Trump's Menacing But Dumb Plan to Break the Midterms

He can try to fake a national emergency to seize control of elections, but that doesn’t mean it will work.

(Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

For all its splendor, our Constitution does have this vexing tendency to leave some concepts a bit murky. What exactly counts as “high crimes and misdemeanors” sufficient for impeachment? Are we all just agreeing to ignore the part about how each House member can represent a maximum of 30,000 people? What even is a “Letter of Marque and Reprisal”?

But when it comes to elections, our founding document is blessedly clear. It’s up to the states to set “times, places, and manner of holding elections,” and Congress can pass laws that override the states as it deems necessary. That’s it – direct and easy. The Constitution conspicuously omits the president here; the Founders understood the risk of centralizing power to run elections in the hands of the one person who already sits atop our government.

But now Donald Trump seems to be crafting a workaround, or perhaps a work-through, for the 2026 midterms. All indications are that he’s quite serious about stealing the upcoming elections, including through dubious if inventive means. If he tries, it will get ugly — but he will ultimately fail in the courts.

In an interview last week, Wayne Allyn Root of Real America’s Voice could barely keep from hyperventilating as he told the president that he has “the right to declare a national security emergency for elections” and 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 by both houses of Congress.” Trump interjected suggestively, “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”

He’s not joking. Trump is already hard at work laying a foundation of doubt about election security for 2026, and his history makes plain that he will never accept electoral defeat. January 6 marked a historic nadir, of course, and the president’s 2020 election denialism continues, exasperatingly, to this day. When Trump lost the Iowa Republican primary in 2016, he alleged that his own party cheated and that a new election should be held because of “fraud.” Even after he won the presidency in 2016, Trump claimed falsely that “millions” voted illegally, and that he won the popular vote in addition to the electoral count. The man has never lost an election, if you ask him, and never will.

Trump isn’t on the ballot in 2026, but the president – with his current approval rating in the low-to-mid 30s – will be the central figure in the congressional midterms. If Republicans lose the House (which appears likely) or the Senate (a coin flip, more or less), his second term will descend into the muck of legislative gridlock, oversight hearings, and investigative subpoenas. Recognizing the stakes, Trump has already begun crying fraud, even in the other party’s primaries; he proclaimed without proof that Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan because of “more votes being cast than there are voters, by a lot.”

So what happens if Trump follows Root’s wacko suggestion to declare a national emergency and seize control of the 2026 elections?

First, it simply doesn’t work that way. The president cannot declare an emergency in a vacuum and then do whatever he wants. Rather, he must (1) point to a specific emergency powers statute passed by Congress, (2) demonstrate that there is in fact an emergency, and then (3) take the specific steps authorized by that emergency law. Here, of course, there are no facts to support a claim of a 2026 election emergency and there is no law giving the president emergency powers over elections. He can shout out “Emergency!” all day long, but there’s no legal or governmental mechanism to actually do anything with it.

Root has not discovered some magical workaround. His analysis is jumbled but he appears to refer to an obscure law called the National Emergencies Act. But that statute creates no new powers for the president. Rather, it establishes expedited procedures and gives Congress the power to override certain declared emergencies by a two-thirds vote. As constitutional law professor James Sample concludes in his Substack, it’s a Congressional off switch, not a presidential power source.

Root authoritatively invoked a 1983 Supreme Court decision, INS v. Chadha – and then completely misrepresented what it actually holds. The question in that case was whether one house of Congress, acting alone, can veto executive action; the Court ruled that votes of both House and Senate are necessary for an override. But the Chadha decision did not create or acknowledge any new powers, emergency or otherwise. The president had no authority over elections before Chadha, through normal channels or emergency declarations, and he hasn’t been granted any such powers by Congress or the courts since then.

Ultimately, any attempt by Trump to enact Root’s nuthouse plan would be resolved through litigation. Criticize the federal courts as you please – I’d likely concur in some part – but the judiciary has been a bulwark against Trump’s abuse of emergency powers. The Supreme Court has recently rejected the president’s invocations of emergency powers to impose global tariffs, to deploy the National Guard, and to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act.

Nor have the courts countenanced Trump’s encroachments on election processes. Federal and state courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, rebuffed dozens of lawsuits contesting the 2020 election. And judges have roundly rejected Trump’s preliminary 2026 midterm election interference attempts, including his ongoing efforts to impose federal oversight of voting rolls and to severely curtail mail-in ballots.

Trump’s mad quest to tamper with the 2026 midterms has already caused confusion and concern, and if he keeps down this road it’ll wreak chaos and maybe worse than that. But it won’t work.