Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.
Trump framed the issue as a means to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that noncitizens are voting in numbers that can affect an election are a lie. But it raises concerns about potential efforts by the president to rig the November midterm elections.
While describing his victory in terms of counties he won in 2024 – and ignoring the vast difference in population between large urban counties and rural counties – Trump said of immigrants: “If Republicans don’t get them out, you will never win another election as a Republican.”
Trump said that immigrants “were brought” to the United States to vote, “and they vote illegally. And the, you know, it’s amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say: ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least many – 15 places – the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
“We have states that are so crooked – and they’re counting votes – we have states that I won, that show I didn’t win,” Trump continued. “Now, you’re going to see something in Georgia, where they were able to get with a court order the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things coming out.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to questions on Tuesday about Trump’s call for the nationalization of elections.
“The president believes in the United States constitution,” Leavitt said. “However, he believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections, and again, voter ID is a highly popular and commonsense policy that the president wants to pursue and he wants to pass legislation to make that happen for all states across the country.”
Trump’s comments to Dan Bongino, the podcast host and short-lived former deputy director of the FBI, come less than a week after FBI agents served a criminal search warrant to obtain nearly 700 boxes of ballots and other election material from Fulton county, Georgia, long a target of Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Trump reportedly held a short phone call with the agents, alongside the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, to congratulate them as the raid concluded.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, responded to Trump’s comments on Tuesday. “That statement alone makes clear that this threat to our election security, the basic premise of our democracy, is forward looking, to 2026, to 2028,” he said. “This is about whether these same tactics we’re seeing now, or worse, will be used to disrupt free and fair elections.”
Voting is not a national process in the US: the constitution gives each state the responsibility to govern its elections. Congress can make laws to safeguard the constitutional rights of voters to preserve one-person-one-vote standards and prevent discrimination, but the federal government does not manage elections apparatuses.
Trump’s remarks also come as Congress considers several bills that would have a significant impact on US elections.
Anna Paulina Luna, a representative from Florida, led an effort by a group of Republicans to add the Save America Act to the spending bill necessary to end the government shutdown, but the effort failed. The act would require proof of citizenship – not just a driver’s license – when registering to vote or updating voter registration. It also largely outlaws mail-in voter registration and government-funded voter registration drives, and would charge elections officials with a felony if they register a voter without citizenship documentation, even if that voter is a citizen.
An earlier version passed in the House but has stalled in the Senate. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York described the legislation as a “poison pill” if added to the spending bill as an amendment.
A more strident elections bill, the Make Elections Great Again Act, was introduced last week by Bryan Steil, a Republican representative from Wisconsin. In addition to the provisions of the Save America Act, the legislation would outlaw ranked-choice voting and universal vote-by-mail, require all mailed ballots to be at an election office before polls close, restrict third parties from helping voters and create a national elections auditing system.
