President Donald Trump has made clear in recent weeks that he is willing to use the enormous strength of his office to prevent the party from losing control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
Some of the measures Trump took to intervene in the election were typical, but controversial political manipulations at his extremes. It includes Pushing Republican lawmakers in Texas Other conservative controlled states will also redraw legislative maps to expand the number of US house sheets that favor GOP.
Others involve directly using official presidential power in unprecedented ways, such as ordering his Department of Justice Investigating major liberal fundraising organizations,actblue. The same goes for the department Request detailed voter files With an obvious attempt to search for unqualified voters from each state on a large scale.
And on Monday, Trump posted an a False rumours Social media has led a “movement” to ban voting machines and mail-in voting, the latter of which has been the mainstay of democratic voting since Trump urged Republicans to avoid it in 2020. Turn the problem This is ahead of last year’s presidential election.
Individual actions will be an alarming move among those worried about the future of American democracy, in addition to unprecedented attempts by the incumbent president to intervene in key elections before it is held.
“These are behaviors that are not seen in healthy democracies,” said Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that sued the Trump administration. “These are actions you see in authoritarian states.”
Trump is already trying to overturn the election
Basin pointed out that the president routinely gives up for the party in medium-term elections, steering projects and trying to strengthen existing people with support for the district. But he said Trump’s history is part of the warning about the mid-term.
He referenced Trump An attempt to overturn Results of 2020 Presidential Electionand it ended with Violent attack About the Capitol by his supporters.
“One thing we know from our experience in 2020 is that this is someone who uses every measure and strives to maintain power in all tactics regardless of the outcome of the election,” Bassin said.
He said in 2020, Trump was checked by elected Republicans from Congress and state homes who refused to bending rules, along with members of his own administration and military leaders who distanced themselves from defeated incumbents. During his second term, the president locked in almost identical loyalty from the GOP, building up loyalty and administration.
Incumbent presidential parties usually lose their seats in Congress during medium-term elections. That’s when it happened to Trump in 2018, when Democrats won enough seats to reclaim the House, thwarting the president’s agenda, and ultimately leading to his two bluffs each.
Trump said he didn’t want repeating it.
He also argued that his actions were in fact an attempt to maintain democracy. Repeating unfounded allegations of fraud, he said in a meeting with Ukrainian President Voldymir Zelensky on Monday that “you can never have a real democracy in a mail-in vote.” Earlier this month, Trump said he “qualifies for five more seats” as he reached out to Texas in the 2024 presidential election.
An attempt to design GOP control in the US home
Republicans currently have a three-seat margin in the House of Representatives. Trump is urging Texas Republicans to redraw Congress maps to create up to five new winnable GOP sheets, lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, and taking similar steps to fill the margins further.
The Texas Legislature may vote for that map Wednesday. there is There is no guarantee that Trump’s Gambit will workhowever, there is no legal ban on messing around with maps of these states, due to the advantage of partisans. In response, California Democrats are moving forward. Their own rezoning efforts As a way to counter Texas Republicans.
The president is not openly hoping that the president will produce more seats for the party, but usually responds to court orders, but previous medium-term map adjustments have been made previously. Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond said that while the House District redrawing may not be successful, as Trump expects, could ultimately motivate Democrat voters.
Still, Diamond said he was worried. “What’s surprising is the overall pattern, and the reason for doing this is because of pure partisan advantage,” he said of Trump’s tactics.
Diamond wrote a book in 2019 about the “12-step” process to turn democracy into dictatorship, saying, “The final step in the process is to riggle the election process.”
The Justice Department acts on Trump’s priorities
Trump has called for loyalty from all levels of his administration, and has called for the Justice Department to follow his orders. One of them was to investigate ActBlue, an online portal that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations to Democratic candidates over two decades.
The site was so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture called Winred. In particular, Trump did not order a federal investigation.
He also has Trump appointees from the Department of Justice Voting data has been requested From at least 19 states, Trump has continued to claim that he actually won the 2020 election, suggesting a special prosecutor to investigate the vote count for that year. Trump has, like he did before winning the 2024 election It implies that there is no basis Democrats say that future votes could be counted against him.
In at least two states, California and Minnesota, the DOJ follows election officials last week, threatening legal action if it fails to hand over voter registration lists by this Thursday. Neither nation nor either is controlled by Democrats – does not respond publicly.
Attempts to disrupt votes and elections
Trump’s threat this week is to end mail-in voting and abolish voting machines. It is just his latest attempt to shake up how elections are carried out. an Presidential Order He signed earlier this year and sought documented evidence of citizenship to register for the ballot, among other changes, among others, but many of them have been blocked by the courts.
Several days until January 6th, 2021 Attack on the Capitol To reverse his 2020 loss, Trump’s allies proposed that the military seize the voting machine to investigate Trump’s fraud. Attorney General He said there was no evidence of serious misconduct.
The Constitution says the nation and Congress have set election rules rather than president, so it is unclear what Trump can do to make his promises come true. But election officials saw them as a clear sign of 2026 interests.
“Let’s see what it really is,” said Anne Jacobs, Democratic chairman of the Wisconsin Election Commission.
The president has very few levers to influence elections
Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the idea of seizing a voting machine in 2020 is a sign that the president must influence elections rather than his power. Under the US Constitution, elections are run by states, and only Congress can “change” the procedures.
“It’s a deeply distributed system,” Muller said.
Mueller noted that there are few legal constraints on the president’s powers, including criminal investigations, law enforcement and the deployment of military resources. However, he added that people have usually made the mistake of predicting election catastrophe.
He noted that in 2022 and 2024, a wide range of experts endured violence, confusion and attempts to overturn losses by Trump’s allies, and serious threats never materialized.
“One lesson I’ve learned over the decades I’ve been doing this is that people are often preparing for their final elections, not what’s actually happening in new elections,” Muller said.
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