What Donald Trump is planning, and why Democrats aren’t
ready for it
By David
Frum
June 11, 2025, 10:01 AM ET
The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning
about President Donald Trump’s behind-the-scenes strategy to subvert the 2026
midterm elections, by creating chaos to justify his use of extreme executive
power.
The following is a transcript of the
episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another
episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer
at The Atlantic.
Over the weekend, there was an
outbreak of unruly protest, disorderly protest, and even violent protest in Los
Angeles against immigration raids by the Trump administration. I’m at some
distance; I wasn’t an eyewitness. I’m relying on news reports, and there’s some
uncertainty about exactly what happened, but it looks like rocks were thrown at
ICE vehicles. Protesters tried to impede ICE officers doing their duty.
Fireworks were shot off. A car seems to have been set on fire.
Now, all of this is illegal,
disorderly, and must, of course, be met by the force of law. Fortunately, there
are nearly 9,000 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, uniformed
officers with the right to arrest. And the state of California—in cities and
counties and at the state level—deploys, altogether, more than 75,000 uniformed
officers with arrest powers. So given the state of the situation, there looked
to be nothing that the state of California couldn’t cope with on its own.
Mercifully, at the time I record
today, there were no reports of any injury to any law-enforcement personnel,
which, if correct, gives you some idea of the disorderly and upsetting, but
genuinely limited, nature of the lawbreaking on hand.
Nevertheless, President Trump
announced an intent to federalize California’s National Guard and send 2,000
military personnel into the state, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed
in with an offer of sending actual Marines from bases in California. Now, this
is being reported as, in some ways, an immigration story, but it’s really much,
much more than that. By the way, as it happened, it looks like the National
Guard was never sent (or certainly wasn’t sent in time), and the Marines also
weren’t sent.
I think a way to think about what
happened in California this weekend is as a trial run, a test, a practice for
things that Donald Trump has in mind in 2026. Observers of the Trump
administration have noted a strange paradox. On the one hand, Donald Trump is
doing one after another outrageous act of seeming violation of rules, seeming
illegality, selling billions of dollars of coins to persons unknown, accepting
foreign jets—things that, if he loses the protection of control of the House of
Representatives and the Senate in 2026, portend a world of trouble and even
legal jeopardy for him in the second two years of his administration.
And yet, facing that danger, Donald
Trump has blithely done one thing after another that seems guaranteed to lose
him at least the House, and maybe both House and Senate, in 2026: the tariffs,
this tax bill that offers very little to ordinary people, the economy slowly
being ground into recession under the burden of all of his restrictive actions.
I mean, to do tariffs and an immigration crackdown at the same time is really
asking for an economic slowdown.
So how do you make sense of this? Does
Donald Trump not know that the elections are coming? Does he not sense the
danger that he’s in, of what will happen to him, of what could happen to him
should his party lose its ability to protect him in House and Senate? Well, I
think the answer is: Donald Trump does know, and he does have
a scheme to protect himself, but it’s not doing popular things to keep his
majorities in Congress. It’s looking for ways to subvert the 2026 elections to
prevent them from happening, or at least to control them so they don’t threaten
him at all.
Now, we have had some inklings of
Donald Trump’s thinking along these lines. We saw them in 2020, when people
close to Donald Trump—like his former national security adviser Michael
Flynn—advised him to use the military to suppress the 2020 vote. But Flynn’s
advice in 2020 came too late. The election had already happened. Flynn was
looking to overturn an election in the past, not to prevent an election in the
future. And that’s a big thing to do, especially when court after court after
court has ruled that the president and his supporters’ claims against the 2020
election were utterly meritless.
Also, Donald Trump in 2020 had a
military around him that was not likely to obey illegal orders. Under Secretary
of Defense [Mark] Esper and under chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, the
Defense Department had said, Look—we will follow any lawful order of
the president. But when the president suggests shooting protesters—as he
did during the George Floyd riots—we’re going say, “Mr. President, are you
quite sure? I’m not gonna take a hint here. I need an order, and I need it
maybe in writing, so that when I am court-martialed, I can show, ‘The president
told me to shoot those people.’” And Donald Trump always backed down
because he couldn’t rely on Esper and Milley to take the hint about what he
wanted done.
But here’s how his mind worked. We saw
this in 2018. In October 2018, as Donald Trump was heading toward midterm
elections that would cost him his majority in the House of Representatives, he
began to get very upset about an immigration caravan that was supposedly—a
so-called caravan that was—heading toward the border. And he began talking in
October 2018 about needing a state of emergency to do something about this, to
freeze the border, to militarize the southern states.
Now, that didn’t go very far. In the
first term, Trump’s talk was often much more radical than Trump’s actions. But
you could see the way his mind was going. The president has very broad and
quite messy emergency powers. He can do a lot of different things by invoking a
state of emergency. He thought about it in 2018. He thought about it in 2020.
He wasn’t able to do it either time.
But in 2026, he’s going to have a very
different kind of administration around him. He’s got a former talk-show host
as a secretary of defense, one with a long list of allegations of heavy
drinking and allegations of sexual abuse against him, who’s completely beholden
to Donald Trump. There are similarly beholden people running the Department of
Homeland Security and the FBI. There’s a striking lack of independent voices of
people with substantial reputations and long-proven integrity—and, for that
matter, proven loyalty to the law of the United States. He’s got the
administration of his dreams, and he’s got the problem of a lifetime: the risk
of losing the House of Representatives. So what’s the plan? The state of
emergency. And that was tested in California.
Now, how would this work?
Theoretically, of course. We don’t know any of this. I’m just telling you how a
criminally minded person might advise the president. The president doesn’t have
a button he can press to stop elections. Elections are administered by the
states. But what the president can do is put pressure on certain states, or
delay or stop elections in certain states in order to convene the House of
Representatives, which will be full of newly elected people from his states and
vacancies from the other states.
There’s some precedent for this. In
2018, the island of Saipan, which is a U.S. territory, was hit by a devastating
typhoon, and the governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
issued a series of emergency declarations—he’s acting under federal executive
power; it’s not a state—including ordering postponing elections that were to be
held in the territory for two weeks, including an election to the U.S. House of
Representatives, where the Northern Marianas have a nonvoting delegate.
No one questioned this. It’s a genuine
typhoon, and things really were terribly, terribly disrupted. And two weeks is
not so long to wait for the right to vote in the face of a genuine emergency.
But that was a proof of the power to delay an election that could be wielded by
a functionary of the executive branch.
Back during Reconstruction, the Grant
administration often sent federal troops into areas where there was Ku Klux
Klan activity to postpone elections, reorganize elections, redo elections.
Again, that was Reconstruction; they were facing terroristic violence that was
threatening the rights of, in South Carolina, half the population of the state.
But there are precedents here.
Now, imagine this in 2026. President
Trump provokes some kind of outbreak in California or in some other blue state.
He declares a state of emergency. He sends the National Guard. And he says
elections have to be postponed until order is restored. That may be weeks; it
may be months. In the meantime, there are no representatives from California in
the U.S. House of Representatives. With missing blue-state representatives, the
red-state people will continue their majority, even though they would likely lose
it in a free and fair election in 2026. I’m not saying this is something
that will happen, but it’s something that could happen,
and I think it was something we just saw tested.
So I think as President Trump’s mind
wanders into places where no president’s mind has ever wandered before, it’s
going to fall upon all of us to let our minds follow afterwards—to listen to
the hints, to listen to things that sound crazy, to listen to people who
sound crazy, because they may be the prophets of what’s to come.
Frum: This episode of The
David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea
Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards.
Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio,
and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for
listening.
