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Blue-state governors are sounding the alarm that an increasingly “authoritarian” President Donald Trump has designs to disrupt upcoming elections with military assets.
J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, is exhorting Americans to treat Trump’s stated goals for deploying the National Guard to blue cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago with deep skepticism: “He has other aims other than fighting crime,” Pritzker told Face the Nation of Trump’s threatened troop deployment to his state.
“He’d like to stop the elections in 2026, or, frankly, take control of those elections,” Pritzker asserted. The governor added that by pre-positioning troops, Trump could attempt to impose his will on locally administered elections. “He’ll just claim that there’s some problem with an election — and then he’s got troops on the ground that can take control.”
Invoking the collapse of democracy in Germany in the 1930s, Pritzker warned that Trump has learned from “authoritarian regimes” across history — and that one of the primary ways authoritarians have consolidated power is to provoke “mayhem that requires military interdiction.” The governor continued, “Donald Trump is just following that playbook.”
Pritzker is not alone in issuing stark warnings about the danger Trump’s domestic military deployments could pose to free-and-fair elections in this country. California Gov. Gavin Newsom also gave voice to the same concern during a conference call late last month, organized by the Democratic National Committee. Newsom said the National Guard troops, Marines, and other federal agents Trump has deployed to Los Angeles could be used to stoke fear at the ballot box — as soon as this November.
Trump recently extended the deployment of National Guard troops in California for another 90 days. “We still have federalized National Guard, interestingly assigned through Election Day,” Newsom said. “Is that coincidental? Through Election Day?!
“That’s a preview for the National Guard of things to come,” Newsom insisted. “Don’t think for a second now that ICE and Border Patrol won’t be showing up at a voting booth or polling places this November.” The California governor added, “We talk about authoritarianism, and I know it turns some people off. But at least we can submit that this is encroaching authoritarianism.”
Concern about Trump using federal power to interfere in American elections — which are administered by state and local authorities — is not abstract. Just as he’s ramped up National Guard deployments on two coasts, Trump has gone on a public offensive against mail-in voting — a move he said was inspired by a chat with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
Vote-by-mail is a secure and popular method of casting ballots, relied on by absentee voters across the country. Universal vote-by-mail is practiced in red and blue states across the West. There is no evidence that mailed ballots create opportunities for fraud. But Trump is already using his presidential powers to punish states that rely on them. He justified his decision this week to relocate Space Force headquarters to Alabama because its current location, Colorado, “went to all mail-in voting,” Trump said, alleging the state therefore has “automatically crooked elections.”
It’s not difficult to connect the dots of how these paired developments endanger democracy: Ending remote voting, and then using military assets and federal law enforcement assets to intimidate voters at physical polling stations, could suppress turnout in large cities where opposition to MAGA policies is strongest.
To be plain, any election interference by Trump would not be legal. “There is no law that allows the president to deploy the armed forces in any context to prevent a free and fair election, or to overturn the results of an election,” said Liza Goitein, a senior director of the pro-democracy Brennan Center on a recent call with reporters. Indeed, she added, “there are laws that specifically prohibit the armed forces from being involved in interference with an election.
“That would be a coup, essentially, led by the president against our democracy,” she said.
In his second term, Trump has not paid much heed to what’s legal. In fact, a district court judge ruled this week that Trump’s National Guard deployment in California violates a bedrock law called Posse Comitatus, because Trump is effectively transforming these troops into “a national police force with the president as its chief.” (The administration immediately appealed the ruling, which is stayed.)
The 47th president is also playing with fire, rhetorically — toying with the authoritarian labels that his Democratic critics are appending to him. “They say … ‘He’s a dictator! He’s a dictator!’” Trump mocked in a recent Oval Office appearance, before adding with menace: “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator.” (Trump then said he rejected the label, asserting he’s just “a man with common sense” who knows “how to stop crime.”)
A veteran of Trump’s 2020 attempt to subvert an American election is already laying out ideas about how Trump could assert emergency control over future federal contests. Cleta Mitchell is an “election integrity” lawyer and right-wing activist who infamously joined Trump on the 2021 phone call in which he pressed Georgia state officials to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state.
As flagged by Democracy Docket, Mitchell recently appeared on a podcast where she highlighted a president’s ability to intervene in voting by citing a “threat to the national sovereignty of the United States.” Mitchell argued such a threat would be easy to “establish” because of how “porous” state-run elections are. “I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward,” Mitchell said.
Trump’s counterweights in the states are calling on Americans to wake up. “Nothing about this is normal,” Newsom said. “We’re not going to act as if anything is normal any longer.” This exact note was echoed by Pritzker in a press conference this week warning against the deployment of federal forces to his state: “To everyone listening, but most especially to the press, I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal.”
Pritzker denounced “the abject cruelty that we’re seeing play out with the execution of Trump and Steven Miller’s policies,” whether that’s brutally rounding law abiding immigrants or responding to sandwich-throwing civilians by deploying armed military forces to the streets of the capital.
The Illinois governor closed with a chilling warning that the past may be prologue. “Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question,” he said. “Once [the administration] gets the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?”
