Trump Urged to Declare Martial Law as Republicans Face Concerns Over Losing Control of Congress

Some of Donald Trump's longtime outside allies are pressing him to take control of November's midterm elections, with martial law among the scenarios being discussed.

The push was reported by The Atlantic on 23 September 2026, in an article by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Michael Scherer, and it is coming from outside the White House rather than from within it.

Inside the administration, the report says, senior advisers and Cabinet secretaries have been working to steer Trump away from the election-fraud claims these allies promote, and a White House official said the most prominent of them have no role in its election policy.

No official step towards declaring martial law has followed, and the midterms are scheduled for Tuesday 3 November 2026.

Who Is Doing the Urging

The most prominent voice has personal history with the president. The Atlantic identified the attorney Peter Ticktin as the outside adviser with the deepest ties among those urging Trump to seize control of federal elections. Ticktin attended military school with Trump when they were teenagers and helped him sue Hillary Clinton in 2022.

He has also campaigned for Tina Peters. Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, was convicted in 2024 on seven state charges, including four felonies, arising from unauthorised access to election equipment.

Ticktin applied for a Trump pardon on her behalf at the end of 2025, and Trump announced one in December, although a presidential pardon cannot erase a state conviction. Colorado Governor Jared Polis granted her clemency in May 2026, and she was released in June.

Ticktin set out three ways he sees autumn going. The first, a smooth election, will not happen in his view because, he claims, Democrats already cheated in the primaries; no evidence supporting that claim was presented in The Atlantic's reporting.

The second is that Trump acts before the vote to prevent what Ticktin says would be cheating. The third is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around 3 November.

Others have floated related ideas. The conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root has proposed that Trump declare a national security emergency to impose measures such as proof-of-citizenship requirements and voter identification, and Trump responded to that proposal in August by saying stranger things have happened.

At the Storm Summit, a gathering at an off-Strip Las Vegas hotel attended by people who promote unsubstantiated election-fraud claims, speakers described a nightmare scenario in which Democrats win Congress and impeach the president.

The Political Backdrop

The anxiety is not imagined. Democrats have expressed growing confidence about retaking the House, where Republicans hold a narrow majority under Speaker Mike Johnson, and a YouGov and Catawba College poll released on 17 September found Democrats ahead by 49 per cent to 38 per cent on a hypothetical House ballot among registered voters.

The Senate, where Republicans hold the majority, is also considered competitive.

Trump has spoken about the stakes himself. At a House Republican retreat on 6 January 2026, he told lawmakers that if Democrats retook Congress they would find a reason to impeach him.

He has also argued for greater federal involvement in elections, saying in February that Republicans should nationalise voting in at least 15 places.

The Response Inside the White House

The administration's own advisers have been pulling in the other direction. According to The Atlantic, senior aides and Cabinet secretaries meet regularly as an elections working group and have worked for months to move the president's focus away from the unsupported election-fraud claims promoted by Ticktin, Root and Peters. A White House official said the three have no role in the administration's election policy.

The same reporting says the administration has also authorised efforts to investigate claims of election fraud, including examining election equipment and gathering intelligence on foreign interference. Those efforts have not produced evidence of the large-scale fraud Trump and his allies have alleged.

The legal footing for what the allies propose is thin. Martial law involves the military taking over functions normally carried out by civilian authorities, and the Supreme Court has placed significant limits on it, holding in Ex parte Milligan and later in Duncan v Kahanamoku that military rule cannot simply replace civilian courts that remain open and functioning. There is no established precedent for a president using martial law to take control of a federal election.

States have primary responsibility for administering elections, while Congress has substantial constitutional authority over the rules for federal elections. A national emergency declaration can activate specific statutory powers, but the reporting does not identify any statute that would give a president unilateral authority to take over state-run federal elections or overturn their results.

The report has been widely picked up. CNN's Jake Tapper discussed it on 24 September, and Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairman, characterised the possibility on MS NOW the following night, saying Trump would do whatever it took to secure the outcome he wanted, a view of the president's intentions rather than evidence of a plan.

The people urging martial law include longtime Trump allies with personal and political ties to him, and his senior administration advisers are, according to the reporting, trying to steer him away from it.