President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at giving him more control over federal elections ahead of the upcoming midterms.
The 79-year-old president’s growing unpopularity—his net approval rating is now at a new low of -20—as well as Democratic wins in deep-red seats suggest November’s elections could be a bloodbath for the Republican Party.
This has prompted alarm within party ranks, prompting a flurry of GOP retirements from the House of Representatives.
Trump, meanwhile, has zeroed in on mail-in voting as an outlet for his grievances, describing it as “mail-in cheating” and announcing his intent to “lead a movement” to abolish the process entirely.
The president’s crusade against mail-in voting comes despite the revelation that he and wife Melania and their 20-year-old son Barron all voted by mail in a special election last week for the Florida House seat that covers his Mar-a-Lago resort. In a personal humiliation for Trump, the seat was won by a Democrat despite Trump carrying the district by 11 points in 2024.
On Tuesday, the president took steps to formalize his campaign against mail-in voting with an executive order that aims to create lists of verified voters and ask the U.S. Postal Service to only provide mail-in ballots to those individuals.
The lists will be collated by the Department of Homeland Security from federal citizenship and naturalization records, as well as Social Security records and other federal databases. DHS would then send the lists to the states to verify their voter rolls.
Trump told reporters that he believes the order is legally “foolproof,” but it is likely to be legally challenged as unconstitutional.
“I think this will help a lot with elections,” Trump said on Tuesday. “We’d like to have voter ID. We’d like to have proof of citizenship, and that’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that. You would think it’d be easy.”
Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee President Heather Williams said in response to the order, “Trump’s latest attack on mail-in voting should alarm everyone who believes in free and fair elections.”
“This is a blatant attempt by the President to undermine states’ control over election administration for his own benefit – which is a direct attack on the Constitution and our democracy,” she said.
Williams went on to call the “unprecedented” order an example of “voter suppression” that “marks a desperate move by Trump to steal the next election.”
“This will be blocked by the federal courts before the ink is dry,” David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told NBC News.
A previous executive order that sought to withhold election funding from states that refused to alter voter registration forms to Trump’s specifications was blocked in September.
U.S. District Judge John Chun ruled that the order was an attempt to exert unconstitutional pressure even though the president does not have the power to control how states run their elections.
The president has been busy championing his SAVE America Act, a rebranded version of last year’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which requires extensive proof of citizenship and strict voter ID requirements while requiring states to hand their electoral rolls over to DHS.
“American citizens—and only American citizens—should decide American elections," the SAVE America Act website states.
Trump has continued to pressure Republicans in Congress to ensure that the act is passed. As a result of Democratic opposition and the legislative filibuster, it is currently stalled in the Senate.
