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Trump’s Plan to Steal the Midterms

Not only is it illegal, it could backfire

Dan Rather and Team Steady Feb 26

Credit: Getty Images

The president knows if Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it’s game over for Trump 2.0. An opposition Congress would use its innumerable powers to check the Trump agenda, and, perhaps more frightening to him, spend the second half of his term investigating the deep corruption of the first half.

Donald Trump doesn’t want you to vote, especially if you’re a Democrat. It’s becoming increasingly obvious he will do anything to keep eligible Americans away from the polls.

The president has hinted at taking executive action around this issue in the past few months, but for the first time, new reporting reveals an actual plan to take away our most cherished right.

Trump’s latest gambit: direct White House lawyers to find a legal avenue to take control of the upcoming midterm elections, according to the cable network MS NOW. One ploy he is said to be considering is issuing an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote.

Since he can’t bend the Senate to his will to pass the SAVE Act, the most restrictive voter-suppression bill in American history, Trump reportedly is actively looking for another avenue to unilaterally assert control over U.S. elections.

Trump and the White House counsel’s office will be looking for a long time. The Constitution is clear: Article I states that administration of elections belongs to the states. And any changes to voting laws must pass through the Congress.

There is a second constitutional issue. IDs such as passports and driver’s licenses cost money. You can’t charge Americans to vote. I witnessed the effect of poll taxes designed to keep Black Americans from voting in the Deep South. The poll tax was banned by the 24th Amendment in 1964.

Trump’s own lawyers know the legal realities and warn that whatever they come up with will likely be struck down, according to White House officials who spoke with MS NOW.

According to the Washington Post, a 17-page draft executive order is being circulated throughout the White House. The EO’s premise is to claim a national emergency precipitated by the allegations that China tried to interfere with the 2020 election.

It is mighty convenient that Trump’s perpetual claims of 2020 election fraud, which have been debunked over and over again, are the crux of this latest scheme. As far as Chinese interference goes… A 2021 intelligence review found that China considered trying to influence the election but never actually did. There is no hard evidence the Chinese had anything to do with the election.

We have plenty of problems in America, but voter fraud is not one of them. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives have investigated the possibility extensively. No credible review ever found widespread election fraud or anything more than a few cases among millions of votes cast.

The Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, decided to dive into the election integrity issue. To do so it used data collected by the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank that authored “Project 2025.”

Brookings found that no election outcome in the U.S. has been altered by fraud. In Pennsylvania, for example, researching 32 elections over three decades, a grand total of 39 cases of fraud were found of the 100 million votes cast. That works out to .000039%. No system is perfectly safe, but U.S. elections are pretty close.

Getting people to worry about a problem that doesn’t exist is classic Trump. “They want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it,” Trump said of Democrats during his speech on Tuesday. Does he understand the old saying, “The pot calling the kettle black?”

During the run-up to the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly tried to sow seeds of doubt about the integrity of the election. “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country,” he wrote on social media.

Miraculously, when he won, all talk of voter fraud ceased.

Now, about the premise that requiring proof of citizenship to register and ID to vote will hurt Democrats and help Republicans. During non-presidential elections, voter turnout drops considerably. In low-turnout elections Democrats historically do better than Republicans.

But Trump is like a dog with a bone when he gets an idea into his head. So no one is going to convince him otherwise.

In an interview with Newsmax after Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, “If we lose the midterms, heaven forbid, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect.”

For many Americans, the reaction to that statement would be, “From his lips to God’s ear.”

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Stay Steady,
Dan