Time for Trump to 'stop the steal'

President Donald Trump’s 25-minute primetime speech on Thursday was crafted to undermine confidence in the integrity of American elections by using a concocted spray of disproved nonsense about “deep state” and foreign interference.

Trump’s obvious goal, beyond justifying his ploys to nullify his clear election loss in 2020, is to tilt the playing field for the November House elections, where the Republican majority is at risk.

Congressional seats routinely turn over in the second year of any presidency. But for Trump, this would be a special threat, because his expansion of power and privileges could be checked and balanced for the first time since he returned to office last year.

In his address, the president failed to make his dark case with the intelligence reports, internal emails and other materials he declassified and released. At most, China considered influencing opinion but didn’t manipulate any voting machines or ballots.

DISPUTED CLAIMS

Also rehashed were Department of Homeland Security claims that 250,000 noncitizens were registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. State officials dispute the numbers and there is no evidence otherwise.

The White House keeps demanding passage of the highly controversial so-called SAVE America Act requiring voter ID at the polls and proof of citizenship to vote. But noncitizen voting is already illegal, and extremely rare. And even as voter ID makes sense in the long run, rushing it through Congress in a spending bill within four months of Election Day could disrupt ballot operations in the fall. Is that the real goal of Trump’s SAVE America Act urgency?

After the 2020 election, Trump tried but failed to get the still-independent Justice Department to interfere with state election processes. In his second term, he’s bent the department to his will. But the courts keep finding his current gambits illegal just as they did the old claims of rigged voting machines and baseless allegations of misdeeds by state election employees.

One snapshot of what Trump is up to, with echoes of 2021: Last week, a federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit to access West Virginia’s unredacted voter rolls — one of 15 straight court losses in the department’s effort to seize sensitive voter data from all states.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston wrote that the demand for the data in West Virginia is “devoid of any factual basis.” That is, there’s no suspicion or evidence that the state isn’t maintaining its lists properly under federal law or any anomalies in the data.

The administration had sued 30 states in all, plus Washington D.C., for voter registration information that would include driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The Constitution clearly gives each state the power to administer elections, yet Trump continues pressure them for special treatment, as he did during his first term.

Last week, Idaho’s Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador tersely told DOJ to stop haranguing the secretary of state for unredacted registration rolls and warning of criminal action for noncompliance.

“First, you can stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” James Craig, a division chief in Labrador’s office, wrote in a letter. “Second, you can voluntarily dismiss your lawsuit,” he added, since the DOJ has already been provided with a public version of the list.

WASTE OF RESOURCES

Then there’s Georgia. In an absurd waste of resources, the FBI recently asked its field offices across the country to dedicate more than 200 staffers to investigating the 2020 election results in Fulton County. Votes there were counted three times — once by hand — and this only affirmed that Joe Biden won the state. Trump will never be able to accept that he lost.

In January 2021, Trump made a phone call to Georgia in which he pressured and threatened GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and overturn electoral results. Courageously, Raffensperger refused the president’s demand that he cheat. The call, which was recorded, later became one of the articles of impeachment against Trump.

On July 9, Trump abruptly fired two Democratic appointees to the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, which supports state operations. A Republican had already resigned. No commissioners are left. Like five years ago, election integrity will depend on the civic courage of state officials.

Trump has “priors” on his record. In 2023, he was federally indicted for election interference. All U.S. charges were dropped after he was elected anew in 2024. The allegations were never tested in court. It is urgent that the president be kept from doing now what he falsely claimed the Democrats were doing in his first term. As in, “stop the steal.’

Trump’s ill-founded finagling and efforts to tamper with upcoming elections under a thin veil of “reform” needs to stop right away.

Until it does, the republic is at risk of having the people’s voting process skewed under the pressure of a president.