rolling coup – Former House majority leader Richard Gephardt and former Sen. Timothy Wirth say the Trump administration’s use of a National Presidential Security Memorandum on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and other moves to concentrate pow
On a White House lawn staged for spectacle, the message was less subtle than the cheering crowd: the government, dressed in muscle and hardware, would not be crossed.
Last week. President Donald Trump and his inner circle hosted bloody. Roman Empire–styled cage fights on the White House grounds as part of the “America-at-250” celebrations. It was the sort of display that critics say treats violence as entertainment—an overt bid for dominance meant to land with the kind of crowd-control that doesn’t need policy details.
In the middle of that atmosphere. Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth—former House majority leader and presidential candidate Richard Gephardt. and former Colorado senator Timothy Wirth—penned a warning they say deserves daylight now. not after a crisis has already taken hold. Their memo. they argue. lays out fears that the United States could be pulled into a “rolling coup” over the coming months. with the biggest danger arriving later than most people expect.
The thrust of their warning is not about rhetoric alone. In their view. the Trump administration is corroding democratic protections. eviscerating the rule of law. and expanding presidential power through a National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”.
The memo also points to the machinery of emergency powers—powers that. in their telling. sit ready to be used against political opponents rather than the kind of existential threats they were originally meant to address. Gephardt and Wirth argue that a politically cornered Trump facing the possibility of a GOP electoral wipeout in the midterms could declare a national emergency and attempt to activate expansive presidential authority detailed in top secret President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADs). They warn that such action could render “largely meaningless the Constitution’s guarantees of basic rights and liberties.”.
PEAD powers have been built up from the Eisenhower presidency to the present day. the memo says. and their secrecy is part of what makes the risk so hard to assess in real time. Even members of Congress do not know the full scope of what a PEAD-based power grab would look like. But from what is publicly available. Gephardt and Wirth say the authority would sweep broadly enough to curtail free speech. derail the functioning of the electoral process. and seize control over the means of communication. Their argument goes further: PEADs were designed in the early years of the Cold War to ensure continuity of government after a nuclear attack. but could be used. they say. not for continuity of government—rather for continuity of Donald Trump’s political power and for what they describe as his financial grift operations.
To show how that path might be unfolding, the memo points to actions it portrays as early evidence of the strategy.
Last week. it says. more than 100 FBI investigators were deployed to Ohio to comb through materials of and interview people affiliated with a two-decade-old voter registration group called the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The memo’s framing is stark: it says the move was ostensibly aimed at voter fraud. but more likely reflects a fishing expedition intended to intimidate groups that register low-income voters and push back against GOP gerrymandering efforts.
Also last week, the memo highlights California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that he and his wife were being investigated by the Department of Justice for unspecified crimes. In the memo’s view. that announcement lands in a broader pattern of politically motivated investigations aimed at Trump’s opponents and at people such as Federal Reserve board of governors member Lisa Cook who stand in the way of Trump’s agenda.
Gephardt and Wirth portray themselves as unlikely messengers. They are both described in the memo as serious and cautious longtime DC insiders who did not build careers out of alarm. Yet. in their warning. they are “shouting from the rooftops” in 2026. arguing the country is facing a political crisis of a kind they say it has never confronted.
The warning gets more personal when Wirth talks about why he thinks time is running out. When he was contacted for the discussion published alongside the memo. Wirth said he is convinced the case is not overstated. He described Trump as increasingly having “his back to the wall. ” pointing to a situation in Iran where he said Trump is “definitely in a corner.” Wirth linked that pressure to a political dynamic inside the United States: he said Trump is deeply unpopular even in Republican areas and that it is a “double whammy” he believes could push him into decisions aimed at avoiding the label of “loser.” Wirth added a grim consequence. saying Trump knows that if he loses “the jailhouse” could be demanded by the country.
Wirth’s argument about the trajectory turns on institutional changes he says have already been made. He said ICE has been turned into something of a private army for Trump. He also described a prison system being built for immigrant detainees as so large that he says it is “naïve to believe” there aren’t plans to incarcerate large numbers of political detainees inside those facilities if an emergency is declared.
On the military side, Wirth said the oversight systems meant to ensure the military doesn’t violate the law by deploying domestically against groups Trump labels as terrorists have been deliberately taken down.
He pointed to the FBI as already setting a precedent for actions that, in his view, could be extended to the political process itself. Wirth referenced the FBI going into Fulton County, Georgia, and taking hundreds of boxes of materials relating to the 2020 election.
And he tied those examples back to the NPSM-7 itself, saying it has shifted government resources into investigations of putative domestic enemies, many of whom, he said, are singled out by Trump for opposing his power grabs.
If the memo is right. Wirth said all of it is likely meant to pave the way for a national emergency declared either before the midterm elections or in the days following them. He said rule of law and democracy are under deep threat because of Trump’s fear of losing elections. And he argued that too few people in either political party are willing to connect the dots and publicly argue how far along the road to autocracy the country is now traveling.
“We’ve got to stop fiddling,” Wirth said.
In that same thread, the memo closes by placing the election itself in the crosshairs—both in staffing and in legislative pressure.
Wirth and Gephardt wrote that in four and a half months, the country will go to the polls. They say Trump has ensured election-deniers now populate key federal election integrity offices. They also say Trump is continuing to pile pressure on Congress to pass the voter suppression SAVE Act. And they say he has given the DOJ a green light to ramp up investigations into alleged voter fraud in California and elsewhere.
Their call to action is direct: an awake America can stop what they describe as a drowsy one will not. They wrote that time is short and the challenge is urgent.
The political stakes of that warning land against a broader struggle the article frames as immediate and everyday: as the midterms near. the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than occupy ballot lines as “mild alternatives” to what is described as Donald Trump’s red-hot crisis. The piece also points to spending—saying Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran—and ties it to cost pressure on families struggling with surging costs of essentials.
But the core argument from Gephardt and Wirth does not wait for those elections alone. It is built around timing, secrecy, and a chain of moves they say already show how democratic protections can be hollowed out when emergency powers are prepared in the background and justified in the present.
Richard Gephardt Timothy Wirth rolling coup NPSM-7 Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence PEADs national emergency FBI Ohio Organizing Collaborative Gavin Newsom DOJ investigation SAVE Act midterm elections ICE domestic enforcement Fulton County FBI seizure