Trump slams mail-in ballots as corrupt, but may not have the power to derail them

President Trump told Brian Glenn of the conservative Real America’s Voice that he didn’t want to answer his question because it was "off-topic" as he stood there with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders.

Then he proceeded to answer it at great length.

The idea, it turns out, began with Vladimir Putin, who has a bit of experience at keeping himself in power, which isn’t all that hard if you’re a dictator.

My source? Donald Trump.

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He said Putin told him that "it's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections," in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. He said Putin told him he won the 2020 election "by so much," as Trump has long claimed, "and you lost it because of mail-in voting. It was a rigged election."

Music to the president’s ears.

So Trump was ready when a friendly reporter asked the question.

"Mail-in ballots are corrupt," he declared. "Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're going to 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."

He was just warming up.

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 [mail-in ballots] because of what's happened, massive fraud all over the place. The other thing we want, change of the machines. For all of the money they spend, it's approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots. And paper ballots are very sophisticated with the watermark paper and everything else, we would get secure elections. We get much faster results, the machines, I mean, they say we're going to have the results in two weeks with paper ballots. You have the results that night. Most people almost have, but most people in many countries use paper ballots. It's the most secure form."

A little fact-checking is in order.

As Axios points out, many countries around the world have some form of mail-in voting. And millions of Americans who live overseas, such as military families, are eligible for mailing in their ballots.

Trump actually doesn’t have the power to do this. While he says the states are an "agent" of the feds, the Constitution says the mechanics of holding elections "shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof." But Congress can change those requirements. Could the president get this through the narrow majorities in both chambers?

"It’s a fraud," Trump said, adding: "It's time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it, it's the only way they can get elected."

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Trump even invoked Jimmy Carter. In 2004, a commission set up by the former president and ex-Reagan aide James Baker III concluded that "absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud."

In 2020, Trump went all-out in favor of mail-in ballots, arguing that they would help Republicans. Of course, he may just have been trying to make the best of the tools already in place. No party believes in unilateral disarmament.

But his enthusiasm for mail-in ballots in that election stands in stark contrast to his current stance that they are corrupt and should be banned.

Trump wound up telling Brian Glenn, who is dating Marjorie Taylor Greene, "I’m glad you asked that question."

The president doesn’t let himself be tied down by the rules of consistency that most conventional politicians have to obey. Until last Friday, he was insisting on a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine as a precondition for any peace agreement. After the Alaska summit, he dropped the cease-fire idea that Zelensky had been demanding, given that his country is being bombarded every day, with significant civilian casualties, and adopted the Putin stance of allowing the war to continue to further freeze his military gains in the crucial Donbas region.

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But that flexibility – what critics call flip-flopping – has put the president in the position where he has a shot at hammering out a peace agreement, though major obstacles remain.

So I expect we’ll hear a lot more about how mail-in ballots are horrible and evil in the coming months, though whether he can get his Hill allies to go along is very much an open question.