President Donald Trump on Tuesday refused to close the door on illegally sending federalized National Guard soldiers or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents to voting sites in Democratic areas during the November midterm elections despite the complete lack of any legal basis for doing so.
The president was pressed on whether he’d try to send federal resources to intimidate voters as he departed the White House for a state visit to China.
Asked whether he’d send National Guard or ICE to voting locations, Trump replied: “I do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”
His comments came just days after he announced on Truth Social that the GOP plans to dispense a large “Election Integrity Army” to every single state for the 2026 midterms – invoking his debunked claims that the United States does not have fair elections.
In the social media post, he claimed his 2024 election win over Kamala Harris was due to the thousands of poll watchers Republicans had sent into polling stations nationwide,
“During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote. We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger,” Trump wrote.
Trump did not elaborate on who would be part of the “Election Integrity Army” or how large it would be.
But his announcement was reminiscent of familiar claims he made in the run-up to the 2024 presidential race in which he planted seeds of doubt on the validity of U.S. election – seemingly dependent on the outcome.
Since returning to office last January, Trump has remained fixated on his 2020 loss to Biden and has attempted to use his authority to make it far more difficult for Americans to vote by mail, citing widely debunked allegations of fraud in that election.
Earlier this year, he signed an executive order attempting to restrict mail-in ballot voting by directing the government to create a list of eligible voters and demanding that the U.S. Postal Service only send ballots to voters on that list.
He has also demanded Congress pass federal voter ID laws and sought to have Republican-led states redraw congressional maps in their party’s favor.
When his party has lost, as it did during last month’s Virginia referendum on a new congressional map (that has been tossed out by the state’s top court) he immediately took to Truth Social to falsely allege that the Democratic victory was the result of subterfuge.
He screamed in all caps that a “RIGGED ELECTION” had taken place despite there being absolutely no evidence of any irregularities or fraud in the conduct of the plebiscite the previous evening in which 1,575,288 voters cast ballots in favor of a constitutional amendment which permits the implementation of new districts drawn by Virginia’s Democratic-led General Assembly, bypassing an independent, bipartisan commission which has drawn district lines since 2020.
No irregularities were reported during the voting on Tuesday, and Democrats had indicated that they expected to win based on heavy turnout in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon, Prince William and Henrico Counties, all of which are home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers, many of whom have been affected by the Trump administration’s efforts to slash federal employment rolls to punish what GOP loyalists believe is an anti-Trump “deep state.”
Trump nonetheless claimed Republicans had been “winning” the referendum “all day long” — until what he described as a “massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop’” changed the GOP’s fortunes.
