If ‘Save America’ dies, how could Trump still kill elections? | Opinion

It has been extraordinary political theater to watch Donald Trump pull back his own nominee for director of national intelligence, and withdraw support for a major bipartisan housing bill, in an effort to leverage Congress into passing his so called “Save America Act” that would impose massive new changes to the country’s election systems. The only problem is this is not theater—Trump is deadly serious about suppressing as much voting as he can from corners of the electorate he believes are unlikely to support MAGA Republican candidates.

Trump is seeking congressional approval of his legislation that would require proof of citizenship in a way millions of American citizens would not be able to demonstrate, and make most mail-in voting illegal unless a bona fide basis for being able to vote in person could be demonstrated. The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the Senate to pass Save America. So one possibility is that Trump continues to play up the issue to his MAGA constituency and simply continues to rail about Democrats cheating, and illegal immigrants voting, as part of his overall campaign to delegitimize the perception of election outcomes.

On the other hand, he may well find alternative means to undermine election results in a way that does not require congressional action, through actions on the president’s part which he would claim are uniquely part of his executive authority. This scenario, which in light of Trump’s conduct on January 6 and his pardoning of those that participated in the riot on that day, does not seem farfetched at all in terms of Trump’s willingness to go to extremes to overturn an election.

This scenario is best laid out by Jonathan Winer, a former senior State Department official who serves in a pro-democracy organization with me, Keep Our Republic, which he described in an article published a few months ago in The Washington Spectator entitled “Emergency Planning: The President is Preparing to Challenge 2026 Midterms. The Country Can Still Act to Protect Them.”

Moreover, the FBI has recently assigned 260 staffers to once again examine the count of the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, which has been examined exhaustively many times before and no irregularities have been found. The president has already ordered some pretty extraordinary actions. For instance, he has directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to put together state by state citizenship lists in order to enable federal determinations of who is eligible to vote, which turns our system of state administered elections on its head. He also ordered new Postal Service regulations which forbid the delivering of absentee ballots in states which have not complied with rules to furnish election rolls to federal authorities. Despite the fact that courts have ruled against the Trump Administration on these issues, it clearly demonstrates that the president is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to undermine the 2026 elections.

As Winer sees it, the Trump election steal would start by the president declaring that the elections were rigged–claiming illegal ballots were cast, some kind of fraud occurred, or foreign interference was involved. He would then order federal authorities to investigate the election results and claim they could not be finalized until an in-depth investigation had been completed. Nothing hard to imagine there.

The next step in overturning the election results would be to tell House and Senate Republican leadership to ignore the results in the jurisdictions where the president was challenging that Democrats had won, and for Congress to adopt rules in the lame duck session so that the next Congress could be organized around Republican majorities.

Of course, the president’s and congressional actions would be immediately litigated. More importantly, it would be hard to imagine that street protests would not break out in blue cities and states throughout the country. Trump has clearly asserted that the real danger to the country is the “enemy within” and that organizers and funders of domestic demonstrations—the kind of protests in the past his administration has stoked to create violence–should be investigated and prosecuted.

The Trump government’s characterization of this activity as subversive and intended to disrupt democratic processes–even if the protests were nonviolent–would lead to federal agents being ordered to make arrests and attempt to detain individuals prior to trial.

However, where the president might well take this into totally new police state territory is by declaring that street protests against his attempt to overturn elections created a national emergency. This leads to the little-known subject of PEADs or Presidential Emergency Action Documents which Jonathan Alter recently wrote about in his Substack, “Old Goats.” PEADs are highly classified, fully developed proclamations which every administration has had prepared and ready to go in the event of some true emergency–like a nuclear attack–where there may be large-scale societal upheaval of true crisis proportions and the government must put in place a scheme to cope with such a grave situation.

PEADs have been prepared for use by every administration since Eisenhower, though none has ever used them, but it is a very good guess that Trump was referring to them when he said he had “very strong emergency powers” that gave him “the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

Presumably these directives contain provisions on detaining individuals. As to how widespread enforcement operations involving sweeping up protesting individuals could be accomplished—well, we have seen Homeland Security expand its infrastructure of detention facilities, and the creation of a large paramilitary force within that department. So it is not hard to imagine where his enforcement troops would come from without Trump trying to call up the National Guard or the military more broadly.

Yes, the Trump Administration’s use of PEADs would be challenged in court, but the administration would be acting with great dispatch to attempt to seize voting machines and protesters alike, while the courts have shown us how slow they are at checking Trump’s abuses.

Trump is using enormous political capital, to the detriment of Republican candidates, in the cause of undermining fair elections. He has very recently stated the housing bill pales in importance to the “Save America Act” and changing our election system. This personal obsession with so-called election fraud, for which there’s no evidence to support, all stems from his inability to admit he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Moreover, his rhetoric regarding Democrats has become even more intemperate, calling Democratic Socialist candidates who won recent primaries “godless communists.”

As Winer explains: “Nothing in the record suggests this president will be constrained by law, precedent, custom, norms or the Constitution from invoking the unchecked authority conveyed in the President Emergency Action Documents to overturn adverse election results and squash domestic resistance to the consolidation of his power.”

In sum, if the Save America Act loses in Congress, and Trump’s candidates lose elections, rather than losing control of Congress, in light of all of Trump’s statements and actions, we would be naive to think Trump is not going to try through extraordinary means to win the upcoming elections by attempting to overturn them.

Tom Rogers is executive chairman of the AI film studio Fountain 0, executive chairman of cloud AI grid company Claigrid, Inc., the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC and is currently senior adviser to Versant, the company which owns CNBC and MSNOW. He is also the former CEO of TiVo.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.