Politics

The Department of Justice’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia, 2020 voting records remains a chilling, bewildering exercise in using federal agencies to try to validate Donald Trump’s false claim that he won reelection that year, carrying Georgia though even state GOP officials certified that he lost the state by more than 11,000 votes. Trump followed up the FBI raid by insisting, during a podcast interview with former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, that “Republicans” should “take over” voting procedures in 15 states. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 states. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Any attempt to “nationalize” voting processes would be unconstitutional; it’s clearly the purview of the states. But note that Trump specifically said one party, his own, should take over. That’s just about as fascist as he’s ever sounded.

While spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tried to claim that Trump was only referring to the SAVE Act, which would force Americans to prove their citizenship to register to vote, the president himself continued to insist he intended much more than that. Standing in front of a cadre of Republican lawmakers assembled as he signed legislation ending a brief government shutdown, he announced, “I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it.”

This is one of many signs that Trump knows his party is in big trouble in the coming midterm elections. Remarkably, many GOP leaders said they disagreed with Trump’s suggestion that Republicans take over elections. “I’m not in favor of federalizing elections,” Senate majority leader John Thune told reporters. “That’s not what the Constitution says about elections,” Senator Rand Paul told MS Now.