At first glance, President Trump’s Truth Social post alleging voting fraud did not look especially alarming — not, anyway, by this president’s singular standards. Mr. Trump’s long-debunked lies about stolen elections are no less malignant in 2025 than they were in 2020 and 2021, during his concerted effort to overturn his loss at the polls. Still, by now, persistent repetition has diminished the power of those lies to shock.
And yet something quite shocking did emerge from a second journey through the mangled syntax of Mr. Trump’s diatribe against “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”
Buried in the long harangue was an announcement: The president had a plan to “get rid of” election procedures that he alleged were scams. He intended to dictate, apparently by executive order, how states should count and tabulate the votes.
This was stunning. The only modern president who had refused to concede a certified election defeat now proclaimed his authority over election rules nationwide. Mr. Trump vowed that he wanted nothing more than to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” Having tried his best once to undermine our constitutional system, Mr. Trump is the last American — literally or near enough — who should be entrusted to supervise the integrity of the vote.
As widely noted, the executive order that he described would be nakedly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 explicitly directs that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” The same passage grants Congress the power to override those laws. The president has no lawful role, save to sign any new legislation.
Later that day, Mr. Trump told reporters that “the best lawyers” were drafting his executive order “right now.” But the next day the White House appeared to backpedal. Without saying anything concrete, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, left reporters with the impression that the president was shifting focus to making the changes he wants in collaboration with Congress and state governments.
It is tempting to write all this off as another story of chaos in Trumplandia. But even if Mr. Trump abandons his plans for an executive order, the episode illuminates some disturbing features of his presidency.
To begin with, the surprise announcement and the sudden, if ambiguous, turnabout suggested once again that Mr. Trump is governing in his second term without advisers who can or even try to help him discipline his impulses. The episode exposes, as well, his renewed obsession with exerting control over election machinery. And it offers a vivid glimpse of his inclination to regard his powers as all but limitless.
No competent lawyer could have counseled Mr. Trump in good faith that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” as the president asserted in his post. Nor would such a lawyer have dreamed of advising him that state election officials “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Who, if anyone, told Mr. Trump that he could take command of state elections this way? Possibly he made up the authority himself. Some former Trump staff members believe he may not engage at all with questions about whether something he wants to do is lawful or something he wants to say is true. Those questions, they tell me, do not even occur to him.
Others who have worked for Mr. Trump say he seems to believe sincerely, if that is the word for it, that anything is permitted to him. Still others insist that he knows very well when he is crossing a line but presses on until obliged by an opposing force to stop.
Whatever the origins, Mr. Trump has now staked out a fundamentally illegitimate claim to authority over the conduct of American elections. He has yet to repudiate it. If he continues to press the claim, then the foundational mechanisms of our democracy may be in genuine danger. It is more than hypothetically possible that Mr. Trump, when frustrated, will try to compel the obedience of state election officials by throwing the weight of the executive branch against them.
Mr. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington and active duty Marines in Los Angeles, accompanied by threats that he might do the same in other Democratic urban strongholds, suggests another risk. Could he use some pretext to take control of voting machinery? If he dispatches troops or federal law enforcement agents to disrupt blue-city voting or ballot counting in swing states — Atlanta, say, or Milwaukee or Philadelphia — the midterm elections could be in real peril.
With or without the deployment of force, Mr. Trump’s fusillade of baseless claims about election fraud shakes public confidence in the integrity of the vote — and provides excuses for his dishonest efforts to delegitimize the outcomes. For all his political life, he has waged war against the proposition that he or his party could ever lose a legitimate election. He and his allies are preparing the ground for their next battle, in 2026.
From the earliest days of his second term, the president and his lieutenants have pursued an unprecedented assault on the machinery of free and fair elections.
By pardoning or commuting the sentence of every member of the mob charged in connection with the effort to stop certification of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump signaled clearly that crimes committed for his benefit would largely go unpunished. By ordering a criminal investigation against Christopher Krebs, a former federal agency chief, on grounds that expressly included that Mr. Krebs had “denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen,” Mr. Trump signaled just as clearly that contradicting his claims could put a person in prison.
More recently, after Trump said in March that people behind the “crooked” 2020 election should “go to jail,” the Justice Department reportedly created prosecution task forces in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., to look into bringing criminal charges against state officials who fail to secure their elections against foreign tampering, ineligible voters or noncitizens casting ballots. Federal prosecutors have sent intimidating demands for information to several states.
Mr. Trump has also sought to disenfranchise some voters. In March he issued an order to require that anyone who registers to vote with a federal form must show a passport or a comparable document that proves U.S. citizenship. Only about half of U.S. citizens hold a passport. Some 21 million Americans have no ready access to any form of proof of their citizenship. Mr. Trump’s order would have prevented new registrations using the federal form for something like 10 percent of the lawful electorate. Multiple lawsuits, one of them brought by my colleagues at the Brennan Center, persuaded judges to block Mr. Trump’s order.
Mr. Trump ordered the same month the Election Assistance Commission to rescind all existing federal certifications of state voting equipment, which could leave states scrambling to replace billions of dollars’ worth of machinery. The effect and likely intent was to cast doubts on machine tabulation, which extensive research has shown to be faster and more accurate than counting by hand. Those doubts, fed by conspiracy theories, would in turn make it harder for state officials to resist the kind of pressure Mr. Trump put on them in 2020 to change election results.
There are reasons to hope Mr. Trump will fail to subvert next year’s midterms. Election officials of both parties have, by and large, withstood years of relentless threats, violence and disinformation. They can’t do this alone. Ahead of the last elections, police officers across the country trained to protect the polls in partnership with election officials and carried pocket legal guides tailored to their jurisdictions.
Some state attorneys general and other lawyers are organizing to push back against illegal or illegitimate federal demands for sensitive records. Security experts, some of them former federal employees, are stepping in to fill the gaps that the president left when he gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, by helping states to defend voting and tabulation machinery against sophisticated hackers. State courts have asserted their primacy in interpreting state election law, beyond the president’s reach.
The ultimate safeguard of constitutional government is the great mass of citizen voters who decide by the tens of millions what kind of government they want. We hold the power, whatever our partisan preferences, to defend checks and balances and the rule of law. We cannot lose that power unless we surrender it.
Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, is a senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law.
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