'A state of emergency': Republican speechwriter lays out how Trump could derail mid-terms
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum said U.S. democracy contains holes that a certain “criminal mind” could exploit to either postpone or derail mid-term elections if he so wanted. And if that same criminal mind is willing to sic the U.S. military on Americans—and happens to have installed bootlicks and enablers over the military—those holes get a lot more wide.
“Donald Trump in 2020 had a military around him that was not likely to obey illegal orders,” Frum said on today’s edition of ‘The David Frum Show.’ “… [His] Defense Department had said, Look—we will follow any lawful order of the president. But when the president suggests shooting protesters—as he did during the George Floyd riots—we’re going say, ‘Mr. President, are you quite sure?’”
In Trump’s first term, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley were unwilling to fire on Americans without express orders in writing in the event of a court martial, just so they could show, “The president told me to shoot those people,” Frum said. Trump always “backed down” because he couldn’t rely on Esper and Milley “to take the hint about what he wanted done.”
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But that was the old administration, said Frum. In 2026, he’s got a very different kind of administration around him.
“He’s got a former talk-show host as a secretary of defense, one with a long list of allegations of heavy drinking and allegations of sexual abuse against him, who’s completely beholden to Donald Trump,” said Frum. “There are similarly beholden people running the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. There’s a striking lack of independent voices of people with substantial reputations and long-proven integrity—and, for that matter, proven loyalty to the law of the United States.”
“He’s got the administration of his dreams, and he’s got the problem of a lifetime: the risk of losing the House of Representatives,” Frum continued. “So, what’s the plan: A state of emergency. And that was tested in California.”
Frum explained U.S. law has allowed presidents to delay or stop elections in states before. During Reconstruction, the Grant administration sent federal troops into areas of Ku Klux Klan activity to postpone, reorganize and redo racist elections that excluded whole groups of voters.
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“Again, that was Reconstruction; they were facing terroristic violence that was threatening the rights of … half the population of [some] state[s]. But there are precedents here. Now, imagine this in 2026: President Trump provokes some kind of outbreak in California or in some other blue state. He declares a state of emergency. He sends the National Guard. And he says ‘elections have to be postponed until order is restored.’ That may be weeks; it may be months.”
In the meantime, Frum said there would be no representatives from California in the U.S. House of Representatives. And with missing blue-state representatives, the red-state reps would continue a majority that they would likely lose in a free and fair election in 2026.
“I’m not saying this is something that will happen, but it’s something that could happen, and I think it was something we just saw tested.
Read the full Atlantic report at this link.
