Republicans have been engaging in shady voter suppression tactics for years, but none have been quite so obvious about it as Donald Trump. However blatant the scheme, the GOP has, in the past, at least sought to maintain a certain amount of plausible deniability. But Trump, a man about as subtle as a foghorn, has felt no real need to hide what he is trying to do. Sure, he’ll rant and rave about the widespread voter fraud he claims is rigging American elections, despite the absence of evidence. But then, in public remarks, he’ll go ahead and state his intentions directly.
Speaking to Politico about his reelection prospects on Thursday, Trump once again made clear what all his whining about supposed voter fraud is really all about, telling the publication that he believes efforts to expand Americans’ safe access to the ballot in an election beset by pandemic are his biggest obstacle to defeating Joe Biden. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” the president said, referring to Republicans’ pricey legal fight against mail-in voting. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”
There has, of course, been no foundation for the president’s claims that illegal voting cost him the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and experts say known instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare. Moreover, there’s no proof that vote-by-mail gives one party an advantage over the other. But Trump and his allies have mounted an aggressive and public campaign against efforts to expand the vote, railing against the measures Democrats—and some Republicans—are backing to ensure Americans can safely cast ballots this fall against the backdrop of the coronavirus crisis. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said earlier this spring of Democratic voting proposals. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
“It is beyond disgusting that the Democrats are using this crisis to try to dismantle the integrity of our voting system,” Trump campaign counsel Justin Clark, who last year was taped at a private event seeming to discuss a “much more aggressive” voter suppression campaign in 2020, told Politico in April. “The American people won’t stand for this, and the campaign and the party intend to fight with them for a free, fair, and open vote in November.”
If the idea of relying on keeping Americans from voting in order to win seems undemocratic to you, well, that’s because it is. That Trump sees limiting the vote as a key election strategy not only reflects his disregard for democratic norms, but also his perhaps dimming prospects of winning a second term fair and square. A lot can change between now and November, but current polls show him trailing Biden by a significant margin; even a survey by Trump-friendly Fox News released Thursday showed the presumptive Democratic nominee leading the Republican incumbent by 12 points.
National polls conducted four months out from election day should be taken with a grain of salt—Trump made a mockery of both pollsters and conventional wisdom in 2016 when he upset the heavily favored Clinton. But even close aides have been worried about his campaign as he fails in the face of a pandemic that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and a national reckoning on racism and policing. What’s worked for him in the past—distraction, finger-pointing, outrageous theatrics—is utterly failing him now. “This is not something he’s used to,” Republican Representative Peter King told the New York Times on Wednesday. Facing dismal approval ratings, unfavorable polls, and crises that are unlikely to abate anytime soon, the president is facing real political peril.