What did Donald Trump do today?

He took his theory that elections don't count unless he likes the results and made it a literal federal case.

The DOJ has filed a lawsuit in federal court asking a judge to preemptively block the results of Alaska's Senate elections if one specific candidate, incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, doesn't win. Asked about it today, Trump insisted that it was his idea, and that he ordered the DOJ to go ahead with it.

Again, what that means is that Trump is ordering a federal agency to intervene for purely political reasons in an election, and he is openly admitting it.

It would be generous to call this lawsuit frivolous. Trump's theory of the case is that because there are two candidates with similar names—the incumbent senator, and an independent candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.—any result that doesn't have the "correct" Sullivan winning was the result of voter "confusion," and the results should be thrown out.

But Alaska's Supreme Court has already ruled that the independent candidate Daniel J. Sullivan has a right to run for office under his own name. It's very unlikely that Alaska voters will actually be confused: the ballot clearly lists different party affiliations for the two men, and indentifies Dan S. Sullivan as the incumbent. Even if they were confused, it's a ranked-choice ballot. A hypothetical voter who only knew that they wanted to vote for "Sullivan" and not the Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, could simply rank either Sullivan above her.

Peltola is a slight favorite to win regardless, for the same reason that Democrats and independent are competitive in states that haven't elected Democrats in decades or even a century: many voters who are normally staunch Republicans, or independents who voted for Trump as recently as 2024, are horrified at how his second term has unfolded. 

Whether or not Trump actually knew what he was admitting to, it's likely the real intention of the lawsuit is to undermine faith in the legitimacy of American elections, something he has done in essentially every election cycle since 2016—with a healthy dose of assistance from the Putin regime in Russia. Trump has never once committed to accepting the validity of "elections" whose result he doesn't like, and even tried to foment an insurrection when he lost the 2020 election.

Why does this matter?

• If you're not willing to accept the results of an election, you're a dictator, or a wannabe dictator.