Just two months into his second term, Donald Trump signed a radical executive order intended to impose sweeping changes to the nation’s system of elections. Congress hadn’t approved anything of the kind, but the Republican decided that he could just create the policy anyway through presidential fiat.
NBC News reported at the time that the changes “could risk disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans.” Trump, exercising a legal authority he decided to bestow on himself, did it anyway.
Predictably, the order faced a great many court challenges. Also predictably, the president’s policy was rejected throughout the judiciary as a power-grab at odds with how policymaking is supposed to happen in the United States.
Nearly a year later, he apparently wants to give it another try. In an oddly worded missive published to his social media platform, Trump published an item to his social media platform that read in part:
The Democrats … want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!
First, Trump has had many years to substantiate his claims about Democrats “cheating” in elections, and so far, he’s come up with literally nothing, which in turn makes his conspiratorial allegations impossible to believe.
Second, the idea that he’s “searched the depths” of anything, much less “Legal Arguments,” is genuinely hilarious.
Third, while the president is apparently fixated on voter-ID policies, he’s never gotten around to explaining why he thinks this is a good idea, or why the nation needs a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
But even if we put all of that aside, pay particular attention to the last six words of the aforementioned excerpt: Trump is apparently under the impression that he can unilaterally put new hurdles between American voters and their own democracy with or without legislation from Congress.
In a follow-up item also published on Friday afternoon, the president, after peddling a variety of tiresome and baseless conspiracy theories, wrote another screed. “This is an issue that must be fought, and must be fought, NOW! If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” he added.
Some will see this and shrug, confident in the knowledge that whatever Trump tries (if he even bothers to follow through on this vow) will ultimately fail in the courts.
But there’s a larger context to all of this. Trump isn’t just vowing to impose new voting restrictions, he’s also floating the idea of canceling future elections and nationalizing the nation’s electoral system.
What’s more, we’re not just talking about rhetoric. The president and his team have also deployed FBI agents to raid an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, seized voting equipment in Puerto Rico, waged an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states that Democrats won, organized an unnecessary FBI elections “briefing” for state officials and provided one of Trump’s highly controversial former campaign lawyers with classified information as he tries to advance election conspiracy theories.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump also wants to sign an executive order imposing new voting restrictions, without Congress, in order to solve a problem that does not exist. Given these circumstances, shrugging with indifference seems like a mistake.
