President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to sow the seeds of a potential midterm power grab, according to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey.
“I don’t think we should underestimate the lengths that the president and the administration will go to come November,” the 55-year-old Democratic governor said on The Daily Beast Podcast.
Healey argued that Trump, 79, is actively conjuring a “specter of fraud” as a pretext to “exercise emergency powers and go in and take over elections.”
During his 108-minute-long speech to the nation on Tuesday night, Trump baselessly claimed that “cheating is rampant in our elections” and falsely accused Democrats of rigging outcomes.
“They want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” he shouted into his microphone.
Trump’s approval rating has sunk to a five-year low, according to a Washington Post–ABC News poll, and he has repeatedly expressed his worries about potential GOP losses in the 2026 midterms.
At the same time, the commander-in-chief has worked to erode trust in elections on a near-daily basis by falsely claiming they are riddled with fraud, and recently called on Republicans to transfer authority over voting from states to the federal government.
“He pushes, pushes, pushes ... all to sort of sow these seeds to provide some justification for him to exercise emergency powers, put troops on the streets, to scare people away,” Healey told host Joanna Coles.
“I think that what we have to anticipate is not only will we see ICE, we’ll see every federal agency set out around ballot polling places to scare people away,” she added.
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast: “Anything said on the Daily Beast podcast is equivalent to screaming into the void. No one listens to this Trump Derangement Syndrome therapy session full of bizarre Blue Anon conspiracies.” The latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast has racked up more than 100,000 views in less than two days.
Heather Honey, a top official in the Department of Homeland Security and a 2020 election denier, recently promised election officials that there won’t be an ICE presence at polling places, Politico reported Wednesday.
Healey pointed out that Trump has taken the extraordinary step of deploying the military—including the National Guard and Marines—in U.S. cities, often over the objections of local officials.
Trump has also sent waves of federal immigration authorities like ICE into cities, where their heavy-handed tactics and the killings of U.S. citizens at the hands of agents have sparked fear among residents.
On Tuesday evening, the president urged lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act, which would mandate a photo ID to vote, require people to submit proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote, and grant the Department of Homeland Security access to states’ voter rolls.
Democrats have condemned the bill, warning that it could disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens by creating hurdles to register and cast ballots.
Trump has spent years attacking the legitimacy of U.S. elections, and he continues to push—and investigate—his long-debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
During the State of the Union he quipped, “it should be my third term.”
Healey argued it was important to talk about the possibility that the increasingly unpopular president, who said last month that people sometimes “need a dictator,” could try to seize control over the vote.
“We are training local officials, local law enforcement, and community members on what might happen and what their rights are,” said Healey, the first woman elected governor in Massachusetts and one of the first openly lesbian governors in the U.S.
“I think it’s important that we talk about what is actually being attempted right now by the Trump administration and that we have in place what we need to have in place to protect people’s rights.”
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