(Daily Signal)—President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an executive order to secure American elections without relying on Congress passing legislation.
Trump has directed his counsel’s office to explore whether he could develop an executive order requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo identification at polling locations across the country, MS NOW first reported.
The Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing a 17-page executive order to declare a national emergency over elections and ban mail-in ballots and voting machines, on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief White House strategist, told The Daily Signal the president should declare an emergency to secure elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“It’s the president’s duty as commander in chief to declare a national security emergency and take all necessary precautions today to ensure the safety of the November elections—I just pray we are not already too late,” Bannon said.
It is unclear if the president can use an executive order in this way, as the elections clause of the Constitution gives the state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch, the power to regulate elections.
But Cleta Mitchell, chairwoman of the Trump-friendly Election Integrity Network, told The Daily Signal the president is not going to do anything that is not fully based in law.
“I’ve had no conversations with anyone that would suggest in any way that the president is going to issue some kind of illegal order that’s not based in law,” Mitchell said. “He hasn’t done that yet.”
Democrats and the corporate media like to portray the president as being willing to issue orders without legal footing, but that’s not what he does, Mitchell said.
Mitchell cited Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias, who responded to reports of the executive order, saying, “My team and I have been anticipating this for months. It is unconstitutional and illegal.”
“The media should note: Last time he issued an EO about voting, we sued and won,” Elias said. “If Trump issues such an order, we will sue again, and we will win again.”
Though a judge earlier this year blocked Trump’s Executive Order 14248, strengthening voter citizenship verification, Mitchell is confident the order was legal, and the judge’s ruling will be overturned.
“Something is not going to be issued by President Trump and coming from his White House that is not fully grounded,” according to Mitchell. “He hasn’t done that previously, and he’s not going to do it now.”
No matter what’s in the executive order, Executive Director of the Honest Elections Project Jason Snead expects to see litigation.
“Almost no matter what is ultimately in the order, it will be challenged in court,” he said.
Snead thinks an executive order could legally encourage states to pass voter ID laws.
“There’s a lot that could be done to nudge states towards enacting voter identification laws,” Snead said. “The states have primary regulatory authority in this space and then Congress, as far as congressional elections are concerned, as there’s a certain amount of leeway under the elections clause to make or alter state regulations.”
“I don’t think that we should discount the role of states here,” he added.
The president’s turn to executive authority to secure elections comes after Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., seemed to rule out using the talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act.
The SAVE America Act would institute national requirements of proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as photo identification to vote in federal elections.
The act doesn’t have the 60 votes to pass the Senate unless Thune invokes the talking filibuster, a procedural maneuver that would only require 50 votes for the bill’s passage.
“If we were to go down that path, it’s very hard to pivot and get back to open up the government,” Thune said of the talking filibuster Wednesday.
“There just isn’t the support for doing that at this point,” he added.
Trump asked lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act in his Tuesday State of the Union.
“The cheating is rampant in our elections. … We have to stop it, John,” he said. “We have to stop it.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
