President Donald Trump has been leaning on his boarding school friend lately and that pal is feeding his worst instincts, a CNN report said.
On Monday, Jeremy Herb and Marshall Cohen reported that Peter Ticktin, who is also 80 years old, has been pressuring the president to seize control of the midterm elections by declaring an election fraud emergency. In other countries, laws allow leaders to pause or delay elections in extreme situations, such as the war in Ukraine.
That isn’t the case for the United States, however. As UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained in a 2025 video, there’s nothing that Trump could do to stop an election. The timeline for the election is specified in the U.S. Constitution and elections, in general, are governed by the states.
Still, Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer for clients like “a member of the Backstreet Boys and Meghan Markle’s estranged half-sister,” believes that the president can take over. He even went so far as to draft the executive order that would achieve all of what Trump wants for 2026.
Trump has been pressuring Republicans to pass his “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act” or the SAVE America Act.
The larger goal for both Trump and Ticktin appears to be hacking the election to ensure more Republicans can be elected by limiting the voter pool. According to the Trump pal, there is plenty of evidence to prove that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
“With the evidence that we’ve got, and with the evidence that would be forthcoming, that there’ll be no question about it — and what these machines did,” Ticktin said. “It’s a surreptitious overtaking of a country.”
When asked for evidence, and where he’s getting information confirming the election was stolen, Ticktin was described by CNN as “cagey.”
“He says he speaks to Trump a few times a year and has an open line of communication that dates back to his representing the president in an ill-fated lawsuit against Hillary Clinton while Trump was out of office. He also says he’s in contact with officials at the Justice Department — and he even floated himself in right-wing media as a candidate to succeed former Attorney General Pam Bondi,” said CNN.
However, one White House official made it clear that however “well-meaning” Ticktin may be, “he is overstating his current relationship with Trump.” The two don’t speak “regularly” and he doesn’t “influence the White House’s policies.”
It has been six years since the election and not only has Trump lost every 2020 election lawsuit he attempted, he also hasn’t managed to put together enough evidence to prove his case since seizing ballots from Maricopa and Fulton Counties. The FBI is now investigating election workers in Georgia.
Critics say the strategy amounts to an attempt to weaponize the machinery of government against the electoral process itself, with claims of fraud used as a pretext for suppression.
Meanwhile, Ticktin remains in Trump’s orbit of far-right conspiracy theorists and loyalists who continue to feed into the 2020 election lies and the demand for a full federal takeover of elections.
There continues to be a number of lawsuits involving the election software companies named in attacks by conservatives.
“These cases have been thrown into chaos thanks to conspiracy-filled emails from Ticktin to opposing counsel, his continued work with an attorney disqualified for leaking Dominion’s files, and even a physical altercation before a deposition,” the CNN report said, after reviewing dozens of court records.