If you can’t beat ’em, scare ’em. That seems to be US President Donald Trump’s strategy for staving off increasingly likely Democratic victories in November’s midterm elections.
His much-hyped primetime speech last week promised “shocking” revelations about foreign interference in American elections but delivered more of the same old pity party of grievances, lies, threats, debunked documents, and conspiracy theories.
Some top aides reportedly tried to discourage the speech, which turned out to be a big rambling yawn. It was so blatantly political and misleading that even Fox News felt compelled to broadcast a disclaimer, and his favorite show, Fox & Friends, didn’t even mention it the next morning.
And when ABC and NBC declined to carry it live, he threatened to sic his Federal Communications Commission avenger, Brendan Carr, on them to dangle the removal of their broadcast licenses as punishment.
The big element missing from the speech on election integrity was integrity itself. But it was more than a rehash of his historical fiction.
It was really about fear: Trump’s fear of losing control of Congress in November. His greatest dread, he has often said, is that a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives will impeach him – for the third time.
If that happens, he will miss the get-out-of-jail card provided by a subservient GOP-led House of Representatives under Speaker Mike Johnson, a loyal boot-licker who must have skipped the class in law school about separation of powers.
Trump is right to be scared, very scared, that Democrats will take that Constitutional responsibility seriously and conduct extensive oversight hearings of the executive branch. In fact, they “are already pursuing a broad range of investigations,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
Raskin is in line to chair the Judiciary Committee and likely to lead key Democratic investigations. In his view, “The political and financial corruption driving the Trump presidency is a civic emergency.”
Democrats plan to exercise their power of hearings, subpoenas, and depositions to put the Trump administration under the microscope. The president has given them a fertile field to plow.
Trump has accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the federal government to investigate him, but that charge was a ruse to justify how he has been using the Justice Department, FBI, IRS, ICE, Federal Communications Commission, Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other federal agencies to pursue revenge on his enemies.
His choice to head the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, is Trump’s former personal attorney who represented him in a case in which he was convicted on 34 felony charges. Blanche, at his confirmation hearings, would not answer senators’ simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” Is he so subservient that he cannot speak the truth publicly?
Congress will want to look at how the president’s personal wealth ballooned by over $2.2 billion in just the first year of his second term, while his family and friends also grew wealthier by many magnitudes. The self-dealing of a lifetime exemption for himself and family from tax audits must be examined.
Congressional investigators will likely focus on suspected massive conflicts of interest, starting with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s dual roles as part-time diplomat and private equity investor, reaping billions from simultaneous dealings with various Persian Gulf countries.
Another potential target will be Elon Musk and his DOGE agency’s role in indiscriminate slashing of the federal workforce, unilaterally cutting funding to congressionally authorized programs, possible self-dealing, and other abuses.
Those fears help explain Trump’s frantic push for passage of his deeply flawed, anti-democratic SAVE America Act. Falsely labeled election reform, it is the political wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Fear as a political strategy
It sets new and unnecessary obstacles to voting, wrapped in Trump’s lies and myths about voter fraud, particularly non-citizen voting, a virtually non-existent crime outside his own state of denial.
Trump said, “the only reason” to oppose the SAVE Act is if “you want to cheat.” Reality may be quite the opposite, according to some respected analysts.
The nonpartisan League of Women Voters says the legislation threatens to disenfranchise millions of voters by requiring re-registration when women marry and change their names, and when military members and families move.
It also places an undue burden on people who lost documents in natural disasters, people of color who disproportionately lack documentation, and Americans who do not have passports or access to paper copies of their birth certificates.
The “show your papers” demand is reminiscent of authoritarian states, said the Brennan Center for Justice.
Trump has provided zero evidence to support his claim that 278,000 non-citizens are on voting rolls (only in Blue states, of course). To back up those false charges, his Homeland Security secretary is threatening to arrest or even imprison state officials who don’t meet his demands to hand over voting rolls.
Federal law gives the states, not the federal government, the power to run the nation’s elections, but that is irrelevant to Trump as he seeks to manipulate the election system in his favor.
Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state Jena Griswold said, “our biggest threat” in the 2026 elections “is not foreign adversaries; it’s a federal adversary.” The White House, she added, is “weaponizing the federal government against us.”
Trump’s speech was a blatant attempt to undermine voter confidence in our electoral system, intimidate local officials, and grab federal control over the upcoming elections.
An unintended consequence appears to be sowing doubts among Republican voters by undermining their confidence in the electoral system and encouraging them to stay home on November 6 at a time when Democratic enthusiasm is high.
If Trump were serious about election integrity, he would not have spent the first months of his second term, having “dismantled much of the election-security enforcement capability at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security,” according to David Ignatius in The Washington Post.
As Trump himself said, “You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections,” but who is the one really trying to subvert democracy with endless lies about rigged elections, foreign interference, and non-citizen voting? Who is intimidating state and local election officials with threats of prison time, attacking the media, and pressing political gerrymandering by Red states?
And who may be working to incite armed thugs taking over polling places – which may turn out to be the biggest threat of Election 2026, along with the possibility (likelihood?) that if the vote turns against him and his corrupt party, he will set loose the same kind of attempted insurrection that marked January 6 as one of the darkest days in American political history?
What is it about free and fair elections that terrifies Donald Trump? If you can’t answer that question, you haven’t been paying attention.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Source:
www.jpost.com
