NEW YORK:  A little over a year from now, Americans will vote to determine which political party will control the two houses of Congress. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party currently controls both, but its majorities are narrow (53-47 in the Senate and 219-213 in the House of Representatives).

There is no modern precedent for a president’s party to avoid midterm election losses in the House unless the president’s popular approval is well above 50%, and in Trump’s case, an unweighted average of recent polls shows his approval at 45.3%, with 51.9% (a net of -6.6) of voters disapproving.

Under normal circumstances, the president would seek to improve his party’s electoral standing. Yet Trump is doubling down on some of his most unpopular policies. For example, his latest statements suggest that he is committed to sending more National Guard troops to Democratic Party-controlled cities, even though 58% of Americans oppose such deployments.

While the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the use of federal troops for domestic policing, the Insurrection Act of 1807 provides an exception for responding to violent uprisings against the state, and Trump is already threatening to invoke it.

That is why Trump and his advisers are increasingly using terms like “terrorist” and “insurrection” to describe anyone who opposes their agenda. Trump recently claimed, falsely, that Portland, Oregon, has been taken over by left-wing “domestic terrorists” (adding, preposterously, that the city doesn’t “even have stores anymore”).

Similarly, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who increasingly appears to be running things, has called federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration “terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” He has also said that the Democrats are not a political party, but a “domestic extremist organization.”

Such labels matter, because Trump himself has explicitly described how he thinks extremists should be handled. If “radical left lunatics” cause trouble on Election Day, he told Fox News last October, the problem “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” That allusion to Election Day is no accident. Moreover, the vagueness surrounding the enemy’s precise identity serves Trump’s purpose. It is enough, as he recently told an audience of 800 top military leaders, to say that America faces an “invasion from within … No different than a foreign enemy.”

Of course, there is no enemy within, just as there are no cities suffering from out-of-control crime or threats of insurrection or terror.

These are the actions of an authoritarian leader who already tried to steal one election, and who would have no qualms about stealing the next one. Trump could not care less about fair elections. He cares only about power, and he will not hesitate to pursue a military occupation of American cities in order to keep it.

This is not the first time that state militias have been used for political purposes in the United States. When many southern states opposed school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, state governors called out the National Guard to block Black students from enrolling in all-white public schools (in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 and at the University of Mississippi in 1962).

Later, National Guardsmen were also used to impede civil-rights protests – most infamously in the violent disruption of a peaceful demonstration in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965. On these and other occasions, the Guard’s visible support for, or inaction in the face of, aggressive white supremacist mobs and local militias (such as the Ku Klux Klan) served as an effective tool of intimidation.

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican), John F. Kennedy (Democrat), and Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) ultimately federalized the National Guard to counter state resistance to desegregation and equal voting rights. But in an ironic twist, Trump is now occupying predominantly Democratic cities like Chicago with National Guard troops from sympathetic southern states like Texas, seeming to revive and invert the deep sectional divisions that culminated in the Civil War and the post-bellum Jim Crow era of southern white supremacy.

On the surface, calling in National Guard troops from pro-Trump states seems intended to serve the administration’s increasingly aggressive implementation of race-guided anti-immigrant policies. But it also is laying the groundwork for a power grab. These forces’ loyalty to Trump may well increase the likelihood that they will receive, and then follow, orders to scrutinize “unqualified” (particularly non-white) voters come Election Day. Trump need only deploy heavily armed National Guard troops in putatively “hostile” neighborhoods filled with “extremists” and “terrorists” to intimidate and deter voters.

Trump’s armed militiamen are also more likely to obey unlawful orders to seize “suspect” ballot boxes, or perhaps to enforce a suspension of elections altogether, on the pretext that civil disorder has rendered a “fair” process untenable.

Trump has already successfully relied on this pretext to justify the ongoing military occupations of US cities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, and, of course, he can also simply pardon anyone who acts illegally on his behalf (as he did with the January 6 insurrectionists).

Stoking sectionalism may well invite an American version of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Chinese armed forces mobilized troops from distant provinces to crush peaceful student protests in Beijing. If this scenario sounds unlikely, recall the shootings in 1970 at Kent State University, where nervous Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on student protesters, killing four.

In this context, Trump’s rising disapproval rating is cold comfort. The fact that he is doubling down on unpopular policies suggests that deliberate preparations are underway to disrupt a free and fair midterm election. Why bother trying to win votes when there are alternative ways to retain power? Trump’s mushrooming army of billionaire media allies – Larry Ellison (Paramount Global Media, and soon TikTok), Elon Musk (X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post), and Rupert Murdoch (Fox News) – seem all too willing to help him create the pretext he needs for a military crackdown.

In the end, scapegoats for suspended elections will be found and prosecuted by Trump’s Justice Department. Friends will be rewarded, foes will be punished, and Trump will have fulfilled his most infamous campaign promise. “In four years,” he told supporters in July 2024, “you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good. You’re not going to have to vote.”

That may turn out to be true for all Americans. We won’t have to vote, because we won’t be able to.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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