In another fascistic rant on his social media platform, US President Donald Trump said he would be issuing an executive order “shortly” to impose ID requirements for voters in the 2026 midterm election. 

Calling objections to requiring passports or other proof of citizenship at the polls a “SCAM,” he said that if the Republican-controlled Congress could not pass the necessary legislation, “there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”

Any presidential order on voting requirements would be illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution gives primary responsibility for the conduct of elections to the states, with Congress having final authority, and the president playing no role. Article One, Section Four of the Constitution reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

But Trump sought to browbeat the Supreme Court in advance to reject any legal challenge to his executive order, writing, “I hope the Supreme Court realizes … that these Corrupt and Deranged Democrats, if they ever gain power, will not only be adding two States to our roster of 50, with all of the baggage thereto, but will also PACK THE COURT with a total of 21 Supreme Court Justices, THEIR DREAM.”

As usual, Trump accuses his political opponents of the criminal actions he is carrying out himself. He claimed that if the Democrats win the election, they would move rapidly to seize total power, including impeaching him, overturning the filibuster rule in the Senate, and packing the Supreme Court.

In reality, the Democrats are totally prostrate before Trump’s onslaught against democratic rights, hoping only that gains in the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate will give  them a seat at the table in upcoming budget and policy discussions. The Democrats have not lifted a finger against Trump’s increasingly blatant effort to conduct the 2026 elections under conditions of virtual martial law, with federal agents or military personnel overseeing the polls, particularly in major cities with large majorities traditionally voting for the Democrats.

Trump’s series of posts on voter ID requirements followed the passage by the House last Wednesday of the so-called SAVE America Act, legislation that would require voters to show proof of citizenship both to register and when voting in person, and requiring states to purge voter rolls of supposed “noncitizens.” The near party-line vote was 218-213.

While the bill is not expected to pass in the Senate, the sheer scope is an indication of the dictatorial methods of rule being contemplated in the White House. It would allow, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security to seize the voter records of any state. DHS includes both ICE and CBP, targeting immigrants, but its only link to elections previously was in regard to guarding against foreign cyberwarfare attacks.

The voter ID requirements would threaten the ability of more than half the American population, since nearly half don’t have passports, while 70 million married women have birth certificates that don’t match their current legal names, and millions more don’t have access to birth certificates at all, particularly the poor,  racial minorities and naturalized citizens.

The fascist in the White House has declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” (i.e., have the federal government rather than the states operate polling stations) and has used both the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice to pressure state governments to turn over their voter rolls for review.

These reviews would involve comparison of voter rolls with federal databases, including those maintained by the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of the Treasury, all of which operate with differing standards and incompatible data. (The Social Security Administration, for example, does not update Social Security records if an immigrant worker becomes a naturalized citizen, so its database would classify the immigrant as a noncitizen, and therefore ineligible to vote).

Trump is seeking to combine his longstanding “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen with the current nationwide militarized attack on immigrants by armed and masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection. He now claims that the 2026 election will be stolen by mass voting on the part of undocumented non-citizens.

From an evidentiary standpoint, the claim is simply preposterous. Reviews of election results in both Democratic-controlled and Republican-controlled states have found only a few dozen non-citizens registered to vote—usually done inadvertently when they applied for drivers’ licenses—and an even smaller number of non-citizens actually casting ballots.

The logic of Trump’s argument is even more bizarre. His election defeat in 2020 cannot be blamed on immigrants brought into the country by the Democrats since at that time Trump was in power and in control of border security. In 2024, after the supposed influx of “tens of millions” of immigrants under the Biden administration, Trump actually won the election, because of mass discontent over inflation and the impact of Biden’s policies of austerity and war.

The purpose of Trump’s ranting about voter ID is to whip up a fascist hysteria about “illegal voting” which would support his efforts either to manipulate the results of the 2026 election or to call them off entirely. Trump’s former top political strategist Steve Bannon cheered, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” He added a call to send Army troops as well.

Trump continues to prepare the military for intervention in the election. He travelled to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, one of the largest Army bases in the continental US, for a campaign-style rally Friday, in which he called on soldiers to vote Republican in the midterm elections.

Ignoring the longstanding principle that the military is to be politically neutral, Trump told the soldiers, “You have to vote for us,” and he paraded North Carolina Republican candidates before them. Pentagon policy forbids political activity by active-duty soldiers, with the Army field manual declaring, “The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too.”

He later met for two hours behind closed doors with Special Forces troops who took part in the military raid on Venezuela which led to the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, now held in a Brooklyn, New York jail awaiting trial on narcotics trafficking charges.

Meanwhile the Justice Department continues to press states to turn over their voter lists for federal inspections, although Democratic-controlled states have refused to do so and federal courts have upheld their opposition. A federal judge in Michigan agreed to dismiss such a lawsuit last week, the fourth time the DOJ has been rebuffed in the courts.

A federal judge in Oregon took similar action the previous week, writing that the “presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to DOJ that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.”