American Doom How Trump's National Guard shock troops could seize voting machines
Will we have elections next year? I hope so but honestly, I don’t know! What I do know is that there are thousands of election officials and untold amounts of court cases that stand between right now and an honest-to-goodness, free and fair election next year. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of all that and expose bad actors, like I’ve been doing for years. If you want to support those efforts, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or throw a few dollars in our Coffee Fund.
It’s hard to imagine in today’s environment of non-stop authoritarian rumblings coming from the White House, but just less than five years ago, as Donald Trump tried to cling to power amidst an election loss to Joe Biden, the Trump administration hatched what was then a shocking and unthinkable plan.
In a never-issued executive order, the most fervent conspiracy theorists and executive power absolutists that the American right has to offer drew up plans to seize voting machines — with the military, if necessary.
Trump’s direct involvement in those plans — if any — has never been fully revealed.
The plan never came to fruition, and what followed was Trump’s flailing and criminal attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The never-issued executive order was just a part of that attempt, helping conspiracy theories about voting machines to rise from the dregs of the election-denying American right to mainstream Republican policy.
Since then, the election denial movement has continued its assault on all aspects of elections, including voting machines. Trump is firmly at the head of the movement.
I’ve already touched on efforts by Republicans and the Trump administration to interfere with next year’s mid-term elections. Those efforts and more will only continue. In the coming weeks and months, and — god help me — years, I’ll be detailing developments that will be familiar to those who followed reporting by myself and others in the lead-up to 2024.
Among the most extreme scenarios with which Trump and Republicans could seize something resembling absolute power are the cancellation of elections or the throwing out of votes entirely. It is not hyperbole to say that both events are reasonably foreseeable.
That’s because Trump continues to accumulate unprecedented military and law enforcement powers.
There are many troubling possibilities that arise from Trump’s increasing use of the military for both domestic policing and immigration enforcement, some of which we’ve been seeing for the last few months, since Trump first sent the military to Los Angeles. But since we’re not in an election year, we haven’t seen another scenario play out — yet.
It is not implausible to envision Trump using the military or law enforcement to enforce his election demands. The never-issued executive order from 2020 shows that Trump and members of his administration already considered using the military to disrupt the 2020 election or throw out its results completely. Trump has shown no evidence of slowing down, despite the two-term limit that nearly the entirety of the nation’s media-academic complex continues to believe will not be somehow overcome to land Trump back in the White House in 2028.
Trump’s election demands — in the form of several executive orders aimed at fundamentally remaking American elections in ways that benefit Republicans and the election denial movement — include completely eliminating voting machines.
Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this, not that not having legal power to do things has ever stopped Trump and his administration from simply doing things. That’s why an executive order signed by Trump on Monday caught my eye.
The order, which mostly lays out more authority for the National Guard and other agencies as they continue their “mission” in Washington DC, also created a special “quick reaction force” of Guard members to be quickly deployed to, well, what I guess we’ll have to call “domestic conflict zones.”
Specifically, the new “quick reaction” forces of the National Guard will be deployed to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”
As if that last part matters: recent history has shown that the Trump administration will deploy the Guard and whatever other military or law enforcement agencies it wants under the most legally questionable of circumstances. The order calls on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes.”
In addition to ICE and other sub-agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump is now waist-deep in perverting the mission of the National Guard. Clearly, the powers-that-be within the White House and the upper ranks of the American right view the Guard as a tool at their disposal.
How that tool will be used is now apparently up to Trump and Republican governors, who hold tens of thousands of Guard members under their command.
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