Donald Trump Says He Wants To Seize State Elections, Probably Just Kidding Again Because He's Such A Kidder
Just joking, only serious.
Let’s just get this out of the way first: Donald Trump definitely does not have a secret plan to cancel the 2026 midterm elections to prevent losing Republican control of Congress. He has a very public desire to, and keeps floating concepts of a plan at every opportunity. Monday, in just the latest, most explicit version of that beautiful autocratic dream, Trump told his former FBI assistant director, Dan Bongino, how he’d like Republicans to “take over” the elections in states that might vote the wrong way.
Here’s video; for context, this part of the conversation kicked off when Bongbong brought up “crime rates,” which sparked a rambling conspiracy rant from Trump about how how immigrants and their Democrat puppetmasters are the source of all that’s wrong with America.
No, we suppose offering context doesn’t actually help, and it’s obvious he means “immigrants” the moment he lies, “These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally.”
Because of course he believes, as do his followers, that Democrats are actively bringing in undocumented migrants to do voter fraud, even though there’s zero evidence of widespread non-citizen voting (outside a handful of rare cases), and never has been, going back decades. It’s an article of faith for rightwingers, and thus not subject to empirical evidence.
Trump just can’t believe that his party isn’t doing more to stop the nonexistent theft of elections in states he lost but “knows” he won, at least in his rotted mind.
“It’s amazing that Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places.
“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. You’re gonna see something in Georgia. I won that election by so much. Everybody knows it.”
It’s a little short on details, but he’s confident that more clever criminals will step up to get the job done.
It was also very nice of Trump to remind us that he isn’t simply talking about overruling voters; he’s actually working on doing it, not just in his weird obsession with his 2020 loss, but with his flailing attempt to gerrymander 2026 House elections, and with efforts by Republicans in multiple states to disqualify as many legitimate voters as possible.
We like that the New York Times patiently explains (archive link) why Republicans nationalizing the voting would be unconstitutional. (We initially wrote “why Republicans can’t nationalize voting,” but realized they definitely can if they simply ignore the Constitution again.)
Under the Constitution, American elections are governed primarily by state law, leading to a decentralized process in which voting is administered by county and municipal officials in thousands of precincts across the country. […]
The president’s claims of election fraud have been debunked over and over, by both independent reviews and Republican officials. A review of the 2024 election by the Trump administration that began last year had found little evidence of widespread voting fraud by noncitizens as of last month, The Times reported.
But as we say, Trump and his supporters are completely immune to evidence when it comes to the twin myths of voter fraud in general, and of widespread voting by non-citizens. The myths are every bit as real to them as their certainty that everyone who protests against Trump is paid to do so (even though they secretly know he’s best but they hate America) and that LGBTQ people only exist because TV, movies, and the public schools are turning straight kids gay.
This makes the third time in the space of a month that Trump has wondered why nobody will rid him of these troublesome elections. Numero Uno: At the annual GOP retreat at the Kennedy Center (ahem) on January 6 (ahem, AHEM!), Trump mused about how unfair it is that Democrats are even allowed to run for office at all, because “They have the worst policy.” He went on to gripe about “How we have to even run against these people — I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
And we all know how he hates being called a dictator, except when he says dictators are good because they get shit done, as he did just last month at Davos when he said “sometimes you need a dictator,” although he didn’t specify when. He likes to keep us guessing. And of course that “dictator on day one” thing, which has turned out to have 9096 hours and counting.
Numero Two-O: On January 15, Trump said in an interview with Reuters (archive link) that the usual trend of control of Congress switching in the midterms after a change of administration is super unfair to the most successful president in all of American history. Trump figured it only makes sense that, because he’s accomplished so much in his second term so far, “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”
White House Propaganda Minister Karoline Leavitt promptly explained that in both those cases, Trump was simply joshing, as one does. Besides, you weren’t there to hear him say it in the obviously jocular tone he uses when joking. We were sure she’d say the same thing about Trump’s latest, most specific call for Republicans to take control of elections to stay in power, even though this time he said it very publicly and didn’t chuckle or joke about being called a dictator.
Instead, for Numero Tres-O, Leavitt took another tack: He isn’t joking, he simply didn’t say what you heard him saying, dummy. He believes in the Constitution, yes he does! But there’s all that fraud! So even though the words that came out of his mouth were about Republicans taking over elections and nationalizing them in 15 states, he was only talking about “voter ID,” silly! Maybe you didn’t hear him mention voter ID in the recording, but that’s probably because your ears hate America.
Also, just because he didn’t say he was joking doesn’t mean he wasn’t kidding, and really, it’s more of a you problem if you can’t tell when he’s clearly just joking or saying things you didn’t hear him say. You know, like when he repeatedly fantasizes about things like sending the military into American cities, invading Venzueula and taking its oil, or invading Greenland or Canada. Oh, also, he said he wasn’t joking about those last two. But then, maybe that was a joke too. He’s a funny guy, just like Joe Pesci in that one movie.
[Joe.My.God. / NYT (archive link) Time / MS NOW]
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I know it needs to be talked about but at the same time there’s a trap here when Trump starts talking about wildly illegal things like talking over elections.
He does this because he constantly throws shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Once the media picks it up as a real thing and not just some random fart that came out of his mouth they then start debating its legality. By doing this they normalize the POSSIBILITY that it might be a real thing they could do legally.
There’s only one headline for this.
“Trump cannot nationalize elections. The end”
Anything else and you’re playing his game.
We're only joking about the guillotines.
Ha ha.