On Sunday, The Atlantic magazine published a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory by David Frum based not on fact, but entirely on the speculation of a fervid liberal imagination.
In "For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal," Frum provides his theory that former President Donald Trump called out the National Guard during the immigration riots in Los Angeles to prepare for a military takeover of the 2026 midterms.
Here is Frum making his laughable case based on absolutely nothing:
Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026:
Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance—flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.
Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.
Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government—policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.
The proof for this wild assertion? You would have better luck finding it in a Ouija board than in anything Frum provides. And what he does provide is nothing more than who is not currently in the government, namely General Mark Milley and former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
Some of Trump’s most fervent supporters urged him to follow this plan in November 2020. But in 2020, they waited too long—until after the votes were cast. Using the military to overturn an election already completed was too extreme a step for a Department of Defense headed by a law-respecting Cabinet secretary such as Mark Esper.
But the methods Trump threatened in Los Angeles this weekend could be much more effective in November 2026 than the attempted civilian coup of January 2021.
If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control. Or he might suspend voting until, in his opinion, order has been restored. Either way, blue-state seats could be rendered vacant for some time.
...In his first term, Trump repeatedly talked more radically than he acted. He was usually constrained by his own appointees. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley rebuffed Trump’s suggestion during the George Floyd unrest that the military shoot protesters, which sufficed to dissuade Trump from upgrading the suggestion into a direct order.
But instead of Esper and Milley, the second Trump administration’s military is headed by a former talk-show host facing troubling allegations of heavy drinking and sexual misconduct. (He denies these claims.)
Hegseth owes everything to Trump. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are likewise headed by radical partisans with dubious records, abjectly beholden to Trump. This Trump administration is sending masked agents into the streets to seize and detain people—and, in some cases, sending detainees to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing—on the basis of a 1798 law originally designed to defend the United States against invasion by the army and navy of revolutionary France. The presidency of 2025 has available a wide and messy array of emergency powers, as the legal scholar Elizabeth Goitein has described.
Goitein works for the leftist Brennan Center for Justice. In his conclusion, Frum provides a final blast of bizarre tinfoil hat vibes.
This weekend’s events suggest an answer. Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried. But he might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him—and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.
As for detecting a reality based scandal, it appears Frum was unable (or unwilling) to do that even when it stared him in the face as you can see in this gem he posted about Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020:
The people on far right and far left who publicized the obviously bogus @nypost story were not dupes. They were accomplices. The story could not have been more obviously fake if it had been wearing dollar-store spectacles and attached plastic mustache.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) October 18, 2020
