In most mainstream circles, Wayne Allyn Root is probably not well known, but Donald Trump certainly knows who he is. In fact, seven years ago this month, Root, a far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist, claimed that Israeli Jews view Trump as the “second coming of God.”

The president, in the third year of his first term, should have simply ignored Root’s comments, but Trump instead decided to amplify them and thank him for them, generating a fresh controversy in the process.

Seven years later, the president still seems to think highly of Root — the syndicated media personality spoke at a Trump rally last year and was welcomed into the Oval Office a month later — to the point that he appeared on the conspiracy theorist’s Real America’s Voice program as this week got underway.

That’s notable in its own right, though of greater interest was an exchange between the host and Trump during the interview.

“Let me put an idea in your head,” Root told the president. “Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything — now they’re on recess, they don’t get anything done — if they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections.”

After pointing to a Supreme Court ruling that he believes bolsters his argument, the host added, “If you declare a national security emergency, as president of the United States, they can’t challenge it. In can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress.”

Root concluded, “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’s vote.”

At the point, Trump interrupted the host to say, “Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”

In other words, a far-right conspiracy theorist pitched the president on the idea of unilaterally declaring a national security emergency for elections, despite the lack of an actual national security emergency, at which point Trump could theoretically impose wildly unnecessary voting restrictions on Americans by fiat and without congressional approval.

The president could have responded by saying, “No, I won’t do any such thing, because I care too much about preserving our democracy and system of government.” But he didn’t. The Republican instead suggested that he saw this as an actual possibility.

I won’t pretend to know what, if anything, the White House has planned along these lines with 12 weeks remaining before Election Day 2026, and it’s certainly possible that Trump won’t launch any radical power grabs before Americans cast their ballots.

But the fact that he has left this door open to a constitutional crisis is, to understate matters, profoundly unsettling and deserving of public vigilance in the coming days, weeks and months.

The post ‘Stranger things have happened’: Trump hedges when pressed on declaring election emergency appeared first on MS NOW.

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