By all available accounts, the Trump administration and its allies in right-wing media are waging an all-out, if haphazard, campaign to subvert the upcoming midterm elections. This throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach can be difficult to follow, and from the point of view of these plotters, sowing confusion is a feature, not a bug.

One key node of this operation — think Oceans 11 by way of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski — is a middling but persistent MAGA pundit named Wayne Allyn Root. Root is a longtime Las Vegas media gadfly, having been a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a host for a local AM radio show. He’s also spent years in right-wing media, with stints at Breitbart and Newsmax. He currently hosts a show on Real America’s Voice.

It is a sign of the malignant effect the Trump era has had on U.S. politics that Root has any influence whatsoever. And, like President Donald Trump himself, Root’s bottomless buffet of buffoonery makes the potential harm he could inflict all the more galling.

By some counts, there are as many as 19 ways that Trump and his allies are trying to subvert or undermine the November elections. We won’t go through all of them here, but many are predicated on the false claim that noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is an epidemic rather than a virtually non-existenant phenomenon.

Here are some of the lowlights. The Trump administration is attempting to create a national database of citizens under the pretext of rooting out noncitizen voters, which has for now been blocked by a federal judge. It has attempted to interfere in the United States Postal Service’s distribution and collection of mail-in ballots; this was also blocked by a judge, but the administration has asked the Supreme Court to overrule that order. Department of Homeland Security agents are scouring state election databases to find illegitimate registered voters. War Room host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon regularly demands that ICE and other federal officers patrol polling sites.

At the same time, Trump and his media allies are pursuing a related plot to subvert the midterms that relies on manufacturing false claims of Chinese interference in U.S. elections. That was the focus of Trump’s July 16 national address, but documents Trump declassified to support his claims actually “made a stronger case that a different country — Russia — had meddled in the race” for Trump, not China for Biden, according to The New York Times.

From there, the plotters would use that cooked intelligence as a predicate to issue a national emergency and executive order that, its supporters say, would give Trump “king-like powers” over vast swaths of state election systems.

This last part is where Root comes in.

With guys like Root it’s always hard to distinguish between bluster and real influence, but here’s the basic outline. Root claims that in 2019 he persuaded Trump to declare a national emergency to build the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border — an idea that Root, by his own admission, “invented out of whole cloth.” As Root recently told Steve Bannon, “I woke up from a sleep one day and I said, this is a good idea.”

Root’s current plan appears to be to reprise that move. As far back as April, Root claimed he texted Trump about issuing a national emergency declaration and an “executive order on election integrity.” According to Root’s faux-legal analysis of the 1983 court case INS v. Chadha, the emergency declaration and a possible accompanying executive order — he has said at various times that there would be an executive order and also that one is not needed — would not be reviewable by the courts and would require a supermajority in Congress to override them. As Root said on Bannon’s show: “National security emergencies, Steve, cannot be challenged in court.”

Root later told Trump the same thing directly during an August 10 interview. “If you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States,” then the courts “can't challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress,” he said.

Trump responded: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I'll leave it at that.”

On August 30, Root said that Trump posted “my columns about national security emergency for elections three times in the last two weeks. Why is he doing that if he doesn't plan to actually sign that declaration?”

Yes, 100%. Needless to say, INS v. Chadha does not give Trump power over elections, as Root argues it does. National emergency declarations are reviewable by the courts, and while it is true that judges often defer to the executive branch when it comes to emergency powers, that is a choice, not a requirement. Where Root is correct is that INS v. Chadha does effectively impose a requirement that two-thirds of Congress vote to override a national emergency declaration, a vulnerability Trump has exploited repeatedly.

What exactly any of these orders would purport to do is unclear, but in Root’s telling they would achieve the aims of the SAVE America Act without having to go through Congress. That legislation, which is stalled and appears to have no chance of passing, would require voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote and create national voter ID requirements. Others in the election denial ecosystem, like Tina Peters, have recommended to Trump that his future EO ban voting machines and severely curtail things like mail-in ballots and absentee voting. It’s safe to say that any of these actions would face immediate court challenges.

As far as the potential emergency declaration goes, Root is now arguing that Trump doesn’t need a “predicate” at all — for example, that China is supposedly trying to interfere in U.S. elections — and that he only needs to sell the idea of a national emergency to the public.

At the administration level, it’s possible that we could get an announcement during the Republican midterm convention. For his part, Root has predicted Trump would make the declaration sometime in August or September.

My friend, you don’t know the half of it.

• As far back as 2011, Root pushed the racist “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen.
• In 2012, Root suggested that Obama’s transcripts at Columbia held some secret scandal or were somehow faked.
• In 2016, Root spread the false narrative that China — rather than Russia — had interfered in the presidential election.
• In 2017, when a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, murdered protester Heather Heyer with his car, Root claimed the story was “such B.S.” and wrote: “Probably paid actors & infiltrators hired by Soros. No conservative I’ve ever met commits violence. EVER.”
• Months later, when a mass shooter killed 58 people during a concert in Las Vegas, Root falsely alleged that it was a “clearly coordinated Muslim terror attack” and that “ISIS fingerprints were all over this thing.” Also in 2017, following an attack in London, Root wrote that the UK had “let in too many Muslim immigrants."
• In 2018, Root pushed the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had been murdered by Democratic officials, who then covered it up.
• That same year, he also claimed Democrats stole the 2018 midterm elections.
• In 2019, Root said Israelis love Trump “like he is the second coming of God."
• In 2020, Root praised the idea of “secession” to avoid a civil war, and then in 2021 said of a looming civil war: “I promise you it's coming."

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Root peddled an “alkaline structured silver” product that supposedly “kills [the] virus” and can “save your life.” The scam caught the eye of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who “ordered Wayne Allyn Root to immediately cease and desist marketing products as treatments or cures for coronavirus.” In March 2020, the Las Vegas Review-Journal stopped publishing Root’s column, citing his snake oil scheme as “a factor."

Root has dabbled at the fringe edge of electoral politics as well, serving as the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 2008.

Most recently, as we noted above, Root claimed to have texted Trump about the national emergency declaration plan. Root also recently interviewed Trump on his Real America’s Voice show, which, by Root’s count, would be at least the 17th time he’s had Trump on one of his shows over the years. Back when current close Trump aide Natalie Harp was a host at OAN, Root appeared on her show, possibly explaining why his ideas seem to be making their way to the president’s desk.

But their relationship is not new. Never one to miss a branding opportunity, Trump provided a blurb for Root’s 2015 book about the future president, titled: Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America. Root introduced Trump at a Las Vegas rally in 2015, again in October of 2016, and again in September 2018. In 2019, Trump thanked Root for defending him after Trump had said that when American Jews vote for Democrats “it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” In 2025, Root met with Trump in the Oval Office.

Whether the Trump administration will follow Root’s guidance remains to be seen, but it is already working overtime to sow doubt about the reliability of U.S. elections, especially those won by Democrats. Root has been a longtime bit player in this sideshow. Now he’s doing everything he can to grab the spotlight.