President Trump is pushing hard for federal control of this year's midterm elections but with GOP leaders lukewarm on the idea, the president's supporters say they've found a way for him to take direct control. Pro-Trump activists say they've drafted a 17-page executive order asserting that China meddled in the 2020 election and arguing that this supposed interference justifies an emergency declaration, the Washington Post reports. That, they contend, would let Trump bar mail voting and voting machines ahead of the midterms—steps he has repeatedly floated as part of a promised executive order if Congress doesn't enact stricter voter ID and citizenship rules.
Peter Ticktin, a lawyer advocating for the draft executive order, tells the Post that he has had "certain coordination" with the White House. "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," he says. "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." Ticktin, who wrote a book about his years at the New York Military Academy with Trump, represented Trump in a 2022 election-related lawsuit against Hillary Clinton that a judge dismissed as frivolous.
A 2021 US intelligence review found China weighed influencing the 2020 race but did not act. Still, Trump allies point to existing emergency sanctions on foreign election interference as a possible model, even as past Trump efforts to tighten voting rules by executive order have been repeatedly blocked in court.
- The president, who never admitted defeat after losing the 2020 election, once again accused Democrats of "cheating" in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. "They have cheated," he said. "And their policy is so bad that their only way to get elected is to cheat. And we're going to stop it." The Guardian notes that Trump "appears poised to go to extraordinary lengths to protect his administration from the consequences of a possible Democratic majority in Congress this year."
- Earlier this month, Trump claimed that he had an "irrefutable" legal case for bringing in new voter ID rules. "There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!" he said on Truth Social.
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