Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old South Florida lawyer and President Donald Trump’s former classmate, is planning to push Trump to issue an executive order that would give the president control over the upcoming midterm elections. Trump and Ticktin go back to their New York Military Academy days in the 1960s, and he has risen to prominence in the MAGA orbit.
Talking to Vanity Fair, Ticktin claimed that Trump has to take action, adding, “I wouldn’t recommend this to the president if it were not actually an election emergency occurring, where foreign interests are putting their thumb on the scale of our elections.”
It is important to note that Ticktin helped Trump in his 2022 lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, which claimed she was part of a scheme to sabotage the 2016 MAGA campaign. The attorney also believes that Trump won the 2020 election, a claim the president continues to make, despite it having no factual basis.
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Explaining how foreign nations are involved with U.S. elections, Ticktin said, “The only reason Donald Trump is in office now is because the computer data center in Belgrade, Serbia, was disabled by certain American actors in 2024.” He then added, “But they’re never going to let that happen again.”
By “they,” he refers to the Chinese, the Democrats, and the World Economic Forum, who, according to him, are planning to win a Senate majority next year so that they could impeach Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Ticktin then added that after Trump and Vance’s impeachment, New York Congressman Hakeem Jeffries would be serving as president.
According to Ticktin, he first raised the issue of election integrity with Trump a year ago. Since then, he has drafted an “outline” executive order for the president to intervene in the midterms that mentions measures like banning mail ballots and voting machines. While a 17-page draft is now circulating among MAGA allies, Ticktin said he had not created the full version of the document.
He named Jerome Corsi as the person who might have done that. Corsi is a conspiracy theorist and previously contributed to Alex Jones’ InfoWars platform, which pushed baseless claims about former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. However, Corsi said he did not develop the full draft and credited Ticktin with the broader efforts surrounding the election integrity issue.
The kind of cases Ticktin deals with are also notable. He is representing a criminally convicted county clerk for trying to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden. He has also previously represented a number of people involved in the Jan. 6 riot. During his career, his license has been suspended twice over non-permitted referral payments and conflicts of interest.
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While Trump had denied having any knowledge of any executive order related to the midterm elections on Feb. 27, Sen. Mark Warner is raising the alarm over the possibility of it happening. Talking to Vanity Fair, he said, “This is of critical importance.”
He then added, “One thing we should have learned about Trump is he doesn’t hide his intentions, including the notion to call for federal elections.” Given how important U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would be if this were to happen, Warner said, “Tulsi Gabbard is a disaster, and she’s chasing debunked theories about the 2020 election.”
He continued, “She could be the perpetrator of this—putting out a raw piece of intelligence that purports to show foreign interference,” which would then justify Trump’s interference in the midterm elections.
With the current sociopolitical situation in America, including a war with Iran, issues like the president issuing an executive order for the midterm elections might not seem as much of a priority for the government.
However, given Trump’s dipping approval ratings and several major Democratic wins in recent elections, only time will tell how this speculation around the executive order plays out.
