The New Yorker:

The question is not if he will undermine confidence in the midterms but how.

By Susan B. Glasser

On Monday, President Trump phoned into the podcast of his former deputy F.B.I. director, Dan Bongino, and announced that he wanted to “nationalize” American elections in fifteen “crooked” states—he didn’t say which ones—ahead of the upcoming midterms, in which most people in Washington, D.C., these days, including, apparently, Trump himself, expect Republicans to suffer widespread losses. A federal takeover of elections was necessary, Trump said, because he was the real winner of the 2020 election and also because “these people”—he didn’t say which people, but one can guess—“were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally.”

When asked about the President’s idea, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, who owes whatever tenuous hold he currently has on his job to Trump, didn’t say what any states’-rights-loving Southern Republican would have said in the past: Are you crazy? Instead, channelling the boss, he complained about blue-state election practices. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost,” he said. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist turned public maga ideologue, was even less subtle. “We’re going to have ice surround the polls come November,” he said on his “War Room” podcast. Addressing Democrats, he added, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”

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