This is an adapted excerpt from the July 27 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”
With less than 100 days to go until the midterm elections, President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail this week, ostensibly to stump for swing-state candidates. However, his real strategy runs on a parallel track that has nothing to do with winning elections by winning more votes, and the president could not help but reveal that during a stop in Michigan on Monday.
Michigan is a battleground state that has become a top priority for Republicans, who widely believe the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Gary Peters is winnable and perhaps their party’s best opportunity to pick up a seat in the upper chamber this year.
Trump was supposedly there to promote Republicans’ economic agenda, but what he had to say didn’t match up with the experiences many Americans are facing. There was no mention of the high gas prices caused by his war of choice with Iran and no mention of the bipartisan housing bill that became law without his signature and despite his attempt to stonewall it.
He did, however, rail against mail-in ballots, talk up restrictive voter ID and onerous proof-of-citizenship requirements and peddle his voter suppression bill known as the SAVE America Act, a bill that would likely disenfranchise more than 21 million people who can’t readily access the right kind of documents.
Sowing doubts about the midterms is no longer a fringe operation, it’s the executive branch’s official position.
And that’s exactly how he showed his hand. The event had all the trappings of a typical campaign rally, but there was no getting around that Trump’s midterm strategy isn’t about campaigning or winning over more voters, it’s about controlling who gets to vote in the first place.
Also on Monday, Trump ramped up his pressure campaign against Senate Majority Leader John Thune, demanding the South Dakota Republican cancel the Senate’s planned August recess unless and until it passes the SAVE America Act. A handful of Republican senators, led by Utah’s Mike Lee, said they support Trump’s call to cancel the break.
The president wants Thune to blow up the filibuster so he can pass this massive voter suppression bill with fewer than 100 days before an election with only a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes needed by the filibuster. But even that wouldn’t be enough, because all Democrats and four Republicans are opposed to it. So that would only get him to 49 votes, which means the measure would still fail.
But Trump’s Hail Mary to pass the SAVE America Act is just one of his strategies. He’s also working on some other angles.
Back in March, he issued an executive order that sought to change the rules around mail-in voting and give the federal government more control over elections nationwide. The executive order directed the government to create a federal list of eligible voters, and it told the U.S. Postal Service that it can only deliver ballots to people on that list.
Shortly after, 23 states and Washington, D.C., challenged it. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled in their favor, noting that the Constitution gives states the power to administer elections, not the president. Since then, an injunction has blocked the order from taking effect in those 23 states plus Washington that were party to the lawsuit.
Over the weekend, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. On Monday we learned that Trump is now running to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to change the rules around mail-in voting before the midterms. His administration filed an emergency appeal, calling the injunction “indefensible” and asking the justices to reverse that ruling.
The case will now appear on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” which means the justices could rule at any time, without a hearing and without having to explain themselves.
The SAVE America Act and Trump’s mail-in voting executive order have failed so far because they don’t stand up to scrutiny. They don’t live up to the standards that Congress and the courts demand — especially when it involves something as important as our election laws. But the attacks on the elections are coming from within the administration as well, out of the public eye.
In early June, when Trump installed a housing official and election denier named Bill Pulte as interim director of national intelligence, it raised red flags. Pulte had no experience in any kind of intelligence, but that doesn’t seem to be the point, because that’s not why Trump installed him. Trump put him in charge of the entire American intelligence apparatus to push Trump’s long debunked 2020 conspiracies as a means to undermine this year’s elections.
Pulte was part of Trump’s latest gambit to comb through thousands of classified government records to look for evidence the 2020 election was rigged, and he’s been on a firing spree across the intelligence community, announcing his fourth round of layoffs in his five-week tenure this weekend.
Pulte is only on the job on a temporary basis, but the guy Trump nominated to succeed him, Jay Clayton, doesn’t instill much confidence, either. During his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Clayton refused to say who won the 2020 election. Despite that, he’s on the verge of becoming the next director of national intelligence. The Senate just cleared one final procedural hurdle, setting up a final vote on Clayton’s confirmation later this week.
These are the actions of an administration that does not think it can win based on the merits or on the strength of its agenda. Sowing doubts about the midterms is no longer a fringe operation, it’s the executive branch’s official position.
Allison Detzel contributed.
The post Trump says the quiet part out loud on his midterms strategy appeared first on MS NOW.
