Trump on National Emergency Related to the Midterm: "Stranger Things Have Happened"

During an interview with MAGA personality Wayne Allyn Root,1 Donald Trump appeared to suggest that a national emergency related to voting could be a possibility ahead of the midterm election. As previously mentioned, conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell floated this idea in September 2025 during an interview with former Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). It seems that the idea has gained some legitimate traction.

Root complained that the Senate won’t pass the so-called “SAVE America Act” and wanted to “put an idea in [Trump’s] head.” Root said, “If they never get the Save America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1983 under Reagan that INS versus Chadha, that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it; it can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate.”

Trump cut him off and said, “Let me just say the stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.” The full six-minute clip is below. The relevant exchange takes place in the final 46 seconds of the video. I included the entire discussion around the midterm to provide context.

There’s a lot to unpack here, particularly in Root’s comments. Let’s start with the basic premise. The president can declare a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act (NEA), but declaring an emergency doesn’t give him a blank check to do whatever he wants. The NEA works in conjunction with other laws that give the president specific powers during a declared emergency. In other words, the declaration can unlock authorities Congress has already provided. It doesn’t create new ones out of thin air.

Of course, Root never explains what law would actually give Trump the power to impose nationwide voter identification requirements, require documentary proof of citizenship, or restrict mail voting. Simply calling something a “national security emergency” doesn’t answer that question. The administration would still have to identify a statute that authorizes what Trump wants to do. The NEA itself certainly doesn’t give the president a general power to rewrite federal election law.

Root’s description of INS v. Chadha is even more puzzling. The Supreme Court’s 1983 decision had nothing to do with presidential emergency declarations or elections. The case involved a provision of immigration law that allowed one chamber of Congress to overturn an Executive Branch decision to suspend the deportation of an immigrant. The Court struck down that mechanism, known as a legislative veto, because Congress generally has to comply with the Constitution’s requirements of bicameralism and presentment.2 Legislation has to pass both chambers and be presented to the president. Chadha did not hold that a president can declare an emergency that “they can’t challenge,” as Root claimed.

There’s a connection between Chadha and the NEA, but it doesn’t mean what Root thinks it means. When Congress originally passed the NEA in 1976, it included a mechanism allowing Congress to terminate a national emergency through a concurrent resolution, which didn’t require the president’s signature. Chadha called legislative-veto arrangements like that into constitutional doubt. Congress responded in 1985 by amending the NEA and replacing the concurrent resolution with a joint resolution that has to go through the normal legislative process.

That brings us to Root’s claim that a national emergency “can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.” That’s misleading. Congress can pass a joint resolution terminating an emergency through the ordinary legislative process. It doesn’t take two-thirds of the House and Senate to pass the resolution. The two-thirds threshold comes into play if the president vetoes the resolution and Congress tries to override the veto. In the scenario Root is describing, Trump would presumably veto an effort to terminate his own emergency, so Congress might ultimately need two-thirds of each chamber to override him. Still, that’s very different from saying that federal law requires a two-thirds vote to terminate an emergency.

Root also appears to be confusing Congress’s ability to terminate an emergency with federal courts’ ability to review what Trump does under one. Nothing in Chadha says that a presidential emergency declaration or actions taken pursuant to one are immune from judicial review. Courts can still examine the constitutional and statutory authorities invoked under an emergency declaration and determine whether Trump’s actions (or any president, for that matter) are authorized by law and consistent with the Constitution.

This is a real problem for Root’s theory, not to mention Trump’s theory of executive power. The SAVE America Act passed the House in February but has stalled in the Senate and isn’t likely to be enacted before Congress recesses before the election. Among other things, the SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and photo identification to cast a federal ballot. Someone voting absentee would generally have to submit a copy of an eligible photo identification document both when requesting the ballot and when returning it. These are substantial changes to federal election law, which is precisely why Republicans are trying to pass legislation to enact them.

Root is effectively suggesting that if Congress won’t pass those policies, Trump should declare an emergency and impose them anyway. Think about what that theory would mean in practice. The House passes legislation. The Senate refuses to pass it. Instead of accepting that the legislation hasn’t become law, the president declares a national emergency and implements some of its major provisions through executive action. If presidents could use the NEA that way, the legislative process would become optional whenever a president could find something sufficiently alarming to label an emergency.3

The Constitution presents another problem. Because Root is talking specifically about the midterm elections, the Elections Clause is directly relevant. It gives state legislatures the initial authority to prescribe the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections and gives Congress the authority to “make or alter” those regulations. The Executive Branch is conspicuously absent from that arrangement. Congress has considerable authority to establish nationwide rules for federal elections, but it must exercise that authority through legislation. The president doesn’t inherit Congress’s Elections Clause power because senators refuse to vote for his bill.

Trump’s previous attempts to impose election rules through executive action have already run into serious trouble in federal court. Judges have blocked major provisions of his election-related executive orders, although not every lawsuit has produced an immediate injunction or a decision on the merits. In one challenge to the March 2026 executive order, for example, a federal judge declined to issue an injunction because the dispute was premature, a decision that survived on appeal. Of course, a court deciding that a challenge isn’t ripe is not the same thing as deciding that the president actually possesses the power he claims.

Other courts have squarely rejected significant parts of the administration’s approach. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani again blocked the administration from implementing its effort to involve the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in restricting mail voting for the 2026 midterms.4 The ruling prevents enforcement of the relevant provisions nationwide for the November election and again rests on the basic constitutional problem that has followed Trump’s election orders, which is that regulation of federal elections belongs principally to states and Congress, not to a president acting on his own.

There’s also some irony in Root invoking Chadha as the legal foundation for all of this. Chadha is one of the Supreme Court’s landmark separation-of-powers decisions. Root is citing it to support a theory under which the president could circumvent the legislative process when Congress refuses to enact his preferred policies. His line that Trump “doesn’t even need the Senate” gets remarkably close to describing the constitutional problem with his proposal.

None of this means Trump couldn’t declare some sort of election-related national emergency. The NEA gives presidents substantial discretion to declare emergencies, and presidents of both parties have made aggressive use of emergency authorities. Still, the declaration and the powers exercised under it are two different things. As explained, an emergency declaration doesn’t automatically give Trump authority over voter identification, citizenship documentation, absentee ballots, or the administration of federal elections. He would still need a lawful source of authority for whatever actions followed the declaration.

That’s why Trump’s response to Root is so unnerving. He said, “[S]tranger things have happened.” I’ll concede that we shouldn’t turn an ambiguous remark into something more definitive than it was. However, we shouldn’t dismiss it, either. As noted in the opening, Cleta Mitchell floated essentially the same idea last year. The administration has taken steps to circumvent Congress to impose aspects of the SAVE America Act, such as demanding states turn over their voter files and the USPS rule to restrict absentee and mail-in voting. Now, Root has pitched it directly to Trump as a way to bypass a Senate that won’t pass the SAVE America Act, and Trump declined to reject it. Given the administration’s continuing attempts to use executive power to reshape election administration, that makes the exchange worth taking seriously.

The larger issue goes beyond the SAVE America Act. Congress saying “no” is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional system. Legislation sometimes fails because one chamber refuses to pass it. No president gets every bill they want through Congress. That frustration doesn’t create executive authority that otherwise doesn’t exist.5 If Trump could simply declare an emergency and impose policies that Congress declined to enact, the Senate wouldn’t merely be unnecessary for the SAVE America Act. It would be unnecessary whenever Trump decided that going through Congress had become inconvenient.

If Trump is going to sign a national emergency to implement parts of the SAVE America Act, I suspect he’ll do it before Congress comes back from the August recess. Remember, early voting begins in some states as soon as mid-September. The legal challenges will already be formidable because of the lack of authority Trump has to use NEA for this purpose, but the timing—throwing last-minute requirements on states—would upend the election and undermine confidence in elections. That is, of course, Trump’s goal.