Trump’s New Threats to American Elections

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With nine months to go until the midterm elections, President Trump’s campaign to subvert them is escalating. His administration has recently taken a series of steps that have election officials, observers, and administrators deeply and rightfully concerned about the prospects for improper interference with the election process.

In October, I published an in-depth article on how the president could interfere (and already was interfering) with the midterm elections. Since then, the reasons for worry have become more urgent. In the past two weeks, the FBI conducted a search in a major Democratic county in a swing state, in service of debunked theories about fraud in the 2020 election; the Justice Department attempted to extort voter rolls from another Democratic state under threat of armed occupation; and the president floated plans to “nationalize” elections. Trump has tried to subvert an election before, but these efforts are earlier, more organized, and—crucially—employing the power of the federal government to help him achieve his personal political goals.

Yesterday, Trump spoke with Dan Bongino, the podcaster turned FBI deputy director turned podcaster, and called for his party to seize control of voting in states. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” Trump said, reprising an oft-used and incorrect claim. (Voting by noncitizens is rare and does not amount to enough to swing elections.) “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over’—we should take over the voting in at least, many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win.”

The federal government has no constitutional or statutory role in states’ election administration, so the call for “nationalization” is an assertion of power that the federal government does not have, a hallmark of other recent White House ploys. Trump’s declaration that “Republicans” could do it may be a suggestion that Congress take action, but it also points to the partisan aims of his attack.

Trump’s efforts to prove that he won in 2020 are all premised on false claims, yet he continues to try to drum up evidence for a conclusion he’s already reached. “You’re gonna see something in Georgia,” he told Bongino, referring to a search this past Wednesday at the Fulton County election center, in Atlanta, where agents looked for records including ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls from the 2020 election. Immediately after that election, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that he won Georgia, and when his legal efforts to challenge the result fell short, he called the Republican secretary of state and asked him to “find” almost 12,000 votes. (Trump and some associates were charged with racketeering in Fulton County as a result, but the case was dismissed last year.) The search is a stunning intrusion into local election administration. “It’s a five-alarm fire,” as one Arizona Republican election official told my colleagues Sarah Fitzpatrick and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez.

Since the search, more troubling information has emerged. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has no obvious role in the FBI or domestic-election oversight but has been a proponent of bogus fraud claims about the 2020 election, was present for the operation, which she said in a letter to Congress was at Trump’s behest. The New York Times reports that Gabbard met with some of the FBI officers the following day and put Trump on speakerphone for a chat with them—a serious departure from normal practice, and a move that emphasizes the appearance of inappropriate pressure: a federal law-enforcement agency acting as a political agent of the president in a nakedly partisan operation. (Bongino’s own return to partisan podcasting, just weeks after leaving his post as No. 2 at the FBI, demonstrates how politics has infected the bureau.)

As Trump continues to clash with local officials in Minnesota, he also claims that he was cheated out of votes there. “I feel that I won Minnesota—I think I won it all three times,” he said. “I won it all three times, in my opinion.” On January 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz demanding that the state turn over its voter rolls to the Justice Department as a condition of the federal government ending its violent crackdown in Minneapolis. Since May 2025, the DOJ has ordered 44 states and the District of Columbia to hand over voter rolls, though it has no statutory right to them. Many states, including Minnesota, have resisted.

Bob Bauer, a veteran Democratic election lawyer, argues that although Bondi’s letter appears to yoke together two unrelated questions—election integrity and immigration enforcement—the Trump administration may not see them as separate, but rather as an opening to interfering with elections using federal agents. “The administration’s lawyers might view the potential deployment of ICE as an option allowing for the fielding of what one advocate describes as ‘essentially an army’ charged with ensuring election security through immigration law enforcement,” he wrote this week.

As bleak as these developments are, a few hopeful signs for the midterms have emerged. First, Trump has been publicly setting expectations for poor results for Republicans, a sign that he may be resigning himself somewhat to a loss. Second, the president’s attempt to force gerrymanders in GOP-controlled states, in order to help preserve the House majority, seems to be ending up as basically a wash, after Democrat-controlled states responded in kind. Third, an election is at greatest danger of interference when the margin of victory is narrow, and Americans’ growing disapproval of the president’s handling of immigration and the economy has buoyed Democrats on the generic ballot for Congress. An old joke goes that the election administrator’s prayer is, “Lord, let this election not be close.” Even as Trump tries to tamper with elections, his actions in office make it more likely that the prayer is answered.

Related:

• Donald Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already under way.
• Trump’s DOJ comes for the ballots.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Trump is doubling down on all the wrong things.
• Tom Nichols: Countdown to an arms race
• Donald Trump has built a clicktatorship.

Today’s News

1. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton reached a deal with House Republicans to testify before the House Oversight Committee later this month about Jeffrey Epstein, avoiding potential contempt of Congress charges. The closed-door interviews are scheduled for late February.
2. The House passed a set of spending bills today that will reopen the government. The bill now goes to President Trump to sign and triggers a 10-day window for bipartisan negotiations about how ICE conducts immigration raids.
3. Trump met privately at the White House with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, their first face-to-face meeting after months of public clashes that escalated following a recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela.

Evening Read

The Problem With Using AI in Your Personal Life

By Dan Brooks

More and more, large language models are relieving people of the burden of reading and writing, in school and at work but also in group chats and email exchanges with friends. In many areas, guidelines are emerging: Schools are making policies on AI use by students, and courts are trying to settle the law about AI and intellectual property. In friendship and other interpersonal uses, however, AI is still the Wild West. We have tacit rules about which movies you wait to see with your roommate and who gets invited to the lake house, but we have yet to settle anything comparable regarding, for example, whether you should use ChatGPT to reply to somebody’s Christmas letter. That seems like an oversight.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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