It is not too useful to make bold unsupported claims that the current administration has the power to subvert elections. That just lowers us to their level, and the last thing we need is for a further erosion in confidence in our democratic system. The states run elections, and no matter what Trump says to get people to keep paying attention to him, they don't jump when the president tells them to. The feds have money and nukes, but States have a lot of the actual power.

Half the states are actively engaging in voter suppression, and the ones that aren't are under attack on all fronts by the federal government.

Yes, if the states themselves which to subvert their own elections, they definitely have the power to do that.

> under attack on all fronts by the federal government

That seems hyperbolic. There's a lot of rhetoric, certainly, but executive orders are toothless against the states and they all know it.

> executive orders are toothless against the states and they all know it.

And judicial orders are toothless against the federal government... And the states can't lift a finger against any deployment of federal power against them, whether it's legal or not.

What recourse will a swing state in November have against ICE goons being deployed to do Kavanaugh arrests in voter lines?

Elon Musk just announced spending 300 million to make it harder to vote.

And it didn't even make the headline of the article I read it in.

And he's being spreading lies about elections for years. Again, not regularly mentioned even in critical articles about him, because it's so normalized.

Elon is not the federal government, however.

Is he working in concert with the current administration on this issue? That's going to be the question with many of these new tech-billionaire/administration collaborations.

States run the elections.

The US president just today said that Republicans should "nationalize the voting" in future elections.

It certainly gets us to keep talking about him. Which seems to be his primary skill. It does not have any basis in reality, however.

This is what people keep saying until the administration does something and then dares the courts to stop them.

Reality check is that he has actual track record on delivering or trying to deliver on his anti-democratic impulses. In terms of personal monetary gain, he is the most successful president of history.

He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality. He is on the way to cause very real harm (economic, physical) to blue cities too.

> In terms of personal monetary gain, he is the most successful president of history.

And in terms of legislative impact he is the least successful president in history. I don't like the corruption one bit, but on balance it is probably the less damaging of the two.

> He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality

Not at all, though, on any kind of permanent basis. He is showing that you can make the executive branch do shitty things with executive orders. What he isn't managing to do is codify any of this in law. There's a reason that the universities and other 'elites' knuckle under and cut deals with him -- they know that these deals are informal and temporary, and go away with the next POTUS. If Trump took this agenda to Congress and got it enacted into law it would persist for many more years.

That sounds like a call to get rid of the electoral college...

It's a call to have his ICE goons (armed to the teeth and trained to escalate to violence of course) operate voting stations because of all of the "illegal" voters and for DHS to administer elections instead of leaving it to the states.

He also said his polls are the best they've ever been today. Trump works hard to cultivate an aura of inevitability, but he simply does not have the power to make false things true by declaring them so.

Well that's nice (i.e. an impeachable, despicable offense), but it doesn't actually change how elections are run.