Pre-planning the Chaos

President Trump reminds us again why the attacks of January 6th are not about the past.

This is why the attack on the Capitol on January 6th was never about the past. A president who tries to change the rules once will do it again. The more his first attempt is downgraded, has its edges smoothed, turned into a matter of differing opinion rather than a unique effort to break the American system, the easier it is for that same person to break the laws again.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Donald Trump said on a podcast recently. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The attacks of January 6th were the end point of a two-month effort to overturn the vote of 81 million people.

The president is doing poorly in the polling. The upcoming elections are not likely to go well for his party, and a bad result will be read as a referendum on his leadership. So he is sowing doubt about the electoral system—laying the groundwork to contest results he doesn’t like, just as he did in 2020.

This is a familiar move. We’ve seen this before. He has a record of preemptively attacking the integrity of elections — from claiming Ted Cruz “stole” the 2016 Iowa caucuses and demanding a new vote, to repeatedly saying the 2016 general election would be “rigged at the polling places,” to insisting for years that mail‑in and absentee voting would produce a “rigged” or “stolen” election, especially in 2020 and beyond.¹

To remind: the reason the United States vests power for elections in local officials is the same reason the federal system exists in the first place. The Founders, having just escaped a monarch, designed a republic where power was deliberately scattered — not out of administrative convenience, but as a safeguard against tyranny. Multiple centers of authority, checking and competing with one another, make it nearly impossible for any single person or faction to seize control of the whole apparatus.

It was that federal system that kept the country on track after the attacks of January 6th. It was judges, election officials and independent authorities in multiple states that stopped Trump’s overthrow effort. Furthermore, the disparate nature of elections acted as one of the best pieces of evidence against Trump’s claims of a vast conspiracy -- it’s impossible for so many states with so many different systems to act in coordination in the way the fantasy of a rigged election would suggest.

The president is a steward of this system--as all presidents are. For Donald Trump to suggest nationalizing elections is not an opinion on one side of an argument. It is a position fundamentally at odds with the office he holds — in the same way that a priest conducting a wedding ceremony should not direct the groom to a nearby brothel.

1. For a comprehensive catalog of these instances, you can consult:

• The New York Times’ guide explaining the history of mail-in voting attacks.

• ABC News’ detailed timeline of election denial rhetoric.

• The AMark Foundation database, which logs more than 900 separate statements regarding “rigged” or “stolen” elections from 2012 through 2021.