Now, look. Every election season the left dusts off a fresh nightmare, and this year’s model is a real beauty. The claim making the rounds is that President Donald Trump is going to declare martial law so Democrats never get their hands on the House or the Senate.
Where did this come from? A report the left-wing rag The Atlantic ran on Friday. The author tracked down several Trump associates who want him to do exactly that, because they’re convinced Democrats plan to cheat. The goal of the media, as usual, is to stoke fear and deepen the very divisions these same media figures claim to hate.
Here’s the passage they’d like you to lose sleep over:
Which is why it might be worth listening when [attorney Peter] Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas. The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario. When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.
So a lawyer standing backstage at a conference in Las Vegas has sketched out his personal forecast for November. Is that what passes for a national scoop these days? Apparently so.
Ticktin can say what he thinks Trump should do. He can even predict what Trump might do. But his opinion tells us nothing about a decision inside the White House. The Atlantic asked an interesting question and came back with a lawyer’s speculation. By the time it reaches the reader, that speculation has been dressed up as a warning about the fate of the midterms. Where is the evidence that Trump plans to declare martial law? The article never gets us there.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELThe piece keeps going:
Trump has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local level. In February, he said Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 places. In August, when the television and radio host Wayne Allyn Root pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and other measures, Trump played coy: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.” Later that month, Trump posted a Root column on the topic, with a headline that described the plan as “foolproof.” Peters announced after meeting with Trump in June that the president “basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” In a prime-time address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump again repeated the false claim that he had won the 2020 election, and sarcastically encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” in the upcoming elections.
That “Peters” is Tina Peters, the former Colorado clerk Trump pardoned after she was convicted of tampering with election equipment. She and Root have both called for martial law too. And yet the author concedes, somewhere in all of this, that the White House has no plans to do any such thing. Funny how that detail never seems to make it into the headline.
Think about what the reader is being asked to accept. Three people want Trump to take an extreme step. The White House says it has no plan to take it. Somehow, the people outside the administration get to drive the story, while the answer from the people actually running it becomes a footnote. That makes for a dramatic headline. It makes for a much thinner case.
In fact, the article spells it out:
At the White House, the constant lobbying by election deniers continues to be viewed as problematic. A White House official told us that Ticktin, Root, and Peters play no role in election policy at the White House. 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.” Suggestions that “such an initiative is under way at the Department is false,” the spokesperson said. Some officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, have said publicly that there are no plans to forcibly take over the role of state election administrators or deploy federal officials to polling places, though Mullin said there could be exceptions in the case of “specific threats.”
The author even notes that people in the president’s inner circle, along with Republican leaders, oppose taking extreme measures like this.
So what did The Atlantic actually uncover? Three people. That’s the whole haul: a trio who think Trump should use the military to grab control of elections if Republicans lose the midterms, dressed up to look like a mainstream position on the right.
Here’s the trouble with that little strategy. It only lands with folks who already want it to be true. The author offered no real evidence that Trump plans to impose martial law, and anyone who isn’t suffering from TDS is going to figure that out in about thirty seconds.
#trump #midterms #martiallaw
