Vladimir Putin really had his way with Donald Trump last week. We know that Putin and Trump’s closed-door meeting in Alaska left Trump staffers looking “ashen” and “shocked.” We know that whatever went down in Alaska was bad enough that President Zelenskyy immediately lit up the Bat Signal and Europe’s leaders immediately flew to Washington on Monday. But it wasn’t all international catastrophes. Apparently, Putin has now convinced Trump that he needs to discourage Americans from voting by mail-in ballots AND voting machines.
President Trump announced Monday on his social media site, Truth Social, that he plans to “lead a movement” to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines in the country ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Part of his plan includes signing an executive order that bars states from using mail ballots and potentially some voting machines. He said, without evidence, that voting machines are “highly inaccurate,” as well as more expensive and less reliable than counting paper 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,” Trump said during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House Monday. “And 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.”
Although Trump himself urged his supporters to vote using mail-in ballots prior to the 2024 presidential election, Democrats have been significantly more likely to vote using mail-in ballots, compared to Republicans, since the 2020 election. That gap has only gotten wider in recent elections as GOP-led states have passed more restrictions on this method of voting. But legal experts say Trump does not have the legal authority to tell states how to run their elections.
Michael Morley, a professor at Florida State University College of Law, told NPR that the Constitution gives Congress – not the president – the power to regulate federal elections.
“There’s really nothing that the executive branch can do on its own in terms of direct mandates,” he said.
“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.” It’s true, the only way Democrats can get elected is by people voting for them. This reminds me of the 2020 election when Trump and many Republicans sowed distrust in mail-in ballots, which ended up suppressing the Republican vote. If Trump keeps telling his cult that they can’t trust mail-in ballots or voting machines, they’ll believe him and they might just stay home. Isn’t it funny/grotesque that Trump has got this particular bug up his ass just a few days after he met Putin face-to-face? It’s especially funny when you consider Russia’s years of interference with American elections.
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- Washington, DC Arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy before a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and European leaders at the White House in Washington. Pictured: Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskiy BACKGRID USA 18 AUGUST 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: MediaPunch / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Washington, DC United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on as US President Donald J Trump meets President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Monday, August 18, 2025. European Leaders are at the White House in support of President Zelenskyy following President Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Anchorage, Alaska. Pictured: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump BACKGRID USA 18 AUGUST 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: MediaPunch / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Washington, DC United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on as US President Donald J Trump meets President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Monday, August 18, 2025. European Leaders are at the White House in support of President Zelenskyy following President Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Anchorage, Alaska. Pictured: Donald Trump BACKGRID USA 18 AUGUST 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: MediaPunch / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Washington, DC United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on as US President Donald J Trump meets President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Monday, August 18, 2025. European Leaders are at the White House in support of President Zelenskyy following President Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Anchorage, Alaska. Pictured: Donald Trump BACKGRID USA 18 AUGUST 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: MediaPunch / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Washington, DC President Emmanuel Macron and former President Donald Trump join President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders at the White House for high-level talks on the ongoing war in Ukraine. Pictured: Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni BACKGRID USA 18 AUGUST 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: Best Image / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
The only movement this mthfr needs to lead is bowel related as he is full of shit.
Dictatorships have one iron clad Rule –“Logic is an Enemy, and Truth is a Menace”
– Rod Serling.
Elections are state run, so EO’s have no jurisdiction on Elections. The Red States are likely to be complicit, but honestly if he wants hand counts of ballots have fun. But I honestly don’t see why successfully gerrymandered Republican states would do this. CA for sure are not gonna give up mail in ballots for no other reason is that its crazy easy, and to some degree we are lazy. Filling it out at our kitchen table and dropping it off or mailing it in is crazy convenient.
Yeah exactly–in a lot of ways it seems self-defeating but I’m sure the imagined scenario is long lines in dense blue cities with ICE hovering over voters, demanding IDs etc. Republicans have made huge gains in swing states by using mail-in ballots so the whole thing seems pretty short-sighted on his part.
As per usual, there’s been no actual thinking behind this. All of this idiot’s stupid executive orders have shown similar lack of fully thought-out planning.
It might be tinfoil territory, I know, but honestly this sounds like a precursor to cancelling elections because no voting can be trusted.
Not tinfoil at all. It may even be buried in Project 2025.
What isn’t buried in Project 2025?? Cause I know I hear the soul of our country pounding on the lid of the coffin.
There sure as heck is some kind of plan here. I am certain Putin is coaching him on how to steal elections effectively.
Absolutely. The fact that Putin pushed for this; Trump’s insistence that elections be called the very night they are held (not possible if all votes are being hand counted); Ivanka’s Chinese trademark for voting machines (awarded when Daddy was prezzy the first time, btw); and Trump promising followers that they would never need to vote again after 2024…
…something terrible is afoot.
Again.
He did tell his followers that they wouldn’t have to vote again. That he just needed them one more time, and then they wouldn’t ever have to do it again.
Write your senators and reps in Congress and on the state level! The president is given ZERO authority over elections in the Constitution. Tell your reps to do their jobs and protect state’s rights on election sovereignty, and the rights of those who need / want to vote by mail. Even the Republican reps need to hear from us on this.
He did and no one took him seriously.
I still think many are in denial.
I mean anything is possible but I’ve been saying since the beginning that there WILL be elections, they just won’t be free and fair. See: Russia, China, Turkey etc. They all have elections, they’re just rigged AF by autocratic leadership.
He already floated the idea of if there’s a war going on, elections can’t be held. Another lie, of course. Lincoln was elected during the Civil War, LBJ & Nixon both during the Vietnam War, FDR during WWII, etc. He said this on camera!
Does anyone remember how he used mail in voting in 2020?!
Do as I say, not as I do!
Americans need to stop being apathetic – we are going to lose forever bc this man will lie and cheat and steal our democracy! Organize and vote him out! Vote and arrest every MAGA politician complicit with this!
Guess he doesn’t want the military to vote. And fun fact: they have mail-in voting in Russia. Of course, all the ballots are filled in for Putin in advance, but still…
And I believe Putin is still very much interfering in our elections. There are so many bots on all social media platforms that they may be outnumbering real people soon.
So, harder for people where polling places have been drastically reduced; harder for people who lack transportation; harder for people who don’t have flexible work schedules. So poorer and more rural communities will be hit harder— while wealthier and more urban communities might be ok, even with excessive crowding. Hurts the Democrats — but also potentially really hurts MAGA voters. While I’m sure bags of votes will get disappeared, they lose even the appearance of plausible deniability that their computer guy Elon provided.
In the end, it’s one more chunk of anti-Democratic awful — and it’s yet another distraction. What? Everyone — including wealthy world travelers and (oops) the military —will have to return to their local polling places to vote? I think Putin was playing with Trump just for funsies.
In DC we’ve been distracted by the presence of world leaders, the military presence — that, so far, has been hovering almost exclusively in the safer areas of the city, and humidity. What about the Epstein files though?
I think it will hurt poor rural voters as well. Plus the elderly. Maybe he hopes that RFK Jr will have precipitated a pandemic worse than COVID by then so the vote will be even more suppressed. He definitely understands that his base would still go to the polls during those conditions while the science-believers might be more likely to stay safe at home.
Hmmmm, I don’t know about the last bit. I think the science believers will be triple masked — or whatever we can come up with, but we’ll do our best to be there.
If/when there is another pandemic , and if/when Trump is infected with it, I hope he gets directly confronted with the results of his Executive Orders. The scientists at NIH who were working on cures, the physicians at Walter Reed who were doing cutting edge implementation of treatments that followed from that cutting edge research, and the nurses and support staff — which included a significant number of immigrants, won’t be there for his care like they were the last time. I hope this is brought home to him directly and repeatedly until that is the last thought registered in his deteriorating brain.
I’ll show up at my polling place in a fucking hazmat suit and a gas mask if I have to. I hope everyone else will too but if we end up in a pandemic more deadly than COVID with no real treatment or vaccine in the works, I could see why the elderly and immunocompromised might not risk it. Of course at that point, we’d probably have nothing to lose anyway. Sigh.
ITA that if it does happen I hope Trump feels the full force of his despicable decision to put an anti-science lunatic like RFK Jr in charge of public health and a billionaire in charge of slashing necessary PH funding. As I type this I’m reminded that he fired the doctor who saved his life when he first got COVID smdh.
And god help us all….it’s only been 7 months!!
They’ll take my vote by mail from my cold dead hands.
This is the next step in voter suppression. We saw the beginning with the chatter in 2024 that only votes counted election day should count and that hand counting is better than machine counting. To be clear, neither red nor blue states have all their ballots counted election day, and manual counting is not as accurate and machine counting.
He’s a moron
Where are all those naysayers who freaked out about Biden’s supposed mental decline because of one partially weak debate performance now?
You just know they showed him all that they had on him that that meeting. To remind him to get in line.
Excuse me, but isn’t that exactly what Putin told him to do at their meeting in Alaska?
He’s just throwing so much sh** at us it’s hard to keep up or form solid plans to fight against it.
In Colorado, mail-in ballots are clutch.
If you ban those, you GOTTA make election day a federal holiday.
Yes, that was the plan, and the Trump team was open about it before the election. It almost doesn’t really matter what sticks and what doesn’t if we’re exhausted from the onslaughts.
Not surprising but also not remotely amusing to those of us living in states that have done mail only for decades now. That would require those states to scramble to create voting booths in a year’s time, which is exactly the kind of disruption they want. This is one of the first few major steps to arresting democracy entirely, as they planned all along.
This overwhelmingly impacts Western states, which are a complete mix of red and blue states. The reason mail in voting has enjoyed bipartisan support in the West is precisely the problem that everyone is so darn spread out. To take mail in voting away would either really disenfranchise rural (often red) voters or you’d have to pump enormous amounts of money into these states to scale up in person voting. I don’t see either as being likely. The West is just too used to the ease of mail in now and good luck taking that away.
Yeah, people really don’t understand the distances we have way out West. Some kids have a 2hr commute, one way, just to get to school. Other people have a 3hr drive just to go to the grocery store. The trump admin closed a lot of post offices in small towns, so folks have even further to go just to stay in communication with people.
None of this is funny. And of course Putin told him to do this. I remember MAGA throwing a snit fit during the 2020 election about states ‘suddenly changing the rules’ to allow more people to vote by mail (a lot of states only had that contingency for absentee ballots or the military). Never mind the fact that we were deep in a pandemic & people shouldn’t have to risk death in order to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
And trump lied during that presser, saying the only country that votes by mail is the US. Not true. Oregon’s been doing mail in voting since the 2000 election. Zero problems. Don’t know when the voting machines came in, but I voted that way in Georgia for six years in the 2010s & that state had no problems. Also, this big lie that MAGAs been perpetrating for a while now–that our elections are corrupt, that ‘illegal aliens’ (vile term) have been voting, dead people have been voting, etc.–is simply not true. US elections have been free and fair, more so since the Voting Rights Act (currently under assault by MAGA). Shoot, one of the many good things Jimmy Carter did in his retirement was help out & monitor elections in emerging democracies.
Also, what about absentee ballots? You’re not home during the election, so too bad, so sad? How about our military? Posted overseas during elections, ah well, sucks to be you? Really? Live 50 miles from the nearest polling place because your state’s been shutting down polls & you can’t get there between work & home? Bummer. Are you a person with a disability & find getting out & about increasingly hard? Tsk, tsk, don’t really want your vote either. Etc. Gad, I really despise trump, putin, MAGA, et al.
Constitution – Schmonstituion.
Extraordinary that any world leader would be discussing their country’s voting system with another leader; and still more extraordinary when it’s with despotic invader Putin, with form in interference. One hint of that under Obama would have been instant uproar and weeks of outrage.