Calmes: Trump's Mail-in Ballot Ravings Are Part of a Play to Force Another Election Big Lie Down Our Throats

Saying the quiet part out loud, the reality TV show president keeps boasting that the murderous dictator Putin, a recognized expert on free and fair elections, agrees with him on the subject.

By Jackie Calmes /Los Angeles Times

The president says he’ll lead a “movement” to end mail ballots and outlaw voting machines.

Like most Americans, including White House reporters apparently, I’ve tuned out Donald Trump’s incessant Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election — “by a lot.” That means his nonsense about rigged voting and Democrats’ cheating goes mostly unchallenged, and he continues to undermine faith in U.S. elections. After all, it’s not like anyone can shut him up.

Still, it’s time to quit tuning out.

Whether a reporter on the beat or a citizen in conversation anywhere, pay attention and push back against Trump’s un-American blather. Because in recent days the power-drunk president has in various ways telegraphed that his Big Lie isn’t just about a past election but a pretext for what he could do to disrupt the next one, the 2026 midterm elections for Congress.

Right-wing media pays for 2020 election lies. Other 2020 election liars are paying a big price, literally.

Just this week, right-wing Newsmax agreed to pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems, on top of $40 million in March to Smartmatic, to settle defamation lawsuits based on Newsmax’s false reporting (echoing Trump) that the companies rigged voting machines for Joe Biden. Newsmax’s penalty is of course dwarfed by the $787 million that Fox News paid to Dominion in 2023; in a pending trial, Smartmatic seeks $2.7 billion from Fox.

All the while, the president of the United States continues to spout the same slop, all but immune to legal action, as he sets the stage for 2026.

After Trump’s bro-fest summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine, Trump happily recounted to Fox’s Sean Hannity in Alaska that the two presidents digressed to discuss the 2020 U.S. election and — what do you know? — Putin, the KGB-trained master manipulator and well-known arbiter of honest elections (not) supposedly assured Trump that, yes, he actually won big ,but the election was rigged against him.

As an aside here, recall that Hannity and other Fox network stars privately trashed Trump’s 2020 election lie, according to filings in the Dominion lawsuit, and that Hannity testified under oath: “I did not believe it for one second.” Yet in Anchorage, Hannity nodded along as Trump told him that Putin said Trump won in 2020 “by so much,“ but “your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.”

Assuming Putin said what Trump claims, the Russian was playing to Trump’s longstanding, groundless gripes not only against the 2020 election but against voting by mail, which Democratic voters use much more than Republicans do.

And Trump, ever the Kremlin’s useful idiot, took his cue: First thing on Monday morning, he declared in a long, error-filled and much-capitalized social media diatribe that he’d “lead a movement” to ban mail ballots and voting machines.

Trump repeated Putin’s falsehood that the United States is “the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” But in fact, dozens of countries use mail ballots and, as with other forms of voting, research, along with the courts, has found that fraud is vanishingly rare.

Trump vs. The Constitution, Chapter 987. The president’s stance on mail ballots is like his position on a ceasefire in Ukraine: He was for it before he was against it (and he was for both things before getting ensnared in Putin’s web on Friday). In 2024, bending to Republican officials’ pleadings that he drop his opposition to mail ballots, Trump urged supporters to vote by mail — as he typically, and hypocritically, does — and even recorded a video promotion.

Now that Trump is back to opposing mail ballots, he yet again contradicted the plain words of the Constitution to claim powers he doesn’t have, that he can order states to get rid of mail ballots and voting machines.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

Here’s the Constitution on that:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” (emphasis ours/ed).

It’s just more proof that both times Trump took the oath of office to uphold the Constitution and “see that the laws are faithfully executed,” he lied then, too.

The president has since repeated that he, with Republican allies, will “do everything possible” to end mail ballots. And he’s saying the quiet part out loud: Without mail-in voting, he told reporters in the Oval Office, “you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting.”

There you have it.

Trump’s “movement” against mail ballots, along with his push for red states to redraw congressional district lines to elect more Republicans, is all part of how he’s trying rig elections in 2026, in what is expected to be a bad year for his party given his unpopularity. And it’s all predicated on the Big Lie about nonexistent Democratic election cheating.

There are other warning signs: Trump’s military takeover of the District of Columbia. His occupation of Los Angeles. Repeated threats to send troops to other big, blue cities. All on specious grounds and over the objections of elected local and state leaders.

Bottom line. It’s wholly imaginable, then, that on trumped-up claims (pun absolutely intended) about potential election fraud, Trump would militarize Democratic vote-heavy cities in time for next year’s elections. At a minimum, that would surely intimidate some would-be voters.

At worst, well, I don’t even want to speculate about the worst.

When Trump entered presidential politics a decade ago, it took a while for journalists to get comfortable applying the L-word: Liar. But he earned it. Now he’s all but inviting us to expand the nomenclature to include autocrat, dictator or even the F-bomb, fascist.

Jackie Calmes is a Washington D.C.-based opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Subscribe to the Times and its newsletters here.

Image: The Week.