' integrity before the courts have a chance to stop him.
"On legal grounds, the theory that the president can claim power over elections by declaring an emergency is laughable, said Hofstra University law professor James Sample," the Post reported. "But Sample is treating it as deadly serious."
He added, "In the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, lawyers backing him came up with another theory Sample viewed as preposterous: that Vice President Mike Pence could reject some states’ electoral votes and let Trump claim victory. Pence refused, but the theory set the stage for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Constitution gives states and Congress authority over elections, not the president. A national emergency declaration triggers greater powers under federal law, Sample said, but none of them affect elections."
The journalists concluded, "The risk, he said, isn’t whether the notion would survive in court. It’s that Trump could use it to take sweeping actions while voting is ongoing and before courts can respond."
As Sample told them, “The idea is simply to do first and say, ‘So what?’ So much of Trump 2.0 is to outrun and outpace the courts.”
Indeed, the Post found that pro-Trump local politicians often make comments that suggest, through their words and actions, that they will toe the president's line on refusing to acknowledge elections unless their side wins.
"In 2022, commissioners in New Mexico’s Otero County listened as an attorney insisted they were obligated to certify that year’s midterm results," the Post reported. "This kind of motion was normally a drama-free event. But the three commissioners didn’t see it that way, and they delivered their votes in rapid succession: 'Nay,' 'Nay,' 'Nay.'"
The Post added, "Among other issues, they cited debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines that had circulated in MAGA circles since Trump refused to accept his 2020 defeat."
When an attorney said they were legally required to certify the results, Commissioner Vickie Marquardt laughed and said, "So then what? They’re going to send us to the pokey?”
Speaking to AlterNet in June, Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights, expressed alarm at the possibility of Trump stealing the election through a variety of tactics.
“I think there are two things to consider," Chaudhuri told AlterNet. "One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that factor, Chaudhuri worried that both gerrymandering and the FBI's recent seizure of Fulton County, GA, could also keep voters away from the polls.
“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri concluded. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”
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Who is Wayne Allyn Root, the right-wing pundit pushing Trump to undermine the midterms?
Root, who has pushed conspiracy theories for years, has been one of the loudest proponents of a scheme in which Trump would declare a national emergency and seize control over election systems
Written by John Knefel
Published 09/10/26
Wayne Allyn Root, a right-wing media figure in President Donald Trump's orbit who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories, is trying to advance a plot to subvert the upcoming midterm elections based on outlandish legal reasoning and expansive theories of presidential authority.
Trump has spent years pushing election denial. Who is this Root guy, and where does he come from?
- By all available accounts, the Trump administration and its allies in right-wing media are waging an all-out, if haphazard, campaign to subvert the upcoming midterm elections. This throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach can be difficult to follow, and from the point of view of these plotters, sowing confusion is a feature, not a bug.
- One key node of this operation — think Oceans 11 by way of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski — is a middling but persistent MAGA pundit named Wayne Allyn Root. Root is a longtime Las Vegas media gadfly, having been a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a host for a local AM radio show. He’s also spent years in right-wing media, with stints at Breitbart and Newsmax. He currently hosts a show on Real America’s Voice.
- It is a sign of the malignant effect the Trump era has had on U.S. politics that Root has any influence whatsoever. And, like President Donald Trump himself, Root’s bottomless buffet of buffoonery makes the potential harm he could inflict all the more galling.
Before we go deeper on who Root is, can you back up and explain what’s going on with this midterm stuff about a national emergency and cooked intelligence about China that’s been in the news?
- By some counts, there are as many as 19 ways that Trump and his allies are trying to subvert or undermine the November elections. We won’t go through all of them here, but many are predicated on the false claim that noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is an epidemic rather than a virtually non-existenant phenomenon.
- Here are some of the lowlights. The Trump administration is attempting to create a national database of citizens under the pretext of rooting out noncitizen voters, which has for now been blocked by a federal judge. It has attempted to interfere in the United States Postal Service’s distribution and collection of mail-in ballots; this was also blocked by a judge, but the administration has asked the Supreme Court to overrule that order. Department of Homeland Security agents are scouring state election databases to find illegitimate registered voters. War Room host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon regularly demands that ICE and other federal officers patrol polling sites.
- At the same time, Trump and his media allies are pursuing a related plot to subvert the midterms that relies on manufacturing false claims of Chinese interference in U.S. elections. That was the focus of Trump’s July 16 national address, but documents Trump declassified to support his claims actually “made a stronger case that a different country — Russia — had meddled in the race” for Trump, not China for Biden, according to The New York Times.
- From there, the plotters would use that cooked intelligence as a predicate to issue a national emergency and executive order that, its supporters say, would give Trump “king-like powers” over vast swaths of state election systems.
- This last part is where Root comes in.
So how does this Las Vegas pundit fit into the plan to declare a national emergency?
- With guys like Root it’s always hard to distinguish between bluster and real influence, but here’s the basic outline. Root claims that in 2019 he persuaded Trump to declare a national emergency to build the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border — an idea that Root, by his own admission, “invented out of whole cloth.” As Root recently told Steve Bannon, “I woke up from a sleep one day and I said, this is a good idea.”
- Root’s current plan appears to be to reprise that move. As far back as April, Root claimed he texted Trump about issuing a national emergency declaration and an “executive order on election integrity.” According to Root’s faux-legal analysis of the 1983 court case INS v. Chadha, the emergency declaration and a possible accompanying executive order — he has said at various times that there would be an executive order and also that one is not needed — would not be reviewable by the courts and would require a supermajority in Congress to override them. As Root said on Bannon’s show: “National security emergencies, Steve, cannot be challenged in court.”
- Root later told Trump the same thing directly during an August 10 interview. “If you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States,” then the courts “can't challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress,” he said.
- Trump responded: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I'll leave it at that.”
- On August 30, Root said that Trump posted “my columns about national security emergency for elections three times in the last two weeks. Why is he doing that if he doesn't plan to actually sign that declaration?”
Root’s legal reasoning — that a national emergency declaration is unreviewable — sounds pretty half-baked, right?
- Yes, 100%. Needless to say, INS v. Chadha does not give Trump power over elections, as Root argues it does. National emergency declarations are reviewable by the courts, and while it is true that judges often defer to the executive branch when it comes to emergency powers, that is a choice, not a requirement. Where Root is correct is that INS v. Chadha does effectively impose a requirement that two-thirds of Congress vote to override a national emergency declaration, a vulnerability Trump has exploited repeatedly.
So what happens if Trump issues this emergency declaration or these executive orders? What’s next?
- What exactly any of these orders would purport to do is unclear, but in Root’s telling they would achieve the aims of the SAVE America Act without having to go through Congress. That legislation, which is stalled and appears to have no chance of passing, would require voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote and create national voter ID requirements.
- Others in the election denial ecosystem, like Tina Peters, have recommended to Trump that his future EO ban voting machines and severely curtail things like mail-in ballots and absentee voting. It’s safe to say that any of these actions would face immediate court challenges.
- As far as the potential emergency declaration goes, Root is now arguing that Trump doesn’t need a “predicate” at all — for example, that China is supposedly trying to interfere in U.S. elections — and that he only needs to sell the idea of a national emergency to the public.
- At the administration level, it’s possible that we could get an announcement during the Republican midterm convention. For his part, Root has predicted Trump would make the declaration sometime in August or September.
Wow, this is a lot. What kind of conspiracy theories and stuff has Root pushed over the years? Is he as out there as you make him sound?
- My friend, you don’t know the half of it.
- As far back as 2011, Root pushed the racist “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen.
- In 2012, Root suggested that Obama’s transcripts at Columbia held some secret scandal or were somehow faked.
- In 2016, Root spread the false narrative that China — rather than Russia — had interfered in the presidential election.
- Months later, when a mass shooter killed 58 people during a concert in Las Vegas, Root falsely alleged that it was a “clearly coordinated Muslim terror attack” and that “ISIS fingerprints were all over this thing.” Also in 2017, following an attack in London, Root wrote that the UK had “let in too many Muslim immigrants."
- In 2018, Root pushed the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had been murdered by Democratic officials, who then covered it up.
- At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Root peddled an “alkaline structured silver” product that supposedly “kills [the] virus” and can “save your life.” The scam caught the eye of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who “ordered Wayne Allyn Root to immediately cease and desist marketing products as treatments or cures for coronavirus.” In March 2020, the Las Vegas Review-Journal stopped publishing Root’s column, citing his snake oil scheme as “a factor."
- Root has dabbled at the fringe edge of electoral politics as well, serving as the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 2008.
How close is Root to Trump? Does he really have direct access to the president?
- Most recently, as we noted above, Root claimed to have texted Trump about the national emergency declaration plan. Root also recently interviewed Trump on his Real America’s Voice show, which, by Root’s count, would be at least the 17th time he’s had Trump on one of his shows over the years. Back when current close Trump aide Natalie Harp was a host at OAN, Root appeared on her show, possibly explaining why his ideas seem to be making their way to the president’s desk.
- But their relationship is not new. Never one to miss a branding opportunity, Trump provided a blurb for Root’s 2015 book about the future president, titled: Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America. Root introduced Trump at a Las Vegas rally in 2015, again in October of 2016, and again in September 2018. In 2019, Trump thanked Root for defending him after Trump had said that when American Jews vote for Democrats “it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” In 2025, Root met with Trump in the Oval Office.
- Whether the Trump administration will follow Root’s guidance remains to be seen, but it is already working overtime to sow doubt about the reliability of U.S. elections, especially those won by Democrats. Root has been a longtime bit player in this sideshow. Now he’s doing everything he can to grab the spotlight.
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mma 8 26
Roger Stone says national emergency declaration for elections is “brilliant” and “revolutionary”
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MSNBC 8 26 NOT TRYING TO PROVE BIG LIE IN CT, JUST GIN UP A GOOD ENOUGH STORY TO DECLARE EMERGENCY
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1ST NON WACKO CALL?
MMA
08/18/26
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AN 8 26 VID
President Donald Trump's loyalist and election denier, Tina Peters, is on a roadshow. Peters managed to score a commutation from a Democratic governor after her conviction for state crimes around the 2020 election. She was slated to be in jail for nine years. She only served 20 months.
The new election conspiracy roadshow drew the attention of CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who spoke with host Dana Bash on Friday. Bash questioned whether Peters has able to do much since she's "preaching to the converted." Cohen explained it's all about access.
Peters has met with the White House, the Commerce and the Justice Departments.
"The question of influence is something we're going to find out as we get closer and closer to the midterms and see if the president enacts some of these very extreme and aggressive ideas and proposals that Tina Peters is pitching," Cohen warned. "You just saw on your screen photos of her meetings this week in Washington, D.C.. She sat down with Harmeet Dhillon, who is the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division."
Dhillon has been pushing her own election changes while at the DOJ.
Peters also met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which prompted questions on Lutnick's role in elections.
"The Commerce Department is home to the Census Bureau [which] put out a report claiming that there were tons of non-citizens voting in elections," Cohen explained. "It suggests that the office is also trying to play in this space, which is why it's notable that Tina Peters is meeting with him."
He said he spoke with Peters' lawyer Peter Ticktin, "who is also pushing for some very aggressive moves before the election."
According to his comments, Peters "has a plan."
"And I don't know whether, you know, she'll get the support to make sure her plan gets implemented. Her plan differs from mine greatly. It's still going to need an emergency order in order to have it happen," Ticktin said.
The idea of declaring a national emergency so the president can take over the 2026 midterm elections isn't a "hypothetical situation," said Stateline.
Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, said that they're already preparing for Trump's attempts to nationalize the election.
Last week, when asked about nationalizing the election, Trump told a conservative commentator, "Stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Trump has yet to hit the "nuclear option," said Cohen. He also noted all of this is coming, again, because Democratic Gov. Jared Polis (Co.) commuted Peters' sentence, releasing her early.
"He said, it's the right thing to do, but he's disappointed in what she's up to in Washington," said the reporter.
The other thing that is making officials "lose their mind," Cohen said, is that Peters could be appointed to a post to consult on election security for the state of California. The post was offered by the Shasta County election official, who is a 2020 election denier.
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mma
Trump says “stranger things have happened” after Wayne Allyn Root pitches his national security emergency idea on elections directly to him
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 08/11/26
In an interview with Wayne Allyn Root, a host for Real America's Voice and longtime supporter of the president, Donald Trump appeared to give credence to the emerging far-right notion that he could declare a national emergency regarding elections. Trump previously distanced himself from the notion. Media Matters has been documenting this for months.
Media figures who've pushed claims of widespread election fraud — some of whom say they have been involved with drafting such an order that is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk” — have urged Trump to give himself “king-like powers” by implementing the proposal, as it would supposedly empower Trump to “be able to make the rules” and use the National Guard to oversee midterm elections.
John Solomon, Steve Bannon, Cleta Mitchell, and others have appeared to signal that Trump could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national security emergency posed by China.
Media Matters has been covering the right-wing media personalities converging on the idea of an executive order for Trump to sign regarding elections for nearly a year. In fact, Wayne Allyn Root laid out the same plan to Steve Bannon weeks ago.
Update (8/11/26, 3:30 pm ET): At Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen lays out a case for vigilance but against panic:
This is ridiculous and people should not panic over it. The President has no role to play in running elections, a points courts have repeatedly raised in challenges to his two executive orders on elections. Calling it a “national emergency” doesn’t change things. There’s no part of the Constitution or federal law that would give the President power to say how states run their mail ballot programs, voter id, etc.
Now Trump could do a lot of things bad by declaring an emergency (Just Security has a good primer). Perhaps under the Insurrection Act he could try to mess with posting by sending troops into the streets. For many reasons that I’ve talked about elsewhere, it’s very unlikely he’s going to do that for political reasons. But even that is not a power over elections. (I’m also much more worried he will try to illegally mess with the tabulation and certification of votes if there is a close election for control of the House or Senate.)
This CAP report does a good job showing that a president’s declaration of a national emergency would not give him power over elections. But this has been the fever dream of the conspiratorial right for quite some time, going back to Cleta Mitchell floating this idea a couple of years ago.
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From the August 10, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's America's Top Ten Countdown
WAYNE ALLYN ROOT (HOST): Let's segue way to the midterm. Listen. This is the whole ball of wax, the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole kitchen sink. We got to win the midterm because, otherwise, the last two years of your presidency, you and I both know you're not going to be able to pass anything. We got to win. So what's the strategy to win the midterm?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): Well, one thing is the Senate has to get going on SAVE America. I really believe that because people expect that to happen, and it has to happen. And you have a couple of Republicans who are voting for it, a few. You know, it's about an 89% issue with the overall population, including Democrats. SAVE America's voter ID — with photo, by the way. You know? It's nice to have them. They're fighting on the photo. We don't want a photo. Now why don't they want? Because they want to cheat. You know? It's very simple. There's only one reason. But we want to have that.
We want to have proof of citizenship. So it'd be nice to say, yes. I'm a citizen. Here's my citizenship. Proof of citizenship. And ideally, but we're not even stressing this because it's — that's only a 79% issue. You know, that's not in the 90s. The mail-in ballots are so corrupt. You know that.
ROOT: Right.
TRUMP: They're so corrupt. You saw it in California the other, a couple weeks ago when Spencer Pratt had a very substantial lead. And the election kept going on and on. You know, going on for weeks. It's — it might still be going on, actually. But, all of a sudden, you hear a report that the woman that nobody ever heard of is surging. Nobody ever heard of her. She's surging.
...
ROOT: So, let me put an idea in your head. OK? Because it's so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they're on recess. They don't get anything done, if they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections and the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, that INS v. Chadha, 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 of both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots and you don't even need the Senate's vote.
TRUMP: Let me just say that stranger things have happened OK? I'll leave it at that.
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MMA
07/30/26
Multiple figures behind the proposal have also urged Trump to declare a “national emergency” over the midterm elections
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 07/30/26
A group of activists in the election denial community — including Tina Peters, a former Colorado election official convicted of charges related to the 2020 election, and Clay Parikh, who has served as a “special government employee” for the Trump administration — claim they presented a key government agency responsible for protecting elections with “operational guidance” for the midterms in the form of a “risk mitigation” and “practical election-security plan” to implement in the 100 days before the elections. The proposal appears to be the latest attempt to push the Trump administration to take over election processes ahead of the midterms.
The new proposal, dated July 22 and called the “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” and “Operational Guidance for the November Federal Election – 2026,” urges the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security that is “one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick regional support,” per MS NOW — to “concentrate on six achievable measures,” including “transition[ing] the general electorate away from ballot-marking devices (BMD) to hand-marked paper ballots” and “insisting that the official count can only be certified after a full hand-count of every ballot.”
It also lays out an implementation framework that would involve classifying all counties based on current election processes and their ability to transition ahead of the midterms and then providing each county with implementation plans. During a podcast interview discussing the plan, Peters acknowledged that “CISA is not a forceful body that they can make people do things, but they can actually make recommendations,” and suggested that DHS could use a recently announced grant for states “that comply with certain things like paper ballots and so on and so forth” as an “incentive.”
Voting machines and tabulators have been the target of election conspiracy theories for years, sparking campaigns to replace them with full hand-counts. As experts have explained, a system of hand-counted paper ballots would be less accurate, more expensive, impractical, and “potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use.” Studies have actually shown that “hand-counting ballots produces more errors than machine tabulation,” and as the Brennan Center for Justice has explained, “Many checks exist to ensure that voting machines count ballots correctly and produce accurate election results.”
Peters released the new proposal, which she called a “practical election-security plan,” on her website along with a July 24 letter to the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency thanking him “for meeting with us … and for giving us the opportunity to present our concerns and proposed path forward for the 2026 federal election.”
These are the figures who signed the letter to CISA:
Peters, who publicly released the plan, is the former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, and was “convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election” before Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence. She met with Trump at the Oval Office in late June, later claiming that she told him, “If we don’t fix these machines, if we don’t get rid of these machines, we’re going to lose the next election.”
Parikh, who has served as a “special government employee” in the Trump administration and who was cited in the FBI’s warrant for its raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility. Parikh was also involved in Kari Lake’s unsuccessful legal effort to claim fraud was involved in her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election defeat and has reportedly “served as a witness in other cases … challenging the use of voting machines.”
Conrad Reynolds, a podcast host who reportedly ”thinks Arkansas voting machines could be flipping votes” and who was involved with Restore Election Integrity Arkansas and its push for an amendment “aimed at requiring all elections in Arkansas to be conducted with paper ballots and removing language in the Arkansas Constitution that permits elections to be conducted by voting machines.” Reynolds has also run the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, which has aimed for “getting rid of voting machines” in favor of paper ballots.
Will Huff, who often co-hosts Reynolds’ podcast and has pushed election-related conspiracy theories about “dirty voter rolls” and “the mail-in ballot scheme.” Huff has also been involved with Restore Election Integrity Arkansas and the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative.
Peters also explained the proposal during a July 27 podcast appearance, claiming that Trump's July 16 speech indicated “a lot has come out about the vulnerabilities of our election infrastructure.”
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From the July 27, 2026, edition of America, Can We Talk?, streamed on Rumble
TINA PETERS (GUEST): Now, so — and that’s in that 14-page memo to CISA. But here’s what you can do. If we cannot physically get rid of the machines before November, then having — you know, taking the preliminary count that comes from the machines, but not certifying the election until — and however long it takes — until finishing up the hand-count. Then, if those two things don’t meet, then then you know.
So it’s a way if you’re — if you use that as your preliminary results and then you have — I’m going to say it again — then you have an actual hand-count, however long it takes to get it done, and then you have the certification. The thing of it is is that a lot of the judges that are put in the place to certify the results are taking the word of an electronic device. They can't actually see that, yes, we had a group of people, Democrat and Republican, that have checked this out.
It’s just like, you would always check your bank ledger, right? You just, you know, check, make sure everything is, you know, before you realize that it’s valid. That’s what we need. And if it take — right now, they’re taking how many weeks to finish an election anyway, right?
Additionally, Peters said on the podcast that she had urged Trump during their Oval Office meeting to fire members of the Election Assistance Commission — which Trump subsequently did.
Trump has taken actions to expand his control over election processes, and election deniers have been proposing policies for even more power ahead of the midterms
In recent months, Trump and his right-wing media allies have advocated for passage of the SAVE America Act and other policies to increase federal control of the midterms. As USA Today reported, “Trump is working to gain unprecedented control of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections” with “a series of new assertions of presidential power.”
These actions have included firing key leaders of the federal Election Assistance Commission, putting election deniers in administration positions that oversee elections, and issuing executive orders that would tighten rules for mail-in voting and create a federal list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote.
ProPublica also noted that Trump “eviscerat[ed] CISA” at the start of his second term, replaced career election specialists at the Department of Homeland Security with his allies, including some who have ties to the election denial movement, and “discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference.”
Right-wing media and election deniers have called for the president to further expand his power by issuing a national emergency executive order that would supposedly give Trump “essentially king-like powers” over the midterms. Two of the signatories of the letter to CISA — Reynolds and Huff — have called for the declaration of such a “national emergency,” and Peters has said she believes “Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say that they are — that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections.”
As part of those calls, election deniers reportedly circulated a draft of a proposed executive order within the administration, and right-wing media figures appear to be weaving together a narrative about foreign interference in American elections by countries like China and Venezuela that could be used as a “predicate” for a national emergency.
The new proposal to CISA from Peters and the others in the election denial community appears to be the latest attempt to control election processes for the midterms.
//
06/30/26 10:00 AM EDT
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
07/02/26 10:05 AM EDT
02/26/26
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// RUBIO TERROR NETWORK INT;L 4 ORGS NSPM 7
mma
07/17/26
Bannon calls for ICE at polling locations based on Trump admin claims about noncitizen voting
07/17/26 1:18 PM EDT
07/17/26 12:35 PM EDT
Fox News buries Trump’s election denial address
07/17/26
mma
AHead of tonight’s speech, Fox praises Trump as a leader on election security — ignoring his repeated efforts to undermine it
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published 07/16/26
mma
OMFG
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
Right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, John Solomon, and Cleta Mitchell appear to be weaving together a narrative about interference by China in US elections to justify a national emergency to curtail voting rights
Written by John Knefel
Published 07/02/26
Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China.
The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify and release documents purporting to show foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially by the Chinese Communist Party.
Next, Trump would use that supposed “proof” of a stolen election to declare a national emergency, thereby — according to those pushing this idea — giving him extraordinary powers over the upcoming midterms. That move would serve as a way to advance the anti-voting rights measures in the SAVE America Act, like forcing voters to prove their citizenship, without having to actually pass the law — which Congress, so far at least, appears reluctant to do.
The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a central node, attempting to advance the operation on his War Room podcast, aired on right-wing network Real America’s Voice, long a major source of misinformation about the 2020 election.
The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House
Bannon’s RAV colleague John Solomon, whose role in the plot appears to be running the declassification effort, was recently appointed to a White House “task force” into supposed election integrity. Solomon was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year in 2019 for his role in laundering misinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine through his opinion columns.
Also in the mix is Peter Schweizer, who founded the Government Accountability Institute with Bannon and has moved from spreading misinformation about the Clintons to claiming that China is taking over the United States by exploiting birthright citizenship.
Then there’s Cleta Mitchell, a right-wing lawyer who was on the January 2021 call when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough ballots to tip the state his way. She referenced Schweizer in a June 20 appearance on War Room, positively paraphrasing an argument he made on his podcast acknowledging that much of the voting activity he wants to suppress is actually legal.
“Peter Schweizer put it pretty well last week in a podcast that he does with Eric Eggers, and the question they posed is: If fraud is made — if election fraud is made legal, is it still fraud?” Mitchell asked. “Because what's happened in California over the last decade is that the far-left Democrat, socialist, Marxists, communists have completely upended every vestige of election integrity.” (Bannon had teed her up by referencing the Los Angeles mayoral primary, claiming without evidence: “They stole it right in front of our face and laughed at us the entire time.")
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From the June 20, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Mitchell is supported by a loose array of election deniers who have called on Trump to issue an executive order to seize “king-like powers” over voting systems, supported by the national emergency decree.
Bill Pulte, the newly installed acting DNI, and his recently appointed chief of staff, former Republican National Committee official Christina Norton, also appear to figure heavily into the plan. On June 20, Bannon said Pulte’s role at DNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Ten days later, Bannon described Norton as “one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC” and said Pulte is “signaling where he's going on this” with her hiring, adding that “my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election."
The same day, NBC News reported that Solomon’s task force “is gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, with plans to declassify some of them, so President Donald Trump can amplify new accusations about past elections.” In describing his unpaid role at the White House, Solomon said he will be releasing “some documents, some secrets you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, other things."
Solomon’s recent media footprint offers clues about what he is likely looking to find, declassify, and present — possibly out of context. The subhead of a May 6 article of Solomon’s states: “The evidence continues to stack up that the U.S. intel community sought to downplay China's actions in 2020 as Trump sought reelection.” Then, during a May 19 interview, he said: “We do know the FBI had grave suspicions that China was trying to rig the election, probably with help from people on the ground, to help Joe Biden specifically."
The Supreme Court’s narrow June 30 decision to protect birthright citizenship could turbocharge the Bannon-Solomon-Pulte scheme, in part by providing fodder for anti-Chinese sentiment on the right. On Solomon’s website, Just The News, an article about the birthright citizenship case referenced Schweizer’s book and hyped the supposed China menace.
Birthright citizenship abuse via birth tourism, when foreign nationals travel to the United States on temporary visas specifically to give birth, is an issue that Trump addressed early in his second term.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer detailed this practice extensively in his 2026 book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” in which he described how China has industrialized the practice on a large scale through an organized industry.
Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute told FactCheck.org that “birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child.”
And as the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind noted: “Consulates have a ton of discretion under existing law to deny someone a visa. And suspicion of birth tourism _has_ served as a reason to deny visas in the past. If the problem is insufficient enforcement, good news, you can solve that problem without changing the law or Constitution!”
Bannon stated plainly on June 29 that Solomon’s “task force” and “also Pulte” would be central to creating a “predicate” for the declaration of a national emergency and subsequent executive order achieving the anti-voting rights goals of the SAVE America Act.
On June 30, Bannon interviewed another of his RAV colleagues, Wayne Allyn Root, who further elaborated what a national emergency declaration could look like.
“Stop talking about the SAVE Act and do a national security emergency for elections, which is the SAVE Act, which contains everything that's in the SAVE Act, Steve, and more and more,” Root said.
Just days earlier, on June 24, Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill to pressure Congress to pass the stalled out SAVE America Act, which he referred to as a “National Emergency."
The “predicate” Bannon is hoping to manufacture could also be for other election initiatives the administration is working on — such as trying to force courts to give the administration access to various state voter rolls — an issue the administration is facing significant resistance to.
Whether this harebrained plot congeals into an active conspiracy to subvert the midterms remains to be seen, but given that Trump has already tried to overturn one election it would be a mistake not to take these rumblings seriously. There may indeed be an emergency — it’s just not the one that Bannon and company are talking about.
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mma 7 26
06/30/26
Cleta Mitchell reacts to the Supreme Court late-arriving mail-in ballots ruling by saying it's time to challenge early voting
Mitchell to Steve Bannon: “There's a lot in that opinion that would suggest that we ought to be challenging early voting. We ought to be challenging unfettered absentee voting.”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 06/30/26
Video
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From the June 29, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, I think that - I don't know, but Amy Coney Barrett writes for the majority, and this is what is shocking, is that there are five justices of the Supreme Court who believe and who wrote in this opinion that there is a difference between casting the ballot, that is when the voters make their choice, and when the ballot is received. That makes no sense.
Frankly, according to their opinion, I actually think that this gives us good grounds to challenge early voting and to say that voting is — there's a lot in that opinion that would suggest that we ought to be challenging early voting. We ought to be challenging unfettered absentee voting because they also point out, which Marc Elias conveniently forgets to discuss, that — repeatedly they referred to the fact that the ballots had to be postmarked on or before election day.
Well, California doesn't require a postmark. I think we ought to challenge that. I think that what we have to do on our side is that we have to do what the left has done. And I know that that when Stephen Miller started America First Legal Foundation after — in 2021, the idea was to build a judicial attack mob that's similar to what the left has. And we haven't really done that.
I mean, they — there are — we've done a lot better. But these guys, the left challenges everything. And we are getting these terrible decisions from these awful left-wing trial court judges all over the country. And then this decision — to me, the worst part of this decision is it emboldens these left-wing crazy judges that are inhabiting our courts all over the country. That's the constitutional crisis we face, is all of these judges.
But I will tell you that I think that there is a roadmap in this. Unfortunately, it requires congressional action and we see how terrible Congress, the US Senate is. So I mean it's, we have a crisis because the judges are not letting the president do his job and they're trying to do Congress's job.
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NOTE FOREIGN INTERFERE IS PREDICATE FOR EMERG ORDER // GABBARD
bannon mma 7 26
June 30, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): SAVE America Act — a lot of people are saying, hey, do we have time to implement it? Are we going to have lawsuits? But President Trump is driving forward. We're a huge proponent of that.
We also know that Bill Pulte is at DNI, and that John Solomon of Real America's Voice is leading a task force on declassification. And yesterday, Pulte hired, from the RNC, as his chief of staff, one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC to be his chief of staff. So he's telling you where he's — signaling where he's going on this.
My understanding — I don't have any access to this classified information — but my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election.-
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mma
Election deniers reach a fever pitch calling for a “national emergency” declaration so Trump can give himself “king-like powers” over the midterms
Tina Peters: “I believe Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say ... that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections”
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 06/30/26
After President Donald Trump issued an executive order at the end of March aimed at stopping supposed fraud with mail-in ballots, election deniers have urged Trump to declare a national emergency to allow a federal takeover of election processes. On June 24, Trump echoed those calls and suggested that passing a bill to supposedly combat election fraud is a “national emergency.”
Media figures who have pushed claims of widespread election fraud — some of whom say they have been involved with drafting such an order that is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk” — have urged Trump to give himself “king-like powers” by implementing the proposal, as it would supposedly empower Trump to “be able to make the rules” and use the National Guard to oversee midterm elections. Others claim that they have asked Trump directly to invoke the proposed order, saying it would be “very easy” for the president to “issue an executive order through a national emergency and have the National Guard count those ballots by hand.”
Election deniers drafted executive order declaring a national emergency to implement election policies and Trump issued an executive order on mail-in ballots
- Since at least April 2025, a group of right-wing figures and Trump allies have called for Trump to issue a national emergency declaration “to make sure that the elections in 2026 are secure,” even proposing and circulating among Trump administration officials a draft executive order that would “declare a national emergency” and “empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.” Those involved include attorney Peter Ticktin, former Infowars staffer Jerome Corsi, and QAnon influencer Wayne Willot, known online as Juan O. Savin.
During his second term, Trump has issued two executive orders related to elections. As explained by The New York Times, a March 2025 order instructs the Election Assistance Commission “to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information,” and it “seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day.” Multiple federal judges have since blocked that executive order.
On March 31, Trump issued an executive order that directs the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State,” and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to “transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List.” NPR reported that “election experts said the order was unconstitutional.” After Trump signed the executive order, election deniers hailed it as a “win” that will leave Democrats “toast.” On June 25, a federal judge blocked parts of the order.
While Trump reportedly “shrugged off reports that he could consider declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections,” he has repeatedly advocated for the SAVE America Act, which would put restrictions on voting but has struggled to pass in Congress. On June 24, Trump canceled plans to sign bipartisan housing legislation “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”
- ## Since Trump issued the executive order in March, election deniers have repeatedly urged Trump to also declare a national emergency ahead of the midterms
- Savin, who wasinvolvedwith the proposed national emergency executive order,claimedthat Trump “is going to have to declare a national election emergency that gives him essentially king-like powers within the area of elections.”He added that the proposal is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk, the 17-page order which my team put together within the coalition.” He’s also claimed that Trump “wants to sign it and [is] having the legal people review it to make sure that we got everything right,” may try to issue the order in “bite-sized pieces,” and that Trump has “tried to break up” the proposed order and it will “ultimately … get sealed in one summary executive order at some point in time, but they’ve taken a couple of pieces out and done them individually.”
- Ticktin, also supposedlyinvolvedwith the proposed order,saida national “election emergency” would allow Trump to “be able to make the rules.” He also said that it would give Trump “additional forces of some sort” like the National Guard to have “camera observation” of ballots and make “sure the counting is done and done correctly.”
- Corsi, another figure supposedlyinvolvedwith the proposed order, said that hebelievedTrump is “very strategically laying out his plans” with multiple executive orders related to elections and “saving his powder for that one last executive order, which will come much closer to the election.” He also claimed that the “nightmare” of Trump’s impeachment and removal by a Democratic-controlled Congress “can be avoided by that kind of an executive order” and Trump’s authority under the national emergency could “extend to utilizing the National Guard to intervene in states that didn’t cooperate.” During another appearance in which he discussed the order, Corsi claimed that “politically, Donald Trump cannot afford to let the 2026 midterm election occur under the current rules because he will most certainly lose. And that’s not going to happen.”
- Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peterssaidduring a stream following her release from prison that she had spoken with the president and she believes “Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say that they are — that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections.”She also said on a separate podcast that “we need to get rid of the machines” and “mail-in ballots,” and Trump “needs to sign an executive order ... saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done.” Corsi has also claimed that Peters will “play a major role in one of the key factors in Trump ultimately declaring the need for the elections to be supervised by the federal government.”
- Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has been aprominent fundraiserfor election denial efforts andplayed a rolein trying to overturn the 2020 election,saidTrump should announce a national emergency to “run our election this year ... and teach them how to run them in Iraq.”He later added that he hoped the president would declare an emergency “this summer.” Byrne is supposedly involved with the proposed order.
- Savin’s supposed “chief of staff,”Matt Meck,saidthe proposed national emergency order is “what we think needs to be done.”Meck — a board member of Fight Voter Fraud Inc., an organization which “has been criticized in the past for repeatedly advancing unfounded claims based on its misinterpretation of voter registration information and other data” — is supposedly involved with the proposed order.
- Mark Cook, described byColorado Newslineas one “of the most influential election deniers in Colorado,”said, “How much more of an emergency do we need to establish here? It's right in our faces, and we have to do something immediately.” Cook is also supposedly involved with the proposed order.
- Laura Scharr, thefounderof South Carolina Safe Elections,saidthat “it can’t just be an executive order — they’ve blown off the other two executive orders [related to elections] that Trump put out.”She added, “The only way is through a national emergency.” Scharr, who is supposedly involved with the proposed order, concluded that “it must be a national emergency. It has to happen as soon as possible.”
- Wayne Allyn Root — a radio host who hasclaimedthat mail-in ballots were used to “rig and steal the 2020 election” and who the Nevada Currentreportedis “known for subscribing to conspiracy theories”— has authoredmultiple columnsfor The Gateway Pundit advocating for the proposed national emergency. On his show, Root claimed to have texted the president about a national emergency and he said that he would urge Trump to “sign Jerome Corsi’s executive order on election integrity, Mr. President, and do it now.”
- John Goodman, who ispart ofthe “Florida Election Integrity Committee,”saidonStern American's “election integrity call” that “if you like the SAVE Act, you should love the national security emergency even more because it's like the SAVE Act on steroids,“ and that such a declaration “will be the trick, unobstructed.” He has also claimed that the call for “a national security emergency on elections” based on his ideas has been “very well received by Trump's legal team.” Root has said that “John Goodman, my election expert, has been telling me” that a national emergency is “the way to go,” and he claimed that Goodman “sent me all the reasons … as to what I could pass on to President Trump to push the urgency of a executive order to deal with election fraud and election integrity.” Corsi has also claimed to “have been working with” Goodman.
- Linda Szynkowicz, thefounderof Fight Voter Fraud Inc.,claimedon her podcast that the Constitution “gives the president the power in a state of emergency from foreign intervention in the elections,” for which “we have more than enough proof.” She made this claim in response to Goodman’s call for a “national security emergency.”
- David Clements, a podcaster“criss-crossed the country to who hasevangelize about purported election fraud,”saidat a local Republican event in Oregon that it would be “very easy” for Trump to “issue an executive order through a national emergency and have the National Guard count those ballots by hand.”During a podcast appearance with Corsi, Clements also claimed that he did not see “any scenario where we can run a clean election without the aid of the National Guard.”
- Douglas Franksaidin an appearance alongside Ticktin on theTake Your Power Back Showthat “we have people all over the country ready to support the president in case he needs to make some kind of emergency order.” The Los Angeles Times reported that Frank has given speeches across the country as “part of a multi-pronged effort by the election denial movement to make a significant impact on future elections.”
- Tamara Favorito — who reportedlyhelps runthe “election integrity” organization VoterGA with her husband, Garland Favorito —saidon a stream that Trump “needs to hurry” to declare a national emergency “because November is not very far away.” After being asked if there was “enough time before the midterms for” Trump to declare “the national security emergency and executive orders that mandate the things that make elections safe,” Favorito responded that “if the election officials in the counties put their mind to it, I believe it can be done, but he [Trump] needs to hurry because November is not very far away.”
- Gregory Stenstrom, a Pennsylvaniapoll watcherwhoclaimedwithout evidence that he saw votes for Biden being uploaded to voting machines in 2020,saidonStern American’s “election integrity call” that “Trump is required to take executive action.” Stenstrom said, “In the executive order that is being drafted by Peter Ticktin and Mr. Corsi, they can refer to multiple cases within the courts right now that show that President Trump is required to take executive action because certain secretaries of state and certain county officials in key counties are cheating and not complying with the law.” Stenstrom was also part of a lawsuit that reportedly alleged that there was “negligent and fraudulent misrepresentation related to the 2020 general election,” but which a local district attorney said there was “no merit found to the claims.”
- ## Why this sounds familiar and continues to matter
- Trump and his right-wing media allies have been pushing claims of election fraud for years. During Trump's second term, election deniers known for promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have been given access to the levers of power — feeding already debunked claims to the Department of Justice, taking roles in the administration, and contributing to federal investigations. Some, like Peters, Byrne, and Martin Rodil, claimed they have spoken directly with Trump and administration officials. (The Guardian reported Rodil became a source “for the Trump camp and ultimately for investigators and … promoted two major allegations about Venezuela.”)
As the 2026 midterms approach, right-wing media and the Trump administration appear to have ramped up their efforts to undermine the midterm elections — invoking repeatedly debunked conspiracy theoriesabout widespread election fraud in the U.S., relying on one-off incidents and hypotheticals that are often exaggerated or misleading, and pushing for Trump policy priorities like the SAVE America Act.
Election deniers have already claimed that primaries for the 2026 midterms have featured election fraud, and Savin himself has claimed that the primary elections have been “laying the groundwork” for Trump to declare a national emergency — language which the president has now repeated.
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4 6? 26 TRMS INTEL COMM DEM
TRUMP WILL STEal mark warner fabricate emergency
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5 26 Billionaires’ Shocking Plan To Silence Working-Class Voters
May 18, 2026
50% of voters say being forced to show a passport would be a barrier to voting, according to a new poll we conducted. Billionaires like Elon Musk, the Uihleins, and Leonard Leo are funding Trump’s attempts to take over elections and nullify your vote.
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CONTEXT SCOTUS
AN 4 26
Last week, internal memos from an obscure 2016 Supreme Court decision were leaked by The New York Times, showing shocking revelations about Chief Justice John Roberts, who frequently plays a public role as a non-partisan justice, but behind the scenes, he's being exposed for his right-leaning slant.
In an analysis about it on Tuesday, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explained that this ruling is what began the "shadow docket."
AlterNet highlighted a piece by Georgetown University Law School Professor Steve Vladeck last week, calling out the legal flubs. Vladeck, who wrote the book on the "shadow docket," discussed the 2016 ruling, which had zero oversight and made significant changes to the U.S. legal system, all over a power grab in opposition to President Barack Obama's administration.
For years, conservatives have complained about the "shadow docket," calling it judicial secrecy and implying it was "bad motives to a benign emergency procedure that operates according to neutral legal principles," the Slate report said. The newly released memos "reveal exactly why the Republican-appointed justices don’t want to shine public or academic light on this practice: If this leak is any indication, the public would be aghast to see the brazenly political, spin-soaked flimflam that goes into deciding these critical cases."
When the high court stepped in to block the "Clean Power Plan" in 2016 with nothing more than a paragraph, while Justice Elena Kagan blasted it as "unprecedented." But it's the Supreme Court, so this set the new precedent, and what has followed is a decade of anti-green technology. Red states jumped in with a "Hail Mary" to stop the new EPA rules from going into effect and the conservatives on the court agreed.
"At the time, SCOTUS had never before frozen an executive branch policy while an appeals court was still reviewing it (and had already refused to grant a stay)," the legal analysts explained. That was what happened in this case. The D.C. Circuit Court hasn't even heard arguments over the case yet. Meanwhile, because the requirements didn't take effect until 2018, states had years to address them in court. Fossil fuel companies were given six years to prepare.
But the conservative justices still claimed there was a huge sense of urgency, and they needed to step in to stop everything from moving forward.
The leaked memos from Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer, exchanged with their colleagues, show how they came to the conclusion that it was an "emergency" and that the shadow docket needed to step in.
"Perhaps most shockingly, this correspondence reveals that it was the chief justice who pressed hardest for a swift and sweeping decision, and that his reasoning had far more to do with presidential politics and personal grievance than any majestic legal logic," wrote Stern and Lithwick.
"More than anything, the new reporting puts the lie to the hollow claims of the chief justice sitting astride a mythical 3–3–3 court where his measured centrism guides the nation through partisan times. It is now manifestly clear that Roberts is himself a top partisan operator, especially under the cover of secrecy and internal norms of collegiality and confidentiality," they added.
While Vladeck detailed the legal mistakes in the ruling, Lithwick and Stern bashed Roberts for his catty snit, claiming that Obama shouldn't be able to "transform a substantial swath of the nation’s economy" without it being "tested by this Court before it is presented as a fait accompli. But it seems that the EPA is sufficiently confident of this rule’s immediate implications that not even the combined efforts of Congress and the President could reverse its effects.”
The Slate writers called Roberts' "glib" reaction particularly rich, given he has spent the past decade voting "to let the Trump administration implement a policy with immense, irreversible national consequences before his court has approved it on the merits."
The only way that they can read the comments from Roberts (and supported by Justice Samuel Alito) is that they were somehow offended, Lithwick and Stern said. "That the Obama administration, by way of comments, was somehow disrespecting the high court."
In Alito's memo, he claimed that the regulations would make a “nullity” of the court’s power and “institutional legitimacy," the piece said. Roberts went so far as to attack the EPA administrator, saying that if they didn't stop the rule immediately, then everything would be "functionally irreversible."
It wasn't a personal attack; it was an attack on the court as an institution. "Obama’s EPA was allegedly short-circuiting the court’s much-prized supremacy, and needed to be put in its place," the legal analysts explained.
The result has been the Supreme Court's "profoundly flawed analysis" of how to define an "emergency" so that they can "rubber-stamp policies and practices that seem dubiously meritorious, with adverse effects on millions of people waved away," the analysis closed.
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aha not me note spatial aspect: zone of exception
an 3 26
When President Donald Trump sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to airports, his supporters applauded the move as a great way to help out Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees who are feeling overwhelmed during a partial government shutdown. Trump's critics, however, countered that ICE's presence at airports did nothing to make TSA agents' jobs easier or shorten long lines at airports — and if anything, they got in the way.
Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in a biting article published on March 25, argued that Trump's real motivation wasn't helping beleaguered TSA agents — he saw the ICE agents as a way to "bully" and "trigger the liberals." And Marcotte's Salon colleague Chauncey DeVega sees Trump's ICE/airports move as part of his "authoritarian" push to restrict "freedom of movement."
"Authoritarian regimes attempt to control freedom of movement, association and privacy; this is one of the most direct ways that such leaders exercise power," DeVega explains in an article published the day after Marcotte's. "People internalize the restrictions and conform. Those who refuse to do so are punished. The Trump Administration is now using America's airports as a space for authoritarian training and conditioning."
DeVega notes that in a 2024 report, Freedom House pointed out that authoritarian regimes "around the world use mobility controls — revoking citizenship, passport restrictions, travel bans — to coerce and punish dissidents, activists, journalists, and ordinary people."
According to Freedom House, "For people targeted in this way, mobility controls produce a sense of powerlessness."
Paul Gowder, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, views airports as a place where authoritarians make a point of exercising control.
Gowder told DeVega, "The federal government has created agencies and personnel trained and socialized in operating in these liminal spaces. Most infamous is the Border Patrol, which has a long record of brutality — predictable, because they are trained to deal with people with lesser rights, in spaces where monitoring of their conduct is thin or nonexistent."
DeVega warns, "When militarized guardians of the border and the larger national security state are turned inward against a country's own citizens, it is known as the boomerang effect. This is a defining feature of democracies collapsing into authoritarianism…. Civil and human rights abuses at airports are a feature of this system, not a bug — and a measure of how far Trump is pushing its boundaries to advance his authoritarian project."
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MOJO 3 26
These Far-Right Conspiracists Are Pushing Trump to Take Control of Voting
Election deniers are lobbying the president to declare a national emergency.
Ari Berman
National Voting Rights CorrespondentBio
On Monday afternoon, as war raged with Iran, President Trump was seemingly preoccupied with more trivial matters. “FREE TINA PETERS!” he wrote on Truth Social, referring to the former Colorado election clerk who’s serving a nine-year sentence for giving election conspiracists access to sensitive voting equipment.
While it might seem odd for Trump to be posting about Peters as bombs fell on Tehran, there’s a connection between her and Trump’s orbit—her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, is a former classmate of Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who has represented the president in litigation against his political opponents. And Ticktin is now pushing Trump to declare a national emergency, based on the false claim that China interfered in the 2020 election, so that the president can assume vast new powers over the voting process. After the US invaded Iran, Trump reposted an article from a far right news site claiming that Iran also attempted to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections, seemingly tying the military effort to his voting crusade.
The 17-page executive order Ticktin is lobbying Trump to sign would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an unprecedented attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution gives to states and Congress. The order claims that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more error-prone than a regular machine count.
Attorney Peter Ticktin listens during oral arguments for People vs Tina Peters in the Court of Appeals at the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver on Jan. 14, 2026.AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post/Pool/AP
That’s not all. The order would require all Americans to re-register to vote in person before the 2026 midterms, effectively voiding all state voter rolls, and force voters to re-verify their status before every election, a wildly impractical measure. It would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or are out-of-town during the election. It would require strict forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, which could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who lack such documents. “Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” notes the voting rights group Fair Fight.
“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin told the Washington Post. “But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”
Of course, there is no evidence that China interfered in the 2020 election. And the two statutes that Ticktin claims allow Trump to declare a national emergency—the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—in fact give the president no control over the voting process. (The Supreme Court just ruled that the president could not invoke the IEEPA to justify his tariffs.)
“None of the cited authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact, even in the face of national emergency—including attempted foreign interference,” says an analysis from the Center for American Progress.
For these reasons, any such executive order would likely be immediately blocked in the courts, much like the last executive order on elections Trump issued last March.
Trump said last week he’s “never heard about” Ticktin’s proposal, but he’s already vowed to issue a new executive order on elections. And given his obsession with the 2020 election and calls for Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” the allure of attempting to gain dictatorial control over the electoral process, no matter how illegal it is, is sure to appeal to the president.
Some of the sketchiest figures in the far right’s election denial movement are behind this push.
Ticktin, whose friendship with Trump dates back to their time at the military academy in the 1960s, has had a rocky career as a lawyer. He’s been suspended twice from the Florida bar. After the 2020 election, he represented Trump in a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of manufacturing allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered sanctions against Trump’s lawyers, including Ticktin.
“The rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory,” wrote US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks.
“Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.”
Ticktin subsequently went on to seek pardons for election deniers including Peters, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, members of the Proud Boys, and other January 6 insurrectionists. He told Steve Bannon the 101st Airborne should be sent in to free Peters, who was convicted of giving access of 2020 election records to an associate of My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Ticktin has been promoting the proposed executive order since last April, including on QAnon-affiliated talk shows. “If President Trump can’t call a national election emergency, then we will lose our country,” he told QNewsPatriot in January. Ticktin said the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has also “been very involved” in the effort. Corsi has been circulating a new draft since the summer alleging that Trump could invoke emergency powers because of alleged foreign intervention in the 2020 election.
Corsi was the driving force behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry’s military record in 2004 and the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Trump amplified. Corsi was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly acting as a conduit between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks as part of the effort to leak emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Corsi falsely claimed the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.
The work of these fringe characters has been amplified by outside advisers closer to the president. Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election, said on a podcast in September that she believed “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Bannon has repeatedly promoted the national emergency scenario on his radio show in recent days.
In December 2020, the likes of Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne went to the White House to urge Trump to order the military to seize state voting machines. Trump was talked off the ledge by his advisers, but now says he regrets not doing so.
Whereas the craziest schemes hatched by election deniers were rejected by Trump’s aides in 2020, today those very election deniers hold prominent positions in the administration and are plotting from the inside. Recently, six administration aides took part in a gathering hosted by Flynn where attendees called on Trump to declare a national emergency. “At some point,” Byrne, the ex-CEO of Overstock.com, said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
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ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ WIKI
:{:{DeSantis invoked a standing 2023 immigration "state of emergency" to seize the county-owned airfield and fast-track construction[33] without the usual environmental reviews or the traditional collaboration with local officials.[34]}:
Both Democratic Party and Republican legislators[35] have questioned the use and overreach of emergency powers.[36] Demographers from Florida State University found that the number of immigrants without legal status in Florida has declined since 2018, concluding "that policies that discourage new arrivals or encourage — or force — migrants to leave could jeopardize Florida's robust economy and the well-being of its population."[37]}:
OMFG
AN PP 3 26
Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.
According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting.
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”
The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.
“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”
Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.
In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”
Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”
The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.
Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.
“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson
of these
. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”
Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”
In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.
One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”
Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.
The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.
A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.
Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.
Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”
“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.
At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.
Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.
Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.
“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”
McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”
Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.
Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.
“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.
Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.
The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”
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YIKES
an 2 26
Legal and voting rights experts are sounding the alarm after a Washington Post bombshell report revealed that President Donald Trump — who has been insisting on federalizing voting and has issued an executive order to pressure states to require proof of citizenship for voter registration — is now being urged by activists to sign an executive order declaring a voting "emergency."
The proposed 17-page order would "unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting,” the Post reported, noting that the proposal "claims China interfered in the 2020 election" which would be the "basis to declare a national emergency."
Former Trump national security official Miles Taylor warned that the "biggest electoral crime in American history might be unfolding."
"The president cannot seize control of state-run elections by declaring a fake 'emergency.' There’s no statute that permits it," wrote Fair Fight Action communications director Max Flugrath. "Reviving debunked conspiracy theories to force changes before a major election is what politicians do when they believe they’re going to lose."
Flugrath added that the Post's reporting follows up on an October New York Times investigation which found "that Trump officials discussed a fake 'national emergency' to force new election rules on states. A DHS official said it could allow Trump to 'go around Congress' and take over elections."
“What a gift such a clearly unconstitutional executive order would be!" election security expert David Becker told CBS News' Scott MacFarlane. "Though divorced from legal and factual reality, it would enable the courts to invalidate this power grab well in advance of the election, and confirm the clear limits to fed'l interference in elections."
Prominent elections attorney Marc Elias wrote, "My team and I have been anticipating this for months. It is unconstitutional and illegal. The media should note: Last time he issued an EO about voting, we sued and won. If Trump issues such an order we will sue again and we will win again."
"Far right voices in Colorado," journalist Kyle Clark noted, "have long called for this step as a prelude to military tribunals and mass executions."
U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said, that there is "no national emergency exception" to Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.
"States regulate elections unless Congress passes law," he added, stating that is why Trump "desperately" wants to pass the SAVE Act, "to suppress voting."
The NAACP called the proposed executive order a "dangerous proposal," and "a direct assault on our democracy."
Former WBZ-TV anchor Liam Martin commented, "I tend to think even this SCOTUS would block an attempt to federalize elections. But what Trump and his team are doing is setting the stage to declare the midterms void and refuse to seat the new members. What do we do then?"
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'Extraordinary Presidential Power': Trump Is Urged to Declare Emergency Over Voting
Trump, who has insisted on federalizing voting and who issued an executive order last March to pressure states to require proof of citizenship to register voters, is reportedly now being urged to declare an emergency over voting.
“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,” The Washington Post reported in an exclusive.
“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.”
According to Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, who is advocating for a presidential order on voting, “we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes.”
“That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it,” Ticktin told the Post.
Claiming there is an emergency would allow the president to ban voting by mail and voting machines “as the vectors of foreign interference, Ticktin argued.”
Trump has repeatedly urged Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which critics say could disenfranchise millions of American citizens who do not currently have a passport or access to their birth certificates. It could also disenfranchise people who have married and changed their names but did not do so on all their legal documents.
“Trump has said that if the bill fails, he will act unilaterally to impose the changes for the midterms,” the Post reported.
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PROMOTING THE NATIONAL DEFENSE BY ENSURING AN ADEQUATE SUPPLY OF ELEMENTAL PHOSPHORUS AND GLYPHOSATE-BASED HERBICIDES
Executive Orders
February 18, 2026
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (50 U.S.C. 4501 et seq.) (the “Act”), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, it is hereby ordered:
_Section_ 1. _Policy and Findings_. Elemental phosphorus is pervasive in defense supply chains and is therefore crucial to military readiness and national defense. It is a key input in smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices and is a critical component for manufacturing the semiconductors that are central to numerous defense technologies, such as radar, solar cells, sensors, and optoelectronics. It is also increasingly important in modern lithium-ion battery chemistries used in a multitude of weapon-system supply chains. For these and other reasons, on November 7, 2025, the Department of the Interior, acting pursuant to the Energy Act of 2020, designated phosphate as a critical mineral.
Elemental phosphorus is also a critical precursor element for the production of glyphosate-based herbicides, which play a critical role in maintaining America’s agricultural advantage by enabling farmers to efficiently and cost-effectively produce food and livestock feed. As the most widely used crop protection tools in United States agriculture, glyphosate-based herbicides are a cornerstone of this Nation’s agricultural productivity and rural economy, allowing United States farmers and ranchers to maintain high yields and low production costs while ensuring that healthy, affordable food options remain within reach for all American families.
There is no direct one-for-one chemical alternative to glyphosate-based herbicides. Lack of access to glyphosate-based herbicides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system, and may result in a transition of cropland to other uses due to low productivity. Given the profit margins growers currently face, any major restrictions in access to glyphosate-based herbicides would result in economic losses for growers and make it untenable for them to meet growing food and feed demands.
:{:{Ensuring an adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides is thus crucial to the national security and defense, including food-supply security, which is essential to protecting the health and safety of Americans. Nonetheless, the United States’ ability to domestically produce those critical inputs is extremely limited. Indeed, there is only a single domestic producer of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides, and this producer does not meet our annual needs for those inputs. }:
For that reason, more than 6,000,000 kilograms of elemental phosphorus are imported from other countries annually. Future reduction or the cessation of domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides would gravely threaten American national security by disrupting, and requiring the further offshoring of, this Nation’s defense supply chain including by having a debilitating impact on domestic agricultural capabilities.}:
I accordingly find that, consistent with the Department of the Interior’s designation, elemental phosphorus is a scarce material that is critical to national defense and security. Our Nation’s inadequate elemental phosphorus production, which must sustain both defense manufacturing and our significant agricultural needs, and the threat of increased domestic scarcity leave us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and pose an imminent threat to military readiness.
Consistent with these findings, I find that ensuring robust domestic elemental phosphorus mining and United States-based production of glyphosate-based herbicides is central to American economic and national security. Without immediate Federal action, the United States remains inadequately equipped and vulnerable. Accordingly, I hereby find, pursuant to section 101 of the Act, that domestic elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides meet the criteria specified in section 101(b) of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4511(b)).
:{_Sec_. _2_. _Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides_. (a)
Notwithstanding Executive Order 13603 of March 16, 2012 (National Defense Resources Preparedness), the authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act to require performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense, and to implement the Act in subchapter III of chapter 55 of title 50, United States Code (50 U.S.C. 4554, 4555, 4556, 4559, 4560), is delegated to the Secretary of Agriculture (Secretary) with respect to ensuring a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides.}:
(b) The Secretary shall use the authority under section 101 of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4511), in consultation with the Secretary of War, to determine the proper nationwide priorities and allocation of all the materials, services, and facilities necessary to ensure a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides.
(c) The Secretary shall issue such orders and adopt and revise appropriate rules and regulations as may be necessary to implement this order.
(d) In exercising the authority delegated in this section, the Secretary shall take into account the President’s judgment that domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides is critical to the national defense. Accordingly, the Secretary shall ensure that any order, rule, or regulation issued under this section does not place the corporate viability of any domestic producer of elemental phosphorus or glyphosate-based herbicides at risk.
_Sec_. _3_. _Immunity_. This order confers all immunity provided for in section 707 of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4557). Additionally, domestic producers of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides are required to comply with this order, in accordance with the provisions of 7 C.F.R. part 789.
_Sec_. _4_. _General Provisions_. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
(d) The costs for publication of this order shall be borne by the Department of Agriculture.
DONALD J. TRUMP
THE WHITE HOUSE,
February 18, 2026.
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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is facing a highly classified whistleblower report, and there is concern about how to safely share it with lawmakers.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday morning that the sensitive report is "said to be locked in a safe." President Donald Trump's administration has avoided telling lawmakers about it, claiming that it involves such secret information.
The information could cause “grave damage to national security" if it becomes public, an official claimed. The information reportedly includes "claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House."
This is an administration, however, that has claimed "national security" liberally, such as the rationale for taking over Greenland and the immigration crackdown.
“If everything can be a national emergency or a threat to national security or a matter of foreign policy, then essentially all constitutional powers are ceded to the president,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford Law School in an Aug. 2025 report by Paul Blumenthal. “And that can’t be intended by the constitutional design.”
Gabbard's office claims the allegations are “baseless and politically motivated.”
However, the whistleblower's lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, said he was never aware that the inspector general's office had made any determination about the complaint's credibility. However, the inspector general's office decided that some of the allegations weren't credible while others might be.
Bakaj sent a letter to Gabbard that was also sent to the House and Senate in November, which the Journal has viewed.
"Months later, lawmakers still haven’t received the complaint itself. Some Democratic staffers on the intelligence committees have tried to learn more about the complaint in recent weeks, with little success," congressional aides told the reporters.
The month before the complaint, Republicans approved a new inspector general for the intelligence community on a 51 to 47 vote.
The new IG is Christopher Fox, who worked for Gabbard before the new job overseeing her work.
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Trump blames welfare fraud investigation for 'violent' protests in Minnesota
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2X SAME DAY ADMIN WORDS BITE ASS
AN 1 26
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to respond to President Donald Trump's claimthat a national emergency justified his drastic tariff moves. However, the Constitution allocates tariff-regulation power to Congress, not the presidency.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent spoke with MS NOW's Steve Benen on Monday morning, noting that Trump’s own words may be the strongest case against his tariff powers. The two analysts argued that Trump has repeatedly blown up the legal and political rationale for his trade war in public statements.
During a morning podcast "The Daily Blast,"Sargent and Benen dissected Trump’s recent threats to increase tariffs on parts of Europe not because of some economic reason but because the countries sent military to aid in the defense of Greenland from the U.S.
Trump keeps publicly admitting that his “emergencies” are more whims and leverage plays. Trump threatened tariffs on Brazil for multiple reasons and also claimed that France rejected his Gaza 'Board of Peace.'
Trump boasted that he raised tariffs from 30 to 39 percent after a call with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter “rubbed [him] the wrong way,” then lowered them after being courted by industry executives who brought him a Rolex and a personalized gold bar.
The two incidents make it clear that there isn't an "emergency" necessitating a tariff, but that Trump is using them for his own personal gain, the men agreed.
Benen argued that these anecdotes from the president undermine the administration’s legal claim that Trump is using emergency powers under the 1977 law to address a genuine economic emergency, namely trade deficits.
He continued, saying that Trump is "so far gone, is so wrapped up in his own delusion that he forgets he’s supposed to maintain the emergency pretense." Trump then ends up “confessing in public that the entire rationale for his policy is a sham.”
The trade deficits that Trump claimed are an emergency, Benen said, are not inherently harmful.
He explained, “You and I have trade deficits with our grocery store,” and they have been shrinking, not exploding into crisis. The Constitution vests tariff power in Congress, through Article I, not to the presidency. It's the main reason most legal scholars and experts think Trump is likely to lose at the Supreme Court if the justices follow the statute and the Constitution. In fact, one of Trump's own officials thinks the policy might fall at the high court.
The two men go on to skewer House Speaker Mike Johnson, who praised Trump’s supposed “Article II” tariff power, which simply doesn’t exist. Tariff authority sits in Article I, Benen told Sargent, making Johnson’s hands-off posture “completely antithetical” to the system he claims to revere.
Meanwhile, Republicans who privately dislike tariffs are allowing Trump to proceed unilaterally, even though it is "pushing prices up and that it’s becoming a drag on the economy."
Sargent agreed, saying, "It’s very, very clear that affordability is an enormous issue in these elections." Those high costs are hammering voters and it could cost the GOP the House, and possibly the Senate, in 2026.
If the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s approach despite his public admissions, Benen said, it would mark “a breakdown of American governance at crisis levels,” normalizing an enormous abuse of power with no institutional check.
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HCR 1 12? 26
...The Senate advanced a bill to stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. And, just two days after Trump had reversed the victims and offenders in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that Capitol Police officers had been among the offenders, the Senate unanimously agreed to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating that the plaque be hung, but Republicans until now had prevented its installation.
Friday was a busy day at the White House.
On Friday, Trump threatened Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”
Trump’s threat against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally has had American lawmakers and foreign allies scrambling ever since. In a joint statement, the leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) released a video explaining that “what you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe. You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.”
Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the country in the future.
What oil executives did suggest to Trump on Friday was that they would quite like to be repaid for their losses from the 2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”
Yesterday the government made public an executive order President Donald J. Trump signed on Friday, declaring yet another national emergency—his tenth in this term, by my count—and saying that any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies “will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Specifically, the executive order says, such repayment would “interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela” and, by extension, jeopardize U.S. foreign policy objectives including “ending the dangerous influx of illegal immigrants and the flood of illicit narcotics;…protecting American interests against malign actors such as Iran and Hezbollah; and bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere more generally.” So, it appears, Trump wants to retain control of the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.
...
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YT 12 25 HCR TOTAL # EMERG DECL/LAWS INVOKED 9?
But because of the Department of Government Efficiency um and Elon Musk working together with the director of
10:24
the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vote, who was one of the key writers of Project 2025,
10:30
the executive branch under Trump grabbed that power. They took that power away from Congress. And this to me was the
10:37
first and major shock of this administration that the Republicans in the Senate, I didn't expect a lot out of
10:43
the Republicans in the House of Representatives for a number of reasons, but I was surprised that the Republicans in the Senate didn't say, "Whoa,
10:51
doggies, hang on there. You you may not have the power of the purse because that's all the power they have really."
10:59
So, they're setting up here or they were setting up here this attempt to go around, not even to go around the
11:05
Constitution, to pretend the Constitution didn't really exist. But it didn't stop there. Um, think about the
11:11
fact that Trump controlled the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate and the White House. When
11:17
you have a trifecta like that, it means that the president theoretically should
11:23
be able to pass whatever he wanted, right? But Trump never tried to pass
11:29
legislation that he wanted. He simply did something new and that was to
11:34
declare national emergencies. Trump during between um the time he took
11:40
office and I want to say mid November,
:
don't quote me on that, declared nine emergencies. And the trick
11:51
to emergencies is that declaring an emergency often gives the president extraordinary power. And that makes
11:57
sense, right? If there is an attack, if there is a disaster, if something happens, you don't want the president to
12:03
have to to drag everybody into Congress and debate a law, you want the president
12:09
to be able to do something very quickly. And so we have written in our laws these places where the president can do things
12:16
very quickly. But rather than try and get anything through Congress, Trump just went ahead and declared emergencies
12:23
that would enable him to do whatever he wanted. And you saw this really dramatically beginning in April when
12:29
Trump declared that we had an emergency. And because of that, he instituted his
12:35
tariff wars beginning with what he called liberation day. Remember, I think it was April 2nd. And the idea there was
12:42
that he could just do whatever he wanted because he had declared an emergency. Well, the constitution explicitly gives
12:48
to Congress the right to levy tariffs. That's in the constitution. There is an
12:53
emergency act that enables the president to do things in an emergency. But there
12:58
was no emergency. He simply declared that there was emer an emergency. And then crucially,
13:06
there is a way to challenge emergencies. The Congress has to say, "Hang on a second there. We want to have a vote on
13:12
whether or not there's really an emergency." But between the time they do that and the time they take on a vote, a vote on it, 15 days have to elapse. 15
13:19
working days have to elapse. Well, what happened was the House of Representatives under uh House Speaker
13:26
Mike Johnson declared that for the purposes of that law, for the rest of
13:32
the congressional session, no days would pass. And I couldn't believe that that didn't get more attention because that
13:38
is bonkers. The idea that the the the the uh Congress can just say, "Oh, days
13:44
are not going to pass because we don't want our president to be challenged." Well, what's going on there is
13:51
interesting because what's going on there is that this harks back to a
13:56
political theory that was popular in Nazi Germany. It was articulated by a
14:02
political theorist named Carl Schmidt and he said a number of things that I'm not going to go into now. But in terms
14:08
of the power in a government, what he said was that the true power in a
14:13
government flows not to whatever the constitution says, but to those people
14:18
who can exploit emergencies in order to create exceptions to the constitution so
14:25
that they could exercise power without regard to the law. And you saw this in
14:30
um in um in August of this year when Trump said, "I have the right to do
14:37
anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our
14:42
country is in danger, and it is in danger in the cities in that case, I can do it." Um that's straight out of
14:50
Schmidt. And actually JD Vance is a follower of Schmidt. He once said um he described JD uh Schmidt's ideas as
14:57
saying there's no law, there's just power. And these ideas of Carl Schmidt
15:03
are um circulating pretty widely on the American right including with a thinker
15:08
so so-called um uh named uh Curtis Jarvin. And Curtis Jarvin is one of the
15:14
people who's behind the Dark Enlightenment, the attempt to destroy American democracy and replace it with
15:20
dictatorships. And um he's the sort of guy who would just have been, sorry about what it's called, but would pretty
15:25
much have been a poster except for the fact that he drew the attention of Peter Teal, who is a billionaire um tech
15:31
bro who really loves this idea that you could get rid of the federal government, which is um in in people in the mind of
15:39
people like him uh creating regulations and taxes that make it impossible for
15:45
people like him to um improve society as quickly as he feels that he would able
15:51
to do. Musk thinks this way as well, but Peter Teal is really the one who is most closely aligned with Kurtish Yarvin. So,
15:58
you see this in the the the government in this idea of just getting rid of of
16:03
democracy, getting rid of our constitution, getting rid of our laws and working outside that. All right. So,
16:11
um, we have the tariff wars and then, um, you're you're increasingly seeing
16:18
this idea that Trump's got this momentum, nobody can stop him. And I think you really see that in July. It's
16:25
building up through June and into July when Congress passes what the Republicans began to call the One Big
16:32
Beautiful Bill Act or zero BBBA. um which they're trying to change the name
16:38
of now for this simple reason that what the OBBBA did was it put into place the
16:46
ideology that the Republican party had articulated since at least the 1990s but
16:52
but back into the 1980s. um that they could create a great nation
16:58
if only they got rid of regulations and taxation and got rid of the basic social safety net that we have enjoyed since
17:05
- And you saw this in the one big beautiful bill act. It uh the primary
17:11
thing it did was it extended the 2017 tax cuts for the from under the first Trump administration which
17:18
overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations. But it also slashed Medicaid and the supplemental nutrition
17:25
assistance program and they let it expire the supports for purchasing
17:30
affordable um uh health care insurance under the Affordable Care Act. They cut
17:36
through a whole bunch of things that would benefit ordinary Americans in order to benefit the wealthy and corporations. Now, crucially,
17:44
there were no Democratic votes for those bills. And that I say is one of the reasons that it's caused a lot of
17:50
trouble since then because the Republicans are trying to get the Democrats to look as if they had
17:55
something to do with that act because they passed it in July and the world has changed a lot since July. So you're also
18:04
seeing in that same period the first half of 2025 increasing attempts on the part of Trump and his cronies to line
18:10
their own pockets. I mean, they basically have just done everything they can to put billions of dollars into
18:16
their own pockets, through leveraging tariffs, through cryptocurrency, through buying uh or through selling pardons,
18:23
through doing everything they possibly can. So, you had all this going on in that first half of the year. And a lot
18:30
of people, especially in the mainstream media, who were watching this, either got on board or sort of stood back in
18:37
horror and seemed to go, I guess we better go along with this. But I'd like to argue today that with this attempt to
18:45
destroy American democracy and to work outside of our laws and our constitution
18:50
in a way that in many ways reflected the world before the creation of the United
18:55
States of America that something else happened. Now that something else
19:01
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see CLETA SOVEREIGN EMERGENCY BORDER 9 25 ALSO 10 25?
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AN 12 25
After President Donald Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House, the administration is now looking at 17 other sites it hopes to bulldoze to the ground. According to The Washington Post and The Daily Beast, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem invoked a national emergency to justify the move.
Just two days before Christmas, the General Services Administration (GSA) told the city of Washington, D.C., "it was planning an emergency demolition of 17 historic buildings because they constitute a present risk to life and property,” the Post said.
Noem says the buildings constitute “a present risk to life and property” because some of them sit on the DHS’ West Campus complex. The area is a vast achoridge with tall mature trees and a small pond.
The vacant buildings being torn down would give the government a “tactical advantage” in any possible “active shooter scenarios.” ALICE'sActive Shooter Response Training clocks that the average mass shooting ends in just five minutes. Far fewer mass shootings happen in or around law enforcement agencies compared to schools. Still, the Dec. 19 memo from Noem fantasized about a "malicious insider" or "disgruntled DHS employee or contractor" who could enter the complex and use the empty buildings to carry out a sniper-style shooting.
The building Noem wants to see gone is St. Elizabeths, which was a first government psychiatric hospital. It was built in 1855. It became a national landmark in 1990.
President Trump stated during the campaign that he supported reopening state-run mental health institutions. In fact, Trump's "crime" executive order goes so far as to direct federal agencies to encourage states to use "civil commitments" to put the severely mentally ill into a long-term institutional setting.
As NPR reported, "In the mid-to-late 20th century, America closed most of the country's mental hospitals."
GSA spokesperson Marianne Copenhaver told The Post via email that Homeland Security alerted the agency about “a present security risk to life and property” at St. Elizabeths “that may require us to demolish buildings.”
“Accordingly, we are following all applicable laws and regulations to address those issues,” she said.
"If these buildings are considered such a security threat, DHS should first reevaluate the location of its perimeter security fence, as suggested in early consultation meetings," wrote Elizabeth Merritt, the deputy general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Rebecca Miller, the executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, in a statement to the Daily Mail.
"If the space within these vacant buildings is accessible, that’s because DHS and GSA have failed to effectively secure them," Merritt and Miller said.
Among the buildings are four Allison buildings, the East lodge, the greenhouses, the creamery staff house and residence, and the Linden and Holly wards.
The Allison group of buildings was established as a home for disabled veterans. The Linden and Holly wards housed white female epileptics, a condition that, in many, can now be treated with medication. The East Lodge segregated female African-American patients, the Daily Mail said, citing St. Elizabeths, A History, a 2013 document by the GSA.
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// context
President Donald Trump's administration is now responding to a lawsuit seeking to halt construction of his proposed new White House ballroom.
The Associated Press (AP) reported Monday that Trump is now justifying the construction of his $300 million ballroom – which would replace the demolished East Wing of the White House — by claiming it's necessary for "national security" purposes. U.S. Secret Service officials told the judge assigned to a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States that construction on the site where the East Wing used to stand had to continue to meet unspecified "safety and security requirements."
The administration's claim of needing the ballroom for "national security" purposes was roundly mocked on social media. Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas), who sits on the House Foreign Relations Committee, asserted on her official X account that Trump's ballroom was "not a national security priority."
"His vanity project is only a distraction from resolving global crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the list goes on," Johnson wrote.
Former Democratic campaign worker Gerald M. LeRoy also piled on, observing that the news of the day was "so insane that I do appreciate the humor of a breaking news headline essentially being 'Trump opposes someone opposing him.'"
"There is no bottom to the mendacity of these scoundrels," Chicago-based writer Lynn Becker posted.
Florida-based attorney Steve Kerins responded to the news by also pointing to Trump's recent executive order classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).
"National security ballroom. Fentanyl WMDs. We're really on a roll of authoritarian consolidation today," Kerins wrote.
Vox.com senior writer Elias Isquith took a different direction, sarcastically wondering if Trump was the "physical embodiment of a larger metaphysical force" that was "designed to ruthlessly exploit the most obvious flaws in our constitution & our society & thus force us to address glaring defects."
Click here to read the AP's full report.
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AN AH 10 25
In the United States' last three presidential elections, Donald Trump had a clear advantage in rural areas. But Trump's steep new tariffs are creating a great deal of hardship for many of the farmers who voted for him, and farmers are hoping that a bailout will enable them to make ends meet.
The New York Times' Michael Grunwald, in an op-ed published on October 21, points to the difficulties farmers are facing as an example of a pattern with Trump — who, according to Grunwald, creates a crisis, then proposes a solution at taxpayers' expense.
"Once again, President Trump says he's preparing an emergency bailout for struggling farmers," Grunwald explains. "And once again, it's because of an emergency he created. China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans to protest Mr. Trump's tariffs on imports. In response, Mr. Trump plans to send billions of dollars of tariff revenue to U.S. soybean farmers who no longer have buyers for their crops. At the same time, Argentina has taken advantage of Mr. Trump's tariffs to sell more of its own soybeans to China — yet Mr. Trump is planning to bail out Argentina, too."
Grunwald continues, "This may seem nonsensical, especially since Mr. Trump already shoveled at least $28 billion to farmers hurt by his first trade war in 2018. But it actually makes perfect sense. It's what happens when Mr. Trump's zero-sum philosophy of trade — which is that there are always winners and losers, and he should get to choose the winners — collides with Washington's sycophantic approach to agriculture, which ensures that farmers always win and taxpayers always lose. In the end, Mr. Trump's allies, including President Javier Milei of Argentina and the politically influential agricultural community, will get paid — and you will pay. I didn't say it was good. I just said it makes sense."
Trump's view of economics, Grunwald notes, is outlined in his 1987 book "The Art of the Deal."
"The most important thing to know about the former real estate developer and casino operator in the White House is that he doesn't believe in mutually beneficial transactions," the Times journalist observes. "The central theme of his book, 'The Art of the Deal,' is that every deal has a winner and a sucker. On trade, Mr. Trump sees America as a perennial sucker, and he vows to make it win so much that you'll get tired of winning."
Trump's protectionist approach to trade, according to Grunwald, is "lousy policy for America" but "works nicely for Mr. Trump, because it gives him enormous power to reward or punish specific companies or industries."
"We do not live in a zero-sum world," Grunwald argues. "The nice thing about free markets and free trade is that voluntary transactions between individuals or nations really can make both sides better off. Or we can keep paying farmers to farm soybeans, pay them more to convert some of those soybeans into wildly inefficient fuels, pay them even more when they can't sell their soybeans because we're in a trade war with their customers — and then pay extra to bail out one of the countries replacing them in the marketplace. That only makes sense in Mr. Trump's Washington."
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Jesse Watters says Democrats are “flirting with secession”
10/06/25 8:36 PM EDT
//
MMA
October 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five
KAYLEIGH MCENANY (CO-HOST): When you look at the DOJ filing -- I bring my primary sources when I'm on with Jessica always -- the 169-page DOJ filing requesting an emergency filing to reverse that judge. What you find in it is this: their legal authority is 10 U.S.C 12406. They say in two cases Donald Trump can federalize the National Guard. One case: you're unable to implement the laws of the United States. You cited the laws of the United States. It's immigration law as passed by Congress. Unable to enforce that because ICE agents are being targeted.
Number two: you can federalize the Guard if there's a rebellion against the authority of the government. Well, ICE is government. There's a pretty clear rebellion against this authority. Go ask the Dallas ICE agents who were targeted with anti-ICE bullets. This is a rebellion against US government sources.
And also, what's interesting, you only have to get ten pages into this lawsuit, here's what you find, just to add to Jesse's list here. There's someone who wielded a firearm at ICE in Portland. There's an individual -- you mentioned the rocks, the sticks. Listen to this, officers have been bitten, kicked, shot with paintballs, threatened with a machete and a knife, and assaulted with potentially blinding lasers. The protesters literally lit a material on fire up against the courthouse and other protesters threw accelerants on the fire. That's just one fire, there was another fire too. That one was done with motor oil over the building in Portland ICE.
Donald Trump is on strong legal footing. I can't speak to the one federal judge. I think they're going to get reversed. The ninth circuit sided with Trump once, I think they'll do it again. You can't be biting ICE officers and lighting their building on fire.
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AN 10 25}:
Barbara F. Walter, author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, warned Sunday that democracy in the United States is in decline and President Donald Trump could create "fake emergencies" to intensify his campaign against his opponents.
Speaking ata podcast on*The Bulwark*posted Sunday morning, Walter said, "I think American democracy is in a really sad place, actually. It's in a place of democratic decline. It's probably likely in the near future to be in a place of economic decline. And these are things that are not going to turn around anytime soon. If you look at the underlying conditions for political violence, the United States, unfortunately, has all of them right now."
She continued: "Political violence tends to happen in countries with weak and declining democracy, especially democracies that are changing rapidly and moving more and more towards autocracy. We call those anocracies, and that's actually the most dangerous place to be. Full, healthy democracies almost never experience political violence."
She added that hardcore autocracies rarely experience political violence, and most of the violence happens in the middle.
"And since January 2025 of this year, America's democracy has declined faster than it ever has in its history. And it's declined faster than democracy in any other advanced industrialized democracy in the world," she added.
Likening Trump to a "wannabe dictator," Walter said the president could use "fake emergencies" to "clamp down on citizens."
"These types of sort of fake emergencies allow these wannabe dictators to declare a state of emergency, declare martial law, and basically just clamp down on citizens so that citizens aren't allowed to leave their homes," she said.
She added: "There's curfews. Soldiers are now patrolling the streets. There's roadblocks. And this effectively ends democracy. So people were saying, okay, is theCharlie Kirk murder, and in particular, the Republican Party's reaction to it, that this is almost a declaration of war by the left. People were worried that that would be that type of situation."
Walter also warned that Trump does not see the American constitution as an impediment.
"I don't think Trump sees the Constitution as an impediment in any way. [Viktor] Orban did not see Hungary's Constitution as an impediment. He simply changed it. Netanyahu doesn't see Israel's Constitution as an impediment. You know, these guys are bullies and strongmen, and they just push their way through and see if anybody stops them," she said.
The analyst noted that following conservative activist Charlie Kirk's murder, many expected a war on the left by the Trump administration, but it didn't play out that way. The administration, she argued, is now looking for a bigger reason to ramp up its efforts to go after its opponents.
"The Trump administration isn't ready to declare a state of emergency and to basically take control of the potential hotspots for opposition. Those hotspots for opposition are going to be America's big cities," she said.
Walter added: "It's hard for most Americans to feel deeply threatened because an outspoken activist on the right was killed. They might be horrified by it. They might desperately wish it never happens again, but they don't feel personally threatened by it. And for people to be willing to give up their rights and freedoms to say, 'okay, martial law is okay with me.' They have to be, they have to truly believe that their and their family safety is threatened. And Charlie Kirk's murder didn't do that. So it's going to have to be something bigger than that," she said, noting that Trump is still trying to "create a situation" where he can "suddenly grab all power."
"That's where you have most of the people who disagree with Trump, feel threatened by Trump. And he doesn't have his soldiers in place there. He started to do that in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, and he tried to do that in Chicago. But he's not ready for the moment to sort of pull the trigger," she said.
Asked if this democratic backsliding could lead to a civil war in the U.S., Walter said, "So the main point I want to make is that citizens are much more powerful than they think they are. There's over 330 million of us. You know, think back to your time at school in the schoolyard. You know, everybody's seen bullies operate and and they see what happens when the you know, the kids in the schoolyard, dozens of them, just stand up."
She continued: "Bullies tend to wither. We have 300 and, you know, over 330 million Americans. And if we just in our own separate individual ways, simply just started silently and peacefully resisting, not voluntarily complying when we're told that to do something that's illegal .So there's a whole series of things. And then protest is the greatest tool," she added.
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AN COMM DR 10 25 BASED ON 5 YR OLD FOX B ROLL
Top Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller was accused of spreading dangerous “propaganda” Saturday night regarding the federal judge who ruled that the White House could not deploy 200 National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon.
The White House deputy chief of staff accused US District Judge Karin Immergut, who was appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term, of “legal insurrection” after she found that the president’s claims about violent protests at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland were “untethered to facts,” and that residents’ expressions of opposition to ICE do not meet the high legal standard for calling the National Guard.
Miller claimed authorities in Oregon and Portland are aiding “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers” by refusing to aid ICE agents, and claimed Immergut was attempting to assume the role of “commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces” by siding with state officials and issuing a temporary restraining order blocking the National Guard deployment, which was expected to begin this weekend.
Immergut said the state had provided “substantial evidence that the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days—or even weeks—leading up to the president’s directive.”
Portland residents who oppose Trump’s mass deportation agenda began holding nightly demonstrations at the ICE facility over the summer, with some trying to block vehicles from entering and exiting the property. Crowds have dispersed quickly during the daytime, while at night federal officers have sometimes used tear gas and other weapons to move people away from the building. The Portland police have reported 27 arrests since early June at the protests, and at least two dozen people have been arrested by federal officers.
While the president has described Portland as “war-ravaged,” Immergut said that the protests fall far below the threshold for ordering federal troops to Portland, which the president has the authority to do only in times of foreign invasion, a rebellion, or when local authorities are unable to maintain order.
“The protests have been such a minor issue that the normal nightlife in downtown Portland has required more police resources than the ICE facility,” said Immergut.
The judge added that the US “has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs... This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of the nation.”
Miller’s accusation that Immergut was taking part in a “legal insurrection” by rejecting Trump’s false claims about the nature of the protests was “reckless,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“It’s authoritarian propaganda, plain and simple. Stephen Miller should be fired,” said the Democrat.
New York Timescolumnist David French added that Miller’s claims put Immergut in potential danger, as right-wing counterprotesters have arrived in Portland in recent days.
Immergut’s temporary order is set to expire in two weeks, but she is expected to rule on the state’s request for a more permanent injunction barring the deployment of the National Guard.
The Trump administration on Saturday night appealed Immergut’s ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously ruled that Trump could send the National Guard to Los Angeles to stop anti-ICE protests after a federal judge had decided that deployment should be halted.
In addition to seeking the National Guard deployment, the administration has reportedly discussed sending the Army’s 82nd Airborne division, which is typically deployed in hostile foreign territory, into Portland.
On Saturday, Miller repeated claims that “there is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in this country” that is “well organized and funded” and ”shielded by far-left Democrat judges.” Immergut is a Republican.
“The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks,” said Miller.
Since the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last month, the president and his allies have insisted that left-wing groups are fomenting violence, with Trump signing an executive order falsely claiming he has the authority to designate “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization”—despite the fact that no “antifa” organization exists.
The president also signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
On Saturday, Miller said on Newsmax that the administration intends to apply NSPM-7 in Portland, initiating investigations into what he called a “domestic terrorist network” whenever federal agents make an arrest at a protest.
Miller, said investigative reporter Jim Stewartson, “collapsed Democrats, ‘far-left Democrat judges’, and ‘antifa’ into a single domestic terror threat as a pretext for mass arrests.”
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AN 9 25 BULWARK
Bulwark writer Philip Rotner says American law did not account for a bad-faith actor in the Oval Office, and it shows.
“Time and again in just eight months back in office, Donald Trump has advanced norm-busting assertions of presidential power far beyond anything ever attempted — or even dreamed of — by his predecessors,” said Rotner, referring to Trump declaring national emergencies that would typically require congressional approval or regulatory review. This include his unilateral tariffs, sending the military to Los Angeles, federalizing the Washington, D.C. police force, militarizing the southern border, ending birthright citizenship, deporting foreign students, targeting colleges and law firms and destroying the independence of administrative agencies.
“As tempting as it may be to call these actions ‘blatantly illegal,’ the truth is actually worse,” said Rotner. “The constitutional and statutory ambiguities Trump is attempting to exploit really do exist. Indeed, strategic ambiguity has until recently generally been viewed as a feature, not a bug, of our legal system.”
READ MORE: 'I'm the one asking the questions': CNN host cuts off Ted Cruz after he shouts over her
Rotner said the Constitution is framed in generalized language, with phrases like “due process” and “equal protection” left largely undefined. But broad, nonprescriptive constitutional and statutory language is only a virtue when the American public puts good-faith actors in the White House. In the hands of a bad-faith leader, strategic ambiguity becomes a weapon.
“Trump is a bad-faith actor with a wide authoritarian streak,” Rotner said. “He is systematically testing the limits of the law, probing for soft spots, loopholes, and ambiguities to increase his power and provide him legal cover to do ‘whatever I want.’”
And he trusts the courts will allow him enough leeway to expand his power vastly beyond "what anybody had previously imagined," Rotner said. It does not matter when his assertions of presidential power are thin or nonexistent in the eyes of most legal scholars. Scholars don’t get the last word,’ Rotner said. That belongs to the courts, which appears to rule by unexplained shadow docket decree.
“A clear pattern has emerged in the Court’s repeatedly putting its thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor, often ‘without a murmur of explanation,’” Rotner said. “Virtually all of the cases will require the Court to interpret vague, ambiguous statutory language drafted by Congress to permit presidents to act swiftly and decisively in times of crisis.”
READ MORE: 'Undisputed idiot king': Former NBC journalist calls Eric Trump 'the epitome of stupidity'
But the Republican majority Congress has ceded some of its powers to the executive branch, said Rotner, and it will be up to a future Congress to get us out of the mess by no longer assuming good faith when it drafts legislation or amends existing statutes.
“The rules of the game have changed and good faith can no longer be assumed,” Rotner said.
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AN 9 25
'They will take what they want': 7 ways Trump is already planning to disrupt the midterms
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an 8 25
Salon Senior Writer Chauncey DeVega says President Donald Trump’s DC takeover is just Trump doing exactly what he’d planned to do all along.
“During the 2024 election, Donald Trump promised to be a dictator on ‘day one.’ Seven months after his return to power, he is earnestly expanding that promise,” writes DeVega.
Trump’s concerns about “law and order” in DC are “self-interested and wholly circumstantial,” said DeVega. He noted that Trump did not deploy the DC National Guard when an armed mob was laying siege to the U.S. Capitol in 2021 to try to help him hold on to power.
READ MORE: Trump's worst crimes and destructions haven't even happened yet
DeVega went on to write that, similar to other authoritarians, Trump is willing to manufacture statistics and public emergencies that do not exist. There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia, he writes. Violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low, and is down another 26 percent so far this year.
But autocrats and demagogues use false claims of crime and disorder as pretexts to “declare a permanent state of emergency and to suspend the rule of law, along with civil rights and liberties," writes DeVega. Salon democracy expert Katherine Stewart called the tactic “one of the most frequently telegraphed stunts in the authoritarian canon.”
Trump’s war on the homeless and the poor is yet another example of an authoritarian at work, says DeVega, explaining that they are “human proof of how a government and its leaders have failed the people,” and they are “a form of narcissistic injury to an authoritarian who presents himself as being all-powerful and perfect.” He referenced Trump’s social media announcement of the DC takeover, in which he promised “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR. I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN!”
“Inconvenient” and “disposable” people must be removed or erased because “they are an affront to the Great Leader, the Party and the myth of national greatness,” says DeVega, adding it’s a category that “inevitably expands to include political ‘enemies.’”
READ MORE: 'Not plausible': Trump-appointed judge hands him major loss in court
DeVega added that simply “being American” may not be the antidote that political observers hope it will be.
Read DeVega's full Salon essay at this link.
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wapo burgum energy
Former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for interior secretary and “energy czar,” also suggested during his confirmation hearing Thursday that the incoming administration could consider declaring an energy emergency because of soaring electricity demand.
“This is part of a larger crisis our nation is facing around electricity,” Burgum told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The energy emergency declaration relies heavily on concerns about the nation’s power grid not being able to keep up with surging demand, particularly from tech companies developing artificial intelligence. It stresses that the nation’s “ability to remain at the forefront of technological innovation” requires more energy.
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an 525
Defenders of climate and the rule of law blasted the Trump administration on Friday for using what one consumer campaigner called a "phony" emergency to wage lawfare agaist states trying to hold Big Oil financially accountable for the planetary crisis.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed complaints against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which empower states to seek financial compensation from fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate mitigation. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of human-caused global heating.
Separately, the DOJ also sued Hawaii and Michigan "to prevent each state from suing fossil fuel companies in state court to seek damages for alleged climate change harms."
"The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing."
Hours later, Hawaii became the 10th state to sue Big Oil for lying about the climate damage caused by fossil fuels. The Aloha State's lawsuit targets ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other corporations for their "decadeslong campaign of deception to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change" and sow public doubt about the existence and main cause of the crisis.
"The federal lawsuit filed by the Justice Department attempts to block Hawaii from holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for deceptive conduct that caused climate change damage," Hawaii Attorney General Anne E. Lopez said. "The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing and is a direct attack on Hawaii's rights as a sovereign state."
The DOJ on Thursday cited President Donald Trump's April 8 executive order, " Protecting American Energy From State Overreach," which affirms the president's commitment "to unleashing American energy, especially through the removal of all illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources—particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources."
Trump also signed a day-one edict declaring a "national energy emergency" in service of his campaign pledge to "drill, baby, drill" for climate-heating fossil fuels. The "emergency" has been invoked to fast-track fossil fuel permits, including for extraction projects on public lands.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a statement Thursday, "When states seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authority, they harm the country's ability to produce energy and they aid our adversaries."
"The department's filings seek to protect Americans from unlawful state overreach that would threaten energy independence critical to the well-being and security of all Americans," Gustafson added.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, on Friday accused the Trump administration of "using a phony energy emergency declaration to illegally attack state climate and clean energy laws."
"There is no energy emergency, and Trump's stated reasoning for it is as much a scam as every other pathetic con and hustle this president attempts," Weissman continued. "Fake constitutional claims based on a fake emergency cannot and will not displace sensible and long overdue state efforts to hold dirty energy corporations accountable."
"These corporations have imposed massive costs on society through their deceptive denial of the realities of climate change, and through rushing us toward climate catastrophe," he added. "It's good policy, common sense, and completely within state authority, for states to hold these corporations accountable."
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AN 4 25
It was 218 years ago that President Thomas Jefferson signed into law the Insurrection Act of 1807, which has only been invoked on rare occasions since then. Under the Insurrection Act, a president can deploy the U.S. military nationally and federalize the National Guard units of individual states.
The last president who invoked the Insurrection Act was George H.W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in 2020 during the George Floyd protests but didn't follow through.
But now, in his second term, Trump is threatening to deploy the military on U.S. soil on Sunday, April 20.
READ MORE:'Mugged by reality': How the 'dissident right' is rebelling against MAGA
After returning to the White House on January 20, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency on the U.S./Mexico border. And he left open the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act 90 days later.
In an article published by Salon on April 15, legal expert Austin Sarat (who teaches jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts) lays out some reasons why Trump invoking the Insurrection Act could be so dangerous.
"Given the breadth of the authority the Insurrection Act grants presidents," Sarat explains, "it is unsurprising that President Trump has long thought about using it…. And, make no mistake, the Insurrection Act grants the president broad authority. In 1827, the Supreme Court made that clear."
Sarat notes that in 2024, Trump proposed using the Insurrection Act against "the enemies from within" and "radical-left lunatics."
READ MORE:'Death Master File': How DOGE won 'a momentous internal battle' over an illegal 'novel strategy'
"The president alone gets to decide what constitutes an 'insurrection,' 'rebellion,' or 'domestic violence,'" Sarat warns. "And once troops are deployed, it will not be easy to get them off the streets in any place that the president thinks is threatened by 'radical-left lunatics.' That's why April 20 will be so consequential. If Americans take to the streets to protest the president's invocation of the Insurrection Act, the president might use those protests as an excuse to extend the deployment of troops."
Sarat continues, "The prospect of using the military against Americans is a nightmare and would mark a further descent into authoritarianism…. As we contemplate what might happen on April 20, Americans who object to the invocation of the Insurrection Act will be in something of a bind. If they take to the streets to protest, that may give the administration a pretext to expand its use further."
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STATE OF EMERG --> EL SALV bs
AN 4 25
Trump is authorizing the U.S. military to take jurisdiction over federal lands along the southern border to help enforce his immigration agenda.
On Friday, Trump issued a memorandum entitled "Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions" to the secretaries of Defense, Interior, Agriculture and Homeland Security, reports USA Today.
The memo names the Roosevelt Reservation, which lies between Mexico and the states of California, Arizona and New Mexico, as "National Defense Areas.” And it frames immigrants as “invaders” threatening “the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the United States.”
READ MORE: (Opinion) Trump is about to target something far more terrifying than tariffs
“Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats. The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past,” the memo reads.
While long, the territory is only about 60 feet wide, "the distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound,” according to Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the Washington Office on Latin America, in Washington, D.C.
Isacson told USA Today the consequences of the Department of Defense assuming control of federal land at the border was not “immediately clear,” but he said it could result in “more severe criminal charges for migrants” unlawfully crossing the border. This is primarily because migrants may qualify as having “trespassed on a military installation” if they set foot on it, and they could potentially face more than the federal misdemeanor of “entry without inspection.”
“In carrying out activities under this memorandum, members of the Armed Forces will follow rules for the use of force prescribed by the Secretary of Defense,” the memo reads.
READ MORE:Could be the last one standing': Trump aims to 'illegally remove' head of bipartisan board
The administration is increasingly pressing migrants to self-deport. Earlier this week the administration asked the Social Security Administration to relist thousands of immigrants as “dead” to remove their ability to legally work in the country and access credit and banking services.
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick posted to Bluesky that Trump's deployment of the military to take over the Roosevelt Reservation could be an effort to "bypass the Posse Comitatus Act," which prohibits the U.S. military from enforcing civilian law. He added that Trump's move was "bad and dumb."
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note abbott? tex gop tries to use invasion as legal justification for fuckery
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