The Department of Justice’s seizure of 2020 Fulton County, Georgia voting records remains a chilling, bewildering exercise in using federal agencies to try to validate Donald Trump’s false claim that he won re-election that year, carrying Georgia though even state GOP officials certified he lost the state by more than 11,000 votes. Trump followed up the FBI raid by insisting that “Republicans” should “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, during a podcast interview with former deputy F.B.I. director Dan Bongino. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 states. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Any attempt to “nationalize” voting processes would be unconstitutional; it’s clearly the purview of the states. But note that Trump specifically said one party, his own, should take over. That’s just about as fascist as he’s ever sounded.

While spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tried to claim Trump was only referring to the SAVE Act, which would force Americans to prove their citizenship to register to vote, the president himself continued to insist he intended much more than that. Standing in front of a cadre of Republican lawmakers assembled as he signed legislation ending a brief government shutdown, “I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it.” 

This is one of many signs that Trump knows his party is in big trouble in the coming midterm elections. Remarkably, many GOP leaders said they disagreed with Trump’s suggestion that Republicans take over elections. “I’m not in favor of federalizing elections,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters. “That’s not what the Constitution says about elections,” Senator Rand Paul told MS Now.

While Trump lackey House Speaker Mike Johnson expressed doubt that his party could take over elections, he did echo the president’s continued false claims about Democratic voter fraud. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost,” Johnson told reporters. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No.” 

That’s right, Mike. You can’t prove it, because it isn’t true.

Still, there’s no doubt Trump is so worried about the midterms that he is looking for ways to manipulate the process (rather than abandon the cruel policies that are making Republicans so unpopular). Trump has suggested cancelling the midterms altogether. He has proposed banning mail-in voting entirely, and decertifying voting equipment he doesn’t trust, believing a smaller, more constrained electorate will skew Republican. The administration has sued states, including Minnesota, to get access to voter rolls. Just yesterday, Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast, “We‘re gonna have ICE surround the polls…We’ll never again allow an election to be stolen.” 

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Trump has also looked for ways to take custody of ballots and voting records away from local election officials. Democracy Docket founder and voting rights attorney Mark Elias believes last week’s seizure of Fulton County ballots “was in part a dry run to work out the logistics of how this could happen in the future.”

We still don’t know exactly what led to the Georgia ballot seizure, or why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was part of it (she seems to have been quietly sidelined from genuine intelligence concerns). There are reports that a grand jury is investigating the Fulton County election process; in Davos, Trump suggested that “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” Even stranger was the news that Trump talked to Gabbard after the raid, and used her phone to address the agents who carried out the seizure and thank them for their work. 

On one level, the Fulton County exercise may be meaningless because the 2020 results were certified, and President Joe Biden served his term. But if the Department of Justice can find a basis (however flimsy) to seize ballots five years later, it’s not clear what would stop them from seizing ballots after an election. Marc Elias says the strange show of force in Georgia should make Democrats take Trump “seriously and literally” about his plans to impede voting in upcoming elections. CNN reports that Democratic election officials are planning for potential federal interference in the midterms, including the potential to use ICE and other agencies to intimidate voters. 

On the other hand, some people (including me, occasionally) worry that overstating the threat of GOP interference could lead some Democrats, especially alienated, infrequent voters, to throw up their hands and assume the fix is in. Discouraging Democratic voters is very much part of the GOP’s voter suppression playbook. But Trump’s increasingly bold, shrill comments about making sure the GOP wins upcoming elections serve to send a signal to his true believers that every idea, no matter how crazy-sounding, is welcome, given the party’s dire political straits. We can’t afford to tune him out.