It can’t be easy to work for Donald Trump. It’s not uncommon for the president to say something outlandish, at which point his team scrambles to reassure the public that he didn’t exactly mean what he said, only to have Trump soon add that his defenders are wrong and that his ridiculous comments were correct.
On Monday, for example, the president appeared on former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s podcast, peddled some weird conspiracy theories and concluded by endorsing a federal takeover of American elections. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places,” Trump said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Pressed the next day for some kind explanation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the president was really just referring to a misguided bill called the SAVE Act, which would make it more difficult for Americans to register to vote.
Leavitt’s explanation was laughable, since Trump clearly wasn’t referring to the legislative proposal, but the talking point had clearly gone out to the relevant partisans: House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune separately told Capitol Hill reporters that the president was actually talking about the SAVE Act, not a federal power-grab.
A few hours later, Trump made those allies look rather foolish. The New York Times reported:
President Trump doubled down on his extraordinary call for the Republican Party to ‘nationalize’ voting in the United States, even as the White House tried to walk it back and members of his own party criticized the idea.
Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he believed the federal government should ‘get involved’ in elections that are riddled with ‘corruption,’ reiterating his position that the federal government should usurp state laws by exerting control over local elections.
So much for the walk-back.
If states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over,” Trump said, floating a variety of evidence-free conspiracy theories about cities with Democratic majorities. “Look at some of the places — that horrible corruption on elections — and the federal government should not allow that. … The federal government should get involved.”
Abandoning GOP orthodoxy altogether, the Republican president added, “If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”
There’s no reason for him to be confused about this: The federal government doesn’t “do” election administration because it would be illegal: The Constitution, which Trump swore to uphold, delegates power to the states to conduct elections.
Reminded of the basics of constitutional law, the president said states “can” administer elections, thought he quickly added, “but they have to do it honestly.” And who gets to decide whether the elections have been handled in an honest way? According to Trump, he does — and as he’s repeatedly made clear, when he doesn’t like the outcome of an election, that necessarily means it wasn’t honest. Looking ahead, the best-case scenario is that the president will continue to peddle conspiratorial nonsense, as he’s done countless times over the last decade, and his election-related lies will remain the background noise of our civic lives. His mindless rhetoric will be annoying but ultimately inconsequential. The worst-case scenario, however, is far more dangerous. Trump has already deployed FBI agents to raid an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots and voting records as an extension of the president’s conspiracy theory, while Trump’s Justice Department continues to wage an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states where Democrats won in 2024. It’s painfully easy to imagine the administration taking additional steps down the same radical path — in this year’s midterm elections and beyond — especially as officials scramble to satisfy the whims of a president who’s convinced of systemic election crimes that are, in reality, occurring only in his imagination. The danger is that Trump’s incessant whining is the first step and not the last. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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