Trump Was Asked If He’d Interfere With the Midterms. He Didn’t Say No.

“Stranger things have happened” is not a reassuring answer from a president who has spent months testing the boundaries of election power.

Photo by Sean Ferigan on Unsplash. Image by author.

---

WASHINGTON D.C. (The Daily Whatever Wire) — Somewhere in the Upside Down, a demogorgon just felt seen. A reporter asked Donald Trump whether he’d declare a national security emergency and personally take over the 2026 midterms. This is not a hard question. It has a one-syllable, two-letter answer. Toddlers manage it 40 times a day about broccoli.

“Stranger things have happened,” Trump replied.

I’ll wait while you throw your phone across the room. Go ahead.

Here’s what “stranger things have happened” is not: a no. It’s not “the Constitution doesn’t allow that,” which is a true fact a first-year law student could recite in his sleep. It’s not even the standard-issue political sedative, “I have complete confidence in our electoral process.” It’s four words engineered to leave the door open, and make the rest of us do the work of figuring out why.

---

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard Trump insinuate an end to free elections.

In January, Trump told a crowd he wasn’t saying cancel the election — they should. It was just a suggestion, tossed into a room full of people whose job is applauding on command, like he’s workshopping a bit at an open mic where the only other act is fascism. Days later, he told Reuters that, “we shouldn’t even have an election.” The White House subsequently characterized the remark as facetious.

My pal Merriam-Webster defines facetious as, “joking or sarcastic especially in a way regarded by others as silly, annoying, or inappropriate.” Hmm. Do you find the president “joking” about not holding elections silly? Or annoying? Because maybe I’m overreacting here, but I consider it like a DEFCON 1-LEVEL NOT A FUCKING JOKE sort of scenario.

In February, a reporter asked him point-blank about a specific proposal circulating among his allies to declare a national election emergency. His answer: “No. I’ve never heard about it.” Hold onto that sentence. We’re going to need it.

Because that same month, he told Republicans they should “nationalize” voting in at least 15 places. Which is an awfully specific suggestion for a man who’d just said he’d never heard of the idea of using emergency powers to intervene in elections.

Except there was, in fact, an idea.

A 17-page draft executive order was circulating among pro-Trump activists. It proposed using alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election as the basis for declaring a national emergency and unlocking extraordinary presidential powers over voting. The Washington Post got hold of the document, because apparently even the potential federal takeover of American elections now comes with a paper trail.

Trump said he had never heard of it.

Sure.

By August, the hypothetical had gotten considerably more comfortable. That’s when Wayne Allyn Root went on Real America’s Voice and handed Trump a gift-wrapped workaround: if Congress wouldn’t pass the SAVE America Act, Root suggested, Trump could declare a national security emergency and impose photo ID, proof of citizenship, and limits on mail voting anyway. Root invoked the 1983 Supreme Court case INS v. Chadha to support his theory, although Chadha concerned the legislative veto in immigration law, not presidential authority to take over elections.

Trump could’ve said no. He’d already said no, in February, on tape, pre-written, load-bearing.

Instead, he said the four words you met at the beginning of this story: “Stranger things have happened.”

And now you know the history behind them.

---

The insidious part is watching how the ask keeps getting closer to reasonable, or at least, realistic. First it’s a joke about canceling the election. Then it’s Republicans “nationalizing” voting in 15 places. Then there’s a draft executive order, complete with legal citations and a theory about national security. Then a friendly host hands the president a ready-made workaround and asks, essentially, Why not just do it?

The hypothetical keeps creeping ever closer to possibility, to policy.

But the legal case for any of this is garbage — actual, structural, Tenth-Amendment-shaped rubbish. States have the primary role in administering elections, while Article I gives Congress — not the president — the authority to alter the rules governing congressional elections. The Constitution does not hand the president a giant emergency button labeled ELECTIONS: DO WHATEVER.

Which makes Trump’s repeated flirtation with the idea more interesting than the legal theory itself. Maybe it’s political theater. Could it be leverage on Congress? Sure, why not. Or perhaps some of the people circulating these ideas are simply throwing constitutional spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.

Or… maybe it’s a stress test.

Maybe Trump and the ding-dongs feeding him these ideas are testing exactly how loudly the alarm rings before somebody hits snooze.

We’ve seen the trailer for this movie. In 2020, Trump’s false claims about election fraud produced months of lawsuits, recounts, and pressure on election officials before culminating in an effort to overturn the certified result. Courts rejected the central claims.

The difference is that last time, the chaos came after the votes were counted. This time, the argument is already underway before anyone has voted.

Our instinct may be to file this under noise, because Trump says an enormous number of things and nobody has enough nervous-system capacity to treat every one of them like a five-alarm fire. You’d have no gasps left if you spent one on every “stranger things” sentence he’s ever muttered.

But that instinct is precisely why the sequence matters more than any individual remark. A comment in January can be dismissed as a joke. A proposal in February can be dismissed as a fringe idea. A draft order can be dismissed as something Trump says he never saw. A friendly interviewer can be dismissed as a crank.

Eventually, though, the pieces start sitting next to one another.

So here’s my unequivocal, unsolicited advice: Take. Trump. At. His. Word.

Not because he never bluffs — dude bluffs constantly, professionally, it’s basically his whole personality — but because the sitting president and his people have been escalating the rhetoric all year.

And when a man finally handed him the easiest possible version of the question, Trump did not say no.

He’s been not saying no since January.

The Upside Down isn’t a metaphor anymore. It’s 17 pages in a Washington Post filing cabinet. By November, we’ll know whether we heard the warning — or whether we waited for the alarm to become the emergency.

Stranger things have happened.

---

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every weekday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!