Trump Mobilizes DHS and USPS in Latest Assault on Elections

He’d sooner set the Constitution ablaze than face the music in a free and fair election.

The Contrarian
by Samantha Tarazi
Apr 14, 2026

President Donald Trump signed a second executive order on elections last month. This is his latest, desperate attempt to abuse the power of the White House to seek more control over the 2026 midterms. It’s no coincidence that this executive order comes a year after his first executive order on elections (blocked by three separate courts) and a week after the Senate failed to pass his top legislative priority in the SAVE Act.

Let’s cut right to the chase: this executive order is a dangerous — and likely unconstitutional — federal overreach into how states run elections. All to create chaos and sow seeds of doubt ahead of this year’s midterms while giving Trump’s allies in state legislatures a playbook to undermine American citizens’ freedom to vote.

Here’s what the order attempts to do:

It mobilizes the Department of Homeland Security to tell states who can and can’t vote. The order doubles down on a deeply flawed, incomplete, and unreliable DHS database to try to create a “State Citizenship List.” It ignores the fact that local election officials already maintain lists of eligible voters using far more reliable data.
It weaponizes the Department of Justice to investigate election officials who don’t follow orders from the White House — even if those election officials are following state law. The idea is as absurd as it is dangerous. Election officials nationwide already face death threats and intimidation spurred on by the president’s election lies.
It commandeers the U.S. Postal Service by barring the delivery of mail ballots to any voter not on a pre-approved federal list of mail voters. The order attempts to completely overrule state laws to hand the Postal Service unprecedented authority over mail voting, and flouts the checks and balances that protected 48 million Americans’ mail ballots in 2024.

You’ve likely heard it before, but it bears repeating: The U.S. Constitution affirms that states and Congress run our elections. The president has zero authority over voting in this country. He can’t override state election laws. He can’t boot people from voter rolls. He certainly can’t tell the Postal Service to toss your mail — whether it’s your ballot or your subscription to Us Weekly.

Above all else, the Trump administration is on a mission to convince Americans that our elections are broken. He’s desperately afraid voters will hold his party accountable at the ballot box this November, so he’s pulling out all the stops to convince voters in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to doubt a process that could deliver results he doesn’t like. He’d sooner set the Constitution ablaze than face the music in a free and fair election.

States and voter protection groups were quick to challenge this order on constitutional grounds — and rightly so. But the legal fight isn’t the whole story.

A key and often overlooked part of the story is what could come next in states. The executive order hands Trump’s allies at the state level a blueprint. Even if it survives legal challenges (which is highly unlikely), it signals exactly what the administration wants—and state legislators are paying attention. That’s where this fight is going to play out, and that’s where we must turn our attention next.

This isn’t just speculation. While dozens of states — blue, red, and purple — resist a DOJ quest for private voter data, Trump allies from Texas to Ohio have gleefully complied. And we’ve already seen state legislatures fall in line — fueled by a five-year election disinformation pressure campaign following Trump’s 2020 loss.

Since Trump’s return to office, 22 states have introduced proof-of-citizenship mandates inspired by his first executive order on elections and the SAVE Act. In just the past month, South Dakota and Utah and, to a lesser extent, Florida and Mississippi approved flawed and misguided proof-of-citizenship laws for future voter registrants—laws that will block tens of thousands of U.S. citizens from voting.

Meanwhile, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah passed laws to toss mail ballots received after Election Day — another top Trump priority — according to our Election Policy Tracker. Voters in another 14 states could see their mail ballot grace periods eliminated when the Supreme Court rules in a case argued last month. That could see millions of mail ballots — potentially including those cast by servicemembers stationed overseas — thrown out under new rules.

And if that weren’t enough, the Supreme Court could open the door to yet another wave of racial gerrymandering in the states if they further gut the Voting Rights Act. Should the court give states the green light, states like Florida have already made plans to answer Trump’s call and redraw their maps — with primary season already underway.

The bottom line is this: Much of Trump’s latest executive order is unconstitutional and will be struck down by the courts. But that’s hardly the end of the line for the president’s extreme elections agenda. State lawmakers will continue to chip away at the freedom to vote, and as long as the president and his allies continue to spread lies around our elections, voters everywhere are being primed to question the integrity of our elections. And that’s exactly what Trump wants.

November’s midterms are just around the corner. This fight is just getting started.

Samantha Tarazi is CEO of Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to securing and strengthening elections in all 50 states.

Trump Is Dismantling the VA to Privatize Veterans’ Health Care

“President Donald Trump’s administration keeps denying that the Department of Veteran Affairs is headed toward privatization – just like it couldn’t stop denying that mass layoffs of 80,000 employees wouldn’t impact veteran care. But facts have a way of catching up.

After intense pressure from veterans’ groups and Congress, the administration was forced to walk back its plan – cutting 30,000 jobs instead. Already, though, the VA has lost thousands of health care staff since January – including 688 physicians and 1,882 registered nurses – while still claiming its services remain unaffected.

The budget numbers don’t lie – even if Trump and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins do.

This year, the Trump administration requested a record-breaking $441 billion VA budget for fiscal year 2026. That’s a 10 percent increase over last year and, in theory, should be good news for veterans and the people who care for them.

Yet, buried in the fine print is a deeply concerning contradiction: Even with the budget expansion, the VA plans to eliminate nearly 3,000 jobs, including over 2,000 from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), which handles disability claims, education benefits, and more.

In other words, the VA is spending more money – just not on the people who keep the system running. Some are forced to work out of closets due to untenable working environments, while others are being overworked or incentivized to find work elsewhere.

While the administration claims it’s focused on “eliminating waste” and “empowering local leaders,” in reality, it is hollowing out the VA’s internal capacity. VA staff are being stretched thin, even as more veterans enter the system.

Instead of hiring more nurses, claims processors, or crisis responders, the administration is pushing billions of dollars into the private sector via expanded community care programs. This seems less like reform, and more like privatization by attrition.

In the House of Representatives, where the Veterans Affairs Committee advanced the Veterans’ ACCESS Act, the path toward privatizing veterans’ health care becomes clearer. Framed as a way to reduce wait times and empower veterans through online self-scheduling, the bill would expand veterans’ ability to seek care outside the VA system.

No one denies that veterans deserve choices in their health care. But choice without access to quality, specialized care isn’t really a choice at all. Long-term cuts to Medicaid – totaling more than $1 trillion – will inevitably force the closure of many rural hospitals that veterans depend on. And with a hollowed-out or dismantled VA system, these veterans will be left sicker, poorer, and without access to the care they’ve earned.

The VA’s own internal analysis, the “Red Team” report from May 2024, has been removed from the VA.gov website. It warned that rising costs of private-sector care – $30 billion in FY2023 alone – are threatening to “materially erode the VA’s direct-care system.” This erosion isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening. Staffing shortages are so severe that 82 percent of VA facilities report critical nurse vacancies – and now even more jobs are being cut.

Rather than fix the staffing crisis, the Trump administration is shifting resources away from VA hospitals and clinics and into for-profit care. For example, funding for in-house VA medical services is being cut by 17.4 percent, even as the Community Care budget jumps 50.7 percent. What message does that send?

Combined with cuts to food assistance that many veterans rely on, reductions in federal agency staffing where one in three employees is a veteran, cuts to housing programs that prevent veteran homelessness, and deep cuts to Medicaid – on which over a million veterans depend – it has never been more clear: Trump and the GOP hate taking care of the veterans.“

Michael Embrich – Rolling Stone

Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Trump just crossed a line no other president ever dared to.

by Thom Hartmann

With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:

“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We’re gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.

Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.

Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.

Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.