President Donald Trump on Tuesday floated the idea of canceling future U.S. elections, elevating a longstanding concern among critics of how he might try to limit threats to his power in his second term.
Trump brought up the idea while speaking to House Republicans at their annual retreat, and then quickly insisted he was not calling for such a move, casting his remarks as a critique of Democrats rather than a proposal. “They have the worst policy,” he said in his remarks at the Kennedy Center to about 70 House Republicans. “How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
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Trump’s comments were part of a freewheeling address that also included complaints about his polling numbers ahead of the midterm elections and fresh musings about serving beyond the constitutionally mandated two-term limit. Most polls show Trump’s approval rating hovering around 40%.
“I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy,” said Trump, who usually insists bad polls about him were rigged.
“You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” he added. “I’ll get impeached.”
Federal law leaves no room for a president to cancel or postpone congressional elections. The timing of federal elections is set by Congress, and the administration of elections is carried out by the states, with oversight by Congress and the courts. Even under emergencies such as war or natural disaster, there is no clear legal mechanism for a president to unilaterally suspend national elections.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump from repeatedly flirting with the idea, which has alarmed Democrats and voting rights advocates.
During his first term, he publicly suggested delaying the 2020 election, despite lacking the authority to do so. More recently, in a meeting in August with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump appeared to voice approval of Ukraine’s ban on elections under martial law, prompting laughter in the room but alarm among his critics.
“So you say during the war, you can’t have elections,” Trump said to Zelensky at the time. “So let me just say, three and a half years from now—so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”
His comments came on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss, a result that Trump has never accepted. During his speech Tuesday, he again falsely claimed that the 2020 election had been “rigged,” repeating unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud that have been rejected by courts, election officials from both parties, and members of his own former administration.
“The election was rigged,” Trump told the House Republican Conference. “You ought to have voter ID. You ought to insist on it.”
He added, “We got to straighten this out before it gets too crazy,” arguing that opposition to voter identification laws was proof of corruption. “When somebody says, ‘No, we don’t want voter ID,’ that means they’re crooked,” he said, without evidence.
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