'You can't laugh it off': Dems declare war on 'far-fetched' Trump election threats

Democratic officials, attorneys and voting-rights groups are quietly rehearsing for midterm election scenarios so extreme that, in another political era, raising them would have sounded crazy.

In early August, more than three dozen people — including former Attorney General Eric Holder, legal experts, elected officials and labor and pro-democracy leaders — met privately for a war-gaming session convened by Hillary Clinton, who opened the meeting and then largely observed as two teams worked through hypothetical election-chaos scenarios, reported NBC News.

“The fact that you have very serious human beings who are worried about this to the point they’re calling a meeting should signal that the threat is real,” said one person with knowledge of the Clinton event. “Leaders have to lead and this is a moment that requires protecting our freedom.”

More than a dozen party officials, attorneys and democracy groups told NBC News there has been an unprecedented push to anticipate and counter possible election disruption, including drafting legal briefs ready to file in court on short notice.

Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Action, who has run roughly a dozen tabletop exercises with senators and elections experts, said preparing this way isn't paranoia — it "would be malpractice not to be ready."

More than 100 potential threats have been considered, and some of the scenarios under discussion sound almost cinematic.

“Can he invoke emergency powers? Can he establish martial law? Can he suspend habeas corpus? At any other time, you’d almost look at people as though they had lost their minds,” said Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee. “But it’s Donald Trump, so you can’t laugh it off and say, ‘Well, that would never happen,’ because no one would have ever thought Jan. 6 would have happened.”

One scenario that concerns voter protection groups is the possibility that Trump could urge congressional Republicans not to certify elections in some states.

“One of the popular theories that’s been discussed and planned for is the House just says, ‘We’re not going to seat certain members from these contested jurisdictions and, oh, by the way, those jurisdictions are necessary for the Democratic Party to take control of the House,’” said Stephen Richer, a Republican who previously served as a top election official Maricopa County, Arizona.

Participants have debated how to maintain the sanctity of ballots if Department of Justice monitors, who are allowed inside polling locations, attempted to seize ballots, but Richer said that concern was likely "overblown.

“Maybe I lack the imagination a little bit for today’s world because if you had told me that in January of 2026 the FBI was going to execute a warrant and remove materials from Fulton County for the 2020 election, I would have said, ‘That seems far-fetched,'" Richer said. "But indeed, it did happen.”

Trump has signed executive orders on elections that courts have largely blocked, pushed the restrictive SAVE America Act, called for Republicans to "nationalize" elections, and directed the Postal Service to screen mail ballots by citizenship status — an order still tied up in litigation. Asked about invoking emergency powers over elections, Trump told a conservative interviewer, "stranger things have happened."

The Justice Department, for its part, dismissed the ballot-seizure fear outright, calling it fearmongering and insisting "this will not happen."

Democrats say they're preparing anyway, training tens of thousands of poll observers and pushing early, in-person voting as a hedge against whatever comes next.