At Least Trump Isn’t Subtle About Wanting to Steal the Midterms

Rigging a democracy isn’t easy… at least not if you want to be subtle about it. Just ask Republicans, who have been playing the voter suppression long game for decades. Like a grandmaster slowly moving chess pieces into position, they put in place one policy after another to disenfranchise people unlikely to vote for them.

In one state, polling locations on college campuses are closed, in another, DMV offices in majority-minority districts are shuttered after new voter ID requirements are put into place, and when the citizens of a third overwhelmingly approved an amendment that allowed most felons to vote, Republicans quickly reversed the will of the people and placed new restrictions on them.

We could go on and on and on with examples from a variety of GOP-led states. Once Republicans get into power anywhere, you can be virtually assured that some kind of anti-democracy bill is going to get passed to make sure they stay that way.

But, like we said, it takes a long time if you don’t want to make it too obvious what you are up to.

First, you have to win an election in a census year; then you gerrymander the state legislature to secure a veto-proof majority, get anti-democracy judges onto state supreme courts, pass legislation to secure your interests, go through litigation, block ballot initiatives that expand voting rights, etc.

Donald Trump, however, isn’t subtle, and he is too old and in too much legal jeopardy to play the long game.

That is why he isn’t shy about making it very clear that he wants to rig the midterms to maintain the GOP majorities in Congress.

And that’s a good thing (not his plan to steal an election, of course, but rather, that he is saying it out loud) because it gives people time to prepare.

Just as importantly, nobody can pretend that it isn’t happening.

Take Trump’s appearance on the podcast of his former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino on Monday, where the president made it quite clear that the states he lost should not be allowed to run their own elections.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places,’” Trump stated. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The president’s justification for this unconstitutional power grab are the false claims that noncitizens are voting illegally and that he won the 2020 election.

Both claims have been thoroughly debunked – both by independent experts and Republicans.

Of course, that won’t stop Trump from continuing to spread his Big Lie, especially not in light of the epic shellacking the GOP is heading toward this fall.

For the president, it’s all on the line. If Democrats control the House, he will get impeached (again), and his lawless administration will be subject to aggressive oversight.

And it is quite clear that Trump is prepared to do just about anything to prevent that from happening.

This week, his FBI (with the involvement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard) raided an election center in Georgia to secure documents and materials related to the 2020 election.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Trump is looking to create some kind of pretext to allow the federal government to be more involved in the administration of the midterms.

Fortunately, since he does so with a complete lack of subtlety, people are taking note.

“Republicans should not, in fact, ‘nationalize the voting.’ If you were worried about election integrity before, this would make things infinitely worse,” said former Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI). “Decentralized elections are one of the greatest protections against large-scale fraud and abuse.”

And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) took to the floor of the Senate to connect the dots.

He pointed out that, in order to achieve Trump’s goal of nationalizing elections, Republicans are pushing the passage of the “SAVE Act,” a voter suppression bill GOP lawmakers want to attach to must-pass legislation this year.

However, Schumer made it very clear that the measure would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate, and that no Democrat would support any legislation that contains it.

While we have criticized the Democratic leader in the past, it’s nice to see that he is paying attention in this case.

Of course, Trump’s overt declarations of wanting to subvert US democracy make it impossible to ignore the threat he poses to free and fair elections.