To begin with, the surprise announcement and the sudden, if ambiguous, turnabout suggested once again that Mr. Trump is governing in his second term without advisers who can or even try to help him discipline his impulses. The episode exposes, as well, his renewed obsession with exerting control over election machinery. And it offers a vivid glimpse of his inclination to regard his powers as all but limitless.
No competent lawyer could have counseled Mr. Trump in good faith that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” as the president asserted in his post. Nor would such a lawyer have dreamed of advising him that state election officials “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Who, if anyone, told Mr. Trump that he could take command of state elections this way? Possibly he made up the authority himself. Some former Trump staff members believe he may not engage at all with questions about whether something he wants to do is lawful or something he wants to say is true. Those questions, they tell me, do not even occur to him.
Others who have worked for Mr. Trump say he seems to believe sincerely, if that is the word for it, that anything is permitted to him. Still others insist that he knows very well when he is crossing a line but presses on until obliged by an opposing force to stop.
Whatever the origins, Mr. Trump has now staked out a fundamentally illegitimate claim to authority over the conduct of American elections. He has yet to repudiate it. If he continues to press the claim, then the foundational mechanisms of our democracy may be in genuine danger. It is more than hypothetically possible that Mr. Trump, when frustrated, will try to compel the obedience of state election officials by throwing the weight of the executive branch against them.
Mr. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington and active duty Marines in Los Angeles, accompanied by threats that he might do the same in other Democratic urban strongholds, suggests another risk. Could he use some pretext to take control of voting machinery? If he dispatches troops or federal law enforcement agents to disrupt blue-city voting or ballot counting in swing states — Atlanta, say, or Milwaukee or Philadelphia — the midterm elections could be in real peril.
With or without the deployment of force, Mr. Trump’s fusillade of baseless claims about election fraud shakes public confidence in the integrity of the vote — and provides excuses for his dishonest efforts to delegitimize the outcomes. For all his political life, he has waged war against the proposition that he or his party could ever lose a legitimate election. He and his allies are preparing the ground for their next battle, in 2026….
Bart concludes with a note very consistent with my NYT oped on this topic earlier this week:
The ultimate safeguard of constitutional government is the great mass of citizen voters who decide by the tens of millions what kind of government they want. We hold the power, whatever our partisan preferences, to defend checks and balances and the rule of law. We cannot lose that power unless we surrender it.