Trump does not rule out declaring a state of emergency ahead of the mid-term elections
Pete Hegseth has announced that Elon Musk will co-lead a Pentagon project aimed at studying “the future of warfare”. This marks the first time that the CEO of SpaceX has returned to work in Donald Trump’s administration since his time as head of the Office of Management and Budget.
Key points
Donald Trump is raising the spectre of a state of emergency and the invocation of the Insurrection Act in the United States ahead of the parliamentary elections in early November, in which the Republican Party is lagging behind in the polls. “I’m not committing to anything,” he told *Time* magazine when asked about the possibility of taking such drastic measures.
In this scenario, the forces deployed at the polling stations could include both National Guard troops called up to serve directly under the leadership of the White House and the Pentagon, and federal immigration enforcement personnel from ICE, which was significantly expanded under Trump to include some 30,000 uniformed officers.
The president had already raised the idea of militarising the vote, citing – without ever providing any evidence, and despite being contradicted by studies and the courts – serious electoral fraud perpetrated by the democratic opposition. But this new warning, if repeated, risks taking on unprecedented significance in the run-up to the polls on 3 November. According to critics and civil rights organisations, the very act of taking this stance – even without leading to widespread, concrete action – could intimidate the electorate, particularly working-class and ethnic minority voters, and reduce voter turnout, which would currently favour the Democrats. Not only that: it may herald further, aggressive efforts – in the courts or by putting pressure on state authorities – to more easily challenge election results and attempt to overturn them. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the polls showing him and his allies trailing – particularly over the war in Iran and economic management – are ‘fake’.
“I’m not ruling anything out,” Trump told *Time*, referring to extraordinary measures. “We’ll see.” The Insurrection Act dates back to 1807 and had been considered but not invoked in response to street protests against aggressive ICE raids. Trump had subsequently resorted to a more limited federal law to deploy National Guard troops to assist local law enforcement.
When it comes to the ballot box, the White House has repeatedly denounced the alleged mass voting by illegal immigrants in US elections, despite the fact that its claim has been refuted by the facts and by analyses which, at most, have found only a handful of errors in the electoral registers.
