“I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” President Trump said on Tuesday. He then cited Detroit, Philadelphia, adding, “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the vote. If they can’t count the vote legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.” His comments came a day after he told podcaster Dan Bongino, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Trump’s remarks are fundamentally at odds with the Constitution. The elections clause grants states the right to decide the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” and assigns oversight exclusively to Congress; and the Tenth Amendment enshrines the principle of federalism—that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But Trump has never shown much fealty to, let alone understanding of, the Constitution.
Some might therefore dismiss Trump’s rhetoric as an idle threat or perhaps the rantings of an aging madman. But we cannot dismiss it. The threat is real, as evidenced by Monday’s news that Trump personally oversaw an FBI raid of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, where agents seized “truckloads” of ballots, along with voter rolls and scanned images. Trump’s DOJ has also demanded voter roll information from 44 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license and Social Security data, and has initiated lawsuits against 24 districts when they refused to comply.
Beyond the immediate concern that Trump intends to interfere in upcoming national elections, his comments and actions are a stark departure from previous Republican positions on states’ rights. Just a decade ago, when Trump first sought the presidency, the Republican Party platform included complaints against the Obama administration for “bullying of state and local governments.” It declared allegiance to the notion of states’ rights by asserting that “every violation of state sovereignty by federal officials is not merely a transgression of one unit of government against another; it is an assault on the liberties of individual Americans.” And Trump himself stated in 2016 that “many, many things actually should be states’ rights.” He said he was willing to leave issues involving transgender Americans and abortion to the states, and promised to “make states the laboratories of democracy once again.”
Yet the notion of states’ rights has gone the way of the wind as Trump has remade the GOP in his authoritarian image and sought to massively expand his executive power. Now he’s deemed states’ rights rather inconvenient to his maximalist goals. Thus, the administration has attacked the rights of cities and states to enact “sanctuary city” policies that limit cooperation with federal authorities enforcing Trump’s draconian immigration policies. Trump has issued executive orders targeting states’ own climate laws, despite the fact that, as attorney David Doniger of the National Resources Defense Council puts it, “the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state authority to enact and enforce such laws from the early 19th century to the present day.”
After the murder of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection officer, the president told reporters, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns.” And on Monday, Trump’s sycophantic U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, stated to Fox News that anyone who brings a firearm into the city can expect to go to jail. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”
Trump and his MAGA underlings have decided, in other words, that the Second Amendment—long an inviolable part of Republican orthodoxy—does not apply to anti-ICE protesters. This has dismayed not only guns rights groups but even some Republican lawmakers. “Why is a ‘conservative’ judge threatening to arrest gun owners?” Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky asked on X. Representative Greg Steube of Florida tweeted at Pirro, “I bring a gun into the district every week.... I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others.” Of course, they were in the minority: Most Republicans have remained silent, tacitly acknowledging that they don’t have absolutist positions on gun rights and states’ rights after all.
Some might counter that Democrats at times have also violated or wrongfully disregarded states’ rights. This was the contention of the Supreme Court in 2022 when it struck down an Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency regulation that a majority of the justices said went too far in imposing federal carbon emissions standards on states without congressional approval. The Biden administration was also accused of violating states’ rights to craft their own policies around Covid treatment and prevention. In both cases, however, the federal government was motivated by the desire to protect the health and welfare of the people, and can be said to have been acting in the public’s best interests. These were areas of legitimate legal dispute, not pure power grabs as we’re seeing from the Trump administration.
Moreover, these were national policies that applied to all states equally—not directed at specific states for political reasons. The same cannot be said of the Trump administration. It has questioned billions of dollars of federal funding going to 14 blue states and the District of Columbia, and has frozen funding for childcare in five Democratic-led states. Trump’s retributive intentions are hardly subtle: Unlawfully yanking away $7 billion of funding for clean energy products, his officials practically boasted of their motivations to a federal judge, who noted that they “freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily—if not exclusively—based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024.”
None of these actions show a particular regard for states’ rights to make decisions for their own people. Yet asserting that Trump has changed his position on federalism would imply that he had a position on the issue in the first place. Trump, as we know, reverses his position on issues—constitutional and otherwise—whenever it suits him. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he declared that he had “absolute power” to determine and enforce policies. But two days later, after pushback from Republican governors, he decided that he was a states’ rights guy after all, telling the governors, “You are all very capable people, I think in all cases, very capable people. And you’re going to be calling your shots.”
And in his policymaking, Trump has staked out obviously contradictory positions on federalism. He has simultaneously argued that the federal government has no right to tell states to limit coal production and carbon pollution, yet somehow he does have the authority to tell blue states that they cannot set their own emission standards.
Trump, then, only cares about states’ rights when it serves his political or policy purposes. But by and large, during his second term, Trump has shown little regard for states’ rights and sovereignty. There’s no clearer example of this than his militarization of American cities.
There is no more telling signal of governmental overreach than heavily armed, unidentifiable goon squads roaming American streets and terrorizing towns. Even now, after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump has refused to back down and allow states to police their own streets, stating that there will be no pullback in Minnesota. It’s the rare issue where he’s been consistent: He didn’t care about states’ rights, either, when he sent troops into Los Angeles, violating the Posse Comitatus Act, or when he federalized D.C.’s police force.
Meanwhile, Republicans, once the party of states’ rights, have barely made a peep about Trump’s destruction of a once-sanctified GOP principle. Their timid acceptance proves what liberals have long argued to be true: States’ rights was always just a sham excuse for the party to ignore national laws, including those enshrined in or protected by the Constitution, that it disagreed with. Now, states’ rights are largely a hindrance to MAGA’s plans—in particular the weaponization of the federal government against Trump’s perceived enemies, whether it be immigrants, protesters, or entire states that voted against him. And so the principle of federalism becomes just more collateral damage by the fascist regime.
