General Discussion

Then Trump hosted an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during which the Republican became rather animated — but not about the largest war in Europe since World War II. Rather, the American president got worked up talking about how much he hates when Americans vote by casting ballots through the mail.

Trump echoes comments he said Putin made to him last Friday: "Mail in ballots are corrupt. You can never have a real democracy w/ mail in ballots. We as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible. We're gonna start with an executive order to end mail in ballots."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-18T17:44:45.317Z

.....To justify this radical and aggressive offensive against this form of voting, Trump is peddling a variety of stale lies. More importantly, he’s claiming legal authority he does not have. But whether he realizes it or not, the president is also taking steps that won’t do his party any favors. Politico reported that he’s “once again threatening to undermine” a Republican electoral priority.

Republicans poured tens of millions of dollars last year into convincing their voters that casting ballots by mail was safe after Trump spent years bashing the practice and baselessly insisting it was rife with fraud. And it worked, with GOP voters closing or even reversing the mail voting gap with Democrats in several states. But now Trump is attacking mail voting again as he ratchets up his push to protect Republicans’ House majority in the midterms, scrambling a strategy Republicans effectively used to bank millions of votes in 2024.

Politico quoted Barrett Marson, a longtime GOP consultant in Arizona, who said voting by mail “historically has been an advantage for Republicans” in the Grand Canyon State and is a “safe and secure way to vote and has been for a generation in Arizona.” He added, however, that as the president sows “distrust” in the process and Democrats step up their game, the result is “not good” for Republicans.

It would be tough to blame GOP voters for feeling confused at this point. For years, Trump, the party’s undisputed leader, has veered wildly between two opposite positions. On the one hand, he’s falsely condemned mail-in voting as irredeemably corrupt and “stupid.” On the other hand, in between delivering those condemnations, the president has also encouraged rank-and-file GOP voters to cast their ballots through the mail.

At one point in 2023, Trump even told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was time for Republicans to “change our thinking” on mail-in voting, and soon after, he filmed a video for the Republican National Committee in support of the party’s early voting initiative.