This Is It: Trump Is Openly Saying He Wants to Seize Control of American Elections
We can stop him now, or the American constitutional republic will be over.
Robert S. McElvaine is a historian and the author of 11 books, including The Times They were a-Changin’: 1964—The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn. Subscribe to his Musings & Amusings Substack.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting ... in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and they’re counting votes.”
Although this most un-American statement is available on news sources everywhere, I decided to source that quotation from Fox News to assure readers that it is not made up by some “left-wing lunatic.”
Here is the language of Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
So, the President of the United States, the Leader of the “Republican Party,” which has long championed the Constitution, checks and balances, and states’ rights and vehemently opposed overreach by the national government is calling on his party to “take control” of elections.
Why? Because he knows that he and his actions have become so unpopular that Republicans are almost certain to lose the midterms in November in an historic landslide. He has been saying maybe America needs a dictator and the United States “shouldn’t even have an election” in November.
And he knows he lost the 2020 election “bigly,” which he admitted in a private conversation in December 2020 and has repeated a few times since, including in a session with historians in April 2022: “I didn’t win the election.”
Though he knew perfectly well that he had lost the 2020 election—and more than sixty court decisions in which he contested it—he plotted to overthrow the results and stay in office, effectively ending the constitutional republic. That included promoting an insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Somehow, he has persuaded his supporters that what they saw with their own eyes that day didn’t happen the way they witnessed it.
Las week, he again boldly lied again: “But, you know, the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. And everybody knows it!”
In the world of fact, a world from which those still following Trump long ago seceded, what everybody knows is that he lost the 2020 election by more than seven million votes, 4.45 percent. Trump lost the Electoral Vote 306-232. (which, BTW, is exactly the same electoral vote by which Trump won in 2024). And Joe Biden won a majority of the vote—51.31%—something Trump has never done.
The Trump Vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024
2016: 46.20% (–2.0%) Hillary won the actual vote by nearly three million votes
2020: 46.86 (–4.45%) Biden won the actual vote by more than seven million votes
2024: 49.81% (+1.47%) Trump won the actual vote by about 2.5 million votes.
The only time Trump won the popular vote (meaning THE Vote), was 2024, and that was by only 1.47 percent, which he calls one of the biggest landslides in history.
If you believe that Trump won in 2020 or that he won a landslide (with less than 50 percent of the votes) in 2024, your mind is a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald J. Trump.
Late last month, he sent Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (that sounds like a statement from an SNL skit) and FBI agents to Atlanta to seize 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election.
Then last Saturday, a special election for a Texas State Senate seat from the Fort Worth area—a district Trump had carried by 17 points in 2024, was won by a Democrat by 14 points. A 31-point swing to the Democrats in fifteen months … in a very red area of Texas.
Trump and the authoritarians around him are in full panic mode. We, the American people, should be, too.
It is crystal clear that Trump plans to have large contingents of his ICE Gestapo in the streets of blue cities before and on Election Day to intimidate voters. The blatant racism of the administration could not be plainer. They are going after Brown and Black people. Their goons have shown they are willing to kill white folks, too. Trump just made it clear that he is prepared to have federal agents intervene in elections in places where Republicans lose.
In an essay in the New York Times on Sunday appropriately titled, “This Is Not a Drill,” David French laid out a chilling scenario of what could happen in November.
If we Americans, by the tens of millions, fail to perceive the mortal threat to our nation, our freedoms, and our democracy and join together in every possible way to block the fascists, future generations may be seeing this:
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The American experiment in a democratically elected constitutional republic ended five years ago this month when the US Senate failed to convict Trump in his SECOND impeachment. If leading an insurrection on the US Capitol to overturn a legitimate presidential election was not enough to UNANIMOUSLY keep Trump from ever holding federal office again nothing ever would be. THE. SYSTEM. DID. NOT. WORK. The constitutional guardrails did NOT in fact hold — despite what most in the left-wing media claimed. So none of what Trump and MAGA are doing or threatening to do now should come as a surprise or shock to anyone. We’ve been waiting for this moment since February 2021.
Good article. My question to those who read and comment in this space and other spaces is: Have you joined a pro-democracy group such as Indivisible and participated in protests? I have and will. I can't just sit here and wait for somebody to do something, we are the somebody. If I have to help guard vulnerable polling places to ensure people can vote, I will.
I am a veteran. My oath to the Constitution does not have an expiration date, and I took that Oath to protect and defend literally.