Try to imagine what it's like to be president of the United States of America, giving our country's military commanders the authorization to launch a war against another country very early on a Saturday morning.

I picture a scene of intense focus as the orders are issued and bombs start to fall far away, and then as retaliatory strikes begin to target Americans in the region. There's probably not a second for a president to spend thinking about other issues, right?

Not if you're Donald Trump.

Trump, who won a second term on a promise of ending foreign wars and then promptly started a new war with Iran on Feb. 28, swiftly showed his worldview is always preoccupied with one particular kind of fake victimhood.

Trump announced the war in a social media post at 2:44 a.m. on Feb. 28. Then, less than two hours into the attack, the president posted again, not with an update about the ongoing hostilities, but with a 4:35 a.m. complaint about the presidential elections in 2020 and 2024.

"Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States," he posted, linking to a right-wing website story about those elections.

Sure, Trump always tries to weave into any discussion his long-debunked claims that Democrats are always trying to rig elections to cheat him out of victory, despite winning two of his three presidential elections. But why whine about it at the very beginning of a new war?

Trump has been shopping for 'emergency' to federalize midterms

Trump and his election-denying allies have been on the hunt for some sort of "emergency" to exploit so he can try to "federalize" the midterm elections in November.

Democrats stand a strong chance to win control of the U.S. House and maybe the U.S. Senate, too.

Trump has been warning his supporters of that for months, because he openly fears the oversight Democrats could bring to his administration. That's why he wants to seize control ahead of the midterms, despite the U.S. Constitution clearly giving authority to run elections to the states.

Trump on Feb. 2 repeated his call for the midterms to be federalized.

On Feb. 26, The Washington Post reported that some of his favorite election-denying conspiracy theorists were pushing for him to sign an executive order to declare an emergency and require voters to present identification to vote in November and to ban mail ballots. 

The news website ProPublica on Feb. 28 then reported that "several high-ranking federal election officials" had attended a recent summit organized by election deniers who are pushing for Trump to declare a national emergency to seize control of the midterm elections.

David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation and Research, held a media briefing on March 3 about the proposed emergency declaration after he read the 17-page proposed executive order.

Becker split the issue this way: There are things Trump might try to do, but there are also things he has no power to do.

Just because it's illegal doesn't mean Trump won't try

Could Trump declare an emergency? Sure, he's constantly looking for ways to expand his power as president. And he's conducted acts of war against Venezuela and now Iran without approval from Congress, as required by the Constitution.

"The president might try," Becker said. "He might sign a piece of paper, as he did in March (2025), that attempts to dictate election policy in the states. He might sign a piece of paper that says, 'I have emergency powers.' But the Constitution is very clear that he does not when it comes to elections."

Becker predicted that federal courts, from the district level to the U.S. Supreme Court, would strike down such an attempt, comparing it to the Supreme Court's ruling on Feb. 20 that Trump's trade-war tariffs were illegal.

If the president is so worried about election interference from countries like Iran, then why has he used his second term to slash federal programs specifically set up to protect America from that?

The answer seems obvious – to Trump, American voters are the emergency, not foreign adversaries. And that's a problem, because there are plenty of countries eager to meddle in our elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice in September 2024, while Joe Biden was president, indicted three members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for hacking the emails of some of Trump's campaign staff and then offering the information to Biden's campaign before making it public.

And the National Intelligence Council, in a report declassified in March 2021, assessed "with high confidence that Iran carried out an influence campaign" to "undercut the reelection prospects of former President Trump" with social media posts and emails. The report also found that Iran did not attempt to interfere with American election infrastructure like voter registration, voting machines or ballot counts.

The intelligence report said the same about other countries that attempted to influence the 2020 election, including China, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.

If Trump were really concerned with foreign countries attempting to influence our elections, he would be beefing up security, not scaling it back. The only "emergency" here for Trump is the potential for a strong midterm performance by Democrats in Congress.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.

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