Less than six months later, after he had attempted to instruct the Department of Justice to announce falsely that it had found voting irregularities, Trump and advisers contemplated sending in federal troops to seize voting machines—and perhaps rerun the election in contested states—invoking the Insurrection Act, and even declaring martial law. He held back from doing those things, at least in some cases because aides warned him that the courts would rule against him and that they would resign en masse, a step likely to galvanize public opinion.
My chief concern for a second Trump term is that he will fill the Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense departments with subordinates who will not try to keep him within the bounds of the law. His own running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, suggested in 2022 that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Last time the guardrails held; I do not count on them holding again.
A potential Harris administration also has me worried about the future of elections—and about whether Harris’ advisers even understand the stakes. The misnamed Freedom to Vote Act, endorsed by Harris, is the latest version of a shambling omnibus bill of centralizing ideas on voting, many at odds with constitutional guarantees of speech and association, and baldly partisan to boot. Bizarrely, it doesn’t address many of the genuine electoral perils of the Trump era, being instead a wish list of election reforms progressive groups have been flogging since well before 2016. Even on gerrymandering—for which there’s a case for federal reform—it’s an awful botch, tying states up in abstruse expert formulas while actively discouraging traditional criteria of good districting.
Most frustratingly is that adherence to the Constitution and the democratic process are supposed to be the Democrats’ great edge against Trump—and their biggest opportunity to forge a cross-ideological consensus with level-headed Republicans. To come out with a coercive, kludgey contraption is a wasted opportunity.
