A group of loyalists Donald Trumpincluding the lawyer Peter Ticktina personal friend of the US president and part of his legal team in the unsuccessful 2022 lawsuit against the Democratic Party for wanting to harm the New Yorker by linking him to the 2016 Russian plot, has prepared a text that can serve as a draft for the executive order that Trump has promised to sign if, as it seems, his electoral reform project falls in the Senate.
The SAVE Act, by which voters must provide proof of their status as American citizens and prohibits unjustified voting by mail, was narrowly approved in the House of Representatives, but has been stalled for some time in the Upper House, where it does not have the necessary consensus.
The law represents a constitutional earthquake that would have to have the support of the Supreme Courtsince the American Magna Carta does not attribute any jurisdiction to Washington or the White House in electoral processes.
Trump’s objective is to reverse this situation so that he can manipulate the different elections at will. From deciding who votes and how to participating in the recount, something unusual in a country where states and counties have all the authority in this regard.
It could even be the case that Trump decides to suspend the elections by appealing to some international threat.
Midterm legislative elections traditionally serve to punish the party in power and this year does not look like it will be an exception. Hence, Trump has repeatedly stated that “they should not even be celebrated”, since his Government is doing so well that exposing himself to the judgment of the electorate seems unnecessary to him.
He has not yet publicly ruled out even running for a third term in 2028, despite the fact that the twenty-second amendment prohibits it.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump shake hands during a press conference after their meeting to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine in Anchorage.
Reuters
The Russian precedent
In any case, breaking the current order of a democratic country is not easy. It can be done with the support of the army or by twisting the laws until they say what you want.
Having ruled out the first, MAGA is focusing on the second, which is why the draft that is circulating in the media and in the offices of congressmen has the advice of important legal figures.
The objective would be, as we said, to justify that there is an external threat that can decisively influence the process.
It is still curious that this is done in favor of the man who, in 2018, compared to Vladimir Putinassured that he believed the Russian president’s word that his country had not intervened in the 2016 elections… despite the evidence published during the previous months by US intelligence itself.
The president’s denialism did not prevent his entourage, made up mainly of the then Secretary of Defense, General John Mattis; the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; and the then National Security Advisor, John Boltonissued an executive order in 2018 that threatened sanctions against any country that could try to intervene in the legislative elections of that year.
This executive order, endorsed and expanded in 2023 by Joe Biden, is one of the legal bastions on which the MAGA movement now relies.
John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, in September 2024.
Fake driving licenses?
Now, for this to happen, it is necessary to specify what this “external threat” consists of, although it is not even clear that this justifies a centralization of the electoral process.
Acknowledging that Russia may be behind cyberattacks and poisoning campaigns would be doing Putin a disservice and would mean reliving the ghosts of 2016 that Trump wants to leave behind as soon as possible.
For this reason, MAGA has sought a new date and a new enemy.
The date is 2020, that is, the elections that Trump has spent five and a half years insisting were “rigged,” and the enemy is China.
According to the MAGA draft, China would have tried to rig these elections and cites FBI documents already made public by the Republican senator. Chuck Grassley in June 2025, for which China would be trying to manufacture fake driving licenses to obtain votes by mail.
We must remember that in the United States there is no identity card as we understand it in Spain, which is why the driver’s license is one of the most common methods of identification.
The plot would have focused above all on Arizona, where even the National Intelligence Agency, led by the pro-Russian Trumpist Tulsi Gabbardhas already proceeded to seize thousands of votes stored in different warehouses “for study.”
The future of democracy
The normal thing is that Gabbard finds some type of scandalous manipulation supposedly silenced until now by all her predecessors. He has his place in it.
The next thing would be to attribute the manipulation to China and thus justify some type of national security order that dispenses with Congressional ratification and is sufficiently ambiguous so that the Supreme Court does not rule until after the legislative elections.
An election in which, if everything is centralized in the White House, there is no hope that the Republicans will lose. Rome does not move with Santiago to end a Democratic majority in the House and Senate.
The future of American democracy obviously depends on the success of this entire plan. Even if it does not go ahead – many people would have to become corrupt or look the other way – there is always the possibility of not accepting the results and preventing the formation of new parliaments. Trump and his people know a little about that.
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