The Strongest Power, Never Used

In October 2025, federal courts blocked the administration's plan to put National Guard units on American streets, and the president answered by reaching for the Insurrection Act — the statute that lets him federalize state guards or send regular troops into the country. He described it that week with a superlative.

[The Insurrection Act is] the strongest power a president has and you have the absolute right to do it. — Donald Trump

He did not use it. What fills the space a president leaves when he declines to reach for the power he calls his strongest is the question the rest of the year answers. In November 2025, after six Democratic lawmakers urged troops to refuse illegal orders, the president branded the letter sedition and demanded the lawmakers be arrested and tried ^[1]. The Pentagon opened a command investigation into Senator Mark Kelly the same month ^[1] — a year before anyone cast a 2026 ballot. By January he was floating the idea of skipping the election altogether, while his Justice Department demanded private voter data, Social Security numbers included, from at least forty states ^[2]. In May, Attorney General Todd Blanche opened criminal probes of the 2020 election in Arizona, Georgia and Florida, claiming ample evidence the vote had been rigged ^[3]. By September the machinery had turned toward the polling sites themselves: plans circulated to deploy law enforcement and deputize National Guard members as immigration officers, and the military gave two answers — the Joint Chiefs chairman said there were no plans to send troops to the polls, while the general who would command such an operation said he would examine any such order closely ^[4]. In October he urged supporters to cheat at the polls, while his Justice Department sued to block twenty thousand California ballots ^[5]. Then the vote. On election night, as the results came in, Stephen Miller declared the opposition not a political party at all.

The Democrat Party is not a political party. — Stephen Miller

The morning after, the president signaled deals — immigration, tax cuts — on the same morning he appointed Miller chief of staff ^[6]. Two days later the Insurrection Act was reported under consideration again ^[7]. By the twelfth, the vice presidency had been re-tasked from Iran diplomacy to investigating blue states, naming California, Minnesota and Illinois ^[8]. Vance's own gloss was drier than any of it: the war cost them the election ^[8]. On the thirteenth, federal grand-jury subpoenas demanded records from the California counties that had refused to segregate ballots — the officials who said no. These had been civil suits, and the ballot and voter-data cases had by then lost in court twenty-eight times in a row ^[9]. The president's answer to the officials was direct.

They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!! — Donald Trump

Through it all, Blanche was explicit that none of this was a response to the result.

We are actively, and will continue to investigate election integrity cases criminally and civilly, and that wasn't expected to start or stop — no matter what the results of the election were last week. — Todd Blanche

On the fourteenth, the probes reached the winners themselves, with the Justice Department ordered to investigate the newly elected Democrats ^[10]. Two arms, in two different states of reality. The criminal arm runs with no recorded resistance — no prosecutor has resigned over it, no story of internal objection has surfaced — and it is already feeding downward: noncitizen cases from the federal government are arriving at county prosecutors' desks.

It has always been a crime but I've never had a noncitizen case referred to me. — Dan Dow

Its one formal defeat was a grand jury that refused to indict Senator Kelly on seditious-conspiracy charges, and a judge who ruled the Pentagon had trampled his First Amendment freedoms ^[11]. The military arm is the opposite. In thirteen months the Act has been publicly weighed at least twice — in October 2025 after courts blocked his Guard deployments, and again within days of the vote ^[7] — and invoked zero times. The general who would command it has said he would look closely ^[4], and a survey of active-duty troops found roughly eight in ten understand their duty to disobey illegal orders ^[12]. The vocabulary such an order would lean on was already in the record before anyone lost: sedition aimed at Democratic lawmakers a year out, an opposition declared an extremist organization on election night, fraud claimed in the 2020 probes since May. None of it depended on who won. Thirteen months. The Act was weighed once after courts blocked his Guard deployments, and again within days of the vote; invoked zero times. The corridor with no judge in it produced grand-jury subpoenas three days after the ballot suits' twenty-eighth straight loss ^[9]. One arm waited on a permission that never came. The other never needed one.