The US president has again threatened to use executive power to subvert the fall midterm elections. If successful, this move would strike a crippling blow to democratic rights and would represent a giant step toward one-man rule.

During an August 10 interview with Donald Trump, right-wing commentator Wayne Allyn Root suggested the president might declare a national security emergency to enact provisions of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), currently stalled in the Senate. “If you do this in the next month,” Root told Trump, “we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s help.”

“Stranger things have happened,” the president responded. “I’ll leave it at that.”

EDITORIAL

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions, particularly among those populations the administration fears most: Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans; youth; women; and workers in the factories and on the land.

Under the guise of ensuring only US citizens cast a ballot, the Act would require individuals to present proof of citizenship in person at an election office in order to register to vote. Only an unexpired passport, or an enhanced driver’s license — available only in five states, would serve as stand-alone proof.

A military ID would have to be accompanied by service records indicating birthplace; all other forms of photo ID — including the REAL ID — would have to be coupled with a birth certificate bearing an official seal. Most insulting is that tribal ID alone — the document that proves one’s Native American ancestors were the first humans to occupy this land — would not be considered proof of citizenship.

Currently, about 12 percent of voters do not have the necessary documents on hand to meet SAVE Act standards. To get them costs time and money, in essence, a hidden “poll tax.” These hurdles would impact working people disproportionately as they are less likely to have a passport or the flexibility to visit an election office during business hours. And the burden would fall more heavily on some than others:

• In the 30 largest counties by area in the West, rural voters would have to drive an average of 260 miles round-trip to an election office. In Alaska and Hawaii, some voters would have to fly. This cost in money and time is significant, particularly for workers and small farmers and ranchers.
• People of color are disproportionately represented among those without ready access to proof of citizenship. Nearly half of African Americans under 30 do not have an ID with their current name and address. Many Blacks born before the civil rights era were never issued a birth certificate at all.
• About 24% of those under 30 also do not have ready access to qualifying documents. Young people, who tend to move more frequently, would need to present their documents each time they re-register.
• An estimated 69 million women do not have a birth certificate that matches their legal name. They would also have to provide additional paperwork.

The SAVE Act adds to a pattern of other attacks on voting rights by the Trump administration.

On March 31, the president issued an executive order requiring states to turn voter rolls over to the Postal Service — effectively seizing control of the voting process, a prerogative of the states under the US Constitution — and blocking the post office from delivering completed ballots of voters who are not on federally approved lists.

On August 21, the Postal Service published regulations that would comply with Trump’s call to restrict the popular voting-by-mail practice just months before the midterm elections. The Postal Service said it would deliver mail ballots only in states that shared voter data with the federal government and would review every envelope for compliance with the new standards.

The March 31 executive order had been largely blocked by federal courts. But on August 24, in an emergency ruling, the Supreme Court said Trump could proceed with implementing the restrictions to mail-in ballots. The justices cautioned that their order is still “preliminary” and will have to undergo full review. Don’t hold your breath the high court will safeguard voting by mail in its “full review”!

250 years of the fight for universal suffrage.

Since the founding of the republic, working people have fought to expand democratic rights, beginning with the necessary addition of the first ten amendments to the Constitution — the Bill of Rights. The extension of voting rights, initially restricted to only about 6% of the population — white male property owners — has been at the center of that fight.

It took nearly 100 years and a civil war before Black men were allowed to vote. Even with the 1870 ratification of the 15^th amendment to the Constitution, literacy tests, poll taxes, and racist violence limited the exercise of that right in many states.

It then took another half century and a new constitutional amendment before women won suffrage in 1920. Only in 1965 did pressure from the Civil Rights movement lead to passage of the Voting Rights Act, making it illegal to deny access to the ballot based on racial discrimination. The radicalization of the 1960s, when youth who could not yet vote were being drafted in large numbers and shipped to Vietnam, led in 1971 to the reduction of the voting age to 18.

On April 29 of this year, however, the US Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act — already weakened by previous rulings. The court claimed that racism is no longer a factor in elections or representation in Congress. The ruling allowed Louisiana lawmakers to draw a new electoral map that diluted minority representation, setting a precedent for the entire country.

If Trump declares a “national emergency” it would be a huge further step to turn back gains in voters’ rights won over the last 250 years.

What’s the “emergency”? First, it is a continuation of the president’s obsession with erasing the historical record of his loss in the 2020 election — a delusion based to a large degree on the narcissism and recklessness of an ego-maniacal emperor wannabe who hates to lose. Trump’s false claims that massive voter fraud was the root cause of his 2020 defeat have been unending.

A case in point was Trump’s prime-time address from the White House on July 16, when he repeated his unsubstantiated claim that the country’s voting systems are vulnerable to being “rigged and stolen,” without providing new evidence of a single fraudulent vote cast in any election. These allegations by Trump and his ilk drove the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Congress aimed — unsuccessfully that time — at overturning the will of the voters.

On the night of Trump’s July address, ultra-rightist Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist, texted CNN: “We need a National Security Emergency about the midterm elections immediately — this is a powerful predicate for that.” Bannon later predicted such a declaration is coming soon. “Take your No 2 pencil out,” Bannon said on his War Room video podcast on July 29. “It’s coming. It’s coming. Just block the last week of August out. It’s coming.”

This crusade has gained urgency as economic conditions worsen, the president’s popularity declines, and the possibility that his party could lose its congressional majorities this fall looms large.

Another motivation drives not just Trump and his cronies but broader layers of the ruling class.

US imperialism’s global hegemony is declining, as shown in Washington’s humiliation in the war on Iran and the ongoing loss of market share to China.

Resistance within the US borders is also on the rise, signaled recently by the 8 million who turned out for the No Kings rallies in March, and most graphically, by the tens of thousands who stood their ground against ICE in Minnesota and other states — even though these pro-immigrant protests have not stopped the ICE dragnets and deportations.

Citizens, lawful residents, and undocumented immigrants alike have been shackled and transported to brutal detention facilities in many states. Despite court orders that federal officials cannot stop, much less detain, anyone purely on the basis of perceived ethnicity, these stops are still happening on a daily basis in cities and towns across the United States.

Class antagonisms are becoming sharper and more naked.

When democracy threatens the capitalist families that rule.

In his book Democracy and Revolution, revolutionary Marxist George Novack wrote, “Democracy is an overhead expense for the capitalist rulers which they are willing to pay for only so long as they can afford it. Whenever the monopolists observe that sections of the oppressed aggressively utilize democratic rights and institutions to promote their welfare, when they see the workers and their organizations strongly challenge their supremacy, they feel that the democratic bodies and norms are becoming too dangerous a threat and hasten to restrict and eventually do away with them.”

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the White House has used its power to try to do just that. In 2025, the president signed an unprecedented 225 executive orders and issued an additional 49 this year, bypassing the legislative branch.

The administration has weaponized the Department of Justice, initiating prosecutions of election officials for alleged fraud and ballot tampering; it has campaigned against mail-in balloting and electronic tallying; and it has set in place mechanisms — from gerrymandering electoral districts to increased use of armed, masked agents on the streets — to interfere with voting processes and set the stage for voter intimidation.

In more than 60 cases, the courts have rejected allegations of voter fraud used to justify the SAVE Act. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) itself revealed the facts about alleged illegal voting by non-citizen immigrants in April. Only 0.03% of records reviewed by the agency merited additional review as possible voting by non-citizens. When further reviewed by state and local officials, these numbers shrank. Many of those flagged had been automatically registered in error by a state system and never intended to vote; others had already provided citizenship documents.

Nevertheless, the lies are repeated over and over again until they begin to sound like they must be true. Contradicting the USCIS data, Department of Homeland Security officials announced in mid-July that 250,000 non-citizens were found on voter rolls in four states. In an August 18 report, the US Census Bureau claimed that 24,000 non-citizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. Both claims were based on questionable “evidence” and methodology.

The moves to assert federal control over elections also contradict the Trump administration’s claim it favors states’ rights. After all, this was one of the main arguments used to justify the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the undermining of a woman’s right to choose abortion in state after state.

In Trump’s August interview with Root, the threat of a federal takeover of the November elections took the form of an off-hand remark, but the expressed intent represents a grave threat. Coupled with the recent investigations and prosecutions of activists and organizations across a broad political spectrum — from opponents of Washington’s economic war on Cuba to workers and their unions standing up to ICE, it reveals that at least a section of the ruling class may be prepared to take the next step toward authoritarian rule.

As New York Times columnist David French wrote in a July 23 article, “even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.”

French explained: “The actual process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969, a law that revised and updated previous legal procedures governing contested House elections. The law is detailed about process but largely silent about substance. The actual grounds for overturning an election are left to the discretion of the House.”

It’s a plausible scenario.

In addition, in mid-July, the Pentagon extended through Inauguration Day 2029 the year-old National Guard deployment to the nation’s capital. Nearly 5,000 troops now patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., setting a precedent for use of the military as a domestic police force. The announced end date is a thinly veiled threat that troops will monitor voting in the next presidential election and congressional certification of the results.

We are living in a situation where the safety valves of democracy are beginning to explode one by one. Lying, slander, bribery, venality, coercion, murder are taking on new dimensions. These are all manifestations of imperialist decline. Capitalism’s decay denotes the decay of contemporary society with its laws and morals.

We must recognize this new reality to be better equipped to stand up to the attempt to normalize the militarization of our streets and to defend civil liberties against the avalanche of efforts to undermine voting and other democratic rights.

Nothing is excluded under this administration.

If you appreciate this article, share it with friends and subscribe to World-Outlook (for free) by clicking on the link below.

Type your email in the box below and click on “SUBSCRIBE.” You will receive a notification in your in-box on which you will have to click to confirm your subscription.