Donald Trump’s MAGA allies discussed martial law on a September 30 video call streamed on Rumble, tying the idea to the November midterm elections. Peter Ticktin said there would have to be martial law if another election were rigged.
The call went further than rhetoric. Ticktin later said ballots and election equipment might need to be commandeered to get to the bottom of any suspected fraud before anything further occurs, and Gregory Stenstrom urged Trump to invoke the National Emergencies Act to force states to change how they run elections.
Tina Peters was part of the same circle. Peters met with Trump in October, and she and Ticktin visited Trump at the White House in late June, while Peters has been promoting an online plan since August that calls for hand-marked paper ballots and manual recounts where feasible.
White House access and DHS role
The network around the call stretches beyond the activists themselves. Heather Honey now serves as the Homeland Security Department’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity and a senior adviser to the ICE director, while Peter Navarro continues to promote his own report of mass election fraud and irregularities around 2020.
That lineup shows how election denial moved from online argument to a current policy conversation inside Trump’s orbit. Steve Stern, who hosted the call, directed viewers to sign up through the Republican Party to become poll workers and observers for November.
Ticktin narrows his own claim
Ticktin later narrowed his language when speaking to the Daily Beast. “Ordinarily, the White House does not respond to hypotheticals which are suggested. The urging that I do is only in the event of a nightmare scenario where foreign interests take over our election equipment and thereby the outcome.”
He also told Axios, “They’ll probably need to be commandeering of ballots and election equipment to make sure that we can get to the bottom of it before anything further occurs,” and the White House response to Axios said, “Americans deserve elections that are safe, secure, and transparent to ensure full confidence in the results. President Trump believes every legal vote must count, every election must be protected, and Americans must have complete confidence in the integrity of our elections.”
Tina Peters and the coming midterms
Peters brings a concrete history to the campaign. She was convicted in 2024 of crimes tied to a breach of election equipment, and Jared Polis commuted her sentence this year. Her push for paper ballots and manual recounts gives the broader argument a practical form: not just distrust of results, but a call to change the machinery of election administration before November.
What remains is whether Trump or anyone in the White House endorsed any of these proposals. For voters and election workers, the immediate effect is not a rule change but a public pressure campaign aimed at the machinery, the ballots, and the people asked to run the vote in November.
