For a decade, President Trump has talked about a country where elections are broken, plagued by corrupted people, widespread fraud and faulty voting machines. According to Mr. Trump, this country is the only place in the world that allows for mail-in voting and the only country that allows one political party to cheat in every election.
Despite Mr. Trump’s claims to the contrary, the country he is describing is not the United States of America. To say it yet again: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, including by noncitizens, as Mr. Trump claims.
Still, he persists.
Mr. Trump has always ramped up his efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of elections when he or Republicans he favors might lose. So far, ahead of a midterm election season where Republicans are fearful of losing the House — and perhaps the Senate, too — Mr. Trump’s latest pronouncements are right on time, and relentless.
Lately, he has almost compulsively rehashed the results of the 2020 election, which he narrowly lost, telling everyone from his Truth Social followers to congregants gathered for a National Prayer Breakfast that the whole thing had been rigged against him. He has suggested that American elections should be “nationalized,” a comment so at odds with the Constitution that the White House tried to walk it back, offering the excuse that Mr. Trump was simply supporting voter identification measures at the polls.
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump said on social media that voters in the midterm elections would be required to present voter identification, “whether approved by Congress or not.” He said he would issue an executive order including those provisions, a move that would almost certainly be blocked by the courts because the Constitution gives the executive branch no authority over elections beyond what Congress has authorized.
“I don’t know whether his party is going to do well in November or not,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials. “What I know is that he appears to think his party is going to do poorly in November.”
If it feels as if Mr. Trump is using his bully pulpit to attack American elections more often lately, that is because he is.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has used words like “rigged,” “crooked,” “stolen” and “fraudulent” to describe elections hundreds of times. Since the start of the month, he’s gone on a tear, using these words to characterize elections 139 percent more frequently than in the preceding months of his term, according to a New York Times analysis of his public remarks.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump attacked mail-in ballots — a process he has used to cast his own vote.
“We’re the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots,” Mr. Trump said, falsely, during an environmental event at the White House on Thursday. He was promoting voter identification legislation that was passed by the House but which has no path in the Senate, where Republicans have bucked pressure from the White House to ram the bill through.
“There aren’t anywhere close to the votes, not even close, to nuking the filibuster,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, told reporters earlier this week. “That doesn’t have a future.”
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This has not stopped Mr. Trump from pushing for the elimination of the filibuster and from adding misinformation about what the legislation can actually do. On Thursday, he claimed that the legislation would end mail-in voting, which is not true. Nor was his assertion that the United States is the only place in the world that allows for mail-in voting — 34 countries and territories allow for mail-in ballots.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump was “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections,” but did not respond to a question about why the president was promoting false theories.
Behind the president’s bombastic rhetoric is what election law experts call an extensive and distracting — if so far broadly unsuccessful — effort by the federal government to insert itself into state-run elections. The goal appears not necessarily to win in court, but to use the presidential megaphone and the powers of the federal government incessantly to plant seeds of doubt about the integrity of the election process.
Some of the most powerful officials in the United States now openly operate as Mr. Trump does, amplifying fantastical claims already proved false.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, traveled to Fulton County, Ga. — a target of election deniers who have now institutionalized the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election — to meet with federal agents conducting a raid at a warehouse where ballots were stored.
“Those Georgia ballots were counted three times, three different ways, once entirely by hand, with observers from his campaign watching,” Mr. Becker said, calling the administration’s effort’s “rehashed conspiracy theories.”
Ms. Gabbard was also involved in seizing voting machines in Puerto Rico last year to examine them for vulnerabilities. Several Democrats have attacked this operation, including Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who told Reuters last week that Ms. Gabbard’s team had no evidence of foreign interference.
Other efforts by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on elections, rearrange the voting map or access voter data have encountered a flurry of legal and political challenges:
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An executive order Mr. Trump signed last year that required proof of citizenship to register to vote was blocked in federal court.
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This week, a federal judge ruled that state officials in Michigan were within their rights to deny a request by the Trump administration to hand over voter data. The Trump administration has sued 24 states to access private voter data. So far, cases in California, Oregon and Michigan have been dismissed.
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The Trump administration’s pressure on Texas to redraw its congressional maps has kicked off an effort by several Republican and Democratic-led states to carve out new districts ahead of midterm elections in November. The Trump administration tried to block a redistricting effort in California, but the Supreme Court allowed state officials to proceed.
With only months to go until the midterm season, Mr. Trump and his allies are conjuring a chaotic jumble of lawsuits, voting-machine seizures and ballot-examination wormhole expeditions.
After all that, acting outside of the bounds of congressional checks on his power, Mr. Trump is leaning heavily on Republicans to pass legislation that would federalize more barriers to accessing the vote — and threatening to act without them if they don’t.
The legislation would require people to furnish proof of citizenship through a document like a birth certificate or passport. Research from the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice has found that more than 21 million Americans lack easy access to documents like a birth certificate or a passport, and about half of Americans do not even have a passport.
All states with voting systems already require voters to verify that they are United States citizens. The sort of fraud that a voter identification system would prevent is also almost nonexistent, according to experts.
“We do not have evidence that suggests voter fraud at any scale, especially the sort of fraud that a photo ID is meant to provide protection against, is going on,” said Michael Hanmer, who helped conduct the University of Maryland Center for Democracy survey and studies election security. “There just isn’t that sort of impersonation fraud going on at any scale.”
If history tells us anything, it is that Mr. Trump’s beliefs are shaped less by the facts than by an inability to acknowledge defeat. After he lost the 2020 election, he had top advisers and family members who told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless. Mr. Trump never publicly conceded, but he did leave office.
After clawing his way back to power, Mr. Trump and his current set of advisers have weeded out anyone who offers up a dose of unwelcome reality. They are proud that there is no one like that around the president now.
Dylan Freedman contributed reporting from Washington.
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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