What did Donald Trump mean last Friday when he wrote on Truth Social that “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!”? We didn’t have to wonder for long, because exactly 27 minutes later, he explained it with a follow-up post: “If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”
Trump can issue an executive order changing the temperature at which ice becomes water, but that won’t make it happen. The Constitution couldn’t be clearer: Presidents don’t run elections; the states do. Congress can change the rules, and it did in 1967 when it mandated single-member districts (a couple states at the time still elected members on an at-large basis). But the president has nothing to do with any of it.
Why is Trump so worked up? The House passed the SAVE America Act, an ill-disguised attempt to codify voter suppression, last Wednesday. But as he well knows, it’s not going to get through the Senate—unless Republicans decide to kill the filibuster. Right now, that seems unlikely, and assuming that doesn’t happen, Trump and the GOP’s main vehicle for suppressing turnout this fall will die. Hence, the executive order threat.
The problem for Trump is that no court in the country will honor his executive order. I can’t imagine even the Supreme Court will, given how unequivocal the Constitution is on the matter. So the question is: When his executive order is shot down, what will he do?
The Trump administration has done many shocking things, far too numerous for me to list. If I had to name three really bad ones, I’d go with: the rancidly political investigations of people he perceives as enemies; the staggeringly corrupt personal enrichment; the shipping people off to prisons in foreign countries, sometimes in direct contravention of judicial orders. All these are direct assaults on the core principles of democratic self-governance.
Trying to prevent or subvert or nullify an election, I would argue, is on another level. We’ve had presidents and other political leaders who tried to get their foes thrown in the clink. We’ve had loads of corrupt pols, though never anyone near Trump’s operatic scale. And we have, alas, treated a lot of people very badly, from the 400,000-plus African people brought over as slaves to the millions of Native Americans we drove from their lands or herded onto reservations to the patriotic Japanese Americans during World War II.
But through all those moral calamities, we’ve had elections. A federal election has never been postponed or cancelled in the history of the United States. If ever one was going to be postponed, it obviously would have been in 1864. But Abraham Lincoln refused even to consider delaying it. And he was convinced he was going to lose! On August 23, 1864, he wrote this memo to his Cabinet members: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
He put it in an envelope and asked his Cabinet officers to sign the envelope without reading the memo. Note how there was no question in his mind that the election would be held—even though he was sure he was going to lose. That’s how a small-d democrat behaves. Can you imagine Donald Trump doing that? Never in a jillion years, and it’s precisely that difference that explains why Lincoln is our greatest president and Trump our worst.
Otherwise, every federal election in this country’s history has been held. And this one probably will be. But consider these two points. First, the mere fact that I even have to write “probably” is disturbing. Imagine, the week before the election, Trump giving a speech in which he says that “evidence” of “Democrat cheating” is so overwhelming that he has no choice but to declare martial law and delay the elections until these matters are sorted out. That might not be likely. But you know as well as I do that it is far from impossible.
And second, we have to ask, assuming it does take place, under what conditions will it be held? Will we see ICE agents at polling places, as Steve Bannon wants? Other self-appointed armed thugs, showing up at polling places in Black neighborhoods, demanding to see voters’ identification cards?
Remember—the entire issue is fake. There is no mass voter fraud. The state of Michigan conducted a review of the 2024 voting. About 5.7 million people voted. The number of ballots they found cast by non-citizens? Sixteen. That’s .000028 percent.
Additionally, Trump said over the weekend, and has said repeatedly, that the United States is “the only country in the world” that uses mail-in voting. It’s a massive lie; 34 countries and territories use some form of postal voting. Twelve allow all voters to vote by mail, including the UK, Germany, Poland, Greece, and Canada.
Trump may not get away with this. But whether he gets away with it or not isn’t the point. The point is that he’ll try; that he feels no compunction about doing so. Also that his party and his favorite “news” organizations will back him.
We’ve all seen scenes in our lives from elections around the world where intimidating armed militias stood guard at polling places, violence broke out, and more. We may be about to see them again this November. But this time, it won’t be Tanzania or Bangladesh. It will be the United States of America under Donald Trump.
