Trump Can’t Actually Ban Mail Ballots. He Can Still Do a Ton of Damage.

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Earlier this week, President Donald Trump threatened to do two things that are (stop me if you’ve heard this before) extremely illegal: ban mail voting and end the use of voting machines in U.S. elections. In a lengthy, erratically capitalized post on Truth Social, Trump bemoaned the “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” ostensibly inherent in these practices and promised to sign an executive order to ensure the “HONESTY AND INTEGRITY” of the 2026 midterms. The post is alarming because it casually makes threats against free elections and also because, in the context of an ongoing military quasi-occupation of Washington, it’s probably not even the president’s most autocratic action this week.

Annoyed law professors needed only a few hours to run out of ways to make clear that Trump (again, this should feel familiar) does not have the unilateral authority to do the things he aspires to do. But his vendetta against mail voting is less an earnest attempt to eradicate the practice by next fall than part of the Republican Party’s long-standing commitment to framing election outcomes it does not like as inherently illegitimate and suspicious. The president tacitly acknowledged as much on Truth Social: One of the primary benefits of getting rid of mail voting, he asserted, is that Democrats would be “virtually Unelectable” without it.

We’ve heard this story before. In the weeks following the 2020 presidential election, when Trump was filing harebrained lawsuit after harebrained lawsuit insisting that he was its rightful winner, I wrote that the real danger was not that he would literally persuade Congress to set aside the results, but that he would create a culture in which aggrieved Republican politicians would blame every defeat on nefarious, never-proven ballot-box irregularities, thus justifying their efforts to address the scourge of “cheating” by any means necessary. Somehow, Trump’s reelection in 2024 has made the conservative movement more confident that pervasive voter fraud is a real, urgent crisis, despite allegedly benefiting the party that just lost its bids for the House, Senate, and White House.

Before Trump left office the first time around, many Republican leaders were already pointing to the 2020 election as evidence of the manifest evils of mail voting—if not in support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results, then at least in support of the general principle that their man had been robbed, and that they could not stand idly by and allow future GOP presidential hopefuls to fall victim to the same fate. “It is clearer than ever that there is a battle to be waged, and for the sake of the integrity of this and future elections, it is a battle we must win,” wrote then–Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel in an op-ed. On Fox News, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham warned that if Republicans did not “challenge and change” the system, there would “never be another Republican president elected again.”

Ambitious Republicans took this message to heart. In the 2022 midterms, nearly 200 candidates on the ballot—including congressional candidates in almost every state—rejected the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, according to the ACLU. Fortunately for normal people, many of these candidates lost in the general election, but that they made it as far as they did indicated just how mainstream this brand of conspiratorial thinking had already become: As Trump tightened his grip on power within the Republican Party, the candidates who succeeded were the ones who parroted what they knew their leader wanted to hear. Those whose brains weren’t steeped in demented Dominion Voting Systems–adjacent lore never had a chance.

The GOP’s transformation into an election-denial cult has also altered the way Republican voters think: In 2004, 87 percent of them reported being at least somewhat confident in the accuracy of presidential election results, compared with just 59 percent of Democrats, per Gallup polling. (The Supreme Court’s decision in 2000’s Bush v. Gore played a major role in Democrats’ skepticism at the time.) By 2016, and after two victories for President Barack Obama, though, the parties’ expectations had flipped: 85 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans expressed faith in the integrity of the vote. Gallup recorded similar numbers among Democrats in 2020 and 2024, but among Republicans, confidence has continued to plunge: 44 percent in 2020, and just 28 percent in 2024.

Put differently, about 4 in 5 Democratic voters now approach elections hoping they win but understanding the reality that they might lose. Roughly 3 in 4 Republican voters expect to win and view losses as proof of the other side’s criminality, lawlessness that their leaders have a solemn duty to stamp out. Trump has been at the forefront of this shift, but he’s simultaneously taken great advantage of it—his executive order threat is just the most recent example.

During the first two years of the Biden administration, Democrats could have seized the upper hand in the fight for democracy by passing the For the People Act, which would have created new protections for voting rights, outlawed partisan gerrymandering, and made Election Day a federal holiday. The bill passed the Democratic-controlled House in March 2021 but died in the Democratic-controlled Senate after Republicans blocked the bill using the filibuster. Democrats, who held the slimmest possible Senate majority at the time, could have moved the legislation forward by eliminating the filibuster. They could not muster the votes to abolish it, however.

Four years later, as Trump promises a crackdown on mail voting while Texas Republicans kick off a nationwide gerrymandering arms race, Democrats’ failure to pass the For the People Act is yet another example of the most depressing recurring story in American politics: By choosing not to exercise power, Democrats effectively handed it to Republicans, who are never afraid to take advantage of their opponents’ generosity and/or cowardice.

Nothing about the status quo is conducive to building a functioning democracy. But no one to the right of former Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has an incentive to do anything differently: Embracing Trump’s voter fraud narrative is now table stakes for anyone who aspires to be relevant in Republican politics. Candidates for high-level administration jobs have reportedly been asked to provide a yes-or-no answer to the question of whether the 2020 election was “stolen,” with the understanding that a response of no will land their application in the rejection pile. Trump’s judicial nominees have offered carefully rehearsed responses to similar questions, conceding that Congress “certified” the election for Biden but refusing to say that he “won” it.

No politician’s career arc better illustrates the value of this craven opportunism than that of erstwhile Trump skeptic J.D. Vance, who in a November 2020 interview predicted that the president’s disappointed supporters would “more or less accept” the results and move “on to the next fight.” But as a Senate candidate in 2022, Vance reinvented himself as a standard-issue election denier; as Trump’s running mate two years later, Vance parried questions about 2020 by spouting embarrassing gibberish about Big Tech and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Like many of Trump’s executive orders, whatever his office manages to cough up with respect to mail voting should be understood mostly as the addled musings of a 79-year-old man slipping further into senility with each passing day. However, by framing ballot access as a matter of election integrity, the leader of a party that has spent decades perfecting the art of voter suppression has built an alternate reality in which rejecting democracy is not a fundamental betrayal of one’s oath of office but an act of courage of the highest order.

On Jan. 6, Trump tried and failed to persuade a critical mass of Republicans to put their convictions into action. But a lot will have changed in the time between Jan. 6 and next year’s midterm elections, and the next generation of Republican election deniers won’t have to do much persuading. Thanks to Trump, their audience will already be inclined to believe them.

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