TRUMP / WAYNE ROOT
"Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK? I'll leave it at that."
"So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship and a limit to mail-in ballots." — — Wayne Allyn Root, pitching an elections emergency seconds before that answer
A radio host told the president he could declare a national security emergency over elections and impose voting rules without the Senate. Trump answered "stranger things have happened," and when Root called it "the SAVE Act on steroids," said "Yep." The press ran it for a day on the ambiguity — declines to rule out — then moved to whether Bannon's late-August prediction would land, and when it did not, dropped the thread. Then on August 28 at 11:22 AM the president posted the Daily Mail piece about his own "chilling five-word response." At 11:23 he posted Root: "Scream & Attack All You Want. You Can't Stop It. It's Foolproof." That afternoon: "Judge lifts nationwide block on Trump's mail voting order." Alarm was the entire coverage strategy, and the subject reprinted the alarm as a receipt. Sixty seconds apart, on the official feed, and almost nobody covered it.