If you live in a Blue State, Donald Trump just put a gun to your head.
The administration will withhold public safety money from states that don't hand over control of their elections to Trump.
In a breathtaking move, the Trump administration is preparing to hold back hundreds of millions of dollars in public safety funding (money states use to fight terrorism, cyber attacks, and mass shootings) from Blue States unless they go along with the president’s attempt to control the midterm elections.
Under rules just issued by the Department of Homeland Security, 20 percent of every state’s homeland security grants will be frozen until governors fork over their voter rolls and overhaul their elections to Trump’s specifications. The primary target is Blue States that have so far refused to participate in Trump’s election-takeover schemes. Now they are being told to comply or their citizens’ lives will be put at risk.
And that’s only half the story of accelerated intimidation from the Trump White House over the midterms. The House of Representatives is returning to Washington this week with one overriding assignment from the President of the United States: pass the SAVE Act, by any means necessary. Although they face long odds, if MAGA Republicans find some way of succeeding, democracy itself will be on life support.
Speaker Mike Johnson has already announced the plan. Having failed three times to get the bill through the Senate, he now intends to jam it into a budget reconciliation package, which is basically a procedural cheat code designed to dodge the Senate filibuster. Never mind that the Senate parliamentarian has already ruled the bill doesn’t qualify. Never mind that even MAGA hardliners like Anna Paulina Luna are calling the maneuver “Kool-Aid.” Trump wants it done before the midterms, and he’s holding hostage everything from a bipartisan housing bill to the nation’s foreign surveillance powers until he gets it.
Why the desperation? Because the SAVE Act isn’t about fairness and “election integrity.” It’s the biggest piece of the Trump election-takeover machine. To understand what that machine is supposed to do for him in the midterms, we need to step back and revisit its biggest parts.
Part one is the SAVE Act itself. If passed, the bill would require Americans to produce documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or birth certificate, in most cases) just to register to vote. Sounds harmless until you remember that roughly half of Americans don’t have a passport, that millions of married women have birth certificates that don’t match their legal names (including my own wife!), and that the citizens least likely to have these documents on hand are young people, poor people, and voters of color.
If you had any doubt about whether this was meant to be a historic, sweeping tool of voter suppression, then you need only listen to what the president had to say on July 4 in his speech to the nation. He admitted it. He openly claimed it would give one side a decisive advantage for a century.
“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms — if we are foolish, stupid and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.”
Part two is Trump’s mail-ballot executive order. In March, Trump signed an order directing the federal government to compile lists of “approved” voters and instructed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. It’s really difficult to overstate the insanity here. The president’s hand-picked Postmaster General would get to decide whose ballot arrives and whose doesn’t, i.e. who votes and who doesn’t.
DEFIANCE immediately provided funding for a legal consortium that sued to block the obviously unconstitutional order. And in June, a federal judge stopped the order’s key provisions, and concluded that the Constitution gives presidents no such power over elections. But of course the administration is already appealing, and there’s a catch. As of now, the injunction protects only the 23 states and D.C. that sued. In other words, half the nation is still operating under Trump’s illegal edict that allows him to reach into mail carts, pluck out votes, and refuse to deliver them.
(By the way, if you’re still processing this, you’re right in thinking it’s one of the most brazenly unconstitutional things an American president has ever proposed to do.)
Part three is the president’s effort to seize the voter rolls. The Trump Justice Department has been demanding that states hand over their complete voter files, including names, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. Then, they’re running that information against federal databases to check “eligibility” to vote. Most states have refused this demand because, again, the Constitution says that states and not the federal government administer elections. The president doesn’t get to create his own “eligibility” list. So the DOJ sued twenty-nine of those states for their refusal.
Now they’ve decided to put a gun to the heads of noncompliant states by putting the literal lives of their residents at risk. I’ve been warning for years and years this would happen — that Trump 2.0 would use federal money as a tool of coercion. Days ago, DHS announced new rules freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants until states surrender their voter rolls and remake their elections to Trump’s liking. I can tell you, firsthand, that those are the funds used to protect you against terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, mass shootings, weaponized drones, and more.
I will say it again. If you live in a Blue State, Donald Trump and his team are threatening to put your life in danger if your state doesn’t give him control over elections. And by the way, if your governor caves and complies, that voter information will be fed into a database that a federal judge just said “trampled on the privacy rights” of American citizens. Don’t take my word for it. Maine’s secretary of state said this whole scheme “endangers American lives and democracy itself.” For good measure, the DOJ has warned state election officials they could face criminal prosecution, too, if they don’t go along with all of this.
Take a step back. I want you to look at what the whole machine, put together, would actually do. You've got the administration attempting extortion at one end and dangling handcuffs at the other, with a gun to the head of any state that hesitates in between. Under that kind of pressure, a dozen states have already caved.
So let’s play out an example of what that means. Ohio is one of the states that has capitulated on the voter lists. And if all of the other above elements are operationalized, Donald Trump could easily tip the scales in the state and influence who controls the U.S. Congress. I’ll walk you through it.
In February, Ohio’s Secretary of State handed the personal data of nearly 8 million Ohio voters over to Trump’s DOJ. Ohio is not among the states protected by the court injunction against the mail-ballot order. And Ohio happens to be hosting one of the most consequential races in America this November that could decide control of the Senate. Republican appointee Jon Husted is running against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in a genuine toss-up, currently separated by less than a single percentage point.
Now suppose the administration wins its appeal, and the Postal Service’s ballot-gatekeeping scheme goes live. Then the federal government — which is already armed with Ohio’s complete voter file — gets to decide which mail ballots get delivered in that election, and they’ll do it based on flawed databases that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has already warned are incomplete and error-prone.
This could be a race decided by a few thousand votes. And in this scenario, a federal agency run by Trump will control the ballot delivery. So ask yourself: what stops them from quietly withholding a few thousand mail-in ballots in Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown as “unverified”? Who gets to decide what thresholds are set? Who gets to control the appeals process, if any? You know the answer. Trump’s people do.
Here’s the truly insidious part: how would you ever know what really happened? If your ballot never arrives at your house, you might assume it’s lost in the mail. If it does arrive and you fill it out, how do you know it will get delivered to the local vote counting location? If you somehow manage to find out that your ballot was withheld, what can you do about it? If there are voting irregularities in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, who’s able to track down which ballots Trump’s team is holding onto at the Post Office? By the time lawyers and courts untangle such a mess (months later, if ever), Republican Senator Jon Husted has already been sworn in.
It’s even worse if Trump gets the SAVE Act passed. Then the mail-in-ballot corruption would just be a sideshow. Because tens of thousands of eligible Ohioans could be blocked from registering to vote altogether or purged for paperwork “mismatches” before voting even begins. At that point, Trump and his team don’t need to “steal” anything, per se; they can just use the SAVE Act’s draconian provisions to block voters from the polls who might be showing up to support the political opposition.
I spent my career in national security watching how autocrats abroad hollowed out elections. Very, very rarely do they try to cancel elections. Doing so is a gift to the opposition. It’s the clearest evidence democracy has been killed. Instead, autocrats keep the voting open and try to manipulate it in their favor to preserve some semblance of legitimacy. I will tell you, right now and unequivocally, that is exactly what Donald Trump is trying to do.
Here’s the good news. The machine he’s trying to build keeps failing. The pro-democracy movement in this country is stronger than I expected, and we’re challenging every part of it. DEFIANCE.org has been providing emergency support to these efforts. Three federal judges blocked pieces of Trump’s plan in a single week in June. Republican secretaries of state in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Utah told the DOJ to pound sand. And in the Senate, even a handful of Republicans (Senators Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, Tillis) have so far refused to let the SAVE Act pass.
That’s where you come in, friends. This week, as House Speaker Mike Johnson tries his reconciliation gambit to ram through the SAVE Act, then on the other side of Capitol Hill, every senator must be asked: do you want to be remembered as someone who defended the American experiment at its 250th birthday… or as someone who gave away our ballots to the president and forfeited democracy for good?
The founders had a phrase for voting without the power to change anything. Taxation without representation. We fought an entire revolution over it. The least we can do is fight in the courts, in Congress, and in every state capital now. So call your senators. Then keep calling. Defiance isn’t a fad or mood. Right now, I assure you, it’s your most important duty as an American.
Your friend, in defiance,
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