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Prompted by Putin, Trump Plans Illegal Election Power Grab

Last week, in a conversation with Vladimir Putin that either took place or that Donald Trump imagined, the Russian president told his American counterpart that the 2020 election was “rigged because you have mail-in voting.”

While the dictator is not exactly an expert on democracy, he does know a thing or two about rigging US elections after having interceded in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, as acknowledged by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led a bipartisan Senate investigation into Moscow’s interference. 

Still, Putin is probably not the guy you want to listen to when it comes to ways to run fair elections. 

This was evidenced by another remark he made in this (real or invented) conversation, when he (supposedly) pointed out that no other country is using mail-in ballots, which will come as news to voters in countries like Canada, South Korea, Denmark, New Zealand, and Poland (to name a few).  

Still, Trump is always willing to find excuses for his shellacking at the hands of Joe Biden and has never been a fan of mail-in voting (which played a major role in the 2020 election because of the ongoing pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans).

Therefore, he seems to have really taken this (real or imagined) bit of advice from Putin to heart. 

On Monday, instead of preparing for a meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several European leaders who are traveling to Washington to figure out how to end the war Russia started, Trump took to social media to announce that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.” 

At the same time, this “movement” would also seek to get rid of voting machines.

As an aside, a case can be made for eliminating voting machines… but not by a budding authoritarian who can’t get over losing an election, wants to cement his power, and doesn’t know what he is talking about. 

Trump evidenced all of these things in his Truth Social post, in which he falsely claimed that all other countries gave up mail-in voting “because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

So, how does he hope to accomplish this? 

If you have been following Trump’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear that he plans to do so through an (unconstitutional) executive order that, according to the president, is meant to bring “honesty” to the midterms. 

And when Trump says “honesty,” you can be assured that he means the opposite. 

Now, you might correctly say that, in the US, elections are administered by the states, so how can the president end mail-in voting? 

Well, we’re glad you asked. Trump intends to do so with a rather novel interpretation of the Constitution. 

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote. “They 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.”

No part of that is even remotely true and there is no telling where Trump picked up this nonsense. Perhaps Putin mentioned it. 

That would make sense, because the US president often seems to pick up on the last thing he hears and then repeat it (this demonstrably happens when he watches Fox News). 

If that is the case, maybe he should talk to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz when he stops by the White House today… because Merz just came to power after his party prevailed in an election that nobody claimed was rigged and in which 37 percent of Germans voted by mail. 

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.