I’m getting increasingly worried about President Trump’s plans to interfere with, rig or subvert the 2026 and 2028 elections.
As his regime’s brutality, economic policies and war in the Middle East cause his popularity to drop, Trump is demanding that Congress make it harder for millions of people to vote in this year’s elections, including women who changed their name when they got married. His law would disproportionately keep people of color from being able to vote.
Trump’s goal is frighteningly clear. He told Republican lawmakers that passing the misnamed SAVE America Act would “guarantee” victory in this year’s elections. And he says it would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win an election for 50 years. That’s not democracy. And it’s not how our elections should work. Generations of Americans fought and shed blood to protect the right to vote in free and fair elections and it is now up to us to reject Trump’s attacks on that right.
The intensity of Trump’s demand — repeated in interviews, on social media and in remarks to Republican lawmakers — reveals how much he fears the consequences of the subservient Mike Johnson (R-La.) being replaced with a Speaker of the House who takes the Constitution seriously. Trump is frantic to save his own political butt — so desperate that he recently said he would refuse to sign any other bills that come to his desk before the SAVE America Act.
Johnson has ushered the bill through the House a couple of times, only to have Trump demand new provisions, including a ban on mail-in voting. Trump even wants to add attacks on transgender people that are unrelated to elections, I guess because he thinks that will make it easier for him to bully senators into pushing the bill through. It’s a cruel and cynical ploy.
Even without the inclusion of Trump’s latest demands, legislation passed by the House would “block millions of Americans from voting,” according to the respected nonpartisan Brennan Center. It would “inject chaos into election administration” and “place a massive unfunded burden on state and local election officials,” the center warns.
For Trump’s team, creating chaos may be a feature and not a bug. As Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling has noted in The New Republic, “It is not clear how barring undocumented immigrants — who, along with legal noncitizen residents, already cannot vote — could ‘guarantee’ the outcome of the election.” But it is far easier to imagine lots of “perfectly eligible voters” being denied a chance to vote because they are among the more than 20 million Americans who don’t have a passport or ready access to an official copy of their birth certificate. And easy to imagine DMVs or understaffed Social Security offices buckling under a flood of Americans trying to meet the law’s requirements.
Meanwhile, Trump is lying to his supporters, telling them in an email that Democrats are opposing the bill “so they can mobilize millions of non-citizens to vote for them in the midterms.”
Trump also wants to force all states to run their voter registration data through the Department of Homeland Security. Given how frequently DHS officials have been caught breaking the law, lying about it and violating court orders, I can’t imagine why anyone would trust them to play it straight with state election data — especially with the White House looking over their shoulders.
After all, administration officials recently met with MAGA activists who are urging Trump to toss the Constitution aside and use a bogus emergency declaration to take over the elections by executive order.
One of the participants in that meeting was Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn his 2020 election loss. Mitchell now runs the so-called Election Integrity Network, which pushes baseless fears about noncitizen voting.
On March 4, Mitchell was featured on a “prayer call” hosted by religious-right Trump supporters, where she declared there is “nothing more important” than passing the legislation. She urged activists to pressure Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to get around a Democratic filibuster and allow Republicans to pass the bill with just 51 votes. So far, Thune has resisted pressure to abandon Senate rules to give Trump what he wants.
And that brings me to the most frightening possibility. Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism, has cautioned that one effect of the war on Iran could be to provoke a terrorist incident in the U.S. that Trump could “exploit to undo what remains of our democracy.”
That’s a deeply troubling thought. But these are troubled times. And it is unfortunately not hard to imagine Trump turning tragedy into a pretext for tyranny.
Snyder’s advice to Americans is to be mentally prepared for the possibility and not to fall for any effort by the Trump team to exploit it for their authoritarian ends. “Not falling for it” is good advice generally when it comes to Trump. That’s especially so when he claims he needs to destroy democracy in order to save it.