Is it just me, or does it seem as if every election cycle, the media dusts off the same horror story to scare the public about Trump? It’s always that Donald Trump is about to shred the Constitution, call in the troops, and cancel democracy, declare himself supreme leader, something like that. It’s not just me. Oh, and every time, the prediction falls apart, and nobody who pushed it pays any price for spreading lies.
With weeks to go before the midterm elections, they’re at it again.
On Friday, The Atlantic published a report claiming that some of Trump's associates want him to declare martial law to keep the Democrat Party from winning either chamber of Congress in the midterms. Naturally, Democrats and their media allies ran with it right away. But the whole story rests on a few fringe figures who are convinced Democrats plan to steal the election, and none of them speaks for the White House.
"He's the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it," attorney Peter Ticktin said of Trump. He claims that there are three possible outcomes. He dismisses the first, a smooth election, because he claims Democrats already cheated in the primaries. In the second, Trump acts before the election to stop cheating. In the third, Trump declares martial law on or around Nov. 3.
"Either martial law, or step aside," Ticktin said, describing the president's choices in that third scenario. Asked about possible riots if Trump tried to overturn the results, he had a ready answer. "Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are," Ticktin replied.
The Atlantic also leans on radio and TV host Wayne Allyn Root, who urged Trump in August to declare a "national-security emergency" to require proof of citizenship and voter ID. "Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay?" Trump responded. "I'll leave it at that." Then there's Tina Peters, the former Colorado clerk Trump pardoned after her conviction for tampering with election equipment. She claimed that after their June meeting, the president "basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking."
To round out the case, the magazine, which has a sordid history of printing fake news, points to Trump's February remark that Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 places, and to his primetime speech at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where he repeated his claim that he won in 2020 and sarcastically told supporters to "cheat like hell." So the evidence amounts to a coy answer to a talk-radio host, a joke at a convention, and a push for voter ID. Seriously? Here’s a fun fact: proof of citizenship at the ballot box has nothing to do with martial law.
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Meanwhile, the people who actually run things have already knocked this down. A White House official said Ticktin, Root, and Peters play no role in the White House's election policy. A Justice Department spokesperson said there are no plans "to declare certified voting equipment unreliable or unusable absent credible, verified evidence and the legal process for doing so," and called suggestions that "such an initiative is under way at the Department is false." Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin have both said they have no plans to take over state election administration or send federal officials to polling places, though Mullin allowed exceptions involving "specific threats."
The Atlantic even admits it. Buried in its own report is the acknowledgment that the White House has no martial law plans, and that Trump's inner circle and Republican leaders oppose extreme measures. So why are we even talking about this? Once you take away the fringe voices, the story has nothing left in it. Only people with a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome could read it and panic.
The most maddening part is that we've seen this movie before. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, there were rumors that Trump might try to delay, postpone, or even effectively cancel the election, invoke martial law, or refuse to leave office. Make no mistake about it; the media keep making things up to paint Trump as an authoritarian. They made the same prediction in 2020, and Trump still left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, without a single soldier deployed to keep him in power.
