Trump Drops Brief Embrace of Mail In Voting, Screwing His Party
Plus: Another red state map could change, but not in favor of Republicans.
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President Donald Trump’s obsessive insistence about the unreliability and corruptness of mail-in voting contributed to a manufactured distrust of election systems among Republicans during the 2020 election. And that, in turn, likely contributed to the party’s poor showing. After a successful 2024 cycle in which the president reversed himself to encourage the practice, Trump now seems intent on going back to his old conspiratorial, paranoid ways.
“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!!”
Trump later said his team is crafting an executive order to ban mail-in voting on a country-wide scale, though legal scholars generally discount the legality of such an order.1
“We as a Republican party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots,” Trump said. “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.”
Naturally, his fellow Republicans followed suit.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) chided Democrats for opposing Trump’s call to end mail-in voting, writing on X “He wants to stop voter fraud.” In 2024, Van Orden used the same X account to plead with his followers to, “Vote early, by mail, as soon as you can.”
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) has had a similar journey. In 2024, he said: “We have to get right on using these mail-in ballots for the people who can’t get there on Election Day. But when Trump reversed course last week, Perry followed suit.
“We would like to see that enforced,” Perry said. “Americans want to know that citizens are the ones that are voting and not people that are here illegally. And that’s one of the places where we as the federal government should weigh in and can weigh in.”
Why the see-sawing? Both Perry and Van Orden represent districts that Democrats are hoping to flip in the upcoming midterm election cycle. Perry won his race by just over one point in 2024 and is facing the same Democratic opponent for a rematch in a less favorable political environment. Van Orden defeated his Democratic challenger, Rebecca Cooke, by less than three points; he will face her again, as well.
The hypocrisy is not limited to Congress, nor is it new. Newsletter favorite Nick Adams, Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Malaysia, regularly posts attacks on mail-in voting to X, where he recently wrote, “vote by mail should be ILLEGAL in all 50 states!” According to Florida voting records, Adams voted by mail in 2024.
In April, the Republican-led House passed the SAVE Act; if enacted, the legislation would impose onerous new documentation requirements for Americans to prove their citizenship before voting. (Its ostensible justification is that doing so would eliminate fraudulent voting by undocumented immigrants—a solution in search of a problem since there are “vanishingly rare” instances of them doing so.) The bill emerged out of a pre–2024 election scheme cooked up by Republicans who were anticipating unfavorable results and hoping to attribute them to mass fraud by non-citizens and their supposed Democratic allies.
Discouraging voters from using certain voting methods can obviously affect the outcomes of important races. But while the Republican base has enthusiastically taken up Trump’s calls for further restrictions on voting access, the lesson of 2024 suggests that they may be wiser to embrace ballot-casting methods rather than restrict them.
Map quest
If you’ve been keeping up with our reporting on the various state parties currently seeking to redraw their congressional maps in an effort to yield more favorable results for them, you might be interested in the latest developments in the redistricting effort for a traditionally Republican-heavy state: Utah.
On Monday night, a federal judge tossed out Utah’s current congressional map, which the state implemented in 2021. The judge demanded that a new map be redrawn in its place.
According to the Guardian:
The current map, drawn in 2021, divides Salt Lake county—the state’s population center and a Democratic stronghold—among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins. District court judge Dianna Gibson declared the map unlawful because the legislature circumvented a commission established by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.
Utah last elected a Democrat to Congress in 2018. Six months into his House term, Rep. Ben McAdams, a former Salt Lake County mayor, had gained the highest approval rating of all the members of Utah’s congressional delegation, but he lost his re-election bid in 2020 to Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), who still holds the seat today.
Utah voters had passed a proposition creating an independent redistricting commission in order to have less partisan districts. But the state legislature—dominated by Republicans—passed a law overriding the maps created by the commission and putting in a GOP-favored gerrymander instead. That scheme may now be unravelling, though many legal hurdles surely remain.
Big pop, big money
Professional skateboarder Tyshawn Jones has accomplished a lot by age 26. He’s a two-time Thrasher Magazine Skater of the Year, which is arguably skateboarding’s most prestigious honor. He’s also made millions of dollars doing what millions of Americans do for free. But now, Jones is ensnared in a multimillion dollar lawsuit with one of the most recognizable brands in skateboarding: Supreme.
The streetwear brand argues that Jones’s appearance in an ad for designer Marc Jacobs constitutes a violation of his contract with them. There’s a wrinkle, however: Marc Jacobs is by no means a skate brand, which is the category of competitor Jones’s Supreme contract specifies as being off limits. This led Jones to file suit against Supreme, which is now owned by sunglasses giant EssilorLuxottica.
Cole Louison has a new profile of Jones for GQ Magazine, and in it, he gets into some of the remarkable questions about celebrity athletes, including those being raised by the skateboarding prodigy:
Jones’ initial complaint against Supreme asserts that Supreme had “consistently” told Jones and his representatives that “so long as you’re not doing anything for another skate[boarding] brand, or a skateboarding team, we don’t have a problem with it, and don’t want to stand in the way of you making money.”
Can Jones talk about any of this?
“No,” he says, and waits for the next question.
This all points to what is unprecedented about a Tyshawn Jones. He raises questions no one has needed to ask before: Is Supreme still a skate company? Does Tyshawn Jones’s presence in an ad make Marc Jacobs, technically, a rival skate company? Does his Friend of the House status now make Louis Vuitton a skate company? Or does it signal that Tyshawn’s own brand—like that of Michael Jordan, the non-skate athlete few stories about Jones can resist invoking—has officially outgrown the “skate” qualifier?
I keep coming back to this scene in The Dark Knight Rises. Sorry.
Historically when Trump accuses the Democrats of cheating I believe that we usually discover that he has cheated in a similar manner.
I was tickled when Trump came out of his little tête-à-tête with Putin and announced that Vlad agreed with him that you couldn't have an honest election with mail-in ballots. Turns out that Russian elections use mail-in ballots...