The president is a very desperate man
Late last night, while the sky was still dark and most Americans were asleep in their beds, the President of the United States was wide awake inside the White House, giving a telephone interview to an obscure far-right media personality and conspiracy theorist. The conversation happened sometime after midnight with Wayne Allyn Root, a Las Vegas-based Trump loyalist who hosts a show on Real America’s Voice. They spoke for 42 minutes on a wide range of subjects, but perhaps the most dangerous moment came when Root suggested that Trump declare a “national security emergency” within the next month ahead of the midterm elections. Not only did Donald Trump not push back, or flat out say no. He instead said, “Let me just say, stranger things have happened. I’ll leave it at that.” The President of the United States would not say that he wouldn’t interfere in the elections less than three months away.
Any American president, really any leader who genuinely believed in the democratic process and the right of the people to choose their representatives, would have shut that suggestion down immediately. They would have said, absolutely not, because that is not how this country works. They would have told him that the American people decide elections, and that he would respect the outcome. That is what a president who loves this country would say. But Donald Trump is not that president. Instead, he let the idea grow legs, and we are all talking about it now. This was another test balloon from Donald Trump to see how far we let it fly.
And what made it worse was who he was saying it to. Wayne Allyn Root is a far-right conspiracy theorist, a man who once claimed that Israeli Jews see Trump as “the second coming of God,” a comment Trump amplified and thanked him for. He is the same man who has been publicly pushing this national emergency idea for months, appearing alongside Steve Bannon and others in far-right media to lay the groundwork and energize Trump’s radicalized base around it. A group of far-right influencers, including Root, Bannon, Cleta Mitchell, John Solomon, and others, have been urging Trump to use his power to “make the rules” for elections and deploy the National Guard to oversee the midterms. Root even bragged during the interview that he was the one who came up with the idea of declaring a national security emergency at the border in 2019 to redirect Pentagon funds for the wall without congressional approval. He is now trying to run the same play on our elections. And the President of the United States sat on the phone with him after midnight for their 17th interview together.
Root’s legal argument, the one he used to justify doing this, has no basis. He cited a 1983 Supreme Court ruling in INS v. Chadha as proof that a president can declare a national security emergency over elections and that it can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress. That is not what that case says. That case dealt with the constitutionality of a one-house congressional veto. The Supreme Court struck that mechanism down, holding that legislative action must comply with the Constitution’s requirements of passage by both chambers and presentment to the president. The ruling was about separation of powers. It did not grant the president emergency authority over elections.
Regardless of the legality of what he was proposing or what the president alluded to this morning, when given that suggestion, Trump had time to think, and he had time to push back. Yet he ultimately chose not to. And when you combine that refusal with everything else that has happened in the last 24 hours, it becomes impossible to see this as anything other than the Trump administration preparing for every which scenario they can think of to retain unchecked power by laying the groundwork to interfere in the midterm elections both before they happen and after.
The national emergency threat might have been the most dangerous thing he said, but it was not the most unhinged part of the conversation. The interview covered vaccines, pardons, political enemies, and the full range of Trump’s obsessions, and almost every answer revealed how terribly flawed Trump is and how far from reality he is.
On childhood vaccines, Trump described the MMR vaccine, one of the most well-studied and effective vaccines in the history of modern medicine, as “sort of like a nuclear weapon.” He also said the liquid amount of vaccines given to children looks “like a Coca-Cola bottle” being pumped into a child’s body and added, “What do you have to lose?”
Root also brought up pardons. Trump confirmed during the interview that his administration plans to challenge President Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci in court because he claims the pardon was signed by the auto pen. When Root urged him to go after Fauci and, in Root’s words, “make his life miserable to the day he dies,” Trump responded with “We are going to.”
From there, Trump launched into a strange and disjointed explanation of why he believes Biden’s use of the presidential autopen makes the pardon legally invalid, despite the fact that every modern president has used the autopen and no court has ever questioned its validity. He said that Biden “won’t even know what the question is” if asked whether he authorized the pardon. He also added that “I’ve become an expert on the autopen thing because I’m not an autopen guy, as you see. I’m not sure I ever used an autopen, but I signed my name a lot each day. People like the signature, too. It’s a good” This is what the President of the Free World is up at all hours of the night obsessing about.
Trump’s election interference plans are not shocking or something new to us. We might be disappointed that this is coming from an American President, but we are not shocked at all that it is Donald Trump saying it. And behind the scenes, his most loyal enablers are building another safety net to protect him if he is unable to interfere with the midterms.
After Todd Blanche was confirmed by the Senate just days ago, he wasted no time getting to work protecting Donald Trump. As his personal defense lawyer, he is well-versed in doing just that. Within days of Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel had already published a new memo expanding the scope of executive privilege in ways that go beyond anything ever attempted in modern American history.
The memo stated that executive privilege, the legal doctrine that traditionally protects confidential deliberations between a president and his government advisers, will now extend to conversations between the president and private citizens. They are not talking about national security personnel or White House officials. They are now saying that it extends to private citizens and Trump donors. People like his business associates and others that the American public never elected, and who were never given authority to shape the direction of this country. Under this new rule, if you will, anyone Trump speaks to about presidential “decision-making” could be shielded from congressional subpoenas. The exact thing the Democrats are preparing to unleash when they take back control of the House. They want the committees that have subpoena power to be able to demand testimony from anyone who had a part in this authoritarian takeover. And that memo was the Trump administration’s means of blocking it all before it even begins.
Senator Chuck Schumer said of the memo, “Donald Trump is scared,” he wrote. “He knows accountability is coming. He’s using his newly installed Attorney General, his personal lawyer Todd Blanche, to cover up his communications with private advisers and special interest cronies.” Amanda Carpenter of Protect Democracy didn’t mess with her words: “Oh, look. Blanche gets confirmed. Trump gets an entirely new immunity.” Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd noted that the existence of the memo itself is “the White House acknowledging a future with congressional subpoenas targeting the private sector who did ‘deals’ with Trump and his family and friends.”
None of this is new or original. These people have never had an original idea in their lives. They study what the worst leaders in history tried before them, and they build on it. This has Richard Nixon-era cover-up written all over it, because he tried something very similar. During Watergate, when investigators were closing in and demanded his White House tapes, Nixon invoked executive privilege and tried to use it as a wall between himself and the accountability he knew was right around the corner. But even Nixon only tried to shield conversations between government officials conducted inside the White House. He did not try to extend that privilege to private citizens. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against him unanimously, eight to zero, in United States v. Nixon on his attempt at this. The Court held that executive privilege is not absolute and cannot be used to obstruct justice or shield a president from legitimate investigation. That ruling is often cited as the reason Nixon resigned. Once the tapes came out, the truth was undeniable, and his support collapsed overnight. He read the writing on the wall and acted accordingly.
Trump and Blanche looked at Nixon’s downfall and did not learn the lesson the rest of us learned. They learned a different lesson. They learned that Nixon’s mistake was not that he tried to hide behind executive privilege. His mistake was that he only had one wall. So they are building more. Think of it like Swiss cheese. Each layer has holes. Each individual protection can be pierced. Any single wall can fall. But when you stack enough layers of Swiss cheese on top of each other, the holes stop lining up. One wall blocks what another wall cannot. The executive privilege memo covers what the national emergency threat cannot. This is only two of the layers. No doubt there are many more where they came from.
Today wasn’t all bad news, though. We also saw pushback from the courts. United States District Judge Indira Talwani issued a nationwide injunction blocking the Postal Service from enforcing Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting. Judge Talwani had already blocked the order back in June for 23 states and the District of Columbia. Today, after the League of Women Voters asked her to go further, she widened that ruling to cover the entire country. The order had directed the USPS to refuse to deliver mail-in and absentee ballots to any state that did not hand over its voter eligibility lists to the federal government. These lists would have contained citizenship data that most states, including many Republican-led states, have refused to provide because of legitimate privacy concerns. That wasn’t the only reason that the Trump administration wanted these lists. Democrats use mail-in ballots at significantly higher rates than Republicans, so the intended use behind the order was never about election security. It was about suppression, and this court saw it for what it really was.
Judge Talwani wrote in her 27-page ruling that the order was “causing confusion” and “threatening both increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy.” She emphasized that with fewer than 90 days before the November 3rd midterm elections, there was a critical need to prevent the administration from rewriting the rules at the last minute. The ACLU, which represented the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups in the case, said the ruling reinforces that the president plays no role in our elections and that he cannot turn the Postal Service into a tool for disenfranchising voters.
Most legal analysts expect the Trump administration to appeal. They have already asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a related challenge from a different circuit. But what we need to remember is that we are less than 90 days from the midterms. Even if this case moves quickly through the appeals process, the timeline is on our side. The Supreme Court would need to accept the case, schedule arguments, and issue a decision, all before November 3rd. That is an extraordinarily compressed timeline for a case of this magnitude. And the Court has historically been reluctant to change election rules this close to a vote.
This is a win. It may not feel like the kind of sweeping, decisive victory that changes everything in a single moment. But in a time where they are attacking the democratic process from every angle at the same time, every ruling that holds the line matters.
They are showing their cards when they make desperate moves like this. They are showing that they are scared and that they know that they can’t keep control of Congress when they play by the rules. That is why they want them rewritten. If they were confident Republicans would win the midterm elections, they would not be considering declaring an emergency. If Trump were as powerful and in control as he wants us to think he is, he would have shot down the suggestion of declaring an emergency to push voter suppression tactics. He didn’t, though, and that is all we need to remember. They are building these plans because they are terrified of what will happen if the system works as it is supposed to.
The summer slump, as I call it, is coming to an end. Kids are going back to school, families are settling into their normal schedules once more, and very soon the last of the primaries will be over, and we will know exactly who our candidates are. And that is when we need to jump in.
We are going to have to do everything in our power to make sure Trump-endorsed candidates lose. That means volunteering, donating if and when we can, knocking on doors, making phone calls, sharing reliable information, registering voters, talking to our friends and neighbors, and helping the candidates in our communities who can actually win. We cannot sit back and hope someone else saves us. We must save ourselves. Every one of us has something we can contribute, and if we give this everything we have, there is no doubt in my mind that we can take back the House and fight for the Senate, too.
Nothing is guaranteed. It never is. But America has survived other dark periods, and we have emerged from them stronger than we were before, because ordinary people decided they were no longer willing to stand on the sidelines and watch. We have that same choice in front of us now. Our moment to turn all of this fear, anger, and exhaustion into action is here. We know what we have to do. Now we have to do it, and I know we will. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: My interview with Hunter Biden went live earlier today. You can watch or listen to it here. I know I look very serious in this picture, but I promise we had some light-hearted moments as well. No doubt, if Donald Trump ever saw it, he would say I don’t smile enough.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
Real America’s Voice YouTube video
https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-bottle-of-soda-child-vaccine-claim-assessed-by-experts-12309217
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6021261-cassidy-trump-mmr-vaccine-order/
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/08/g-s1-137631/senate-confirms-todd-blanche-attorney-general
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6022381-doj-executive-privilege-outside-advisers/
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6023907-judge-blocks-usps-trump-voter-order/
Heather, the part of your post that sent a chill down my spine was the suggestion that the National Guard could be used to monitor the November mid elections. Why should there be an issue about people going along to cast their votes? I believe Trump knows there is a danger that he could lose the mid terms so he is creating havoc where there is no danger at all. Shades of Adolf.
So, Heather, looking at the worst case scenario, what happens if he does declare a national emergency? Can it be nullified in the courts in order to ensure free and fair elections in November? Or will it cause delays or the cancellation of the elections? Also, what would be the justification he used to do it? Foreign interference? Elon Musk buying votes? Too many unregistered voters?
Worrying times for America.