President Donald Trump isn’t backing off his calls for Republicans to “nationalize” U.S. voting, effectively ending constitutional rights for states to conduct their own elections.
“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,” Trump said on Tuesday during an Oval Office press briefing. The people behind him were congressional Republicans.
Trump listed Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta as cities that — according to him — are too corrupt to hold their own elections. All three cities and their respective states were won by Democrats in the 2020 election.
All three states flipped back to Republican control in 2024.
“Look at some of the places — that horrible corruption on elections — and the federal government should not allow that. The federal government should get involved,” he said. “These are agents of the federal government to count the vote. If they can’t count the vote legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”
No legal challenge to the outcome of the 2020 election has ever held up under scrutiny in any U.S. court.
Trump’s call on Tuesday to nationalize elections is a follow-up to comments he made during an interview on Monday with his short-lived former deputy FBI director, Dan Bongino. Back in the safe space of his podcast studio, Bongino took a call from the president during which Trump called on Republicans to “take over” voting in 15 states.
He did not name the states.
Under the U.S. Constitution, local precincts collect and tally ballots for state and national elections. The federal government does have a role to play, but it does not conduct national elections for the obvious reason that a malevolent government could rig the outcome.
Democrats have been quick to accuse Trump of blatantly trying to shrink the nation’s democracy ahead of what is likely to be a difficult midterm year for Republicans.
“Does Donald Trump need a copy of the Constitution? What he’s saying is outlandishly illegal,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in response to Trump’s suggestion.
The Democratic leader criticized Republicans in the Senate for refusing to speak out against the president’s attempt to undermine the states’ constitutional rights.
Senator Bernie Sanders said no one should trust an election managed by the Trump administration.
“The idea that anyone would trust for one minute this guy running an honest election would be beyond comprehension,” Sanders told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday night. “Not to mention that obviously he has not read the Constitution of the United States, which has states running elections, not the federal government.”
Sanders laughed after watching a clip of Trump insist to the White House press corps that some states hold corrupt elections and therefore cannot be trusted to carry out their own votes. Sanders said that he recalled Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2020, begging him to “find” more votes.
“This is Mr Honesty and Mr Integrity, who provoked an insurrection on January 6 so the election would be overturned,” Sanders said of Trump.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune chimed in, noting that while he, as a Republican, is in favor of requiring voters to have ID with them before they can vote, he is “not in favor of federalizing elections.” He admitted that it was a “constitutional issue,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
House Speaker Mike Johnson offered his interpretation of Trump’s words to reporters on Tuesday, claiming the president was just “expressing his frustration” with certain states and their alleged election integrity problems.
Reporters pressed him repeatedly on whether or not he supported Trump’s idea to nationalize elections, and Johnson said “no.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt — when asked by reporters about Trump’s comments on Tuesday — assured them that the president “believes in the United States Constitution.”
Trump has been insistent that he only lost the 2020 election due to massive voter fraud. His allegations have been tested and found false over and over, but he remains convinced that fraud — and not a rejection of he and his ideology — is to blame for his electoral losses.
It’s difficult not to read Trump’s call for nationalized voting as an indication of his mindset going into the 2026 midterms.
Over the weekend, Texas state Senate candidate Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss by more than 14 percentage points in a district that voted for Trump by more than 17 points in 2024.
The surprise and resounding upset sent shockwaves through both parties. The following Monday, Trump told Bongino he wanted to see Republicans “take over” elections.
