David Frum writes:

If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control. Or he might suspend voting until, in his opinion, order has been restored. Either way, blue-state seats could be rendered vacant for some time.

Precedents do exist for such action. In autumn 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant imposed martial law on counties in South Carolina to suppress Ku Klux Klan disturbances that were interfering with legal voting. More recently, the governor of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands delayed elections, including the election of the islands’ nonvoting delegate in the United States House of Representatives, after Saipan was struck by a super-typhoon in October 2018. In that same month, Trump himself claimed that a caravan of undocumented immigrants heading north toward the U.S. constituted a “national emergency” that would justify suspending civil authority and deploying the military in border states.

In his first term, Trump repeatedly talked more radically than he acted. He was usually constrained by his own appointees. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley rebuffed Trump’s suggestion during the George Floyd unrest that the military shoot protesters, which sufficed to dissuade Trump from upgrading the suggestion into a direct order.

But instead of Esper and Milley, the second Trump administration’s military is headed by a former talk-show host facing troubling allegations of heavy drinking and sexual misconduct. (He denies these claims.) Hegseth owes everything to Trump. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are likewise headed by radical partisans with dubious records, abjectly beholden to Trump. This Trump administration is sending masked agents into the streets to seize and detain people—and, in some cases, sending detainees to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing—on the basis of a 1798 law originally designed to defend the United States against invasion by the army and navy of revolutionary France. The presidency of 2025 has available a wide and messy array of emergency powers, as the legal scholar Elizabeth Goitein has described.

Second-term Trump and his new team are avidly using those powers in ways never intended or imagined. [Continue reading…]