The principle [of emergency power] lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.
—Justice Robert H. Jackson, dissenting in Korematsu v. United States (1944)
The president will do it. The predicate is being laid perfectly” [referring to President Trump’s possible plan to declare a national security emergency around the 2026 midterm elections].
—Steve Bannon interview, July 29, 2026
The enlargement and maintenance of unchecked presidential power, with impunity and partly for personal profit, is the singular strategic objective of the Trump presidency, and “It’s the power, stupid” is its central maxim.
This view of things puts the Constitution’s core tenet of limited government on its head. By aggressively exploiting weaknesses and ambiguities in the venerable old charter, Trump et al. have opened cracks for the deconstruction of America’s rules-based operating system which has long accounted for the country’s prosperity and stability. Despite the appearance of chaos, there is method in the madness, indeed a full-spectrum strategy of power.
Almost everything else that emanates from the White House is window dressing, a pretext or rationalization for the unabashed power grab. Serious, evidence-based policymaking and deliberative governing have been abandoned in favor of imposing simplistic solutions on complex challenges, from trade and climate to diplomacy and war, all the while bullying critics and bragging about greatness.
Every president has been self-regarding—Carter, Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes, Obama all had supercilious, narcissistic aspects—but none before Trump has so totally confused himself with the state and conflated personal interest with the public good. Even the paranoid Richard Nixon had enough dignity to resign after being caught trying to surveil the opposition during an election he was already likely to win (and did win) in a landslide. Nixon’s quiet exit from The White House in humiliation in August 1974 seems almost quaint by comparison with today’s malignant mores and culture of indecency. As Vice President J.D. Vance aptly observed, the Watergate scandal would be only a “12-hour news story” today.
In May of 2020, in an essay for Just Security, we expressed our concern that the threat to the presidential election process that year came not from abroad but from our own elected leader—that a president facing defeat might reach into a deep reservoir of presidential powers, declare a crisis keyed to a claim of foreign interference, put troops near the polling places, and litigate the opposition into submission. “We believe it is safer to take him at his word and fall prey to a degree of alarmism,” we wrote, “than to be complacent and sleepwalk into authoritarianism.”
Later in 2020, in an interview with Harper’s, we explored the analogy of a “Rolling Coup,” a concept which has been picked up in subsequent commentary—notably in the indispensable work of Richard Gephardt and Tim Wirth around the protection of election systems—and is now unfolding before us.
We were often told, politely and otherwise, that we were doomsayers and scaremongers, even after January 6.
Consider a partial ledger from Trump’s second term, six years on:
A draft national-emergency order to assert federal control over a midterm election, premised on an unproven claim of foreign interference, reported this February and denied by the President who reportedly reviewed it.
Federal agents raiding a county election office and carrying away the ballots.
Federalized National Guard troops and U.S. military personnel deployed to American cities on the basis of asserted emergencies, including high violent crime rates, widespread homelessness, severe civil unrest, and lawlessness tied to anti-immigration enforcement protests.
A domestic paramilitary force of unprecedented size and budgetary largesse, answerable only to the President, and deployed to largely Democratic American cities over the objection of governors.
A national directive instructing the counterterrorism apparatus to treat “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” as indicators of domestic terrorism.
An undeclared war—prosecuted past every congressional objection—that opened with the aerial assassination of a sovereign leader, closed the world’s primary oil artery and has no visible end.
What may have sounded like an alarmist scenario of 2020 is now the commonplace news environment of 2026.
We began the “Dancing in the Dark” essays in this publication in January 2024, before the last presidential election, as a mapping of various salient points of vulnerability in the machinery of American governance, including our Constitutional architecture, before anyone was back in a position to exploit them.
Part 1—about preventing a constitutional coup—showed how a bad-faith Congressional majority could potentially hijack a House election through the certification process, short-circuit the Electoral College, and filibuster the inauguration itself.
Part 2 examined the paradox of the Senate filibuster—the often-frustrating anti-majoritarian rule that could prove the last procedural barrier against an authoritarian legislative Blitzkrieg.
Part 3, titled “Electoral Helter-Skelter,” argued that what was coming was not only a brutal campaign but a hostile takeover of the state—that chaos was the core strategy, that for Trump personally there would be no return to the status quo ante, and that the takeover would be sought preemptively, before and not after the votes were counted.
Those essays were published during what proved to be the Biden interlude, when Trump was plotting his path back to the White House and reflecting on the missed opportunities for power consolidation in his first term. Liberals tended to assume that the Biden Administration represented a reversion to a normal range of the curve of American democracy, and that the risk of future deviations had been extinguished. They were badly mistaken.
Between January 6, 2021, and his return to power on January 20, 2025, Trump and his allies developed a blueprint (see Anne Nelson, “Project 2025: The Latest Plot Against America”) to consolidate control over the government, the media, and critical elements of the private sector. His retribution and consolidation program would be armed at a terrifying scale and pace never seen before with the investigative, prosecutorial, and regulatory powers of the presidency.
The present essay, Part 4, has been composed with a seasoned incumbent in power—a president with full command of office, directing the Justice Department, the FBI, ICE (the largest new federal police force in American history), the IRS, the SEC and FCC, the intelligence community, the armed forces. He is using each agency in a coordinated attack on his political adversaries in ways that would have been dismissed as fantasy only a few years ago.
The dark dance goes on, but the ballroom and music have changed. So has the main question. It is no longer “what could a bad-faith actor do with these institutional vulnerabilities?” It is “what is he doing with them, in plain sight, and what remains to be done about it before November 3, 2026, and the election of a Speaker of the House on January 3, 2027?”
And, importantly, before the 2028 presidential election as well. Whatever happens this fall, Trump has two years remaining in power in this term. The midterms are like the shot clock, within a game clock that is much longer.
The first two sections of this essay discuss the peculiar characteristics of Trump 2.0 as a power-driven political enterprise. The third section describes the “Devil’s Accordion File”—the elements of a ramified, radical strategy to hold on to power at almost any cost as we approach the test of the 2026 midterms and look toward 2028. Trump may not have a strategy or contingency plans for the Iran War, but he certainly does so for staying in power in the U.S. The final section explores briefly what can be done by citizens and civic leaders to mitigate the substantial risks to future of the Republic.
One more preliminary note, because we know the objection by heart: this is Trump Derangement Syndrome; you take him too seriously. We answered the charge in Part 3 and real world events have answered it since, but let us restate the method. We take no position here that depends on reading anyone’s soul.
We are political risk analysts, not prognosticators or bettors on Kalshi or Polymarket. We live in a world of shifting and accelerating probabilities in which old certainties crumble overnight. Almost uniquely in the world, the U.S. used to enjoy an asymptotic relationship to zero risk, but our country’s risk curve is bending skyward into zones of unprecedented volatility and unreliability. As analysts, we read documents—budgets, directives, executive orders, court rulings, congressional hearing transcripts. We listen and we count. What follows is not psychiatry. It is arithmetic.
I. The Thesis
James Carville taught us to resist distraction from what was fundamental in 1992 politics. The economy surely remains the dominant factor for voter sentiment, but our rulers have something else on their minds. What is fundamental in the politics of 2026? It’s the power, stupid.
In contrast with his random walk through the business of policymaking, including the Iran war, Trump has a layered, scenario-driven strategy, with ramified contingency plans, to stay in power at all costs, even if it means undermining the electoral process or the electorate’s confidence in it. Power is the sole principle.
The political will, personal motivation, legal architecture and technical infrastructure are by now all in place. Means, motive and opportunity to override democratic norms are at hand.
Mainstream reporting, such as the fine work by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is catching up with this reality. Their new book is aptly titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, and the dust cover highlights the notion of inherent executive power with a quote from the boss: “Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President. But I don’t even talk about that.”
Trump’s success in consolidating and wielding power is not preordained; but neither is his failure.
Every serious analytical error made about Donald Trump across a decade has flowed from the same premise—that he wants something other than power; that the tariffs, the culture wars, the deportations, and the crypto ventures are the ends and the accumulation of unaccountable executive authority the means. Reverse the lens and the picture resolves. The ideology is negotiable. The policy is fungible. What is constant is the drive to make power permanent, personal, and profitable—and above all to make it safe to hold and ruinous to lose.
And the method of holding it is not a temperament. It is a doctrine, learned young and stated on the record. Trump’s education came at the feet of Roy Cohn—Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, the man who gave mid-century fear its legal form, then spent three decades as fixer, teacher, and attack instrument for a young Queens developer. Another recent book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark, serves up an encyclopedic chronicle of Trump’s tutelage. Cohn’s credo survives in his own words: “My scare value is high. My arena is controversy. My tough front is my biggest asset.”
The student absorbed Cohn’s catechism—attack, admit nothing, claim victory—and in March 2016 he recited its first principle to two reporters who asked. Told of President Obama’s dictum that real power means getting what you want without violence, candidate Trump corrected the premise: “Real power is through respect. Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear.” Bob Woodward took the sentence seriously enough to make it the title of his first book on this presidency, and after the 2024 election issued his verdict: “we better be frightened.”
The president’s impunity is now a matter of constitutional law thanks to the current Supreme Court’s capricious interpretation of the founding charter’s meaning. In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court conferred absolute immunity for acts within the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all official acts. Justice Sotomayor’s vigorous dissent compressed the ruling into a sentence: “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
The elasticity of the high court’s interpretation of constitutional powers and rights, whether rationalized under the sporadically applied rubric of original intent (the conservative meme) or underlying principles (the liberal meme), by now strains credulity and puts the Court’s legitimacy in doubt. If expert interpretation of the founding political compact is so fraught and uncertain, the rule of law looks as though it mostly obeys the law of power.
On the first day of the second term, the plenary Article 2 pardon power was exercised for January 6 defendants, including those convicted of seditious-conspiracy—erasing, in a single morning, the fruits of the largest investigation in the history of the Justice Department.
See this in historical perspective: Watergate ended in convictions that reached an Attorney General; Iran-Contra ended in convictions vacated and pardoned; January 6 ended in a failed impeachment and curtailed criminal prosecution as well as mass clemency. Three times in fifty years the law tried to catch up with an out-of-bounds executive operation, and each time the consequence has been smaller.
The pattern of personal profiteering is now a matter of public record. The president’s own financial disclosure, filed this summer, reports more than $1.4 billion in income from crypto ventures in 2025—from a meme coin whose small investors mostly lost money while insiders made fortunes, and from World Liberty Financial, the Trump family firm whose tokens have been eagerly snapped up by foreign funds and other favor-seekers. Among other examples, it has been reported that the president personally traded, in the millions, the stock of a surveillance contractor scaling up under his own security directives.
Political scientists have a plain word for government operated as a private revenue stream: kleptocracy. And kleptocracy obeys an iron law—the wealth is safe only while the power lasts. Exit means exposure; exposure means claw-back, prosecution, ruin.
Money and Power. Put the two together and you have the equation that governs everything in this essay. A president for whom the loss of power means personal, legal and financial catastrophe will rationally spend whatever it costs to retain power. He may not succeed, but he could bring us all down failing.
Caesar crossed the Rubicon not from appetite alone, but because laying down his command meant standing trial. The Founders tried to design a presidency that a man could safely leave. This critical design assumption has failed. For the first time, we are governed by a president who cannot afford to become a private citizen again—and who has, in the immunity ruling, the pardon power, and the machinery described below, the means to ensure he never has to.
II. The Marriage of Convenience
The DNA of Trump 2.0 is different from Trump 1.0 in many respects. Foremost is the fact that the first term could have been a fluke—and indeed the popular vote went against him in 2020 – but still the American electorate narrowly voted to bring him back in 2024, in the face of all the evidence.
Trump 2.0 necessarily reveals something deeper about forces and attitudes pervasive in American society. It’s true that Trump is a uniquely gifted populist communicator, but the significant point is that large sections of the population are inclined to endorse and tolerate his brand of rope-a-dope leadership for their own reasons. People vote for the leaders they want and get the leaders they deserve.
The first term was like a serious accident that the system’s antibodies partially contained—thanks to the “adults in the room,” an opposition House, professional lawyers and generals who slow-walked the worst orders. Vice President Mike Pence played a key dissenting role at the pivotal moment on January 6, which otherwise could have ended in a constitutional meltdown.
In 2024 the electorate—with full knowledge of January 6, the convictions, new revelations of personal indiscretions, the published plans—chose this second Trump presidency. We do not condescend to the voters who made that choice; we note only that the choice forecloses the comfortable theory that all of this is a misunderstanding.
The second Trump term is a far more deliberate project, and it rests on an electoral mandate. To be sure, Trump eked out the 2024 win with a mere plurality. But one of Trump’s populist tricks is to ignore his consistently weak approval ratings—under 40%—and to rule as though he has an 85% mandate, staring down critics and intimidating the resistance.
Another critical distinction from the first term is that Trump 2.0 represents an extraordinary collaboration between MAGA pitchfork populism and the tech evangelism of the Silicon Valley brotherhood. This condominium of interests between unlikely bedfellows has transformed the nature of political power.
It is a marriage of convenience: selfish material interests, not higher values or principles. The union is unnatural but stable. Even after the rather public Trump-Musk tiff of egos in 2025, the relationship has endured and even flourished. Musk’s empire has not lost government contracts or access. The DOGE legacy of destroying government agencies and obtaining access to vast databases on the private lives of citizens lives on. Thiel’s and Musk’s political designees such as the Vice President and the Treasury Secretary remain in place.
The MAGA tribalists are deeply suspicious of tech elites who live above the weather, and the latter have no love lost with the toiling masses aggrieved by globalization. Yet despite the inherent incongruity of this ungodly union, the political logic is clear: Trump gives the tech bros a populist voice that they would otherwise lack, and the tech bros give Trump an overwhelming digital and media edge, plus massive financial muscle to obviate the need for deference to Wall Street and other traditional donors. This is a matrix of raw power and a vantage of strength he could only dream about in 2016.
The strong bond that keeps these unlikely partners together is their mutual interest in overturning the Establishment, breaking the System, and permanently reshaping the political economy according to their own business models and maintaining power as long as possible. This is the “regime change” Haberman and Swan are referring to.
For Trump and his high-tech allies, democracy and elections are an inconvenience, a necessary evil at best. The prestige of public support is always welcome, but the uncertainty of free and fair voting outcomes is not. They crave popularity as most authoritarians do; but if the choice is popularity or power, the only option is power.
In short, behind the Trump 2.0 electoral coalition stands a governing coalition new in our history: the marriage of MAGA populism, which supplies the votes and the grievance, with a faction of Silicon Valley wealth, which supplies the money, the tools, and—the under-examined part—an ideology of radical change for the purpose of maintaining power.
Part 3 of our series traced the strange philosophy of the tech right: Peter Thiel’s flat declaration that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” the will-to-power dressed in a hoodie. Two years on it is no longer a salon provocation; it is an information procurement hegemon. One data-integration firm now sits astride the IRS, DHS, ICE, and the Pentagon’s books, its chief executive promising “an operating system for the entire government,” its alumni seeded through the agencies, a dozen Privacy Act lawsuits trailing behind—that statute written after Watergate precisely to prevent the pooling of tax, medical, and immigration files against citizens.
The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book; the lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.
One good reason for this is they are traveling on a one-way street; there is no safe return to the status quo ante. The president, his family and his confederates have been engaged in actions that would have been considered “crimes and misdemeanors” in the past—civil rights violations, indifference to constitutional mandates, abuses of power, insider trading, kleptocracy—indeed Trump was prosecuted for lesser offenses after the first term but avoided any sidelining penalty. The SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for acts in office as well as the plenary pardon power put the presidency in an unprecedented position of impunity. But still, the risk of allowing the old order to be restored is not worth taking.
That brings us to the two key questions— how long can they hold on to power, and how will they try to do it?
The earliest—but not the last—test of Trump’s strategy for retaining power, and by extension remain a free man, will be the 2026 midterms. It’s normal for the opposition to make gains in the midterms, and this time should be no different, all things being equal.
Losing either the House or the Senate would dent Trump’s prestige and open the door to unwelcome investigations. Trump’s dream of eliminating the Senate filibuster which we discussed in Part 2 might disappear.
Midterm elections are the immune response of the American system. Since the Civil War the president’s party has lost House seats in nearly every midterm, and no president polling where this one is polling has escaped rebuke. If the pattern holds, the Administration loses the House—and with it the committees, the subpoenas, the impeachment power, and the machinery that will govern the certification of the 2028 election we mapped in Part 1.
For a normal presidency, midterm setbacks would be an inconvenience. For a presidency organized around impunity, it is almost existential. The day an opposition House gavels in, the investigations resume—the unimpeded crypto flows, the pardons, the deportation contracts, the wars all are suddenly under glass. And so the observed behavior of this White House has not been midterm moderation; it has been preparation for escalation.
Trump has shown he is eminently capable of serial “TACO” behavior, even making civilization-ending threats and then chickening out, repeatedly. But it’s vitally important to understand the threats and preparations being made are not limited to eliminating wicked ayatollahs in foreign lands but extend to throttling longstanding democratic norms and practices at home. And these two perilous vectors can be deliberately intertwined though the mechanism of a national security emergency, which is the nearly exclusive purview of the presidency.
Unlike the case of the Iran War, which appears to have been pursued without the barest suggestion of a plan, Trump and his cohort have a ramified if chaotic strategy to stay in power at home.
What follows is a short inventory: ten plans, an accordion file of election subversion tactics the Administration can expand or compress as circumstances require. Some are lawful, some are lawless, and the design genius is that each supplies predicate and cover for the next element in the strategic chain.
Hold the dates of the full electoral calendar in mind throughout: November 3, 2026, and its quieter companions, December 18, 2026, and January 3, 2027, [whose significance will become clear at Plan Eight].
Of course, Plan A is to try to win politically and the Democrats are wobbly, but the polls look exceedingly poor for the president three months out. The costly Iran War, grocery and fuel prices, revelations of rampant corruption and general anti-incumbent sentiment are taking a toll on both Trump’s image and his down ballot Republican proxies.
That means Plans B, C, D, E, F etc. become all the more relevant and must be made operational before it’s too late in order to maintain optionality.
Trump’s array of tactics to avert an electoral loss combines a range of conventional and unconventional tools. Trump and his team take the old methods to new levels of unapologetic directness even as they pioneer novel techniques and unconventional applications.
Taken together—these election subversion methods are not mutually exclusive but rather constitute a sequenced and layered strategy. The full election subversion strategy mixes subtlety and brutality, subterfuge and open tactics. It represents unprecedented intensification and escalation of the attack on our once seemingly settled Constitutional order, the operating system that had been taken for granted for several generations.
III. A Look into the Devil’s Accordion File
Shrink the Electorate
The first set of conventional tricks, the oldest play taken to the extreme, involves suppressing the vote through gerrymandering and voter purges: change maps and winnow voter rolls across key states.
The cartographic warring over redistricting is one element. At the president’s open urging, Texas, Missouri, Indiana, and others redrew their congressional maps in 2025—not after a census but mid-cycle, for the stated purpose of manufacturing House seats before this November; California answered with Proposition 50, suspending its own independent commission in retaliation. While we do not cheer the counter-escalation, we note the asymmetry of intent: one side redrew maps to avert an unfavorable election; the other, to preserve the ability to have one.
The SAVE Act, passed by the House in April 2025, is another, prospective, element (the Senate has thus far failed to fall in line). The act aims to oversee federal voter rolls and ID requirements, and it contains requirements (documentary proof of citizenship, matching one’s current legal name, to register or re-register) that millions of eligible citizens, disproportionately married women who changed their names, the poor, and the young, cannot promptly meet. This is a Trojan Horse for later attempts to invalidate the elections: Congress will be blamed for not passing it and thereby failing to prevent imagined election fraud.
In parallel, the administrative face of voter suppression arrived by directive: DHS demanded that states scrub their rolls against Federal databases—a demand that, if executed after early August, would collide with the National Voter Registration Act’s ninety-day quiet period. Note the jiu-jitsu waiting inside that collision: an injunction blocking an unlawful purge will itself be narrated as a court “protecting corrupted rolls.”
Poison the Well in Advance
A related tactic is to delegitimize the electoral process and thus the results in advance, just in case. The president’s national “stop the steal” address in July calling into question the integrity of the voting system was an element of this scheme.
The position is incoherent because Trump is effectively arguing that any election he wins is free and fair; but if he loses, the system must have been rigged by “the Deep State” or other obscure nefarious actors. The irrational theory raises the question of how he managed to fall prey to rigging in 2020 when he was in power. There is vanishingly little evidence of election fraud in the U.S.
Dancing in the Dark Part 3 introduced the concept of preemptive election interference—the delegitimization that begins before any vote exists to dispute. The 2026 edition is running on schedule. When New Jersey’s governor disclosed in July that a motor-vehicle software error had erroneously registered some 6,000 noncitizens—an administrative failure the state itself caught, corrected, and referred—the right-wing disinformation ecosystem converted it within a news cycle into proof of the “widespread fraud” that will retroactively explain any Republican losses in November.
Then came the July 16 address. The president went before the nation to announce that newly declassified intelligence revealed a foreign plot against the 2020 election—Chinese theft of hundreds of millions of voter files involving “eighteen states,” a cover-up by his own intelligence community, etc. Pay attention to what did not happen that night. The one lawful instrument built for foreign election interference—Executive Order 13848, with its sanctions and asset freezes—was not invoked against a single foreign person. The 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment had found no Chinese interference with election processes; the “new” material traces to an unsubstantiated 2020 tip declassified by the FBI director. A finding with real evidence produces sanctions. A flimsy finding built for nefarious domestic use produces a speech. Every authoritarian movement of the last century has understood that the story of the stolen election must be in place before the election it explains.
Criminalize the Machinery of Elections
The third tactic is to pre-position Federal law enforcement within the state mandated election apparatus, ostensibly to investigate the integrity of previous elections. With radical civil rights rollbacks such as Shelby v. Holder (2013), the mandated legislative authority for proactive intervention in the voting process is being replaced by an all of government fear campaign, based primarily on Executive Orders with no congressional or court mandate to sow chaos and promote false narrative that 2020 was stolen, as 2026 might be as well.
Here the incumbent’s advantage becomes decisive, because the vengeful candidate of 2024 could only threaten what the president of 2026 can execute today. On January 28, FBI agents served a search warrant on the Fulton County elections center outside Atlanta and carried away original 2020 ballots, envelopes, ballot images, and voter rolls. This amounted to a Federal raid on a local election office without known precedent, staged five years and two audits after the election in question, with Tulsi Gabbard, the now former Director of National Intelligence, physically present at the evidence collection.
The activity is not limited to Georgia. In April, the Justice Department demanded 2024 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan. In March, Chad Bianco, a county sheriff in California running for governor—seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local “election integrity” group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.
In July, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced the appointment of Federal election monitors for fifteen jurisdictions across six Democratic-leaning states for the primaries, promising “an even more expanded program” for the general—this from the same department that has threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution over their registration practices.
Election-denial activists now hold the relevant desks—at the White House, re-investigating 2020; at DHS, as deputy assistant secretary for “election integrity”; as special government employees whose theories of tabulation errors, all previously investigated and dismissed, appear in the Fulton County warrant affidavit itself. As The Atlantic put it in May, “so many people are pressing debunked and unsubstantiated election theories from within the government that their presence has become a feature of the system.” One state democracy litigator calls the method “death by 5,000 cuts.”
The mechanism is subtler than a stolen ballot box. Every county clerk and canvassing-board member in a contested state now certifies under the shadow of Federal criminal process—the raid, the grand jury, the monitor at the door. The seized ballots are not evidence in any ordinary sense; they are stage props for a narrative whose real audience we will meet later in the tactical timeline. This is not election security. It is political leverage, pre-positioned for the week it could be needed.
The Standing Army the Founders Feared
America’s new special police force is poised to play a role in voter intimidation at polling places.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, funded by last summer’s budget act at a scale approaching $170 billion—including $45 billion for detention, a 265 percent increase—is now the largest Federal law-enforcement organization in American history.
The ICE plans of record: detention “mega-centers” of up to 10,000 beds, a hundred-thousand-plus national detention capacity, an agent corps expanded by half, operating in a dozen American cities in a style—unmarked cars, masked agents, no badges—that has become its signature. The Attorney General has instructed prosecutors, by memorandum, to treat interference with the agency’s operations as a priority offense.
For our purposes the electoral question is narrow: where will these agents be on November 3? The Secretary of Homeland Security has pointedly declined to rule out deploying them to polling places; Democratic states are legislating bans; the Brennan Center for Justice has been reduced to publishing a paper entitled “Sending ICE to Polling Places Is Illegal”—a sentence whose necessity is itself the story.
ICE does not need to arrest a single voter. It needs only to exist, visibly, near the places where naturalized citizens and mixed-status families vote. The enemies of the Fifteenth Amendment understood this in 1876 with rifles and bonfires when they sought to undo Reconstruction. The new technology of intimidation has been federalized, funded, and issued body armor.
Manufacture the Enemy Within
Another key feature of the plan, echoing the Red Scare and McCarthy period, is the hunt for “enemies within” and Fifth Columns of communists, anti-Christians, and other terrorists in our midst. The message is that our house is haunted: be scared, and don’t be surprised if extraordinary measures must be taken.
In a sense the plan of fear may have begun in the aftermath of a murder. On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk—among the most consequential conservative activists of his generation—was assassinated at a Utah campus event by a young man who, investigators indicated, acted alone and belonged to no group. The crime was real, the grief was real, and neither required embellishment.
That evening, before the suspect was in custody, the president addressed the nation and assigned responsibility not to a gunman but to “the radical left,” vowing to find “each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity.”
Five days later, from the victim’s own broadcast chair, the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promised to use “every resource we have” to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” what he called a vast domestic terror movement. Twelve days after the murder came the Executive Order designating “Antifa” as the enemy within, and fifteen days later came National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.
On September 25, 2025, the president signed NSPM-7 titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”—effectively, McCarthyism distilled into a targeting decree. The lineage is personal, not rhetorical: the signer learned the trade from McCarthy’s own counsel. NSPM-7 instructs the roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Justice Department, the Treasury, and the IRS to pursue not acts but beliefs: its “indicia” of domestic-terrorist tendency include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and hostility to “traditional American views” of family and religion. Nowhere does the document mention the First Amendment. At the signing ceremony the President without evidence named two American philanthropists—Reid Hoffman and George Soros—as financiers of terrorism and called for one of them to be jailed.
Directives of such scope are not drafted in a fortnight; the architecture was waiting, and Kirk’s assassination supplied the warrant. The provocation need not be manufactured when it can be harvested. A real atrocity, committed by a real and unaffiliated killer, was converted—while the flag still flew at half-staff—into standing Federal authority over the opposition at large. The Reichstag fire in 1933 Berlin was real, too. What matters is who was waiting with the decree.
The implementation has been swifter than the commentary. An executive order designated “Antifa”—a label, not an organization—as a domestic terrorist entity, though no statute creates any such power. The State Department designated four obscure European so-called Antifa groups as foreign terrorist organizations, opening the potential for invoking the material-support offense against Americans who can be linked to them. (Anyone convicted of providing, attempting to provide, or conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization faces up to 20 years in prison, per offense). The Attorney General’s implementing memorandum—characterized by the Justice Department’s own former counsel for domestic terrorism as an “operational order”—establishes secret lists of “domestic terrorism organizations,” with no notice, no hearing, no appeal.
The FBI’s next budget funds an NSPM-7 “Joint Mission Center” staffed from ten agencies to identify domestic terrorists “proactively”—before any crime—while the bureau expands a watchlist that already carries thousands of U.S. persons; the director has testified to a 300 percent increase in domestic-terrorism investigations—“We’re expanding the watchlist”—and his co-deputy describes the method: “we’re really looking at attacking the money.” The White House counterterrorism director—author of the first National Counterterrorism Strategy to place domestic political movements on the same footing as al-Qaeda—supplied a catalogue of operational verbs on the radio in May: “we are hunting down, we are arresting, prosecuting, neutralizing those violent left-wingers.” The deputy chief of staff, Miller again, states the ambition without euphemism: “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” More than 3,000 nonprofits have signed a letter of opposition; thirty-one members of Congress have called the directive illegal.
And the sentences have begun to come down. They should be read slowly. On June 23, in the Northern District of Texas, eight defendants tied to a July 4, 2025 “noise demonstration” outside the Prairieland ICE detention center were sentenced to a combined 450 years in Federal penitentiary—the first sentencings, the FBI director announced, of “defendants affiliated with Antifa” since the designation order.
One defendant fired on an officer and drew one hundred years; armed violence is a crime in any republic, and his case is not our argument. The other seven are. Five drew fifty years apiece for “material support of terrorism,” the prosecution offering as evidence of a terrorist enterprise the wearing of black clothing, the use of the Signal messaging app—standard equipment in every Federal agency—and membership in an Emma Goldman book club. A man who was not present at the demonstration at all received thirty years for moving a box of anti-fascist magazines out of his wife’s apartment after her arrest; the wife received seventy. The judge applied the terrorism enhancement to every count and ran the sentences consecutively. These are the penalties American law reserves for its worst violent felons, imposed for pamphlets and group chats, because a directive instructed the apparatus to find terrorism in beliefs and the apparatus obeyed.
This is the domestic-terrorism designation machinery doing exactly what it was built to do: formalize fear—fear given a legal predicate, a surveillance budget, and a prosecutorial arm. Cohn’s scare value, federalized. And the effective audience for a 450-year message is not the eight who received it; it is every donor, organizer, and volunteer who concludes that staffing a registration drive, or hosting a book club, is no longer worth the risk.
We ask conservative readers, as is our habit, to run the machine in reverse. A presidential power that is permitted to criminalize “anti-capitalism” today could just as easily criminalize “Christian nationalism” under a future administration; with a new executive memorandum, a pre-crime center aimed at “Antifa” could retarget militias and gun clubs. That is why no such repressive machinery has ever been permitted in peacetime: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover built its ancestor in the dark, and COINTELPRO became the scandal of a generation.
NSPM-7 builds its authoritarian machinery in daylight and calls it policy. Its electoral function is specific: it converts the opposition’s civil society—the donors, the organizers, the nonprofits that register voters and staff the count—into potential domestic terrorism suspects, on a Federal watchlist, in the twelve months before the midterm elections.
And keep this in mind: NSPM-7 need not be the last directive of this Presidency aimed at rooting out supposed internal enemies. The road is open for more imperial decrees in the name of national security. The next NSPM with further sweeping investigative powers and targets could already be drafted.
Provoke the Enemy Within
One of the more insidious tactics for predicating election uncertainty is baiting popular unrest and civil violence as a pretext for declaring local and/or national emergencies, with the potential to invoke delegated Article 1 powers such as the Insurrection Act. Federalizing and deploying the National Guard for police action has already been tested in Chicago, California and Washington, D.C.: these instances serve as trial runs for something bigger.
This pattern ran through 2025 like a drumbeat. The playbook is clear: inject masked federal agents into a Democratic-dominated city; wait for the friction; call the protest an insurrection; send troops to quell the situation. Los Angeles in June 2025—the first federalization of a state’s Guard over its governor’s objection since 1965, with 700 Marines for emphasis. Portland and Chicago in the fall. Then, on December 23, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Illinois held the deployments unlawful, 6-3, and—let the record show—the administration, after some defiance-flavored delay, pulled the troops back. The guardrail held. We will bank it, and read the fine print, as the White House lawyers surely have: the Court construed 10 U.S.C. Section 12406(3) finding that the President had not exhausted the use of regular forces, but it did not touch the question of Insurrection Act authority, which had not been asserted.
The Insurrection Act—whose vague trigger, “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages,” commits the judgment to the president alone—has since been brandished by name. In January, after an ICE agent shot and killed a Minneapolis woman named Renee Good and the city erupted, the President posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E. … I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT.”
We know from the former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper what this President asked the last time he weighed that statute—“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”—and we know from Senate testimony what the current Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would do with a “lawful order” to strike designated terrorist organizations inside the United States: “I would definitely execute that order.”
Meanwhile the military’s legal immune system has been prepared: the service fired the JAGs, hundreds of military lawyers were transferred out, the general counsel’s office was staffed on the philosophy that “the mere presence of risk should not lead an attorney to withhold advising on possible options.” And since September 2025 the armed forces have conducted, in the Caribbean, more than two dozen lethal strikes against persons designated narco-terrorists—a category created by memo—killing near a hundred people without charge or trial. Former Pentagon lawyers have said the quiet part in public: a prerogative to kill outside the law, once established, “might be wielded elsewhere—including inside the United States.”
Here is the strategic point, and it is the one the opposition most needs to internalize before autumn: in this design, the backlash is the fuel, not the cost. Each provocation is chosen because the reaction unlocks the next authority—protest justifies troops, troops produce clashes, clashes justify the escalation of response such as invocation of the Insurrection Act. The whirlwind is not a risk the administration runs. It is the crop it is farming, with the potential harvest scheduled for the weeks around the election.
One assumption underwrites the strategy, and it may be the largest unexamined premise in American public life. A government that deliberately summons the storm must believe it can ride it. This White House evidently believes that with the largest Federal police force in our history, a hundred thousand detention beds, the Insurrection Act and other emergency powers in its holster, the fused databases of its surveillance contractors, and a military legal corps domesticated not to say no, it holds escalation dominance over its own citizens—that it can provoke disorder on schedule and suppress it at a profit. Perhaps. The whole thing could be a gross miscalculation.
No one has ever tested that proposition on a continental Republic of 340 million people and fifty governors accustomed to vibrant democracy. Rulers who made the same type of wager against their people—the Tsar in 1905, the Shah in 1978, Ceauşescu in 1989—occupy a crowded shelf in the library of fallen tyrants. The calculation holds until the hour it does not, and that hour never announces itself in advance. It is an enormous assumption, and we pray it is never tested. Nothing in the strategy and conduct catalogued here suggests its authors are praying with us.
Reach for the Commander-in-Chief Powers
Closely related to the last tactical array would be the use of an external national security crisis—war, terrorism, cyber hacking—as a pretext for invoking Article 2 “inherent” presidential powers, taking advantage of the president’s wide latitude as “commander in chief” and interfering with the election process from mail-in to polling places to certification. In other words, a faithless president could try to use hostilities outside, whether real or imagined, as a pivot to mess things up inside our borders during an election season.
Since September 2025 the United States has fought at least one major undeclared war: destroyers off Venezuela, strikes on alleged drug boats with survivors then struck again, a declaration of “armed conflict” with cartels, CIA covert action, and, on January 3 of this year, a strike on Caracas ending in the capture and extradition of Nicolás Maduro—followed by the president’s summary of the constitutional situation: “We are going to run the country.” Congress voted on none of it; both chambers tabled every war-powers resolution.
We hold no brief for Maduro. Venezuela was the rehearsal, and it taught the wrong lesson. The war came in cheap and fast—a capital struck, a dictator jailed —and it confirmed the oldest temptation of unaccountable power: hubris. Eight weeks later the doctrine went to Tehran. On February 28, American and Israeli forces opened Operation Epic Fury by killing, among others, the Supreme Leader of Iran—probably the first assassination of a foreign head of state by the United States in the contemporary era.
We note the residue: the executive has established, in practice, that it may designate an enemy, wage war on it, and decapitate its government on Article II authority alone, with Congress reduced to commentary. The Article 1 power to declare war, which resides with Congress, is all but dead letter because declaring war is an antiquated formality and the definition of war is murky—which is why the White House styles the Iran war a “military operation.” The War Powers Act, which might limit undeclared wars, is largely impotent.
Here is the question the nation has not been asked to consider: what does a president who cannot afford to lose anything do with a war he is not winning? Could the failure to end the Iran war—or indeed the escalation of the military campaign possibly even to the point of deploying tactical nuclear weapons, as has been suggested—turn into a context for declaring a national emergency? The “madman theory” which so far is failing in the Iran war context could be turned inward against the country. That is the calculus to carry through the rest of this essay: By now we know far too much to underestimate this president’s willingness to break norms and to gamble even with the future of the Republic as the stake.
A common misapprehension about the Trump method is to assume that the most recent outrage must have been the last, rather than a precursor. Venezuela and Iran need not be the last instances of Trump’s “wars of choice.” Cuba and Greenland are already on the white board. Other opportunistic interventions are possible, too.
A wartime presidency is the oldest solvent of republican constraint, and these wars have a distinguishing feature: their enemy is, by the Administration’s own framing, already inside the United States. That is the bridge over which a foreign war could walk home as domestic emergency.
We have seen the tail-wags-the-dog blueprint in the electoral context before, in December 2020, when a draft executive order invoked foreign interference to direct the military toward the seizure of voting machines—it was blocked then by White House lawyers who no longer work there. This February, journalists placed the same cast at a Washington roundtable—the former national security adviser presiding, sitting administration officials in the room—all pressing for a national emergency declaration to enable federal control of the 2026 midterms, with a draft order circulating to ban mail-in ballots and voting machines. Days earlier, a 17-page draft emergency order to the same effect had been reported and denied.
In 2020 the officials who would execute such an order refused. In 2026 the officials who would execute such an order helped write it. If the current Gulf War produces its October crisis—a sunk warship, a terror attack traced to Tehran, a malicious cyber event—every instrument in this hypothetical but usable catalogue upgrades at once.
The Certification Endgame
Everything above funnels toward the potential choke point we mapped in Dancing in the Dark Part 1: not the vote, but the count; not only the count, but the certification; and not only the certification, but the seating of new House members. What has changed is that we can now name the specific gears in the perverse mechanism to hijack a majority in Congress particularly in a close election in which a handful of seats decide the balance.
Begin with a correction of the popular nightmare. Executive Order 13848—the 2018 foreign-election-interference order which the July 16 address conspicuously declined to invoke—cannot touch a ballot, a count, or a seat. Its sanctions run against foreign persons only. The danger is pretextual, not textual.
That Executive Order’s real gift to a bad-faith incumbent is its calendar: it requires the Director of National Intelligence to deliver an assessment of foreign interference within 45 days of the election—for this cycle, on or about December 18, 2026, two weeks and two days before the 120th Congress is seated. A politicized assessment—classified, partial, leaked, or selectively declassified, much as the one offered by Trump in his address on July 16—is the only post-election Federal product capable of laundering a political claim into an “intelligence-community finding” inside the pre-January 3 seating window. It authorizes nothing. It credentials everything.
Now recall DID Part 1’s central mechanism, because it is the destination of the whole design when it comes to the midterms. The House is the final judge of its own elections and rules—and the old (outgoing) House is in a unique position to certify and seat the new (incoming) House. On January 3 the Clerk calls the roll from the states’ certificates; a seat whose certification has been delayed, contested, or entangled in a federal “foreign interference review” is simply omitted—and the majority is decided from those present and seated. Strip five or six seats from the roll in a close election—for example, in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and/or Wisconsin—and a minority becomes a working majority for determining the votes on the new Speaker and rules package.
The Senate is a different animal. Unlike the House, the Senate is a continuous body with only one-third of the seats at stake in any election. The Senate can expel one of its own members by a two-thirds vote. Taken together, this makes interference with the majority count much more challenging even though a much smaller number of seats—often just one – might tip the balance. A predatory executive attempt to manipulate the majority of the upper chamber would likely have to run through Federal prosecution: investigation, indictment, the historically proven path of forced resignation, which could potentially open the door for filling a vacancy (or two) at the right time by a cooperative governor.
There is an even more tail-risk version of interference with the Senate majority—pretrial detention of Senators on alleged national-security grounds, subtracting votes from the chamber without creating full vacancies—a scenario we assess as highly unlikely. Yet we no longer assess anything as completely unimaginable.
To repeat, in normal circumstances these would all be exotic and remote scenarios clearly cutting against the spirit of the Constitution and the rule of law. By now we know far too much about the stated intent and patterns of behavior of the chief executive to discount the risk of such no-limit constitutional nightmares.
Justice Jackson’s “Loaded Weapon”
Our late mentor Ambassador William Miller, who served as staff director of the Church Committee and the Senate’s special committee on emergency powers in the 1970s, used to tell us that the president of the United States holds two existential powers: to end the planet with the push of a button, and to end the Constitution with the stroke of a pen. The former is the most discussed fact in the nuclear age. The latter is among the least, and it constitutes the ninth and most extreme element of the election subversion strategy.
Since Eisenhower, presidents have maintained a portfolio of pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland—Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs—awaiting only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity. The practice was a product of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It did not disappear with the end of the Cold War; to the contrary, it remained in place and expanded after 9-11.
Presidential contingency plans for use of special powers during a conflict using weapons of mass destruction can be considered legitimate for national defense, but such Armageddon scenarios were obviously far beyond the contemplation of the drafters of the Constitution.
To say these emergency powers in the abstract are unlawful or unconstitutional would be debatable; in practice, there is no court that would substitute its own judgment for the president’s in real time.
At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count. None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens “considered dangerous,” the seizure of property and communications.
A TIME investigation in 2024 described the physical object: a book of drafts kept in a safe on the White House grounds, some with blanks left for the date and the circumstances; the career official who kept it called it “the Mad Libs for the most extreme measures of government,” and added: “He’s going to be surrounded by a set of people that would say, ‘You have the power to do this.’ Frankly, if he says, ‘Yes,’ and there are people that say go do it, what’s to stop him?”
We know precisely how much law stands behind these instruments, because the builders told us—once, in writing. In May 1980, after President Carter ordered the first thorough update of the PEADs in a decade, his FEMA director noted of PEAD No. 5—“Providing for the Mobilization of the Nation’s Resources” (approved by President Nixon in 1970)—that “because of its reliance on the ‘implied’ powers of the President and in the absence of a definitive legal basis for the PEAD, it was deemed inappropriate to seek OMB and DOJ clearance at this time.”
Read that sentence twice. The executive drafted orders for the most consequential powers a government can exercise, concluded they had no definitive legal or constitutional basis, and for these reasons declined to submit PEAD No. 5 for formal review and clearance by competent legal authority within the administration. The “loaded weapon,” ostensibly created for our own protection, was designed deliberately outside or beyond the law, and it has been passed hand to hand from that day to this one.
The precise shape of the contemplated emergency powers and the texts of PEADS are highly classified. Access to this information has been repeatedly refused even to the Congressional committees of jurisdiction—a House member was denied in 2007, a Senator seeking them was also denied in 2024.
Congress perhaps came closest to the truth about the extent of asserted presidential emergency powers back in July 1987, when Representative Jack Brooks (D-TX) tried to ask Oliver North, on live television, about the plan to suspend the Constitution—and was gaveled into silence. That exchange remains the high-water mark of public oversight of this machinery.
Two features make this ninth potential element of the election subversion strategy different in kind from the first eight.
First, invisibility: invoking the Insurrection Act for example requires a public proclamation—Congress and the press see it, courts can be petitioned, the statute can be amended. Signing PEADs requires nothing public at all—no notification, no sunset, no proclamation, and the shadow apparatus can be deployed in hours while the Supreme Court’s fastest emergency procedure is measured in weeks.
Second, convergence: the pieces that were missing when the PEADS portfolio was drafted now exist. NSPM-7 supplies the enemy list; the Joint Mission Center supplies the “pre-crime” names; the detention budget supplies a hundred thousand beds; the gutted JAG corps supplies the compliant chain of command; the immunity ruling supplies the impunity; and Plans Five through Seven can supply, on demand, the emergency.
As an example of the reach of emergency contingency planning, PEAD Number 6, in the one credible description we have, provided for the arrest and detention of citizens considered dangerous to national defense and public safety.
This country has executed that type of order once before, in 1942, against 120,000 Japanese Americans, and the Supreme Court blessed it in 1944—over the dissent of Justice Robert Jackson, who saw the risk of sanctioning as constitutional a military order based on supposed necessity to suspend the due process rights of citizens. In Jackson’s words, the Court’s approval of such executive emergency powers amounted to leaving on the president’s desk a “loaded weapon” awaiting the next claim of urgent need based on national security.
It’s worth noting that the odious Korematsu holding was finally overruled in 2018. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, strongly endorsed Jackson’s dissent saying Korematsu “has no place in law under the Constitution.” Better late than never.
Bear in mind that legal theories did nothing to stop the internment program in real time or to meaningfully remedy the damage done to its victims who lost freedom and property.
Supreme Court jurisprudence can move glacially over decades and then change in a lightning strike. A further problem is that, when it does move, the Court’s binding interpretation can move in different—and not necessarily progressive—directions as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which protected seemingly long settled women’s reproductive rights, dramatically illustrated.
The fact that a majority of voters today might agree that Korematsu was odious is a good sign, but the panic after 9/11 and the rushed passage of the PATRIOT Act, with its sweeping surveillance and police powers, showed how quickly both elected officials and the electorate were willing to suspend civil liberties if in principle it meant making the country more secure. For this reason, Justice Jackson’s warning about the “loaded gun” remains painfully relevant.
In any case, the operative scope of inherent Presidential emergency powers remains uncharted territory as a matter of jurisprudence. It is well to remember that, in a darker time and place in European history, the pro-Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt once observed that the key question in law is who decides on the emergencies: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptions.”
We are aware that this is the juncture in the argument where a certain kind of reader often reaches for the phrases “it couldn’t happen here” and “that’s a conspiracy theory.” We reply with the method of this series: every load-bearing fact above sits in the public record—the budgets, the Federal Register, the published investigations, the FOIA litigation, the memorandum in the Carter Library. We are identifying risk patterns based on the evidence.
Post-Cold War and post-9/11, the executive branch architecture remains in place to protect the country from the possible consequences of an existential attack. And there are few clear and enforceable limits to the emergency powers available to the president, whether delegated by Congress under Article 1 or inherent in the executive under Article 2.
This architecture is necessary, but its potential weakness or vulnerability lies with the character of the executive and those around him. When these terrifying powers are used solely for the purpose of maintaining office and avoiding accountability, we have lost our way.
Reflexive Control—the Audience of a Few Hundred
The tenth tactic is not a mechanism but a method—in a sense, a messaging environment in which the other nine run—and to see it clearly the reader must first accept an uncomfortable premise: the propaganda is not aimed at you.
A relentless multimedia indoctrination campaign is sowing seeds of distrust across the land. Doubt, fear and hatred are new meme coins of the realm minted in the Caesar-like image of this President and emblazoned with his favorite slogans of greatness.
Soviet military science spent decades formalizing a discipline it called “reflexive control”: the art of feeding an adversary precisely the mosaic of information—true, false, or curated—that leads him to make, of his own apparent free will, the decision you selected in advance. The doctrine has authors, journals, training syllabi and a bibliography. No one in American politics needed to study it in Moscow—demagogues rediscover and adapt these techniques instinctively.
The tactic has a signature: the same assertion arriving simultaneously through channels that pretend to be independent; speed privileged over accuracy, so the first framing is the anchor; indifference to internal consistency; and above all, un-falsifiability—every debunking metabolized as further proof of the cover-up. Sixty adverse court rulings did not close out the 2020 stolen-election claim because the claim was engineered so that nothing could. A claim built to be un-falsifiable is not a belief. It is an instrument.
An instrument aimed at whom? Not the mass public, which stopped moving years ago. The operative audience is the few hundred Americans who hold binding authority over the events of November through early January such as county canvassing-board members, secretaries of state and their counsel, judges, the Clerk of the House.
The material is not meant to persuade them. It is meant to generate sufficient ambient doubt that non-compliance presents itself to the official as reasonable—prudent, even brave. The seized ballots, the July 16 address, the December assessment, the monitors’ “irregularity” reports: each exists to furnish some future official with the interior monologue the operation requires: I am not stealing an election; I am declining to certify one the FBI is investigating; there was a classified briefing; there were riots.
The propaganda supplies the cover story. The official supplies the decision—and experiences it as his own. Jackson’s loaded weapon needed one more component, and this is its factory of pretext: the barely plausible claim of urgent need, manufactured at industrial scale, for an audience of a few hundred signatories.
Watch for the confirming indicator: messaging that narrows from the mass audience to named officials and named jurisdictions. When the volume rises without new evidence, the operation has entered its saturation phase. When it narrows to the certifiers, it has entered its decision phase.
The good news is that there is an antidote or countermeasure for this insidious propaganda tactic—once you can name it, it largely stops working on you.
IV. Not by Courts Alone
Many of these tactics can be challenged in court—and must be—but courts may not always move promptly enough to block the damaging executive actions, undo the damage to the process, restore normalcy and prevent a stolen or failed election.
Along the way, courts will be particularly reluctant to second-guess the president on national security findings about threats to the homeland. An unscrupulous Commander-in-Chief can try to move fast and create new facts on the ground. Of course, this cynical strategy requires willing implementers who take orders. It is little short of a civil war conducted “by other means.”
The dark scenarios we have described do violence to American institutions, to the rule of law and to our conception of best reading of the Constitution. However, to paraphrase the old saying, the scandal is not what is unconstitutional, but what could be constitutional—might allow the executive branch to get away with when it comes to emergency powers.
The opposition needs to learn how to do adaptive contingency planning of its own, how to think and operate strategically in a dynamic environment that is more like “politics by other means.” This way of thinking does not come naturally to limousine liberals, Boy Scouts, the remnants of the Center, whether GOP’ers or Clinton-Obama Third Wayers.
It is customary at this point to gesture at the courts, and the gesture is not empty. The past year’s ledger shows guardrails that held in key cases: Trump v. Illinois; the judge who voided the Pentagon’s retaliation against a senator who reminded troops of their duty to refuse illegal orders; the injunction that stopped a detention mega-center; the state supreme court that froze a sheriff’s ballot seizure. Fifty-two former federal judges of both parties have organized to defend the third branch, and we are proud to note our own association with that effort. The system is losing slowly, which is not the same as having lost.
But tally the structure against the calendar. The Chicago deployment was enjoined in October and decided in December—the troops were in the streets for the duration. The immunity ruling means no deterrent reaches the president; the pardon power means none reaches his agents; the Court’s limits on universal injunctions mean each abuse is litigated piecemeal while the clock runs. The vice president mused, before this term began, that a president should answer the courts as legend has Andrew Jackson answering Marshall: “let him enforce it”—and the deputy chief of staff called federal rulings an “insurrection” twelve times in a single day. The Supreme Court has no army; its authority over presidential power is a standing wager on Executive Branch good faith. And the ninth plan exists precisely because its designers understood the arithmetic: the shadow government deploys in four hours, and no court in America moves that fast. The courts are a wall, not a shield. Walls stop what is driven into them. They do not move to cover you.
Nor should the opposition console itself that winning the House restores the old equilibrium. As we observed in DID Part 2, this government does not legislate; it rules by executive order, emergency declaration, and impoundment. Divided government checks a legislating presidency. It checks one that rules by decree far less well.
We are not here forecasting whether Steve Bannon’s ominous prediction of an imminent declaration of national emergency by the president is correct, but we have concluded that the threat of executive actions along those lines is credible because the predicates are in place.
VI. What Is to Be Done
Each installment of this series has ended the same way, because this question is the only one that matters. The answer this time is not the centrist instinct—wait, de-escalate, trust the fever to break. It is adaptive contingency planning: assume each plan will be attempted; pre-position the counter. And the planning assumption must now be as wide as the conduct: a president who will gamble the Persian Gulf will gamble the republic. We must be prepared for almost anything —a frightening sentence to write about one’s own government, and one we write deliberately. The defenses below are ordered by leverage, and the reader will notice that the highest-leverage items are also the least glamorous. That is how it always is with machinery.
Harden the January 3 choke point—now. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 helped patch the presidential certification process after 2020 because it clarified the limited nature of the Vice President’s role; nothing comparable protects the seating of the House, and the window to fix it is the second session of this Congress, before November. A House rule amendment or a binding bipartisan leadership agreement governing the Clerk’s roll—providing that a state-certified winner is enrolled, period, and that “pending federal review” is not a ground for their omission—is the single most consequential democracy reform available in 2026, and too few are talking about it. Pair it with a statutory requirement that any intelligence assessment invoked in a certification proceeding be declassified in full—limiting the risk of bogus national security claims about the election process between the December 18 assessment and the January 3 roll call.
Unload the weapon. The remedy for Plan Nine has been drafted for years; what it lacked was urgency, and urgency has now been supplied. Senator Rand Paul’s REPUBLIC Act would require disclosure of the PEADs to Congress; the ARTICLE ONE Act would sunset emergency declarations absent congressional approval; the pending Insurrection Act reforms would define its triggers and time-limit deployments; and a Church Committee for the emergency state—the hearing Brooks was gaveled out of in 1987—is thirty-nine years overdue. Note the authorship of the first bill: a libertarian Republican.
The task of this fall’s campaigns is to put every candidate for the 120th Congress on the record: will you vote to unload the weapon of unbridled presidential emergency powers? And the deeper principle is the one international law already states: emergency powers exist to protect the life of the nation—never the tenure of a ruler, and never, under any reading, an incumbent’s path through an election.
Defend the certifiers—by inoculation, in advance. Because Plan Ten’s propaganda campaign aims at a few hundred officials, the defense of those officials is the defense of the election, and the science is settled: pre-exposure beats correction; ideally the antidote must precede the bite. This means that between now and Labor Day, the shape of the coming operation—the fraud narratives, the “irregularity” pre-positioning, the December assessment—should be described publicly, repeatedly, at low temperature, so that when it arrives it reads as a script, not a scandal. Through the fall, the response to each escalation is recognition, not refutation: this is what we told you to watch for, arriving on schedule. Never relitigate 2020 on the merits—that is the trap. In election week the work goes institutional: every official who touches certification should know, in advance, that the documentation exists, that counsel stands ready, and that the decision will be defensible in retrospect. In 2020 the Republic was saved by a few dozen individuals who declined the roles they were assigned in someone else’s story. The 2026 firewall must be built for perhaps a few hundred such actors and built early.
Deterrence among the states. America is a very big, decentralized country, and the life blood of democratic resistance can flow from state and local levels. Dancing in the Dark Part 1 proposed, as a last resort under a strict no-first-use doctrine, that principled officials in other states could deter certification games by making clear the tactic cuts both ways. That deterrent now belongs to the governors and attorneys general of both parties—alongside the unglamorous work: statutes barring law enforcement from polling places, certified duplicates of rolls and records held beyond federal reach, pre-drafted NVRA and habeas litigation, legal-defense compacts for election officials. Several Republican governors and secretaries have already shown the requisite spine. They should hear that the country noticed.
The public firewall. Former Senator Tim Wirth coined the phrase in 2020, and the public has since given it empirical content: the largest single-day demonstrations in American history, seven million strong, without a riot to show for it. That discipline is not a detail; it remains core to the counterstrategy of standing up for the Republic. If Plan Six of the Devil’s Accordion File depends on provoking the supposed enemy within, the countermobilization must be highly disciplined, rigorously restrained and studiously non-violent, which will starve the escalation ladder of its predicate. Beyond the marches: staff the polls, watch the counts, keep records, vote early and in person and in numbers that swamp the margin of chicanery. The Framers’ machinery has no self-executing clause. Every gear is turned by someone who decides, on a particular morning, to do the honest thing, or not.
VII. The Party of the King
The eternal contest in Anglo-American history, Ambassador Miller taught us, is between the party of parliament and the party of the king: between power that is consented to, limited, and losable, and power that is personal, total, and permanent.
We closed Dancing in the Dark Part 3 with Ambassador Miller’s key lesson, and we close this fourth chapter in the series with it deliberately, because everything in this essay is a footnote to it.
Every plan catalogued here—the shrunken rolls, the poisoned wells, the raided counting rooms, the watchlists, the baited whirlwinds, the wars, the choke points, the loaded weapon in its safe, the tamed press and the tithing boardrooms, the cover stories composed for an audience of a few hundred—is a single project seen from ten angles: the project of making an American president’s power unlosable. It is the king’s party’s oldest dream, and it has never been closer to the American throne room than it is this autumn and beyond.
Benjamin Franklin’s line about the republic—“if you can keep it”—is quoted to the point of numbness, but his second warning, from the same summer, is the one that belongs to 2026: “The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in monarchy.”
The only force that has ever falsified that prophecy of the unchecked power grab is the deliberate, organized, unglamorous refusal of citizens to let it come true—in legislatures, in courtrooms, in county election offices, at kitchen tables, in board rooms and town meeting halls, the streets with discipline, and above all at the polls in numbers no manipulated assessment can launder away.
The loaded weapon is on the table. The claim of urgent need is being drafted. We can all see the drafting hand if we choose to pay attention.
The lights are on now. Nobody gets to say they were dancing in the dark.
Mark Medish, a lawyer, served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the National Security Council as well as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton Administration. Joel McCleary served as Deputy Assistant to the President in the Carter Administration. This is the fourth essay in their “Dancing in the Dark” series.
