loading . . . It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.
I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?
Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. _The Washington Post_ —and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.
The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.
None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”
In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, _trying to help Trump_ : “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”
But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.
With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on _Morning Joe_ Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.
Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.
Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.
As for the media takeover: What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, in trying to take over both CBS and CNN. But he wouldn’t stop. Netflix bid $83 billion. Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion, and Netflix dropped out.
And somewhere in there, Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address, and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board. I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships, or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.
So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping. The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.
And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.
That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned _Washington Post_ , to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier.
That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.
_This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky.__Sign up here_ _._
https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections
