Trump is swift boating the midterms

After the Supreme Court recently took a carving knife to Donald Trump’s claim of emergency powers to justify much of his tariff agenda, one could easily think that he and his associates might reconsider their view that he needn’t follow the plain language of the Constitution. No such luck. The president is making it clear that he plans to ignore the Court’s decision that found imposing tariffs required congressional approval, and that he will find other ways to check off the remainder of his dictatorial wish list. 

Trump has only a few real priorities in his second term: tariffs, revenge, money and legacy. His continuing obsession with the 2020 presidential election falls under the revenge category, and instead of it waning as an active concern it actually seems to be gaining steam. The recent FBI raid of the election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize the stored ballots from that race looks to be just the opening salvo in a much larger strategy to interfere in the 2026 midterms. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump is contemplating an executive order declaring a national voting emergency, citing the same law the Supreme Court just declared he could not use when it came to imposing tariffs. 

Trump has been hinting around at this, posting on Truth Social a couple of weeks ago, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” 

Since the president’s inability to accept his loss has made all of us experts on what the Constitution says about elections, this bleat was rightfully dismissed as yet another asinine rant. Article I of the Constitution makes it clear that the states are charged with the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives… but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” It says nothing about the president taking over the voting system because he thinks there’s an “emergency.” In fact, it says nothing about the executive at all. 

If you’re wondering where Trump got such a ridiculous notion, look no further than the usual suspects, some of whom have been around for decades, pushing insane conspiracy theories and assassinating the characters of Democratic candidates around election time. It’s long been a GOP cottage industry, and a lucrative one. 

According to the New York Times, Trump’s director of “election security and integrity” is a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, one of the most relentless 2020 election deniers who was considered to be a “fringe menace” in the first Trump administration. He was involved in the attempts to overturn the election and has continued to pursue the case ever since. Olsen has been given the power to criminally refer cases to the Justice Department, and he was revealed to have instigated the search warrant for the Fulton County raid. But he is one of many 2020 denialists working throughout the administration in jobs related to elections. 

The Times’ reporting focuses on two outside activists who are pushing Trump to sign this executive order, which is being touted as a “17 page draft” that explains the legal rationale for using the National Emergencies Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, neither of which confer any executive jurisdiction over voting. The main instigator is a newer name in GOP dirty-tricks circles. Peter Ticktin is a lawyer and former New York Military Academy schoolmate of Trump’s who worked on the attempted coup in 2020. The other is a much more familiar and shady name in GOP politics: Jerome Corsi, the man who made “swift boating” a household term. 

Corsi first made his name over 20 years ago when he wrote “Unfit for Command,” the book that smeared then-Massachusetts senator and Democratic nominee John Kerry in his 2004 presidential bid against George W. Bush. Corsi’s book was a patented right-wing smear, dishonestly targeting Kerry as nothing more than a rich boy liar who faked his heroic war record. But his approach was particularly cunning: The accusation he leveled at Kerry mirrored the real story of Bush’s National Guard service.

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Corsi’s next projects were aimed at Barack Obama, starting in 2008 with his book “The Obama Nation.” He followed that in 2011 with “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”, a smear that Trump had taken to the top of the charts. Corsi was also alleged to have worked with one of the original dirty tricksters — and long-time Trump friend and mentor — Roger Stone on the Wikileaks campaign against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

One of the great ironies of this latest round of underhanded campaign tactics — and yet another example of Corsi’s old “I know you are but what am I” strategy — is that this proposed emergency executive order is based on thoroughly debunked accusations of foreign interference in the 2020 election involving China. The story goes that the Chinese government manufactured phony identification cards to help people vote for Joe Biden — and that former FBI Director Christopher Wray covered it up. This wild theory, which was based on some 20,000 fake drivers’ licenses being seized in Chicago, most of which were intended for college students to get into bars, recalled the ridiculous audit of ballots in Arizona, in which conspiracy theorists were looking for the presence of bamboo in the paper’s composition. (And there are about half a dozen more conspiracy theories about foreign interference.)

Since multiple investigations proved Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump and his accomplices naturally said that China interfered in 2020 — and now they are using it as an excuse to sow doubt about and hijack the 2026 midterms. And Corsi, the man who was involved in some of the back-channel work to disseminate the Russian hacks of Clinton’s emails in 2016, had the chutzpah to say, “Here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” 

You cannot make this stuff up. 

Election denialism is Trump’s personal contribution to the degradation of our political culture. When all is said and done, it will remain his most enduring legacy. No president before him has ever been so willing to create mistrust in the electoral system to cover for his own failures. Remember: This is someone who said before any votes were cast in 2016 that he would only accept the election results if he won. 

But the work of smearing Democrats and causing havoc in elections is a Republican specialty, and some of the people who’ve been making a tidy living at it for decades are on board for one more ride.