Trump's Secret Move to Subvert Elections
The plot to make voting harder, under cover of darkness
This one is critically important, because it affects us all.
On Christmas Eve, when the media was half in the tank, the Trump administration pulled a quiet, bureaucratic move that is a complete and utter subversion of democracy.
Donald Trump’s animus toward voting by mail can’t be explained solely by the fact that Democrats use it more, though that is undeniably part of the story. It is also about what it enables him to do rhetorically and politically: cast permanent doubt on the legitimacy of elections themselves.
Mail ballots arrive over time, processed in stages, and counted later than in-person votes, which creates gaps between Election Night expectations and final results, gaps that Trump has learned to weaponize as “proof” of fraud. Because mail voting is decentralized, administrative, and boring — run by clerks, counties, and state officials rather than cameras and rallies — it lends itself to conspiracy more easily than precinct voting, which looks orderly on television.
Trump doesn’t need mail voting to be fraudulent. He needs it to be procedural, because procedure can always be recast as manipulation. By attacking vote-by-mail, he is not merely trying to suppress votes he dislikes but to normalize the idea that any election outcome he or his party loses is suspect or downright illegitimate. This is the deeper project: not just partisan advantage, but the steady erosion of trust in democratic processes, replacing acceptance of results with grievance and making democracy itself contingent on his approval.
But the problem with Trump’s long crusade against mail-in voting is that it always ran into the same inconvenient obstacle: federalism. For years he stomped around like a reality TV Caesar, barking that mail ballots were “rigged” and “fraud,” and demanding that someone — anyone — do something about dangerous grandmas with stamps.
But elections are not a casino where the house rewrites the rules mid-hand. Under the Constitution’s Elections Clause, states set the “times, places, and manner” of congressional elections (subject to Congress’ ability to alter those rules). The federal government doesn’t administer elections the way it administers passports. More practically, state, county, and local officials actually run the machinery in tandem: registration, ballot design, signature checks, polling places, and tabulations.
The president can rant, threaten, and meme his followers into a frenzy, but he cannot, with a Sharpie and a tantrum, simply “end” voting by mail nationwide.
But if you are a would-be strongman who wants to strangle democracy without passing state laws (and without leaving fingerprints), you don’t start with Congress or with state legislatures. You start with the plumbing.
And this is why what happened on Christmas Eve is so dangerous.