White House correspondent dismantles Trump’s 'legally hilarious' executive order

President Donald Trump is lying in ways that strangle democracy, and yet according to a conservative commentator, Americans who should take this more seriously simply are not doing so.

“So far this year, the president has failed to convince Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which among other things would require voters nationwide to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote or vote by mail,” wrote The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger on Tuesday. “But last week, he tried to scratch his election-meddling itch in another way: a one-weird-trick-style executive order trying to seize federal control of mail voting by creating new lists of whose ballots the Postal Service can and can’t mail.”

Egger pointed out that, like most of Trump’s attempts to throttle voting in the 2026 midterm elections, his effort now will almost certainly fail. Yet just because Trump will lose in court does not mean he will not achieve his larger objectives.

“In all likelihood, what the order will actually do, at least as a legal matter, is nothing,” Egger wrote. “Its strategy — which involves ordering the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of ‘approved’ absentee voters, and ordering the USPS not to mail requested ballots to anybody else — is legally hilarious, a slapped-together usurpation of states’ election authorities without the slightest basis in federal law. The order has already drawn a plethora of major lawsuits, which are all but guaranteed swift success.”

The problem is that “it remains gospel in MAGA circles that Democrats fiendishly stole the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden. And Trump keeps testing the waters of how much bullying of election officials he can get away with, most notably with the FBI’s January raid on the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.” For this reason, Trump will almost certainly take advantage of how pro-democracy advocates celebrate his loss in court, but meanwhile spreads misinformation intended to empower him to find other ways to stop elections from hurting him.

“We should take heed of all this,” Egger warned. “Trump really is losing support at a remarkable rate; all the old received wisdom about the impregnability of Teflon Don really does seem to have fallen apart. But Trump still has his hands around the neck of American democracy with a much surer grip than he had in 2020. And too much of the country seems strangely confident — just as in 2020, and with even less justification now than then — that he’ll simply choose not to squeeze.”

Another conservative writer, George F. Will, explained for The Washington Post earlier this year that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being stolen have been decisively debunked.

"Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

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