When President Donald Trump sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month, the topic was the weighty issue of ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But at one point, Trump took a provocative diversion into domestic politics.
Zelensky noted that, in his country, the law doesn’t allow for elections during periods of martial law.
“So you say during the war, you can’t have elections,” Trump responded. “So let me just say, three and a half years from now – so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
Laughter ensued. Trump wondered aloud what the “fake news” would do with his comment.
But increasingly, Democrats aren’t laughing.
A growing number of them are arguing Trump will do something to either try to cancel or commandeer elections to keep his hold on power.
That might seem ridiculous to some. Trump hasn’t explicitly said he plans to cancel elections, and he said last month he would “probably not” run for a third term, which the Constitution forbids anyway. But the president has certainly floated such possibilities before and done plenty of anti-democratic things. And his extraordinary moves to take more control over the voting process and dispatch troops on US soil are already raising alarm bells. (A judge said Tuesday that Trump was, in effect, “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”)
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker claimed Sunday that Trump’s threat to send troops into cities like Chicago was part of the plan.
“The other aims are that he’d like to stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections,” the Democratic governor said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“He’ll just claim that there’s some problem with an election, and then he’s got troops on the ground that can take control if, in fact, he’s allowed to do this.”
Pritzker, who may have his own White House ambitions, pointed to how Adolf Hitler took just 53 days to turn Germany into a dictatorship.
“I can tell you that the playbook is the same,” Pritzker said. “It’s thwart the media. It’s create mayhem that requires military interdiction. These are things that happen throughout history, and Donald Trump is just following that playbook.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom floated a very similar theory last week.
Asked about his own plans for running for president in 2028, Newsom shrugged them off by casting doubt on whether that election would be above-board or even happen at all.
He cited how Trump’s recently passed domestic agenda law made Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency, claiming ICE is increasing Trump’s “private police force.” He predicted that federal agents would be sent to polling places. And then he predicted Trump would try to halt elections altogether.
“I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” Newsom said at an event hosted by Politico.
“People actually think this guy’s serious about having another election?” the governor said, adding: “He’s not being serious? Wake up. You will lose your country.”
These are the most powerful Democrats to float such theories. But they’re not the only ones.
Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York said people shouldn’t laugh at what Trump said next to Zelensky.
“Watch Trump fantasize about dragging America into a war as a pretense to cancel our elections,” she said on X. “The room may have laughed, but HE. IS. NOT. JOKING.”
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who administers that state’s elections, said Trump’s push to end mail voting is part of a pattern.
“What in the world does that pattern lead to?” Fontes told local KTAR News. “It leads to the further erosion of our trust in our elections that might justify his ability to determine that there’s an emergency and cancel the 2026 elections.”
Fontes added: “This is where all the evidence is going, and at every turn Donald Trump gives us another reason to believe that that might be true.”
And Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner last week told CNN’s “Early Start” that Trump’s use of troops in cities is an attempt to create a pretext.
“The only crisis here is Donald Trump, and he wants a crisis because he wants an excuse to cancel elections down the road,” Krasner said.
“He’s talking about the cancellation of elections because of a crisis where there is no crisis. America needs to wake up. This is serious. We have elected officials saying nothing and doing nothing.”
All of these warnings might sound rather alarmist and conspiratorial. Trump certainly lacks the legal power to cancel elections under federal law.
But he’s also flirted with these kinds of things plenty of times and shown a real disregard for democratic norms and election law:
- He not only sought to overturn the 2020 election based on lies about voter fraud, but he later turned those who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, into something amounting to heroes of the MAGA right.
- He has repeatedly flirted with the idea of trying to seek a third term in 2028, despite that being expressly forbidden by the Constitution.
- Back in 2020, he floated delaying the election, despite not having the power to do so.
- In 2022, he claimed purported voter fraud “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
- And last year, he made odd comments suggesting Christians who voted for him in 2024 wouldn’t have to vote in 2028 because he would “have it fixed so good.”
After those last comments blew up, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited Trump to clarify them. She claimed his critics who were saying he wanted to cancel future elections were being “ridiculous.”
But Trump repeatedly declined to directly rebut those critics.
The president has also recently sought to expand his control over elections – and done so unilaterally, by executive action. Early in his term, he sought to boost proof of citizenship requirements for registering to vote. And recently, he began a push to end mail voting and voting machines.
He doesn’t appear to have the power to do any of that. But what Democrats are increasingly suggesting could happen is not a legal effort to commandeer or cancel elections, but an extralegal one – or one that seizes on a manufactured crisis.
And the idea that Trump could take all of it too far is a concern that may not seem so ridiculous to many Americans.
A Public Religion Research Institute poll last year, for example, showed 49% of Americans said there was a real danger in Trump using the presidency to become a dictator. (And this wasn’t just a case where all partisans assumed the other side would do that; only 28% had the same worry about Kamala Harris.)
The question, as always with Trump, is whether he’s being provocative for the sake of provocation, or he really has designs on burrowing his way into the election process to try to hold onto power.
Democrats are increasingly calling on people to start paying attention.
