RIDE THE ROCKET

The Real Fireworks Marking America’s 250th Birthday Will Come on Election Day

A terrified Trump is pulling out all the stops to rig the upcoming midterms.

Opinion

As we approach July 4^th, the President of the United States has just one thing on his mind: Ending free and fair elections in the United States.

Donald Trump seeks to commemorate the 250^th Anniversary of the birth of our country by effectively ending the democracy that was the entire reason our founders fought to establish a new nation in the first place.

It is an obsession that, for Trump, influences and impacts virtually every action he is taking and statement he is making.

Earlier this week, Trump had a rare opportunity. A bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress presented him with a bill to take important, concrete steps to address the housing crisis that is among the biggest problems average Americans face. In a time of partisan division in America and of gridlock in Washington, it represented an opportunity for Trump to have a big win. It could have been a big plus for his party in the upcoming midterm elections, too.

But, you see, Trump does not believe he can win the elections fairly and squarely. That is why, rather than taking the win and celebrating it as virtually any other politician in this country would have done, Trump canceled the bill’s signing ceremony at the last minute. He then asserted he would not sign the legislation until after the so-called SAVE Act, a Trump-conceived scheme to help him and his party cheat to win in November, was passed.

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The SAVE Act is so odious that many of the president’s Republican supporters refused to back it. Despite his energetic efforts, Trump could not get it passed. He coerced. He cajoled. But none of his old tricks were working. So instead, he decided to throw a tantrum and hold a good bill hostage until he got his way.

It is not clear that even the SAVE Act can save the GOP majorities in the House and Senate. That is why pushing for it is hardly the extent of Trump’s efforts to help rig the fall elections.

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Just this week, Trump’s Postmaster General went before Congress and defended a proposed regulation that would have the postal service deny service for mail-in ballots in states that refused to provide them with voter rolls. Why do they need voter rolls? Because they want to be able to challenge potential Democratic voters’ ability to participate in the elections?

The process of seeking such voter rolls has been going on for a while and via multiple channels. Trump continues to lose in the courts in support of such efforts, but that has not stopped him and his team from continuing their pursuit.

And, again, other avenues are also being pursued. Trump has installed as his new acting Director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI) Bill Pulte, a man with zero qualifications for the job. Pulte is being tasked with a ‘deep clean’ of the intelligence community. Why? Well, Trump clearly believes the ODNI can help him fiddle with election results. How do we know? Well, among her last visible acts as ODNI, Tulsi Gabbard made a widely publicized visit to Atlanta as part of the administration’s efforts to seize voter records there. What does the ODNI have to do with voter records? In a sane world, nothing at all. But it is believed that Trump wants to use widely and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories about foreign interference in the 2020 elections to assert further foreign interference today—and thus allow him to question or challenge election results, seize voting machines, and take other actions that could conceivably tip the balance of the vote in favor of enough Republicans to maintain Trump-protecting majorities in the Senate and House.

(We have heard Trump riffing on “rigged election” schemes during recent press gaggles, whether or not it is appropriate—and given that there is zero evidence of rigged elections or even significant instances of election fraud in the U.S., one could argue it is seldom, if ever, appropriate. He also called U.S. elections rigged during his appearance at the G7 Summit in France, and has argued that fellow reality show veteran Spencer Pratt could not have possibly lost his bid to become Mayor of Los Angeles, despite Pratt’s complete lack of qualifications for the job.)

We have seen other tactics the administration appears to intend to employ. In New York State, ICE agents this week confronted a poll worker at a voting location in Syracuse. They apparently “came to warn her to remove a social media account they claimed broke federal law by threatening federal law enforcement officials.”

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Given the increased scrutiny social media accounts are getting from the Trump administration, and their hair-trigger criteria for identifying offenses (remember they are trying to prosecute James Comey for a picture of sea shells he briefly posted online), many saw the Syracuse incident as ominous—particularly coming as it does with Trump supporters calling for him to use ICE and troops to intimidate voters and given the blind loyalty to Trump and obliviousness to personal rights and freedoms displayed by members of his Cabinet including DHS Director Markwayne Mullen.

Why is Trump so obsessed?

Because he fears that if he loses control of one or both houses of Congress, his effectiveness as a president will be severely compromised. He will be able to advance little or no legislation. Worse still, Democrats might take their oversight responsibilities seriously and begin to hold Trump and his Cabinet accountable for their corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence.

House Speaker Mike Johnson captured Trump’s concerns and those of the rest of his party well when, during a statement to fellow Republicans on Friday, he said, “If we lose the midterms, these Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends. Half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”

Even with the immunity the Supreme Court granted him, Trump knows that impeachment is a real possibility and that the investigations that come with it could be ugly. He knows that dirt on corruption scandals could get very messy. And of course, he knows that there is much further digging to do into the “Epstein files” that could come back to haunt him and those close to him.

He not only knows all this, but he appears to be obsessed by it—terrified even, fearing nothing so much as precisely the kind of free and fair elections that the signatories of the Declaration of Independence felt were worth taking on the world’s most powerful empire for.

It may not be the best way to commemorate Independence Day. Indeed, it may mean we have to wait several months to see this year’s real fireworks.

But if those fireworks come as Trump tries to steal the election and the rest of us rise up to fight back and preserve democracy in America, it may truly be a semiquincentennial that is truly worth celebrating.

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David RothkopfChief Global Affairs Columnist

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