Panic as Trump mulls 'clearly illegal' move to control midterms: 'Worst case scenario'

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Regrets — we’ve all had a few. One of President Donald Trump’s, apparently, is not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election in search of evidence of fraud.

That revelation, part of a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times on Jan. 7, commands particular attention in a world where Trump has already sought to push the boundaries of his power, deploying the National Guard to multiple U.S. cities to crack down on protests and crime. The November midterms will be the first federal general election with Trump as president since that 2020 contest, and even before his comments to the Times, plenty of people were already worried that Trump would attempt to deploy the National Guard around the 2026 election.

The National Guard isn’t necessarily the problem here; the Guard actually has a history of helping with election administration, such as when troops in civilian clothing helped fill in for absent poll workers during the pandemic in 2020. But many Democrats and election officials are worried that Trump could, say, send them to polling places to interfere with voting on Election Day. If troops were to take possession of voting machines or other equipment, it could break the chain of custody and invalidate scads of ballots. And if troops just show up outside polling places, even if they don’t try to impede the administration of the election, their presence could still intimidate voters.

That’s a worst-case scenario. However, there are significant legal and practical barriers to Trump doing this.

First, it’s clearly illegal: Federal law prohibits stationing “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” It’s also illegal for members of the military to prevent, or attempt to prevent, an eligible voter from voting and to interfere “in any manner with an election officer’s discharge of his duties.” That could include taking possession of voting machines.

Even the Insurrection Act — which grants the president wide leeway to use the military for domestic law enforcement in emergencies, and which Trump threatened to invoke just last week in Minneapolis — wouldn’t give troops the right to break these laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Second, courts have so far significantly reined in Trump’s existing National Guard deployments — raising questions about whether he’d even have control of the Guard in key states. In December, the Supreme Court signed off on a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from deploying troops to Illinois, whose Democratic governor had challenged his authority to do so. (National Guard troops are usually under the command of their state’s governor.)

The Supreme Court’s order for now functionally limits Trump to deploying the National Guard in states where he has the governor’s consent. And the 2026 midterm elections are likely to be decided in states whose governors mostly aren’t the type to let Trump deploy troops there. Of the 60 U.S. House seats currently listed as “in play” by Inside Elections, an election handicapping website, 38 are in states with Democratic governors.

And while the path to the U.S. Senate majority does mostly run through red states, and Republicans have, on the whole, not shown much interest in standing up to Trump, it’s not a given that every Republican governor would acquiesce to Trump sending in troops — especially for as norm-shattering a reason as to police an election.

The New York Times also reported this week that multiple Republican politicians privately criticized Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And plenty of sitting Republican governors have had their differences with Trump publicly as well:

• Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio (home to three competitive House seats and a pivotal Senate race) is very much an old guard Republican who has objected to Trump’s most controversial behavior.
• Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa (also home to three competitive House seats and a potentially interesting Senate race) endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries and is not running for reelection this year.
• Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (home to two competitive House seats and a vulnerable Democratic-held Senate seat) is a moderate Republican who disavowed Trump in 2016 and waited a conspicuously long time to endorse him in 2024.
• Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia (home to another vulnerable Democratic Senate seat) famously rebuffed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in his state.

The Trump administration has thrown cold water all over the idea that it will mobilize the National Guard this November. A White House spokesperson told NPR in November that concerns about troops at polling places were “baseless conspiracy theories and Democrat talking points.” And in an interview with Vanity Fair late last year, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said that “it is categorically false, will not happen.”

But given Trump’s avowed interest in using the National Guard to subvert an election, many officials aren’t taking any chances. At a conference of local election administrators earlier this month in Virginia, attendees were already gaming out what to do in a scenario where armed troops arrive at a polling place.

Any attempt to use the military to influence the election — even if it’s quickly extinguished by a court — would be one of the most brazen acts of election interference in modern times. Whether or not it ultimately affected the outcome of the election, it could still shatter many Americans’ belief in the sanctity of the voting booth.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

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