What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened state election officials with prosecution, just in case he needed to.

Via the Department of Justice, which is now run in an acting capacity by one of his former criminal defense lawyers, Trump issued a veiled threat to state election officials today about the possibility that he would try to have them prosecuted after this November's elections.

The letter listed dozens of specific federal statutes regarding the conduct of elections, and emphasized that state officials could be prosecuted under those laws if Trump-appointed prosecutors weren't satisfied with their efforts to, for example, keep noncitizens from voting.

The statutes cited have not been used to prosecute state officials in decades, if ever. No official at any level of American government, down to the smallest municipality, has ever been accused of conspiring to allow noncitizens to vote, much less convicted.

The DOJ also demanded that officials "respond to this letter within five days informing us how
the state of Michigan intends to ensure it is complying with these federal laws." There is no such legal requirement. The United States Constitution gives states full authority to conduct elections.

In reality, people intentionally casting fraudulent ballots is almost completely unheard of. For example, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation conducted a study of reported voter fraud in past elections. In just one of the states they examined, Pennsylvania, they found 39 individual reports of voter fraud out of more than 100 million votes cast, meaning that 0.00004% of ballots cast over the course of three decades might have been illegally cast. 

Thanks in large part to Trump himself, Republicans stand a good chance of losing control of the House of Representatives in November's elections, and possibly even the Senate. 

Many things are against federal law. For example, it's a crime to use the powers of a federal office—like a federal prosecutor role—to mistreat people for unlawful purposes, like political revenge. It's also a crime to submit a false instrument—like a declaration by a slate of fraudulent electors that Trump had won their state in the 2020 election—with the intent to defraud the federal government. And, of course, it's an extremely serious federal crime to commit acts of insurrection or sedition.

Why does this matter?

• This is not what you do if you intend to abide by the results of a free and fair election.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He "cheated" in an election, but his candidate lost anyway.

Emily Gregory (D) defeated Jon Maples (R) in a special election for Florida's 87th State House district tonight. The seat had previously been held by a Republican, Mike Caruso, who won by a 19-point margin in 2024. The district also voted for Trump by 11 points in the 2024 election. Gregory's victory is the latest in a series of improbable special and off-year election victories in red districts fueled by Trump's deep unpopularity.

Reuters/Ipsos poll, March 20-23

Gregory's victory is notable for two reasons. The first is that Donald Trump will now be her constituent: the district she won, over Trump's hand-picked candidate Maples, is the one where Trump officially resides (and actually resides, for about three days out of most weeks thanks to his heavy use of a taxpayer-funded private jet). Gregory's win came thanks to huge turnout in her favor from independent voters, making up the significant registration disadvantage her party has in the district: Republicans outnumber Democrats by a 3-to-2 margin.

The second is that she won in spite of Trump casting a ballot in a way that he himself has (falsely) called "cheating" and "VOTER FRAUD!" In other words, like almost a third of all American voters, he cast a ballot by mail—as he frequently does.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with Trump voting in this convenient, legal, secure fashion, especially considering his advanced age and mobility issues that might make in-person voting inconvenient. But getting rid of that option for almost everyone else is such a priority for him that he's made a (functionally meaningless) promise not to sign any legislation until Congress passes a bill that would all but end absentee voting, including vote by mail.

Why does this matter?

• Making it hard for opponents of the leader to vote is what dictators do. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made soldiers go to a campaign rally and told them to vote in ways he wants to make illegal.

Trump doesn't make much of a secret of his feelings about Americans who serve in the armed forces. He went to extreme lengths to dodge the Vietnam draft and joked that his risk of sexually transmitted diseases was as dangerous as the war he bought a fake doctor's note to skip.

Even as president, he's been openly baffled by the idea that servicemembers would sacrifice their lives for the greater good, asking his then-chief of staff John Kelly, "What was in it for them?" and calling America's honored dead "suckers" and "losers." (Kelly, the source of that quote, is a retired Marine general whose son was killed in action in Afghanistan.) Examples abound of his dismissive or mocking treatment of those who serve in uniform. For example, when he made a condolence call to the widow of an Army sergeant killed in an ill-conceived mission in Niger, he forgot or never bothered to learn key details about the man who died, upsetting her further. When she complained about how he treated her in her moment of grief, he called her a liar in the press.

But there is one thing Trump genuinely appreciates about servicemembers: they're not allowed to boo him or show any kind of disrespect towards him, which is a courtesy other large crowds don't usually show him. That's why he's broken with tradition and taken his political events to captive audiences on military facilities, or events like the Army-Navy game where most of the crowd is obliged to show respect to the office of the presidency regardless of how they feel about Trump himself.

He held another rally today at a North Carolina Army base, playing his campaign music and explicitly urging the soldiers mustered up to attend to vote for him. If Trump were actually a member of the military, he would almost certainly be court-martialed for saying that, which is why no president before him ever has in the presence of a military audience. But Trump's remarks came on the same day that he launched another lie-ridden and legally meaningless attack on mail-in ballots. If Trump was aware that many servicemembers vote by mail while temporarily assigned away from home in the United States—and all of them abroad vote that way—he didn't mention it.

Trump is trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the 2026 Congressional elections, in which his party is expected to pay a huge price for his unpopularity, and in which tens of millions of legal votes will be cast by mail. Military ballots, especially from voters overseas, are usually among the very last to arrive and be counted. So by repeating his demands from past elections that the count stop at Election Day and mail ballots be discarded, Trump is calling for the disenfranchisement of the soldiers who sat through his campaign event today.

Of course, that may not be such a bad thing, from Trump's perspective. Republican candidates almost always do well with military voters, but Trump is a big exception. He's routinely underwater in approval polls with them. 

Why does this matter?

• All Americans, including and especially those who serve in uniform, deserve to be able to cast a valid legal ballot and know that their government will honor it.  

• Holding campaign events on military bases is a good way of telling troops that you don't respect them or the Constitution they're sworn to uphold.

• Someone who wasn't willing to lie and bribe to avoid Vietnam was drafted in Donald Trump's place.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pardoned two turkeys and, as it turns out, an unknown number of real human criminals.

Today, Trump took part in the White House tradition, "pardoning" two turkeys from the upcoming Thanksgiving feast. He used the occasion to make jokes at the expense of people like Gov. J.B. Pritzker he regards as political threats, but also victims of human rights abuses and the refugees he illegally deported to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador. 

Bizarrely, but not entirely unexpectedly, he also took a swing at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Standing in what used to be the Rose Garden, which the former First Lady designed, he insisted that attendees would be standing in mud if he hadn't paved it over (and if he'd chosen to hold an outdoor event in the rain in a literal garden). 

"Joking" aside, there was other news on the pardon front today. As a rule, Trump has issued pardons to three kinds of people: those who can pay him for it, those who have committed the exact crimes he himself is known or suspected to have committed, and those whose crimes were done on his behalf. Earlier this month, Trump issued what was supposed to be a mostly ceremonial pardon for people in that last category: the loyalists who presented themselves—falsely—as the legitimate electors from states Trump claimed to have won. 

But the language of the pardon now appears to be so broad that it may cover everyone who committed any crime related to elections in 2020—and the first criminal defendant in such a case is using it in court. That defendant, Matthew Laiss, voted for Trump twice in two different states. (He was caught because, contrary to Trump's wild claims about mail-in voting, it is very easy to determine when someone votes twice in two different jurisdictions.)

In other words, in pardoning members of his inner circle who committed a very specific kind of crime in an attempt to keep Trump in power in spite of having lost the election—a kind of "voter fraud" he strongly approves of—he may have also unintentionally pardoned an unknown number of other people who committed the rare but more garden-variety form of illegal voting. That kind of voter fraud is extremely rare, accounting for less than one vote in a million, according to one study, but Trump routinely tries to get people to believe that the 2020 election he lost involved millions of such illegal ballots.

This is the second time this month alone that Trump has gotten confused over what he was doing with pardons. That may explain why he has been trying to claim that it was his predecessor, President Joe Biden, who didn't know what pardons he was signing. 

Why does this matter?

• Needing to believe that other people have the cognitive issues you yourself are struggling with is called projection, and it's not a sign of good mental health. 

• This isn't the sort of thing that would ever happen in a competently run administration. 

• Giving your supporters a license to commit crimes is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He let a lie about voter fraud get so far away from him that he started talking about needing photo ID to buy groceries.

Yesterday, in what was unmistakably a backlash against Trump, Democratic candidates were elected across the map in a rout. Barely nine months into his second term, Trump is testing new lows in unpopularity, and voting populations he'd made inroads with in 2024 put up eye-popping numbers for Democrats.

Trump, who still claims to believe that the 2020 election was "rigged" against him, obviously had the elections on his mind today. He wrenched his answer to a question about the ongoing government shutdown from a discussion of the filibuster to the (non-existent) issue of voter fraud, but ended up in a place that is bizarre even by his standards:

…We should start tonight with 'the country's open, congratulations,' then we should pass, uh, voter ID, we should pass no mail-in voting, we should pass all the things that we wanted to pass—make our elections secure and safe, because California's a disaster, uh, many of the states are disasters, but can you imagine when they vote almost unanimously against voter ID, all we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID. But for voting, they want no voter ID, it's only for one reason, because they cheat. We would pass that in fifteen minutes. …Mail-in ballots make it automatically corrupt.

You do not need to show photo identification to purchase groceries or gas in the United States, or anywhere else. It's not clear why Trump thought anyone would believe that—but then, it's not clear Trump has ever in his life had to buy his own gas or groceries.

Trump, to the horror of Republican party officials who know how disastrous it would be for them, has long called for an abolition of mail-in or absentee voting (except when he does it). Earlier this year, he renewed his (empty) threats to ban it, saying that he'd gotten the idea from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. That appears to be what he is talking about when he mentions votes "unanimously against voter ID." 

But, of course, even in the eight states (plus DC) where all voting is conducted by mail, voters still have to register, and there are actually more safeguards against fraudulent voting by mail than in person. There are a handful of states where in-person voting is allowed without a photo ID, but even in those states the "affidavit ballots" have other requirements that allow poll workers to verify an address match to the voter file records, and special requirements for first time voters or registering voters that do include photo ID.

Outside of Trump's conspiracy-theory attempts to explain away his 2020 election loss, people intentionally casting fraudulent ballots is almost completely unheard of. For example, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation conducted a study of reported voter fraud in past elections. In just one of the states they examined, Pennsylvania, they found 39 individual reports of voter fraud out of more than 100 million votes cast, meaning that 0.0000388% of ballots cast over the course of three decades might have been illegally cast.

Trump claims to believe that millions of undocumented immigrants all cast illegal ballots, all for his opponents. But in spite of the fact that all states keep meticulous records of who is eligible to vote and who has cast a ballot, he's never been able to find even one such illegal voter.

Why does this matter?

• It shouldn't be possible for anyone to be so far out of touch with everyday reality that you think grocery stores are checking ID before they'll sell to you. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to punish Americans living in Colorado if the state didn't free a supporter who committed crimes on his behalf.

Trump continued his attack against American election systems today, this time in the form of a threat to the state of Colorado if they didn't release a woman, Tina Peters, who committed election crimes on his behalf. She was convicted on ten counts, including four felonies, and is in the first year of a nine-year prison sentence.

In a post to his private microblogging site, Trump demanded that Peters be "let out of jail, RIGHT NOW" calling her an "old woman." (Peters, 69, is ten years younger than Trump—who is also a convicted felon.) He said that he would take "harsh measures" against the state of Colorado if she weren't freed.

Trump, who has no authority to demand that states ignore their own laws or jury verdicts, did not specify what "harsh measures" he had in mind. 

In her role as Mesa County clerk, Peters signed off on a routine post-election audit on November 19, 2020, certifying that a random check of paper ballots against vote tabulating machines had returned no errors. But she became convinced by the conspiracy theories about a stolen election that Trump and his other supporters were promoting in a desperate attempt to keep him in power. In May of 2021, she ordered surveillance cameras guarding voting machines turned off, then gave a QAnon conspiracy theorist named Conan Hays stolen credentials to "inspect" them. Peters lied to other county officials about Hayes' identity.When Hayes released video and data that he had downloaded from the machines' on-board software to the internet, Peters lied again about her involvement and falsely claimed that the reveal of the data (which included passwords that could have been used to further tamper with Mesa County election results) were not a "big deal." 

The voting machines Peters allowed to be tampered were ordered replaced by the county's all-Republican board in order to comply with Colorado's strict ballot security laws. This cost taxpayers more than $800,000.

Her crimes during the 2020 election cycle weren't even Peters' first brush with tampering with election results. In 2019, she left 574 ballots uncounted in a drop-off ballot box in a heavily Democratic area of her district. When this was discovered, she called it an "error."

Trump using his power to reward people who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is nothing new: he called the convicted criminals who stormed the session of Congress where Joe Biden's win was certified "hostages," and then pardoned them immediately after returning to office—including those who attacked and injured police. He's even appointed some of them to high-ranking positions in the Justice Department.

Why does this matter?

• Rewarding people who break the law on your behalf is textbook fascism. 

• People who abuse their powers of office and commit crimes, especially for political reasons, should be punished.

EARLY VOTING IS NOW UNDERWAY IN ALL STATES THAT ALLOW IT, except Maryland (begins Oct. 26), Washington D.C. (Oct. 27), and Oklahoma (Oct. 29).

What did Donald Trump do today?

He voted, as literally only he can.

Trump voted today in his new home state of Florida. A library in Palm Beach that serves as an early voting location had to be shut down for several hours in order to make it secure so that Trump alone could vote. 

Trump normally votes by mail, but he's been trying to convince voters (without evidence) that mail-in voting is subject to fraud. With the uncontrolled COVID-19 epidemic in the United States once again setting daily records, voting without going to crowded indoor polling places is appealing to many Americans.

Trump said today that voting in-person is "much more secure than when you send in a ballot," which is a lie—but this year, for the first time in the history of absentee balloting, there are concerns that his admitted attempts to slow down mail delivery will disqualify ballots.

Trump's vote today was legally valid, but he committed at least two potential crimes in registering. One was that he claimed Washington, D.C. as his official residence while trying to register in Florida, His staff later changed the paperwork, calling it an innocent mistake—although that kind of mistake has sent other Americans to prison.

The other is that his supposed address in Florida—his luxury Mar-a-Lago resort—is not legally a residence. This doesn't automatically mean that Trump can't claim it as his place of residence for voting purposes, but it may mean that he's cheating on a tax agreement with local governments. Voters have faced extremely serious consequences for claiming to live at addresses that aren't proper residences, including a prosecution in Palm Beach.

So what?

• It's wrong to try to keep Americans from exercising their right to vote.

• It's a bad sign when a president can't even register to vote without potentially committing crimes.

EARLY VOTING IS NOW UNDERWAY IN THE FOLLOWING STATES: Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming EARLY VOTING BEGINS ON SEPTEMBER 24th in Illinois

What did Donald Trump do today?

He explicitly refused to commit to a "peaceful transfer" of power.

This morning, Atlantic reporter Barton Gellman published an article directly quoting Trump campaign officials who outlined a specific plan to delegitimize the election results and maintain Trump in power. In summary, it goes like this.

1. Trump, aided by the ongoing COVID-19 disaster, created a partisan split about how to vote where none had existed before. Except for crucial swing states like Florida and Michigan, where he encourages mail-in voting, Trump has encouraged Republicans to vote in person by demonizing absentee voting—which Democrats are now much more likely to use.
   
   
2. Trump has also declared, over and over again and with no evidence whatsoever, that mailed ballots are a giant invitation to fraud. In reality, something on the order of 0.001%—one ballot in every hundred thousand—is cast illegally, and most of those are people mistakenly voting when they are not legally entitled to. The real danger of mail-in voting is that it is easier to make technical mistakes that will invalidate legal ballots—something that would help Trump.
   
   
3. This means it will take longer than usual to count the vote—and because same-day in-person voting can be counted immediately, Trump is likely to have a temporary lead with a small but Trump-friendly portion of the vote counted on Election Day. This is being called the "red mirage."
   
   
4. But as the remainder of the votes are counted in subsequent days—if they are counted—Joe Biden is very likely to take the lead in enough states to win the electoral college outright.
   
   
5. The Trump campaign will use the apparent "victory" of Election Day votes, as well as any chaos or irregularities—even ones he caused—to put pressure on Republican state legislatures to overturn the election and simply declare Trump the winner by legislative fiat. Trump would aid this by declaring—as he already has, over and over again, and in defiance of all law, that only Election Day ballots really count.
   
   In fact, he's already done this in the 2018 election. He insisted that recounts stop in the Florida gubernatorial and Senate race—which Republicans won anyway—and also in Arizona, where Democratic senator-elect Krysten Sinema pulled ahead as absentee ballots were cast.
   
   
6. In order to put pressure on states to invalidate their own elections, and the ballots cast by their own citizens in ways specified by the state as legal, Trump could try to stir up violence, seize ballots, send anonymous federal police forces to find "evidence" of wrongdoing in Democratic strongholds, or declare martial law. 
   
   He could also try to rush legal challenges to the Supreme Court, which would have three of his appointees on it by then—including the newest one who, he explicitly said yesterday, he wanted on the Court to vote against the "scam" of an apparent election loss.

Then, today, Trump had this exchange with a reporter at a press conference.

Q: Mr. President, real quickly, win lose or draw, in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferral of power after the election? There has been rioting in Louisville, there's been rioting in many cities across this country, red and—your so-called red and blue states. Will you commit to making sure that there is a peaceful transferral of power after the election.

TRUMP: Well, we're going to have to see what happens. You know, I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster but—

Q: I understand that, but people are rioting. Do you commit to making sure that there's a peaceful—

TRUMP: No, we want to—get rid of the ballots and you'll have a very peaceful—it won't be a transfer, frankly, it'll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control.

 

(quoted portion begins at 8:10)

No candidate for the presidency in the history of the country, except for Trump, has refused to guarantee the peaceful transition of power.

Why does this matter?

• The will of the American people decides who is president, not Donald Trump.

• Even by Trump's standards, this is pure tinpot dictator stuff.

• There is no way to spin "get rid of the ballots" in a democracy.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He hinted about the election outcome he's hoping for.

In one of several tweets today that were flagged by Twitter as election disinformation, Trump claimed that because many Americans intend to vote by mail, to avoid exposure to the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, the "Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED." He also said that this was what "some" were hoping for.

"Some" in this case includes Trump himself, who has openly said he will not accept the legitimacy of any election he loses. Trump's surrogates like pardoned felon Roger Stone and Michael Caputo have been stirring things up even more in recent weeks. Stone called on Trump to seize ballots and arrest his political opponents—a move more associated with sham elections held by dictators with no intention of leaving office. And Caputo has been openly talking about the possibility of "armed insurrection" and urging Trump supporters to buy ammunition. 

Republican officials—who for the most part have seemed resigned to wait out Trump's leadership of the party—and even members of Trump's own administration condemned the tweet.

In a theoretical legal sense, chaos over the vote count can only help Trump. If the states that provided Biden with a winning margin had a Republican state government—like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, or Ohio—then Trump could put pressure on those states to invalidate their own results. That would force the election into the House of Representatives. Because of a quirk in the Constitution, that vote would heavily favor Trump even though Democrats are almost certain to retain their large majority there, because the vote for President is done state-by-state. Wyoming's one Republican member would have the same vote as the overwhelmingly Democratic 52-person California delegation.

But Trump may simply be trying to give himself a reason to doubt the election results. After all, he also contested the results of an election he won, appointing a panel to discover the five million votes he claimed were cast by illegal immigrants exclusively for Hillary Clinton—which would explain away the fact that he lost the popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes. (It disbanded having found no voter fraud whatsoever.)

Undermining Americans' faith in the legitimacy of democracy itself is a major goal of adversary nations like Russia, and one of many points where Russian disinformation campaigns and the Trump campaign share the same message.

Why should I care about this?

• Nobody tries this hard to trash an election they think they'll win fairly.

• Nobody who refuses to accept the will of the American people is fit to lead them.

• It's bad if the President of the United States is saying exactly the same thing as a hostile foreign country trying to destabilize Americans' faith in democracy.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again told North Carolina voters to commit voter fraud, a felony.

Not for the first time, Trump told his North Carolina supporters using absentee ballots to attempt to vote twice: first by mail, and then again by visiting polls in person on Election Day.
 

To be clear: absentee voting does not require a visit to the polling place, in North Carolina or anywhere else. North Carolina's Secretary of State was forced to try to debunk Trump in real time on Twitter.

NORTH CAROLINA: Do NOT do what the President directs. To make sure your ballot COUNTS, sign and send it in EARLY. Then track it ONLINE with BALLOTTRAX. Do NOT vote twice (it’s a felony), or waste your time, or unnecessarily risk exposure to more people. https://t.co/jOKYoR4hnr https://t.co/1cF6tJoHA4

— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) September 12, 2020

The only GOOD thing about the President’s tweet is that he FINALLY encourages voters to VOTE BY MAIL. It’s an easy, safe & secure way to cast a ballot. To request yours: https://t.co/NPfKjxLyhz

— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) September 12, 2020

Important Thread on VOTING in NC:
1. Register to vote before Fri 10/9
2. Request mail-in ballot ASAP
3. Mail in your ballot ASAP & track receipt by text/email
4. or Vote during 17 days of early vote (Th 10/15 – Sat 10/31)
5. or Vote on Election Day (Tu 11/3)
6. DO NOT VOTE TWICE

— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) September 12, 2020

It's not clear who in Trump's tweet the "them" are supposed to be who are "illegally taking your vote away," although he has made no secret of his attempts to sabotage the United States Postal Service as it gears up for huge pandemic-inspired absentee voting. Because of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has been politicized, Democrats are far more likely to vote by mail this year than Republicans.

Messages like this, which Twitter immediately flagged as an attempt to subvert the election, serve Trump's interest in a number of ways. If his supporters flood polling places, instead of verifying that their ballots were received online, it will contribute to delays and disruption. If the vote is close—and it almost certainly will be in North Carolina—Trump can point to those delays and claim he was hurt by them. 

Voters may be confused by Trump's ridiculous depiction of absentee voting—since the whole point is to avoid going to a polling place—and decide the whole process isn't worth it. (Undermining Americans' faith in democracy is not just a Trump strategy—it's also the major goal of the Putin regime.) And if anyone actually succeeds in voting twice—which is a felony, albeit not one anyone is likely to get away with—Trump can complain that the election is tainted even though he would be the one tainting it.

In effect, Trump seems to have concluded that anything that adds to confusion and chaos and dissatisfaction with the election is good for him.

How is this a bad thing?

• Nobody tries this hard to sabotage an election they think they will win.

• A president who won't respect the rule of law or the results of an election is a dictator.

• Nobody whose interests so perfectly align with those of a hostile foreign power should be president.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He begged his supporters to commit voter fraud, a felony.

By a slim margin, Donald Trump is losing to Joe Biden in the polls in North Carolina. There is virtually no way Trump can win the election while losing North Carolina, and so he was forced to make a campaign trip there today. While there, he had this exchange with a reporter.

Q: Six hundred thousand could vote by absentee in this state. Are you confident in that system?

TRUMP: Well, I — they'll go out and they'll vote, and then they are going to have to check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way because, uh, if it, if it tabulates then they won’t be able to do that. So, let them send it in and let them go vote. And if the system is as good as they say it is, then they obviously won’t be able to vote [in person]. If it isn’t tabulated, they will be able to vote. So that’s the way it is, and that’s what they should do.

 

In other words, Trump is urging people to try to vote twice, which is a federal and state felony—something voters should definitely not do. It's also illegal in North Carolina to induce other people to commit voter fraud.

Of course, normally voter fraud is incredibly rare—but then, no presidential candidate has ever gone on TV to beg his supporters to commit it.

Trump could certaibly benefit if enough of his supporters heeded his call to commit voter fraud and swamped the ballot boxes with illegitimate votes. But in the real world, this is effectively impossible. The in-person voter rolls are updated with those who have returned absentee ballots, and the most any would-be double-voter could do would be to fill out a provisional ballot. The existence of the mailed ballot would then invalidate the second ballot.

The more likely explanation is that Trump is simply trying to sow as much chaos as possible about the results of the election. Any voting irregularities—even in the form of criminal acts that would benefit him if successful—would give him an excuse to avoid conceding if he lost. This is his overall election strategy at this point in the race.

Notably, neither Trump nor the White House has yet claimed that he was "joking," the usual Trump excuse for having threatened to ignore the results of an election.

Why should I care about this?

• Nobody tries to sabotage an election they think they will win fairly.

• A president who won't respect the rule of law or the results of an election is a dictator.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He put a dangerous COVID-19 spin on his usual voting lies.

Trump lost a lawsuit today to prevent Pennsylvania officials from putting out collection boxes for ballots. This is a common form of early voting that allows voters to drop off absentee ballots, rather than stand in line at a polling place, or risk them being delayed past the deadline in the mail.

With the airborne COVID-19 pandemic continuing to spread where people are gathered in large numbers indoors—for example, at polling places—and Trump openly admitting that he is trying to prevent the USPS from being able to handle the expected surge in absentee ballots, many states are turning to collection boxes. 

That appears to be why Trump lashed out today in a tweet so inaccurate that Twitter was forced to hide it as both vote suppression and COVID-19 disinformation.

In other words, Trump is claiming that touching a collection box is more dangerous than standing in line—possibly for hours—at a polling place.

This is not a theoretical risk. When voters in the heavily Democratic city of Milwaukee were forced to stand in long lines at a small number of polling places to vote in April, it led to a spike in COVID-19 cases. Cities have been hit first and hardest by the pandemic, which has led to closing of polling places, which makes it harder and more dangerous to vote in person.

Who cares?

• Nobody tries this hard to suppress the vote in an election they think they can win honestly.

• Americans should not have to choose between their health and their basic constitutional rights.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pre-delegitimized the 2020 election, in case he loses.

Trump spent the morning of the first working day after his disastrous Tulsa rally sowing the seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. 

Trump also claimed that "MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS."

Trump, of course, sought Russian help for his 2016 campaign and was impeached for trying to force Ukraine to interfere in 2020. In fact, undermining Americans' faith in the legitimacy of their own government was the main goal of that Russian interference.

As usual for Trump's talk about mail-in ballots, none of this is true—not even the World War One reference. There was no presidential election during the United States' time in that war. But soldiers deployed away from home voted by mail in the 1944 election without incident. In fact, expanding the troops' access to ballots was a major priority for the federal government.

Trump himself votes by mail; so does almost every voter in five states, and mail-in absentee ballots are available in every state. Mail-in voting is extremely popular, and even after Trump's recent attempts to demonize it, Americans support expanding it to anyone who wants it by more than a two-to-one margin. 

Trump, who famously said in October of 2016 that that election was rigged unless he won, is more or less openly trying to give himself an excuse to delegitimize the 2020 race if he loses. He believes—falsely, as it turns out—that making it easier for voters to cast a legitimate ballot hurts Republicans.

It's hard to see why Trump would bother unless he was fairly convinced he was going to lose. If that's the case, he's in good company. Polls in June are snapshots of the current mood, not a prediction. But in that snapshot, Trump is losing badly to Joe Biden.

Why should I care about this?

• "Elections are only legitimate if I win" is the philosophy of a dictator.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to punish states for helping their citizens to vote in November.

Today, a seemingly furious Trump lashed out at swing states Nevada and Michigan, threatening to somehow block federal funds to them for helping voters vote by mail.

It's not illegal to vote by mail. It's not illegal in Michigan for the government to send applications, or in Nevada to send ballots to registered voters. Trump himself voted by mail in 2018.

As Jocelyn Benton (Michigan's "rogue" Secretary of State) pointed out, many states are moving to help voters avoid COVID-19 risk in November by making it easier to vote by mail. But many of those are states with Republican secretaries of state where Trump is more likely to win.

Trump has made no secret of the fact that he believes—probably incorrectly—that when more citizens are able to vote, Republicans do worse. 

Trump refused to say exactly what funds he would try to withhold to punish Michigan and Nevada, although a president who actually wanted to punish a particular state for voting in ways he didn't like could do an enormous amount of damage. Even the threat of doing so is illegal. 

Why should I care about this?

• Undermining Americans' faith in their elections is exactly what enemies of the United States are trying to accomplish.

• Making sure that only supporters can vote in elections is what dictators do.

• Threatening governments for not helping his re-election campaign is what got him impeached.

• Voters (including millions of Republicans in those states) might not like being punished for voting.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He complained about people voting.

Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that will provide mail-in ballots for all registered voters in the state for the November elections. 

Trump embarrassed his party last month by saying, in effect, that more people voting is bad for Republicans—although it's not clear this is true. Five states conduct most or all elections via mail-in ballots, and it hasn't changed their partisan makeup. Today, Trump exploded again on Twitter about it, saying:

So in California, the Democrats, who fought like crazy to get all mail in only ballots, and succeeded, have just opened a voting booth in the most Democrat area in the State. They are trying to steal another election. It’s all rigged out there. These votes must not count. SCAM!

It's not clear what "Democrat area voting booth" he is talking about, or whose votes he thinks "must not count" in an election conducted by mail.

Trump has never really acknowledged the validity of any election he doesn't like the results of. He refused to promise in advance of the 2016 elections to abide by the result if he lost. After he won the electoral vote in 2016, Trump insisted with no evidence that five million non-citizens had illegally voted. He then spent taxpayer money to form a "commission" to investigate it. It promptly folded, having found no evidence of voter fraud.

In his very next tweet, sent seven minutes later, Trump urged his followers to use mail-in ballots in a competitive special election in California this Tuesday. It's too late for anyone to request a ballot by mail for that election. (He also called that election a "SCAM," without explanation.)

Undermining Americans' faith in democratically elected leaders was the main goal of the Russian sabotage of the 2016 presidential election.

Who cares?

• Undermining American democracy is the job of its enemies, not its president.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to destroy Americans' faith in democracy.

Trump's latest attack on trust in the sanctity of America's elections took the form of an interview with the Daily Caller in which he claimed that Republicans lost elections because "people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote, and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again."

As with his "forged ballots" claim from earlier in the week, Trump presented no evidence—because where voter fraud is concerned, there is none. This has been established by countless studies over and over and over again in recent years. 

The nonpartisan United States Election Project found 35 credible accusations of voter impersonation out of more than 834,000,000 votes cast between 2000 and 2014. The Washington Post found four more reported cases of voter fraud in 2016—three of them committed by Trump voters.

In other words, Trump is saying that because one out of every 24 million voters may be trying to vote more than once, elections should be disregarded—now that he knows the outcome.

In this case, there is very little doubt that Trump is lying, and not simply confused about how voting works. But it would be understandable if Trump were confused, because while he was a private citizen, he didn't bother doing it very often. He cast an invalid ballot last year, and that wasn't even the first time he'd flubbed as a voter. In 2004, he somehow managed to break voting rules on camera, when he filled out a provisional ballot in his limousine, away from a polling place, while filming an Access Hollywood segment. (Trump says he turned it back in, but no such ballot would have been counted.)  

So what?

• Undermining faith in democracy itself is what authoritarians do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He invented a new election conspiracy theory.

Trump waded right back into the ever-tightening Florida Senate and gubernatorial races, declaring completely without evidence that "many ballots" in those races were "missing or forged." 

This isn't true, but it's worth elaborating on how untrue it is. 

Nobody, anywhere, has pointed to any situation where Florida vote counters (who operate under constant supervision by party representatives) supposedly created or destroyed votes. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is run by an appointee of Gov. Rick Scott (who is running for the Senate) says there is no evidence of any wrongdoing in the election. So does the state Secretary of State, who was also appointed by Gov. Scott. So did a Florida judge overseeing the count in Broward County, a Democratic stronghold that is the focus of election-related lawsuits. 

In short, Trump seems to have conjured the idea of "missing or forged" ballots himself, out of thin air—along with his claim that only ballots cast on Election Day should be counted. 

Needless to say, this would be against the law. The ballots Trump wants thrown out include those sent in by Floridians serving in the military. By state law, those must be accepted through November 16.

(In Arizona, where the Election Day ballots favor the apparent winner, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, Trump has a different but equally illegal theory remedy—that an entirely new election should be held.)

This isn't the first time that Trump has said that elections are legitimate only if his side wins. Shortly before the 2016 election, he told a crowd, "I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election," and then added, after a dramatic pause, "if I win." 

After losing the popular vote by a margin of almost 3 million votes, Trump immediately insisted that five million non-citizens had somehow voted, all without being caught, exclusively for Hillary Clinton, but not in the crucial swing states that gave Trump the electoral college victory.

Why should I care about this?

• Ignoring election results you don't like is what authoritarians do.

• In a democracy, legally cast votes are counted regardless of who they will benefit.

• Florida voters may have thought when they cast their ballots—for either party's candidates—that their president would abide by the will of the people.

Sunday Week in Review

What else did Donald Trump do this week?

Voter suppression. It was revealed this week that all four Trumps who were registered to vote in the New York City mayoral election last month failed to do so legally.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner simply declined to vote--which may have been the wisest course of action, given the difficulty the rest of his family had in voting legally. His wife, Ivanka, attempted to vote, but mailed her absentee ballot on Election Day, which is too late. Melania Trump failed to sign the envelope, as is required, and had her vote rejected as well. And Donald Trump submitted his signed vote in a timely fashion, but with an error that, at least in theory, should have caused it to be rejected: he misstated his birthdate.

Trump claims that the only reason he lost the popular vote was that as many as five million people voted illegally (and exclusively) for Hillary Clinton. As a face-saving gesture, one of his first acts as president was to convene a commission to investigate "election integrity." Its vice-chair, Kansas politician Kris Kobach, rejected absentee ballots in Kansas from disabled persons physically unable to sign documents. That same commission includes being on the voter rolls in multiple jurisdictions under its definition of "voter fraud"--a situation that applies to almost any American who has moved in the last few years, including his daughter Tiffany, his Treasury Secretary, and Steve Bannon.

All-white advisors. Omarosa Manigault Newman, still best known for her villainous turn on the 2004 season of The Apprentice (and subsequently on Celebrity Apprentice), either quit or was fired from her White House job. Most of the media coverage focused on the drama around her exit: Manigault Newman was reportedly unpopular with other White House staff, and nobody (including her) was sure exactly what her job was.

But whether or not she was popular or useful, as the Director of Communications for the White House Public Liaison Office, she was the only African-American person who could even conceivably be called a senior advisor to Trump.

As a private citizen, Trump has been sued for refusing to rent his properties to African-Americans (twice), and again when he broke a contractual promise to the city of Gary, Indiana to hire citizens of that majority-black city. Trump was fined in 1992 for ordering black employees off the casino floor when he visited (a practice that dates back at least as far as the 1980s), and recently assumed that black reporter April Ryan was a personal friend of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and could set up a meeting with them.

Media meddling. Last month, Trump made headlines when he apparently leaned on his Justice Department to force the sale of CNN--the politically moderate news network he "hate-watches"--as a condition of approving a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which owns it.

This week, he called Rupert Murdoch, the owner of 21st Century Fox, to be reassured that the sale of Fox properties to Disney did not include Fox News--the right-wing news network that makes up the bulk of his reported 4-8 hours of daily TV-watching. (Much to Trump's relief, Fox News will not be part of the sale.)

Trump's Justice Department has not raised any objections to the $52.4 billion media consolidation deal.

Why are these bad things?

• In a functioning democracy, governments try to make it easier to vote, not harder.

• The most likely reason that a president has no black advisors is that he does not value the opinions of black people.

• It's bad if a president uses the powers of his office to reward friends and punish enemies.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He suggested that perhaps "some people" thought his actual approval rating was 20 points higher than it is.

Trump tweeted this early Tuesday morning at the close of his Asia trip: 

One of the most accurate polls last time around. But #FakeNews likes to say we’re in the 30’s. They are wrong. Some people think numbers could be in the 50's. Together, WE will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! pic.twitter.com/YhrwkdObhP

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2017

Rasmussen is, in fact, not especially highly regarded for its tracking poll. Fivethirtyeight.com gives it a C-plus, behind outfits like Gallup (B-minus, which has Trump at 38%), Ipsos/Reuters (A-minus, 37%), and Quinnipiac (A-minus, 35%). The fivethirtyeight.com average of tracking polls has Trump at 38.1% approval, unprecedentedly low for a president this early in his first term.

By "the last time" Trump presumably means the election polls, which are meant to predict how people will vote rather than whether they approve of an incumbent president. Rasmussen's actual election day forecast was fairly accurate: it had Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 2%, whereas the average prediction among all national pollsters had Clinton winning by 3%. She won by 2.1%. Of course, Trump also claims to believe that he won the popular vote if three to five million "illegal votes" he somehow knows were cast exclusively for Clinton are excluded.

Trump didn't specify who the "some people" were who thought his approval rating was above water, but it's possible to guess.

Why is this a problem?

• Politicians fudge numbers sometimes, but a president who cherry-picks a poll number that still has more than half of Americans disapproving of his performance is in a bad place.

• Inability to understand that other people might not share your opinion of yourself is not a sign of good mental health.

• Numbers are not #fakenews just because they make a president look bad.

• People who voted for Trump and then lost confidence in him might be surprised to learn they don't exist.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He saw his "Election Integrity Commission" get sued not once but twice, for a total of at least three pending lawsuits against it.

Trump created the commission to find evidence to support his completely unsubstantiated claims that three million or more people voted illegally, and that every single illegal vote was for Hillary Clinton. This would explain away Clinton's 2.9 million-vote lead in the popular vote, a subject that Trump is extremely sensitive about. (In theory, the commission's charge is simply to report on the American voting system. But in an indication of the extent to which its results are pre-determined, even Trump refers to it as the "voter fraud panel.") 

Today, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit accusing the commission of violating federal open meeting laws. The ACLU suit also holds that the commission, which is populated mostly by Trump loyalists and vote-suppression activists, violates a law requiring that advisory committees be politically balanced and not designed to reach a particular conclusion. In a separate suit, also filed today, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law made similar claims.

The commission was sued last week by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on the grounds that its recent request to states for massive amounts of voter information violated a federal privacy law. Today, the commission put that request on hold pending a ruling from the judge on the restraining order the EPIC lawsuit seeks.

Why is this a bad thing?

• It's bad if a president uses taxpayer money to create a commission to "advise" him of what he wants to hear.

• Presidential commissions shouldn't try to hide their agendas, especially when the law requires them to be transparent about it.