Commander in Chief for Life

I.

Seymour Hersh reported yesterday that the White House has an operational plan for November, and that the plan does not depend on persuading anyone.

The man running it, according to Hersh, is Stephen Miller, whose assignment is to keep Democrats from taking Senate seats in a short list of contested states: Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas. The method has nothing to do with rooting out fraud. Hersh’s sources describe a plan to station uniformed troops at polling places in the closest races, with Marine Corps units directed toward precincts holding large numbers of Black and Hispanic voters. Texas and Georgia are named. The theory is that a certain number of citizens will see soldiers at the door of the church basement and turn around. A source with firsthand political knowledge told Hersh that discouraging even a handful at the right precincts could hold a seat or take one.

That is the entire scheme. It needs no hacked tabulator, no slate of fake electors, no Eastman memo. It needs a uniform standing in a doorway on a Tuesday morning.

It also has a fallback, and the fallback is the part worth losing sleep over. Soldiers at precincts can be enjoined, filmed, and converted into a turnout drive for the other side. A war cannot. Since April this country has been fighting one in Iran that the president started by himself, and a commander in chief in the middle of a war he started is a very difficult man to remove.

Why now is no mystery. A national Emerson survey this week put the Democrats eleven points up on the generic congressional ballot. Fox’s own poll gave them seven, with Brit Hume conceding on air that his network’s numbers held nothing good for Republicans. Trump’s approval sits at thirty-nine percent, the lowest of either term. Kalshi has the House going Democratic at eighty-three percent. If both chambers turn over, the new Congress will move on impeachment, and the president knows it.

II. The Option They Discarded

The most instructive detail in Hersh’s account is the thing they decided against.

In April, Senator Elissa Slotkin asked Pete Hegseth at an Armed Services hearing whether he would deploy troops to seize ballots and voting machines on election day if the president ordered it. Hegseth refused to answer, dismissing the question as a gotcha hypothetical. Hersh now reports that the White House election operatives concluded ballot seizure was not politically viable and settled on intimidation instead.

They set it aside because they have never needed it.

Greg Palast has spent two decades documenting the quieter instrument, and his findings have the tedious quality of real evidence. Interstate Crosscheck, which flagged voters for removal on the strength of a shared name. Felon rolls in Florida. Phantom moving in Georgia. Form irregularities in Ohio. Provisional ballots issued and then discarded on technicalities the voter never learns about. The MIT study Palast cites, Losing Votes by Mail, put mail-in loss at twenty-two percent. I went through all of this in these pages in November 2020, while the country watched CNN repeat itself and congratulated itself on a count that had finally gone the other way. The machinery that ate close to six million votes in 2016 was never dismantled. It was, for one cycle, simply out-voted.

So the progression is legible. Purge the rolls and nobody sees it. Spoil the mail-in ballots and nobody sees it. When the margin grows too wide for paperwork to close, you send the Marines. The escalation from the clerk’s office to the rifle company is an admission that the quiet method has run out of room.

III. The Vulnerability Nobody Wanted to Hear About

Hersh writes that Trump’s speech last week about weaknesses in American election infrastructure was largely false. He is right about the speech. It is worth saying plainly that the underlying weakness is real, which is exactly what makes it useful to this president.

At DefCon, invited hackers took apart voting machines then in use across twenty-six states and demonstrated that compromising a single model could swing an Electoral College outcome. Five days before the 2020 election, machine problems in Pennsylvania and Georgia remained unaddressed. Those of us who wrote about it were waved off as cranks, largely because the party best positioned to fix it preferred the subject closed. Six years of official indifference have now been handed to a man who intends to use them as a pretext.

At the Nader and Fein impeachment symposium in the Senate Visitors Center on July 22, Bruce Fein described the scenario without hedging. Sometime before November, Trump declares a national emergency over compromised voting machines, cites the Chinese vulnerabilities he has been advertising for a week, and sends the military in to seize the machines and stop the count for some unspecified duration. Fein observed that nobody in the room laughed.

IV. Dress Rehearsals

None of this arrives without practice. National Guard troops went into Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago over the objections of the governors of those states. A federal judge in Portland barred them from the streets, and in November 2025 permanently blocked the deployment after a three-day trial. The Supreme Court declined to let the administration put Guard troops into the Chicago area. Trump pulled them out of all three cities at the end of 2025 and announced that he was doing so, while leaving the door open to sending federal forces back in a stronger form.

The law here is not ambiguous. It is a crime to station troops or armed men at any place where an election is held, unless the force is needed to repel armed enemies of the United States. Military personnel are barred from interfering with an election officer’s duties. The Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids using the armed forces for domestic law enforcement. The Insurrection Act is the exception that swallows the rule, and this administration has spent eighteen months manufacturing the emergencies that would trigger it.

V. What the Pentagon Did in 1974

The last president to face removal had a Pentagon that worried about exactly this.

In the spring of 1974 a Washington bureaucrat named Joseph Laitin telephoned Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and raised the possibility that Nixon might mobilize Marines to save his presidency. If I were in your job, Laitin told him, I would want to know where the combat troops nearest downtown Washington are and whose orders they take. Schlesinger hung up on him. That July he went to General George Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and told him that any order arriving from the White House was to come to him directly and immediately, and that no extraordinary measures were to be taken. Brown later said the chain would have caught anything: troop orders pass through a Pentagon command center, he would have known within two minutes, and he would have been in the secretary’s office thirty seconds after that. Hersh reported the Laitin call. The New York Times put the Pentagon’s precautions on page one three weeks after Nixon resigned. Schlesinger also recalled Admiral Zumwalt telling him that Nixon had asked the Joint Chiefs, the previous Christmas, whether there was military support for keeping him in power.

Stanley Kutler argued for the rest of his life that the whole business was a fable, that nothing beyond Schlesinger’s own account supports it, and that no evidence ever surfaced of Nixon or his staff planning any such thing. Take Kutler’s side of it. The relevant fact survives either way. In 1974 the question of whether the armed forces might be used to keep a president in office was speculative enough that serious historians could spend fifty years calling it a rumor. And the institutional answer, real or imagined, came from inside the building: a Secretary of Defense and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who decided on their own initiative that their oath ran to the document rather than to the man.

That brake has been removed on purpose. The current Secretary of Defense stood in front of eight hundred generals and admirals at Quantico last September to talk about purging the culture of the Pentagon, has spent the months since clearing minorities and women out of the senior ranks, and when Slotkin asked him in April whether he would send troops to seize ballots, declined to say.

Some of the uniformed resistance survives. On July 21, the day before the Nader symposium, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster told the House Intelligence Committee that discussing the military’s role in the 2026 election is irresponsible, that the founders were most concerned about the military becoming involved in politics, and that this kind of talk is dangerous and damaging. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who questioned him, said the president’s willingness to discuss deploying troops to polling places undermines one of the oldest traditions of American democracy. In June, Slotkin introduced the Protect Our Polls Act, which would require a Joint Resolution of Approval before a president could send troops or federal law enforcement to election sites. With the midterms months away, legislative solutions arrive too late.

VI. The Alibi

Troops at polling places is the crude instrument. Visible, illegal on its face, litigable, and by Hersh’s own account as likely to put voters in the street as to turn them away. The second mechanism is quieter and better precedented, and the president already holds it.

The precedents are structural rather than moral. In Ukraine, martial law extends every mandate and elections do not occur. Whatever one concludes about Zelensky personally, the mechanism is indifferent to his character: a state at war lawfully postpones its own accountability, on paper, with no coup required. In Israel, Netanyahu has demonstrated the other half of the equation. A prime minister under indictment who remains a war leader remains, in practice, beyond the reach of the process against him, and Haaretz has said in print what a good many Israelis suspect about whose interests are served by the duration of the fighting.

Trump now has both halves. Since April the United States has been at war with Iran, a war the president began on his own authority, without a declaration, and which he escalated with a public promise to ninety million Iranians that their civilization would end that night. Hegseth has been back to Congress for another thirty-seven and a half billion dollars to continue it. Celinda Lake told the symposium that the American public has concluded the war will run at least another year. Nader, opening the day, raised the prospect of tactical nuclear weapons. Fein said flatly that the president is without scruples where nuclear war is concerned.

A commander in chief in the middle of a war he started, facing a Congress that has surrendered the purse and a Supreme Court that has already granted him immunity for official acts, does not need to cancel an election. He needs only to be indispensable while it happens.

VII. Impeachment Hushing

The remedy has been sitting in Article II, Section 4 the entire time. Fein likes to ask people who tell him impeachment is off the table whether they have airbrushed it out of the Constitution.

Celinda Lake, who has been polling for Democrats since before most of the current House leadership held office, brought the numbers to the Senate Visitors Center on July 22, and they are not ambiguous. Impeachment runs between 53 and 56 percent. Independents and swing voters favor it by more than twenty points. Support tracks presidential job approval almost exactly, which makes it stable, and Trump has done nothing that would raise his. Among those who oppose impeachment, roughly a third concede the allegations may well be true. Lake’s assessment of Beltway conventional wisdom on the question was that it runs wrong close to a hundred percent of the time.

So why will House Democrats not put their names on H. Res. 1155? John Larson’s thirteen articles, drafted with Fein’s assistance, have been available since April.

Steve Cohen, serving his last term after the Tennessee legislature carved his majority-Black district into three pieces at Trump’s request, described sending his own impeachment resolution around for cosponsors. Repeatedly. Forcefully. He collected two or three. Fein asked whether the money explained it, and Cohen’s answer came to yes. Leadership controls the campaign committee. Leadership controls your committee seats, whether your bill reaches the floor, whether your amendment is heard. Fein called the refusal political cowardice, which is the charitable reading. Hakeem Jeffries, asked by a reporter about impeachment, said he did not want to get ahead of the narrative. Ninety percent of Democratic voters are already there, along with two-thirds of independents. He is behind his own narrative and calling it strategy.

Kira Havens, an Air Force veteran who started Citizens Impeachment in April 2025, described going member to member asking whether they would use Rule Nine, the provision that lets any member force a privileged resolution to the floor within two legislative days. Al Green has done it twice. The answer she kept getting was not until after the midterms. So she went out and recruited people who would. Nineteen of them are on general election ballots in November, in front of something like thirteen million voters. That is the current price of getting the constitutional remedy onto a ballot at all: build a slate from scratch, because the incumbents will not move.

There is a further wrinkle worth naming. The Constitution already contains the disqualification power, in Article I, Section 3, which permits the Senate to bar a convicted officeholder from any future office of honor, trust, or profit. It has never bitten this president because it requires conviction, and the Senate has twice declined to convict. The instrument is in the drawer. Nobody will open the drawer.

Hersh opens the same door from the other side. At the end of his piece he reports that longtime wealthy Democratic donors in New York and elsewhere are alarmed. What alarms them is the party’s drift leftward, the prospect of higher taxes should Democrats take Congress, and renewed calls among younger members for guaranteed universal healthcare, which he says these donors regard with horror. Marines outside precincts in Houston and Savannah do not appear on the list.

VIII.

Set the two halves of the ledger side by side.

The White House has an operation with a manager, a target map, a discarded first option, and a service branch assigned to specific neighborhoods in specific states. It also has a war, begun in April without a declaration, which the public now expects to run at least another year, and which nobody in Congress has shown any inclination to defund.

The opposition has a constitutional remedy, majority public support for using it, independents twenty points in favor, and a donor class that finds universal healthcare more alarming than any of the above.

Trump does not have to cancel an election. That was always the least likely version, and the tell is that his own people looked at ballot seizure and decided against it as bad politics. What he needs is a Congress content to remain the caboose, which is Fein’s word for it, and a war that makes him indispensable while the returns come in. The first has been handed to him by people who read the same polls Lake presented and concluded that silence is the safe play. The second he started himself.

In 1974 a Secretary of Defense picked up a telephone to make certain the Army would not be used to keep a cornered president in office. In 2026 the Secretary of Defense will not answer the question when a senator asks it out loud.

Everything after that is arithmetic, and it is being done right now, precinct by precinct, in an office down the hall from the Oval.