Rock the Vote
Life shouldn’t be a popularity contest. But elections should be. So it might seem a little perplexing that the Trump administration is taking so many wildly unpopular steps. Yes, you could argue that the tough immigration stance, the attacks on higher education, the defiance of the courts, the chainsawing of the federal government workforce, and the obsession with all things DEI could bring daily moments of glee to a significant portion of the MAGA base. But I’m talking about the other stuff. The see-sawing tariffs that have shaken the economy for everyone from the investment class who voted for lower taxes and a deregulated market (but have gotten a market pullback and a less certain outlook) to working class voters who voted for lower prices? Meanwhile, the retaliation for those tariffs is being aimed to hurt Trump voters the hardest. Or the kowtowing to Russia when Americans widely support Ukraine? Or the persistant visual that the world’s richest man is slashing benefits for the average American? Or the bizarre attacks on the national parks? The administration is even openly placing its sweaty little hands on the third rail of politics as Musk targets Social Security cuts. The moves have been so unpopular that many GOP members of Congress have stopped holding townhalls in their districts because of the angry reactions of their constituents. Why doesn’t popularity seem matter in a game where popularity determines who wins and loses? Maybe the Trump administration doesn’t think popularity will be the determining factor in 2026 and beyond. Maybe the bet is that an administration stacked with election deniers from the Justice Department to the FBI to the Oval Office will be able to do the very thing Trump has been trying to get done since the “perfect” phone call with Zelensky, the request to Georgia officials to find him 11,780 votes, or the the Jan 6 insurrection for which all of the attackers have been pardoned? The attack on the vote is Trump’s most consistent and relentless policy position. Sue Halpern in The New Yorker: Trump Is Still Trying to Undermine Elections. “So far, it’s a tossup which of the Trump Administration’s wrecking balls will prove most destructive: the one that accelerates global warming, the one that abandons our allies, the one that torches the economy, or the one that compromises public health. Yet all of these are distractions from the President’s long-standing pet project: decimating free and fair elections. It may be that we have become so accustomed to hearing Donald Trump’s false claims about rigged elections and corrupt election officials that we have become inured to them, but in the past seven weeks he has pursued a renewed multilateral program to suppress the vote, curtail the franchise, undermine election security, eliminate protections from foreign interference, and neuter the independent oversight of election administration. And, as with the rest of Trump’s calamitous agenda, he is doing it in full view of the American people.” (Only election deniers see this as a vote of confidence.)
+ It’s not just about the vote, it’s about the money and organizations underpinning the vote. “The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world.” NYT (Gift Article): With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left. “It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle. But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.” (No, that pressure campaign wasn’t a perfect phone call. But that fact misses a bigger story. Trump never hung up.)
