Trump: ‘I should have’ seized ballots in 2020 election

President Donald Trump said he “should have” ordered the National Guard to seize ballot boxes during the 2020 election, raising fears he will actually do so in the upcoming midterm elections. 

Trump made the comments in an interview with the New York Times that ran over the weekend. When asked if that order, which he considered giving in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was ever a real option, Trump ignored the illegality of such an action to opine about the feasibility instead. 

“I don’t know that they [the National Guard] are sophisticated enough,” Trump said. “You know, they’re good warriors. I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”

Trump then avoided answering a follow up question about whether he would make such an order in the future. 

Despite lacking all evidence, Trump has long insisted that he was cheated in the 2020 election. The president and his supporters seized upon a conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems machines were somehow hacked, leading some advisors to urge their confiscation. Those lies, repeated on Fox News, led to Dominion winning a $787 million defamation lawsuit against the network. 

In December 2020, the White House drafted, though never issued, an executive order purportedly giving Trump the authority to order the military or law enforcement to seize voting machines.

States are constitutionally empowered to run elections with Congress as the federal body with authority to regulate them. The president has no legal authority to order the seizure of any election machine or ballot box. 

Despite that, the president’s most fervent supporters have urged him repeatedly this year to invoke non-existent emergency powers to usurp control of the 2026 midterm elections. 

“The president’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States — as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have,” said Cleta Mitchell, a prominent anti-voting lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election, during an interview earlier this year. 

“Then, I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward,” Mitchell added.

The Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela and kidnapping of the nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has reignited hopes among MAGA conspiracy theorists that evidence of Dominion tabulator tampering in 2020 will emerge. 

Dominion was purchased by a former GOP election official and rebranded as Liberty Voting. Dominion sued lawyers who represented Trump’s attempts to undo the 2020 election results, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, over false claims they made. Both settled their lawsuits, with Powell even admitting in a filing in federal court that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”

Trump’s ability to deploy the National Guard was recently curtailed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld a lower court decision keeping troops out of Chicago. Trump had repeatedly ordered National Guard units to American cities in conjunction with the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement maneuvers this year. But he did so citing an obscure legal provision, rather than the Insurrection Act — a more common, if controversial, option that gives the president sweeping authority to use troops to quell violence, suspend Posse Comitatus and enforce domestic laws. 

During the lengthy interview, the Times reporters tried to press Trump on other election related issues. Asked if he’d accept the result of the midterms should Democrats win, Trump intimated he would not. “I always respect the results of elections, but the elections in our country are rigged,” Trump said. “We have a bad election. We have to have voter ID. We should have same-day election. We should not have mail-in votes.” 

The reporters also asked Trump about his attempts to block postal voting. But, in typical Trump fashion, the president never provided a clear answer, instead just repeating his dislike of the voting method. “When you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections. It’s very simple,” he said at one point. 

“Well, I’d love to stop mail-in ballots,” Trump said later, before pivoting to rant about voter ID laws.