Donald Trump is planning to use his attack on Iran to justify a power grab over voting in the 2026 midterms. The fact that the attack violates the Constitution won't stop him from trying. It is our job to expose this plot and ensure that it does not succeed.

At 2:30 a.m. on Saturday, Donald Trump posted a video on his social media platform announcing that he had ordered the bombing of Iran.

Two hours later, he wrote: "Iran tried to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections to stop Trump and now faces renewed war with the United States." In that post, he also shared an article from a right-wing news outlet with that claim as its title.

These two posts — back-to-back, in the early hours of Saturday morning as U.S. forces were launching a military campaign — are just the latest instance of Trump citing foreign interference as the motivation or justification for unilateral executive action.

Trump is setting the stage to claim extraordinary powers to take over the 2026 elections — from banning mail-in voting to imposing new obstacles to voter registration. All of this will be justified on the grounds of national security, an area where presidents enjoy their broadest powers and typically receive the greatest deference from the courts.

Iran is not the first foreign country Trump and his cronies have falsely accused of rigging the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump cronies claimed that Venezuelan former President Hugo Chávez was involved in tampering with voting equipment — notwithstanding the fact that Chávez died in 2013.

Election deniers also promoted a bizarre theory involving Italy, military satellites and foreign computer systems. Additional conspiracy theories implicated Cuba and Germany, among other countries.

If it seems like Trump and his allies have been hopscotching around the globe to explain his electoral defeat in 2020, they have. But lying about the 2020 election is only part of the reason they continue to lean on these conspiracy theories. They have their sights on an even bigger target.

In recent weeks, the motivation behind these lies has been to give Trump the power to interfere with voting in 2026. The Washington Post recently reported that Trump is considering issuing an executive order that would "empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference."

While the president and his supporters have mostly focused on China as the pretext for seizing control of voting, Trump's social media post suggests that Iran may also serve as a useful villain to justify his extraordinary assertion of presidential power.

According to an April 2025 draft executive order circulated by right-wing election deniers, the president's authority to act would rest on several statutes: the National Emergencies Act, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act and the Defense Production Act.

However, none of these laws — nor any others — can override the text of the U.S. Constitution, which empowers the states to set the time, place and manner of federal elections. And while Congress can alter state election laws, presidents cannot.

As a federal court in Washington, D.C., recently held in striking down Trump's last executive order on voting: "Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures."

Those around Trump know that their only chance to overcome the Constitution's plain text is to identify a different constitutional provision that grants him this authority. For that, they appear to have settled on the president's role as commander in chief and protector of national security.

They know that courts are traditionally deferential to presidents on foreign affairs and national security — and that they grant presidents wide latitude to protect the country from foreign attack.

Trump is clearly setting the stage to claim that he must be permitted to rewrite the rules in order to protect our elections from foreign interference. I am confident these efforts will fail.

First, neither of the military actions against Iran nor Venezuela has received congressional approval, and we are not at war with China. While a president's power may be at its greatest as commander in chief, it is Congress alone that declares war.

As for the broader national security interest, that may justify certain presidential actions, but it does not override the plain language of the Constitution, which excludes the president from any role in setting the rules of elections.

Finally, the steps the president wants to take — banning mail-in voting and most voting equipment, requiring photo ID to vote, and requiring proof of citizenship to register — are transparently self-serving and political. In an unguarded moment a few weeks ago, Trump said that Republicans "should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting."

Trump's desire to control voting in 2026 is born of the same impulse that drives him to lie about the 2020 results. His ego cannot withstand his deep unpopularity. His base needs an explanation for why he loses. And he fears the legal and political consequences of losing power.

Iran, Venezuela, China, Italy, Cuba and Germany are not the reason Trump lost in 2020 — he is. These countries do not justify an authoritarian takeover in 2026. No foreign threat or domestic circumstance grants him that power.

Those of us who care about democracy must sound the alarm about the threat Trump poses to free and fair elections. Then we must fight him in the public arena and in the courtroom to prevent him from seizing power he does not have. That is what I will be doing for the next nine months. I hope you will join me.

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