Trump’s MAGA allies openly floated martial law on a Sept. 30 video call if they decide the November midterm elections are rigged, pushing the issue from online grievance into a public discussion of extraordinary action. Tina Peters was on that call, putting a convicted election-system defendant back in the middle of a new fight over ballots and voting equipment.
The conversation matters now because it was not a fringe whisper in private. It was streamed on Rumble, and it came as Peters, who was convicted in 2024 over a breach of election equipment, has been trying to keep pressure on the idea that the system itself is unsafe. She met with Trump in October after visiting him with Peter Ticktin at the White House in late June, which gives the activists’ warnings added political weight even if no official action has followed.
Ticktin told listeners there would have to be martial law in the event of another rigged election. He later said they would probably need to be commandeering ballots and election equipment to get to the bottom of it before anything further occurs. Gregory Stenstrom said he most wanted the election paused over security concerns, and if it was not paused, he proposed Trump invoke the National Emergencies Act to force states to change how they run elections. Those are not routine suggestions. They are emergency powers, and the talk centered on who would control ballots, machines, and the count itself.
What made the call more than a one-off outburst was the broader pattern around it. Peters has promoted a plan online since August calling for hand-marked paper ballots and manual recounts where feasible. Steve Stern has been directing viewers to sign up through the Republican Party to become poll workers and observers for November. At the same time, Heather Honey now serves in the Homeland Security Department as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity and a senior adviser to the ICE director, while Peter Navarro continues to promote his report of mass election fraud and irregularities around the 2020 election. That mix shows how election suspicion reaches from activist streams into the edges of government and back again.
The sharpest contradiction sits at the center of it. Lauren Bis said Americans deserve elections that are safe, secure and transparent, and that President Trump believes every legal vote must count and every election must be protected. Yet his allies were discussing martial law and seizure of ballots and equipment as remedies for a feared rigged result. No formal move toward that has been announced, and the next concrete test is whether the November midterm elections produce the kind of result these activists already distrust — or whether the call itself becomes part of the pressure campaign around them.
