The White House is reportedly considering issuing an executive order alleging that China interfered in the 2020 presidential election. The order would give President Trump the basis to declare a national emergency and ban mail ballots and voting machines to affect the outcome of the upcoming 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” said Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer advocating for the draft executive order, told The Washington Post.

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“But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin added. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

A 2021 review from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence determined that China had considered interfering with the 2020 election but did not. The executive order is being circulated by Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist who claimed that the nation’s first Black President Barack Obama wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

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It’s ironic that Trump would try to blame China for interfering in his 2020 election loss, seeing as he has long railed against Democrats who blamed Russia for interfering in his 2016 election win. Trump has repeatedly called claims of Russian interference a “hoax.”

Trump has never conceded his 2020 election loss, even though he lost by over 7 million votes. Trump claimed his loss was due to an unprecedented vote-rigging conspiracy that only occurred in the states that he lost. He and Republicans repeatedly pushed this lie in the media and courts, even as nearly 60 judges threw out GOP election fraud cases due to a lack of evidence.

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