Trump steps up his campaign to undermine trust in fair elections: ‘Never before has the main threat to the system come from the White House’

It has become almost routine on Capitol Hill. A person chosen by Donald Trump for a position in his administration or in the judiciary sits before a group of senators responsible for confirming the appointment, when one of them, a Democrat, asks about the 2020 election. What follows often goes viral.

The latest example came last week. Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia, asked Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, no fewer than six times who had won the election. Clayton avoided giving the correct answer: Joe Biden. Pressed by another senator, he merely said that Biden “was certified as president.”

Perhaps he did so to avoid angering his new boss, who, six years later, still refuses to acknowledge that his Democratic rival beat him by seven million votes. Or perhaps, despite denying it, Clayton is one of the many election deniers whom the president has placed in key positions related to the administration and certification of future elections, starting with FBI Director Kash Patel. The next elections are in November. Control of Congress is at stake, and Republicans appear to be facing an uphill battle.

Last Thursday, less than four months before that vote, Trump delivered a televised address to the nation in which he revived the false claim of fraud in the 2020 election. He also cast doubt on a democratic system with which he never seems to have a problem when he is the winner. He spoke of fraud in Venezuela and of “foreign election interference” despite frequently boasting of influencing political outcomes abroad, from Colombia and Honduras to Argentina. He accused China of obtaining public data on 220 million voters, though the rival power allegedly did nothing with the information, and he accused the “deep state” of orchestrating a cover-up, returning to one of the conspiracy theories that has become a staple of his political rhetoric.

The White House released hundreds of documents containing revelations that were neither especially sensational nor, for the most part, new. Outside his most ardent supporters, the disclosures were met largely with a shrug.

Yet nowhere was the indifference more striking than among congressional Republicans. At the end of his address, Trump issued them an instruction: pass the SAVE America Act, his ambitious election-reform proposal.

The bill, which is stalled on Capitol Hill, would tighten identification requirements both for voter registration, requiring proof of citizenship, and for voting itself, requiring photo identification. Democrats and voting-rights advocates argue that, in a country with no national identity card and where roughly half the population lacks a passport, those requirements could make voting more difficult for more than 21 million people. Many of those affected, they note, would be women who changed their surnames upon marriage. They also stress that the U.S. electoral system is already secure.

All members of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for reelection in the midterm elections. Many Republicans share the view that revisiting a presidential election from six years ago is not politically helpful at a moment when the president is deeply unpopular, the conflict with Iran shows no obvious path to resolution, and the country is grappling with rising living costs and soaring gasoline prices.

Trump’s most sceptical critics see last week’s manoeuvre as laying the groundwork for refusing to accept the results if Republicans lose in November. Some of his more hardline supporters have gone even further, urging him to declare a state of emergency and prevent the elections from taking place altogether. The latter scenario seems less likely than the former. Above all because Trump already did the former the last time he lost.

Back then, he set about constructing what became known as the “Big Lie.” He pressured officials to “find” the votes he needed, filed lawsuits across the country, demanded recounts that ultimately confirmed the original results, and whipped up a crowd before it stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

For Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading nonpartisan voting-rights institute, Thursday’s speech was merely the latest step in “a coordinated campaign to undermine confidence in elections” that has been underway for the past year and a half.

“Everything he has tried so far has failed because the president has no authority over how elections are run,” Morales-Doyle said in a telephone interview. “When he realized he was running out of ideas, he chose to dust off old conspiracy theories and circulate intelligence reports that contained nothing new.”

A decade of interference

“We have been dealing with foreign interference from autocratic countries since at least 2016, if not earlier,” Jon Finer, former deputy national security adviser, said last Friday at a private Washington event. “They try to discredit our democracy, to paint it as too chaotic and inefficient to convince their citizens that it wouldn’t suit them. The difference now is that these attempts, which have no evidence of success, are being amplified by our president.”

During the year and a half referenced by Morales-Doyle, the U.S. president has pushed to redraw electoral districts in ways that favor his party; cut funding and staffing for cybersecurity units tasked with guarding against the foreign interference he frequently warns about; issued executive orders aimed at curbing mail-in voting, one of his longstanding obsessions; removed Democratic members from the Election Assistance Commission; and called for Republicans to “nationalize elections,” arguing that states should be stripped of the constitutional authority they currently hold to administer them.

Meanwhile, his administration has asked 30 states to hand over their voter rolls. The patchwork of rules across those jurisdictions contributes to complexity and confusion, but experts say it also serves as a safeguard against large-scale manipulation by preventing elections from being run through a single, centralized system.

As with many of Trump’s initiatives, the administration has been met with a wave of legal challenges. It has already lost 15 court cases. Last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, another election denier, went a step further by threatening local officials with jail if they failed to comply with the president’s demands.

Mullin repeated unsubstantiated claims about widespread voting by undocumented immigrants. Trump cited a figure of 278,000 cases in his address on Thursday, a number that David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, dismissed as “irresponsible” and based on a “questionable methodology.”

There are also concerns that Trump could deploy agents from his immigration enforcement apparatus at polling stations. Critics argue that the agency has increasingly operated as a political instrument of the administration and that its presence could deter many immigrants, regardless of their legal status, from going to the polls. According to Morales-Doyle, that is the real danger posed by the administration’s current strategy: that people simply stay home on November 3.

“It’s important for people to understand that all of this is noise meant to undermine their confidence in the elections. And that never before has the main threat to the system come from the White House,” the expert warns.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold agrees that the public needs reassurance, arguing that Trump “thrives on voter anxiety.” “States are preparing to counter his plans for November, from the possible seizure of voting machines to police presence at polling stations,” Griswold said last Friday at an event hosted by the think tank Center for American Progress.

So, while experts remain cautiously optimistic, the question now is what comes next. Having already used the most solemn tool at his disposal, a televised address to the nation, to press his case last week, what will be the next step in Trump’s effort to undermine the system from within and avoid defeat in November? And above all, are the foundations of that system strong enough to withstand another blow after a decade of attempts by Trump to weaken them?

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