Today, President Trump threatened to withhold unspecified federal funds from Michigan and Nevada in retaliation for those states’ efforts to implement vote-by-mail in the face of the coronavirus. While the form and syntax of the threats were typically bizarre — via Tweet, with random quotation marks mashed up against various lies and misrepresentations — the intent is clear. The president opposes efforts to allow Americans to vote while a pandemic renders in-person voting a danger to the public health; and in his made-up allegations of fraud, he seeks to subvert Americans’ faith in our voting system, and by extension, our democracy itself. By threatening to use financial pressure to implement his authoritarian hostility toward allowing people to vote, he has once again demonstrated that he is not simply unfit for office, but a self-avowed enemy of American democracy.
More specifically, of course, it’s the ability of likely Democratic voters the president opposes. So he calls out Nevada and Michigan for supposed fraud, even as Republican-led states, and the Republican National Committee itself, take measures to enable vote by mail.
Even if these two states stand up to him, the president’s threats may have the intended effect on other states considering vote-by-mail measures. In a fiscal environment where states are facing massive disruption to their finances, and are deeply reliant on emergency funding from the federal government, they can be seen as particularly vulnerable to shake-downs like the president is engaging in against Nevada and Michigan.
For all the organized chaos, industrial-scale larceny, and gross incompetence of this administration that has led us to this point of economic free-fall and mass death, in some ways there is very little left to say. Donald Trump, with the complicity and active support of the Republican Party, is clearly engaging in an effort to undermine and delegitimize the 2020 election. He is doing this because he full well understands he will never win a majority of votes in a free and fair vote; in a parallel preparation for this authoritarian presidency, the Republican Party has worked for decades now to undermine Americans’ right to vote and elect officials of their choosing, via gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and purging of voter rolls targeting Democratic-leaning voters. The president is despised by millions upon millions of Americans, while even many of his supporters question his mental fitness to serve as president. Every day he continues in office is a calamity for our present and a curse on our collective future. It is difficult to see a way forward that does not involve the complete political destruction of both Donald Trump and the GOP in 2020 and beyond. A president and a party who don’t believe in Americans’ right to vote have no place in our democracy, full stop.