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Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Donald Trump began this week with a bang. He posted a long screed on Truth Social attacking voting by mail and voting machines and vowed to issue an executive order banning both these frequent targets of MAGA conspiracy theories about Democratic election theft. Legal experts immediately observed that Trump has zero power to do these things, given clear constitutional provisions letting states control election administration and permitting Congress alone to regulate federal elections. The president gave a bizarre twist to this threat by citing an endorsement by Vladimir Putin of his contention that voting by mail is bad (perhaps because the Russian president thinks voting itself is bad, or at least unnecessary).

Less than a day later, however, Trump seems to have gotten the memo that this is one presidential power grab that doesn’t even begin to pass the smell test. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made it known that the new plan was to pursue legislation rather than executive action to radically restrict voting opportunities. Roll Call reports:

[Leavitt] signaled that the administration had ditched the president’s approach.

“The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said. “And I think Republicans generally and the president generally wants to make it easier for Americans to vote and harder for people to cheat in our elections.”

Asked what changed so quickly, and whether Trump had received a legal ruling from within the administration that his office lacked the authority to make such a dramatic election change, a White House spokesman merely lobbed accusations at Democrats and repeated Trump’s 2024 campaign platform on the issue.

This is famously not a White House where mistakes or even self-contradictions are ever acknowledged. But the change of strategy doesn’t alter the likely trajectory of Trump’s latest voter-suppression crusade.

Leavitt can talk about consultations with Congress as much as she wants, but the fact remains there is not even a single chance a Trump-sponsored election administration bill could survive a Democratic filibuster. Democrats themselves tried to establish national voting and election rules of a very different nature during Joe Biden’s administration, but it went nowhere for the same reason.

Her reference to state legislatures is a bit more interesting since, if he chose, Trump could lobby Republican-controlled state governments to restrict voting by mail or abolish the use of voting machines. Utah, an all-mail-ballot state, recently gave Trump a pound of flesh by banning the practice of counting mail ballots postmarked before Election Day but received afterwards, which the president attacked in an executive order he issued earlier this year. If you somehow thought Trump might hesitate to dictate to the states on such matters, his recent demands that Texas and other states steal some U.S. House seats for the GOP should have resolved that question.

As election-law expert Richard Hasen explained today in the New York Times, there are some other power grabs Trump might pursue prior to the 2026 or 2028 elections:

He has directed federal government departments to vacuum up state voter registration data and to investigate voter fraud. He has been sending federal troops into American cities, and we cannot discount the prospect of his ordering ICE and other federal agents into Philadelphia, Milwaukee or other places with large minority populations around Election Day. He might even try to use the 2017 designation of the U.S. election system as “critical infrastructure” — a designation aimed at assuring adequate federal protection of state election systems, made during the Obama administration — as an excuse to meddle with secure and safe state and county election processes.

But whatever the president chooses to do or threaten to do, the one sure thing is that his broader goal is to delegitimize any elections his party loses, just as he sought to delegitimize the 2020 presidential results. Per the Times:

Mr. Trump wants his supporters to believe that Democrats can win only by cheating. “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM,” he wrote in his Monday post. … It’s a recipe for further polarization and, as someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit told The Times, “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

Trump may flip and flop and reverse himself five times a day on both his political strategy and tactics, as he has repeatedly changed his tune on voting by mail. But his underlying war on the credibility of elections abides.

Trump Abruptly Changes Strategy on Mail-Ballot Ban

Trump Abruptly Changes Strategy on Mail-Ballot Ban