The New Republic

05/06/2025

Trump’s executive order is an attempt to centralize and nationalize this game plan: reduce the number of voters likely to vote Democratic to begin with, challenge any reasonably close elections that you lose, and make voters who voted against you prove they were eligible after the fact. It’s not a new effort, Bonilla explained, but one that “reenforces the movements that are already underway … to continue to remove people.” It would also likely dramatically expand those movements by introducing them in states where voting rights are far more expansive than they are in states like North Carolina and Georgia, where mass purges are commonplace. If Trump were to succeed in claiming vast powers to decide who can and can’t vote, it would effectively amount to a hostile takeover of American democracy.

Still, this executive order can—and likely will—be weaponized, even if none of its draconian measures ever come into effect. Say the Democrats win back control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms. Trump may very well argue that they did so only because they refused to comply with its dictates, indicating widespread fraud, and he may potentially use that as a pretext to order the attorney general to stop states from counting ballots that arrive after Election Day. It is a way to delegitimize election results Trump doesn’t like—and might even be a pretext to attempt to overturn the results themselves. It’s the culmination of an election denial movement that has only grown stronger after January 6.

Most Republicans today still do not believe that Trump lost in 2020. His preposterous lies about elections rigged by unscrupulous bureaucrats and foreign invaders are now treated as gospel by much of a Republican base that is primed to doubt the legitimacy of any election the party loses. Led by a president who cannot countenance the idea of losing, Republicans are working tirelessly to ensure the party never does.

For Trump, this is a question of existential importance, and not just because he doesn’t want Democrats to regain power and litigate everything he’s doing as president. The last time he lost power, after all, he quickly found himself embroiled in several criminal and civil cases, some of which related to his conduct as president. He may have ended up being sentenced to prison had he not won the 2024 election. He believes his political rivals were directly responsible for the legal problems that ensnared him after he left office in 2021 and likely fears returning to life as a private citizen under a Democratic president.

He’s also spoken recently of seeking out a third term, despite the apparent constitutional restrictions on doing so. If he decides to actually pursue this route, surely it would be nice for him to know that he’d be starting off with a field goal–like advantage, and that, if he loses, he can simply direct the attorney general to start challenging every vote that went against him. That seems a much easier route than the last time he tried to overthrow the government.