The intent of the letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday could not have been more obvious if it had been cobbled together from letters clipped from newspapers and magazines. If Walz and his constituents didn’t like federal agents prowling the streets of Minneapolis, all they had to do was give the Trump administration data on its aid programs and registered voters, and end its policies protecting immigrants in the state.
If anything, the country’s top law enforcement official should have been writing to assure the governor that a federal officer killing a resident of his state would be the focus of a robust, objective investigation. But as attorney general, Bondi has always seen herself first as a player on President Donald Trump’s team, rather than as an advocate for the public. So she defended Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instead of Alex Pretti and sent Walz a list of demands.
The country’s top law enforcement official should have been writing to assure the governor of a robust, objective investigation.
As you probably figured out, the administration wants data on aid programs because it’s pretending there’s evidence Walz and other Democratic officials have engaged in rampant fraud. The reason they want Minnesota to repeal its policies protecting immigrants is clear. But the voter rolls? Who would believe there’s something suspicious in how Minnesota voted?
The answer, of course, is Donald Trump. Speaking after an immigration officer killed Renee Good this month, Trump insisted, “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times.”
He didn’t. He lost Minnesota three times, by 2, 7 and 4 percentage points.
Seeing Trump say he won a state he lost while his flunkies nod along barely raises eyebrows anymore. But it should. As I’ll explain, what Bondi is doing is much more sinister than simply keeping Trump happy.
A bit of history is useful here. For decades, Republicans (and conservatives more broadly) have wrongly tried to convince the public that rampant voter fraud exists. The right-wing Heritage Foundation put together a database of criminal charges related to voter fraud in 2017, and (mostly) Republican-controlled state legislatures pushed for rules that would require identification for in-person voting.
As has been pointed out ad nauseum, there’s almost no actual fraud. Brookings looked at the Heritage Foundation’s own database of “fraud,” finding that in seven swing states Heritage itself identified only 252 cases of fraud across 408,000,000 cast ballots. That’s like finding one bad penny in a pile of 1.6 million of them. Other analyses have shown in-person fraud of the kind that would be addressed by voter ID is even less common. Every claim about systemic fraud has crumbled into dust.
Every claim about systemic fraud has crumbled into dust.
Regardless, by the time Trump first ran for president, the Republican base had already been primed to believe that rampant fraud existed, and he quickly put that false belief to work for his own purposes, claiming in 2016 that he won the popular vote when he didn’t and, in 2020, that he really won but votes were stolen from him. Not only has no significant fraud been uncovered, the 2020 election result has remained unscathed despite the most exhaustive effort to undermine an outcome in American history.
What we saw in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, remains true today: The claim of fraud, rather than any fraud in itself, is the threat to American democracy.
But Trump and his supporters persist. Last week, we learned that staffers working for Elon Musk’s withered “government efficiency” group allegedly shunted Social Security data to a group trying to prove that election fraud was rampant. The president keeps insisting that overwhelming proof of 2020 fraud is imminent. The seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro revived bonkers conspiracy theories linking that country to the election Trump lost, and Trump has added gasoline to that fire. Much of this is meant to scratch the itch that prompts Trump to maintain frequently that he “was right about everything.” The insistence on fraud now will almost certainly be put to the same use as it was in December 2020: to undermine election results Trump doesn’t like. If his administration can do anything to elevate doubt about the outcome of the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential contest, it would open anti-democratic doors that reality would otherwise keep locked. Consider that in 2018, when Rick Scott was seeking election to the Senate from Florida, Trump chimed in to support his claims that lagging tallies in large, Democratic cities weren’t a function of slow counting but of fraud. Those allegations were baseless and later proven false, and Scott won anyway. But we got a useful glimpse of Trump deploying dishonest claims about fraud even in a race in which he didn’t appear on the ballot. There’s a difference between now and 2018 — and between now and 2020. In both of those years, Trump had people in his administration who publicly disagreed with his fraud claims. Now his administration is fully staffed with people who will do and say what he wants, people who are as invested in protecting his power, and the power of the right, as Trump is. If you doubt that, read Bondi’s ransom note to Walz. To curtail the marauding presence of federal troops in his state’s cities, she wrote, Minnesota needs to hand over data that the administration might use to gin up claims of fraud — just as it used innocuous data and situations to make specious claims about fraud in 2016 and 2020. The administration isn’t just willing to use fraud claims as a tool of power in the future; it’s doing so now.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
