Trump's latest efforts to end democracy
Robert Reich for Inequality Media
We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.
His address to the nation was absurd. It was riddled with so
many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should
have them.
He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Michigan that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020—but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly.
The FBI closed the
investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal
violation or a priority threat to national security.”
He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years.
Nothing
suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, US intelligence assessment says
China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on
US voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence US policy
“as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”
The most significant foreign influence operations occurred
in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of
Trump, according to the Mueller report. To
the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy
of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of US
intelligence agencies.
Despite his repeated assertions that US elections are not
secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of
the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it
validated the integrity of the 2020 election.
So the entire performance was fake—an extension of his
Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
It was also a commercial for the “Save America Act,” which would make it harder for many American citizens to vote. Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote, with documents such as an enhanced form of REAL ID (a state ID card compliant with federal regulations) that indicates American citizenship; a birth certificate; a passport or military identification card.
An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million
Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as
passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less,
according a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic
Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45
states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating
citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.
The point is that American democracy is acutely endangered
by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get the results he wants.
This means that you and I and every other patriotic American
have to do whatever we can to ensure free and fair elections, and fight Trump’s
torrent of lies and authoritarian moves.
If you’re anything like me, you’re warn out by Trump. You’d like nothing better than to tune him out. I get it. But American democracy is seriously on the line here. We must keep up—and accelerate—the fight.
© 2025 Robert Reich
Robert Reich is professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former US secretary of labor. His latest book is the No. 1 New York Times best-seller, "Coming Up Short."
