Unhinged folks on the left are making yet another wild claim about the upcoming midterm elections: President Donald Trump is going to declare martial law to ensure that Democrats don’t take power over either chamber of Congress.
It’s yet another fearmongering tactic that leftist media figures are pushing to stoke more anger and divisions. At the center of this is a report The Atlantic published on Friday. The author spoke with several Trump associates who are urging him to take such an action because they believe Democrats plan to cheat in the election.
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.
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.
CNN reports Trump is so worried about Democrats winning the election that his "outside advisors" are telling him to declare martial law.
— Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis) September 25, 2026
Scary shit and we need to be ready. pic.twitter.com/RrK5qvPh7H
The piece also references former Colorado clerk who Trump pardoned after she was convicted of tampering with election equipment and television host Wayne Allyn Root, who have also called for Trump to declare martial law. However, the author acknowledges that the White House has no plans to make this move.
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 notes that members of the president’s inner circle and Republican leaders oppose taking extreme measures.
So, basically, The Atlantic found three people who think Trump should use the military to take control of elections if Republicans lose in the midterms, and they seek to make it appear as if this is a mainstream viewpoint on the right.
The problem with this strategy is that the only people who will believe it are those who want to believe it. The author provided no real evidence that Trump plans to impose martial law, which means people who do not suffer from TDS aren’t going to buy it.