Donald Trump went to Ohio on Saturday and, like a desperate gangster, threatened an entire state: vote for his candidates, or else.
He’s not even trying to hide the thuggery anymore. In a high school gym north of Dayton, the president of the United States told a few thousand people that their entire state’s access to federal cash now depends on how they vote next month. It was like a robber pulling aside his jacket to show you the pistol in his waistband.
Trump said that Ohio’s Republican officials call him all the time asking for money, and that he’ll be a lot less inclined to pick up the phone if Democrats win control of the state. Of the Democratic candidate for governor, Amy Acton, he was blunt: “I’m not going to help her.” Then he dangled a bribe, telling the crowd that if Republicans win, Ohio will be “strongly considered” for the new Space Academy. Then he told them all to vote as if he were on the ballot himself.
I had two reactions to this. First, it’s a disgusting and blatantly unconstitutional weaponization of presidential power. Trump is using your taxpayer dollars as a carrot-and-stick to get you to vote for his candidates. Second, it’s going to blow up in his face. He’s reached the total desperation stage, Americans can sense it, and his thuggery is only making them more inclined to throw out MAGA candidates and a MAGA Congress.
Let me explain what Trump is describing in plainer terms. Imagine a burglar breaks into your house. You call 911. The dispatcher answers and says that before sending a squad car, she needs to check your voter registration. Republicans get priority. Everybody else waits. You would call that a dictatorship, wouldn’t you? Or the very least a corrupt police state. And you’d be right. Yet that’s what Trump keeps describing, with federal dollars in place of squad cars.
This is the scenario I warned about before Trump’s 2024 re-election. In Blowback, I said that a second Trump administration would build a system of selective protection, in which the government treats you as friend or foe based on your politics, and that the agency I used to help run, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), would be used as a favors agency. DHS hands out billions in grants every year for emergency response and public safety. During my time there, we fought off pressure from Trump to use that money for political rewards and punishment, including his repeated attempts to hold disaster aid hostage in places like Puerto Rico and California.
We said no to him. A lot. But I worried that the next crew wouldn’t. And they haven’t. In fact, Trump’s “threat” isn’t so much a threat as it is a description of what’s already happening.
In the first fourteen months of this term, the president approved a mere 23 percent of major disaster requests from states with Democratic governors and senators, as opposed to 89 percent from Republican-led states (for comparison, in his first term those numbers were 93 and 89, respectively). See the trend? In July, he approved disaster aid for six red states, then denied aid to four blue states, even though they all cleared FEMA’s own damage thresholds. He bragged on Truth Social about the cash he was giving to the red states. Politico later reported he overruled his own agencies to carry out this lawless act of political favoritism. And it’s continued that way. Just last week, his administration rejected Massachusetts’s appeal for help with a devastating February blizzard… for the second time.
If you can believe it, disaster aid is the small end of all of this. A new tracker from the States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness, called “Lost Funds,” documents $177 billion in federal grants canceled, frozen, delayed or otherwise interrupted since Trump took office. Every dollar of it was appropriated by Congress. Health funding alone accounts for $58 billion. The president is doing something no administration has ever dared to do on this scale. He’s breaking the literal laws passed by Congress, hoarding funds he’s supposed to spend, and often doing it to punish blue states.
That’s why states have gone to court 23 times to fight Trump’s financial thuggery and clawed back $35 billion so far. But the Trump I served under doesn’t give a damn about judges, which is why he felt emboldened to say what he said on Saturday in Ohio.
This is just as much about a weak-willed Congress as it is about a wayward Trump. While the states are suing to defend money that Congress appropriated from being turned into the president’s personal piggy bank, Congress isn’t. The body whose major constitutional purpose is to control the purse has sat back and allowed a president to rewrite its spending decisions by region and party. They’ve let stand the gravest misappropriation of taxpayer dollars in history. For what? To please the boss.
But as I said, it’s going to blow up in his face like a pile of fireworks lit by a blowtorch.
Polls keep showing the president’s approval rating cratering. Voters are struggling to fill the tank and afford groceries; they’re drowning in his tariffs, which are just taxes with a different name. And Trump thinks the way to appeal to those suffering people is to threaten to take even more money from them? Great move, pal. You just pissed off anyone who wasn’t already pissed off.
So here’s what that fireworks show is going to look like when voters tell the president to go pound sand on November 3:
It will look like a new Congress that takes Trump to court to defend its power of the purse… It will look like a barrage of subpoenas delivered to Trump officials ordering them to testify, under oath, about who knew what and when regarding the president’s political favoritism schemes… and it will look like representatives voting to take away Trump’s allowance — yanking away every penny meant for vanity projects for himself or gratuitous rewards for his friends — while forcing the administration to comply with the law and provide federal aid to ordinary people the way it’s supposed to be distributed, without political bias or cronyism.
Threatening the very people who hired you is a pretty bad management strategy and even stupider politics. This weekend, Donald Trump proved that he doesn’t need an opponent. If left to his own corrupt devices, he will defeat himself, again and again.
Your friend, in defiance,
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DEFIANCE DAILY
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TRACK THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN READING ROOM & BOOKMOBILE
The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile arrives in New York City today. Epstein survivors; Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY-10); actors Robert De Niro, Rosie O’Donnell, Rosanna Arquette, and Gina Gershon; political commentator Joy Reid; and attorneys Katie Phang and Norm Eisen will speak to the press on releasing the remaining files, protecting survivors, and passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. The entire press conference will be livestreamed on DEFIANCE Daily at 5 pm ET.
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