Trump is setting a trap — and Americans may not see it until it's too late

Something stinks.

Astoria is one of my favorites on the Oregon coast, a small town of around 9,000 people with great restaurants and crafts shops. Two of them, a coffee shop and ceramics studio, are owned by a small businessperson, Audrey Long, who’s mailed herself five postcards since August to test the mail. The results have been grim, particularly since Oregon is a 100% vote-by-mail state.

So far, only two of the postcards have arrived, and the first one took more than a month (and Oregon doesn’t even send out ballots until next Wednesday). Across the street from one of her shops the town’s City Hall isn’t getting its mail reliably, either, and the same is true for the tenants of a 40-unit apartment building next door, according to reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is looking into it, his office telling OPB’s reporter, “The timing of these issues is especially concerning.”

At first, I figured this was a one-off; something weird or broken in the Astoria post office. But when I mentioned this on the air Monday of this week my lines were flooded with calls from states across the nation saying that they’re having similar problems with the mail. The calls have continued every day since.

Yesterday, an American listener who follows us on YouTube from Germany called in to say that his ballot was mailed out on September 19th (the law requires all foreign-resident ballots to go out by then) and he’s tracking it online but it still hasn’t arrived at his home in Mannheim.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order limiting who could get a mail-in ballot, that the Supreme Court knocked down last month. But apparently he’s still working on the Post Office, just in some different ways, many of which are being kept under wraps. But there are some clues.

Raw Story’s Alexandria Jacobson reports that nearly 1,000 armed private security guards have been deployed to at least 55 postal facilities in places with lots of Democrats like Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, and Chicago.

Instead of using the Post Office’s own police force, Trump’s people have hired Prosegur, a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted in 2024 over what its ethics council called “an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to serious human rights abuses.”

The company’s also been accused of intimidating union organizers across Latin America, which may be why Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association worries out loud that nobody from the Postal Service seems to be supervising them. He described the result as “private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control.”

In other words, we’re already partway there: armed men who answer to a foreign contractor and Trump instead of to the public, with no transparency and no clear reason for their being there, are overseeing the buildings our ballots pass through this month.

Then there’s Trump’s wannabe Schutzstaffel of armed, masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs now equipped with electric gloves that are used for torture in other countries who seems to delight in shooting people — including American citizens like Renee Good — in their cars. Democracy Forward just released 166 pages of internal ICE records they got with a FOIA filing and the result is shocking.

This renegade agency that seems to answer only to Trump and Stephen Miller has now collected 50.6 million voter roll records from the Justice Department.

What the hell is ICE doing with our voter records? And what could their having our personal voting habits possibly have to do with controlling immigration?

But it gets worse: they also got another 48.4 million “voter records” from what the documents call the “independent sources” of election denier Heather Honey, who’s now the Department of Homeland Security’s point person on “election integrity.”

Before 2020, Honey was a private investigator who worked counterfeit-goods cases, with no background or experience in elections or voting machines. She’s an outspoken election denier who still claims Trump won in 2020.

And she’s the source of the false claim that “Pennsylvania counted more votes than it had voters,” which Trump repeated from the stage at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 which so enraged the mob that then attacked the Capitol, trying to “hang Mike Pence” and ended up causing the deaths of five police officers and the hospitalization of 140 others.

When The New York Times dug into those same documents they found that Homeland Security has already opened investigations into 150 “good government” nonprofit organizations that register voters. The papers show that they’ve considered sending undercover agents into some of these nonprofits to “disrupt activities.”

Trump’s toadies are also seeding the ground with stories that would justify massive intervention in the final moments or subsequent counting days of the election. In July, former plumber and current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed they’d discovered more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls in just four states and threatened to send state officials to jail for even the smallest infractions, if they make any mistakes during this election.

Pretty quickly that number of 250,000 non-citizens on the rolls — widely reported on rightwing media — dropped like a stone. DHS revised their count to claim that there were 185 noncitizens registered in Nevada, one of those four states; when the state investigated, they found that every single one of those 185 people was a lawful citizen.

But if Republicans lose the election this fall, it’s safe to assume Trump will revive that 250,000 number, true or not; he’s never been afraid to tell “truthful hyperbole” (as he calls lying in his book).

Then there are the polling places and the count itself. The Justice Department is dispatching “monitors,” and voting rights groups and local governments are in court right now challenging the administration’s plans to put armed federal agents at the polls and counting operations.

This administration has also joined Russia and Belarus as being the only three countries in the world to refuse to allow in international election monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has overseen our elections for decades. What are they hiding?

And their arrogance is astonishing: when a federal judge recently told a DOJ attorney he’d require advance notice before a state released its “citizenship lists,” the answer, as Democracy Docket reported, was “If you want to enjoin us, enjoin us.”

In other words, like with the East Wing/Ballroom, reflecting pool, Arch, killing people in boats in the Caribbean, or bombing Iran without congressional authorization (or dozens of other examples), “We’ll do our crimes right in the open and get done what we want and you can sue us and yell about it later. We win anyway.”

Like so many of his crimes that he pre-announces, Trump told the Times earlier this year that he “should have” deployed the National Guard in 2020 to seize voting machines in swing states like Georgia.

— He’s falsely claimed that states are mere agents of the feds when they count votes, so the president can tell them what to do and how to do it.

— He mused to House Republicans about canceling the midterms altogether, said out loud that Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 places, and told NBC he’d only accept the results this fall “if the elections are honest.” We all know what that means when a Putin acolyte says it.

— Asked by TIME about declaring a national emergency around the election, he refused to rule it out.

We should take him seriously: he’s already tried to overthrow our legitimately elected government once before.

At 2:24 on the afternoon of January 6, already aware that the Capitol had been breached and violent thugs were searching for the electoral college ballots and terrifying members of Congress, he tweeted that Mike Pence “lacked the courage to do what needed to be done.” To defy the results of the election, in other words. His mob surged and began chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as Trump gleefully watched on TV from the White House.

Most concerning, that year there were still lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department who could tell him no. They’re all gone now, replaced by election deniers, neofascists, and lickspittles.

Speaking of neofascists, the two guys who run his MAGA Inc. $415 million SuperPac spent part of the past few weeks helping a Putin-aligned candidate and party win an election in the Balkans. When the rightwing winner was announced, he profusely thanked Putin for his help and future close cooperation.

And it’s not like we haven’t seen Republicans steal elections before. After Jeb Bush purged some 90,000 mostly Black and Hispanic voters from the Florida rolls just before the 2000 election, his brother “won” by 537 votes. The state Supreme Court ordered a recount and, ignoring the 10th Amendment and the Constitution having given voting to the states, five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court halted the count.

A year later a consortium of news organizations finished examining the ballots and found that if every disputed ballot in the state had been counted, Al Gore would have come out ahead. As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

But that recount didn’t happen because a crowd of Republican congressional staffers — backed up by lawyers Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett who’d come to Florida to help out — held their “Brooks Brothers Riot” pounding on the doors and windows of the Miami-Dade canvassing board until it shut down its hand recount.

And then there’s the purging of legitimate voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — which is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states with large Blue cities, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

The Brennan Center added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges double-checked and pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

So we need to be ready for anything from slowed-down mail to bogus lists of alleged noncitizens to Spanish agents with guns overseeing our mail-in ballots.

That’s all the bad news.

The good news is that none of these strategies — which worked great for Republicans in close elections like 2000 and 2024 — can stop a landslide.

If the count is too large to deny or whittle away, we may be able to turn back Trump’s steady and varied attacks on our democracy and our elections.