Election Emergency Playbook: Trump’s QAnon Allies Draft the Order

By Rachel Hurley February 26th, 2026 Updated September 29th, 2026

The man who lost the 2020 election, refused to accept it, got impeached for inciting a riot over it, got indicted for trying to overturn it, and then won the next one anyway - is still trying to prove the one he lost was stolen. Five years later. We are in year five of the world’s most expensive cope.

So here’s what dropped today. Pro-Trump activists - who say they’re coordinating with the White House - are circulating a 17-page draft executive order claiming China interfered in the 2020 election. The goal? Declare a national emergency. The prize? Extraordinary presidential power over how Americans vote. The Washington Post broke this one, and I need you to pay attention.

The draft would use a national emergency declaration to empower the president to ban mail-in ballots. Ban voting machines. Just - ban the ways people vote. In the name of protecting elections from Chinese interference that, after five years and multiple investigations, nobody has actually proven happened.

Let Me Introduce You to the Cast

Peter Ticktin is a Florida attorney who went to military school with Trump when they were teenagers. He was suspended from practicing law in 2009 for professional misconduct. He filed Trump’s $72 million racketeering lawsuit against Hillary Clinton - a suit that legal experts called “garbage” and “absurd.” He represented Tina Peters, the Colorado clerk who got sentenced to nine years for tampering with voting machines while claiming to expose election fraud. He brought pardon requests for January 6 defendants to Trump’s Justice Department pardon attorney. He went on QAnon-adjacent podcasts asking viewers to send him evidence of “the fake election.” And now he’s the guy telling the Washington Post that Chinese election interference “causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

This is who’s drafting the blueprint.

Then there’s Jerome Corsi. Harvard PhD who helped popularize the QAnon conspiracy theory. The birther guy - as in, he was instrumental in pushing the lie that Barack Obama had a fake birth certificate. Former Infowars contributor. He’s been going on podcasts for months claiming he and Ticktin have been drafting this exact 17-page executive order. His quote about what it enables:

“A national security emergency will allow Donald Trump to make sure that the elections in 2026 are secure even if we have to go to extreme measures and get the military involved.”

The military. Involved in our elections. To make them secure. Just let that marinate.

This Isn’t Happening in a Vacuum

This is the sequel. Trump already signed an election executive order in March 2025 - the one that tried to require documentary proof of citizenship to register, ban counting mail ballots received after Election Day, and give DOGE access to voter data. Multiple federal judges blocked it. One wrote that “the Constitution does not grant the president any specific powers over elections.” Another noted that “executive regulatory authority over federal elections does not appear to have crossed the Framers’ minds.”

The courts said no. So now the play is: call it a national emergency and try again with more power.

There’s even a DHS official who floated the same idea. Heather Honey, Trump’s deputy assistant secretary for “election integrity,” reportedly suggested the national emergency approach months before her appointment. She’s a former private investigator from Pennsylvania who became prominent pushing Trump’s efforts to overturn 2020. And Trump ally Cleta Mitchell - who was literally on the phone during Trump’s infamous “I just want to find 11,780 votes” call to Georgia - has been publicly advocating for emergency powers over elections too.

The Irony Layer Here Is Thick

Executive Order 13848, originally signed by Trump in 2018, declared a national emergency over foreign election interference. Trump himself renewed it. The very framework they want to exploit - Trump built it. The emergency he declared about foreign meddling in elections? He kept extending it. And now his people want to use that same emergency framework to seize control of how elections are run.

The emergency was always the point. The China angle is just the costume.

Here’s What Kills Me

After five years, across dozens of audits, investigations, court cases, and recounts - after his own attorney general said there was no widespread fraud, after sixty-plus lawsuits got thrown out, after CISA called 2020 the most secure election in history - the claim is still “China did it.” And the evidence is still just the claim itself.

The AP found fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud across six battleground states, out of millions of votes cast. Not 475 thousand. Fewer than 475. That wouldn’t swing a school board race.

But the point was never the evidence. The point is the emergency. Declare a crisis, claim extraordinary powers, rewrite the rules of voting eight months before the midterms. Ban the methods that make it easier for people to vote. Call it security. Wrap it in patriotism. Get a former Infowars guy and a once-suspended Florida lawyer to write it up, and hand it to the White House.

This is the part where someone normally comments, “Surely the courts will stop this.” And yeah, they’ve stopped the last round. But that’s exactly why this version goes bigger - national emergency powers are a different legal animal. And this administration has invoked emergency powers more than any modern president. They’re testing what sticks.

To Recap

A guy who went to QAnon conferences, a guy who pushed birtherism on Infowars, and a handful of activists who think the 2020 election was stolen are drafting executive orders for the President of the United States. The orders would let him declare a national emergency based on unproven Chinese interference and seize control of American elections.

This isn’t a drill. This is the draft. And the people writing it say the White House is listening.

Sources

Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said Peter Ticktin hand-delivered pardon applications for January 6 defendants to the White House - he brought them to the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. It said nobody has proven foreign interference in the 2020 election - U.S. intelligence found Russian proxies pushed misleading stories that year, and it’s Chinese interference nobody has proven. It also quoted Trump’s Georgia call as “find me 11,780 votes” (he said “I just want to find 11,780 votes”), said the draft came nine months before the midterms (it was about eight), and put a year, 1961, on Ticktin’s time at military school with Trump - the line now says what the record shows, that they were there as teenagers.

Update, September 28th, 2026: The headline no longer calls the draft Trump’s playbook - activists wrote it, and Trump said the next day he’d “never heard about it” - and a few lines now say Trump was impeached for inciting the riot, the DHS official floated the same emergency idea months before her appointment, and the AP counted fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud.