WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has directed his White House Counsel’s office to explore the feasibility of an executive order requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo identification at polling locations nationwide, even as his own lawyers have warned the moves would likely run into legal trouble, according to a senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and White House staff secretary Will Scharf are among those overseeing the effort to determine whether a legally viable path forward exists.
It is the latest sign that the president intends to reshape American elections unilaterally and without congressional buy-in, testing the limits of his executive authority.
Trump’s fixation with false claims of widespread voter fraud has clashed with efforts by some White House aides to keep his midterm message focused on kitchen-table concerns. Inside the White House, Democrats’ sweeping victories last November were widely viewed as a warning about the administration’s political standing. Going forward, the White House’s strategic intent was to have Trump focus more on affordability, multiple White House officials tell MS NOW.
But there’s a gap between his top aides’ strategy and Trump’s behavior.
During a closed-door meeting of top White House aides and Cabinet officials on Capitol Hill last week, deputy chief of staff James Blair leveled to the group that it was unlikely that they’d be able to control Trump’s messaging. His advice: Let Trump be Trump, and focus on delivering consistent, data-driven messaging on the trail.
Some in the White House view voter ID as a potent political wedge issue: polarizing, yes, but also a powerful base mobilizer. In that sense, a senior White House official said, it is not unlike the issue of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports that the Trump campaign hammered relentlessly in 2024 — not a top concern for most voters, but one that, when put directly to them, generates passionate agreement.
The outside network
Still, the president’s inner team has not actively pushed stolen-election claims as part of its formal midterm strategy. Outside allies, however, have had little trouble keeping the issue alive and made the case to Trump that emphasizing the issue is a winning stance that galvanizes the president’s supporters.
Cleta Mitchell, a MAGA-aligned attorney and founder of the Trump-aligned Election Integrity Network, has made several recent visits to the White House and is regularly in contact with the president, working to keep election-related issues prominent in his thinking, according to a source familiar with her engagement.
The influence operation has a formal side as well. The president has tapped Kurt Olsen, a prominent lawyer involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement, as a special government employee to lead election-related inquiries directly out of the White House — giving the effort an official foothold inside the administration.
But it is Steve Bannon, operating from outside the government entirely, who has emerged as perhaps the most active outside proponent for expanded investigations into allegations about past elections, according to multiple sources close to the White House. Bannon passes along relevant articles and information to a close aide who serves as one of the president’s most direct channels for outside information — a pipeline that has helped ensure the president’s focus on “election integrity” has not dimmed despite the competing priorities of governing.
On Tuesday night, that messaging infused itself into Trump’s State of the Union address from the dais.
“They want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” Trump said, referring to Democrats. “And we’re going to stop it.”
The legal and constitutional wall
During those same remarks, Trump tried to apply political pressure on Democratic senators to pass the SAVE America Act — a House-passed bill requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot. But the measure appears doomed with near-unanimous Democratic opposition, and some Republican senators, like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, having already signaled their own resistance to the measure that would require 60 votes for passage.
The White House’s withering hope of congressional approval has led the president to attempt to do it himself, albeit on questionable legal grounds.
“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post just more than one week ago.
But the reality is that Trump’s authority to unilaterally change election procedures is sharply limited, and the administration has already tested those limits — and lost. Last March, Trump signed an executive order requiring proof of citizenship on the national mail voter registration form and on a ballot request form used by military and overseas voters. A federal judge struck down both provisions on separation-of-powers grounds. “The Framers of our Constitution entrusted this power to the parts of our government that they believed would be most responsive to the will of the people: first to the States, and then, in some instances, to Congress,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. “They assigned no role at all to the President.” Under Article I of the Constitution, the administration of elections belongs to states and localities; any nationwide changes to voting law must pass through Congress. But rather than accepting those constraints, President Trump has pushed other arms of the government to advance the effort. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted at an event in Maricopa County, Ariz., this month that ensuring only citizens vote in federal elections falls within her department’s purview. Days later, the department’s Homeland Security Investigations unit launched a nationwide campaign to investigate and prosecute naturalized citizens who may have improperly voted or registered in past elections before obtaining citizenship. The Justice Department has fared no better in court. As of February, it has sued 23 states to obtain voter roll data, arguing the files are needed to verify that only eligible Americans cast ballots. A federal judge in Michigan rejected that request earlier this month. Trump has also applied pressure at the state level. He promoted on social media the idea that Georgia’s State Election Board — controlled by three Trump allies — should assume control of elections in Fulton County, the state’s most populous and diverse county. Such a move could allow his supporters to install an administrator with authority over early voting hours, drop-box locations and voter registration in the heavily Democratic county. At a rally there last week, the president called mail-in voting “crooked as hell,” praised the FBI’s seizure of the state’s 2020 ballots and told the crowd: “We’re cleaning it up.” The current push follows a pattern established after Trump’s 2020 defeat, when he pressured officials in several battleground states to investigate unproven and false claims of fraud and decertify election results. Rep. Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, said that Mr. Trump, while at Mar-a-Lago in 2021, urged him to build congressional support for “rescinding” the 2020 election and holding a new one — proposals that, Brooks said, were flatly unconstitutional. In 2022, Trump called on Wisconsin lawmakers to “decertify” his loss there following debunked claims from a private investigator. That same year, he demanded to be declared “the rightful winner” of the 2020 election or to “have a new Election, immediately!” “Does Wisconsin RECLAIM the Electors, turn over the Election to the actual winner (by a lot!), or sit back and do nothing as our Country continues to go to HELL?” Trump wrote in a social media post at the time. The courts have blocked him. Congress has refused him. And yet, with eight months until Election Day 2026, the president has arrived at the same conclusion he reached in 2020, in 2021, in 2022 and again now: that the electoral system is broken, that he alone can fix it and that the law is an obstacle to be tested rather than a boundary to be observed.
Jake Traylor is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.
Vaughn Hillyard is a senior White House reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
