Journalist Garrett Graff says Trump's vow to ban mail-in voting is part of a “roadmap for how our country loses free and fair elections”
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From the August 18, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show
RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): Trump said Putin says that people shouldn't be allowed to vote by mail. Says that he got that idea from Putin. And so today Trump says that he will sign an executive order banning Americans nationwide from voting by mail.
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I feel like I'm seeing three different lanes, three different tactics by which Trump is trying to call into question the normalcy and to sort of change expectations around the 2026 midterms. Do you think that's fair? Do you disagree?
GARRETT GRAFF (GUEST): I absolutely agree, and I think that what you're doing is key to understanding this. Which is I think too often we think of sort of Donald Trump being crazy over here, being crazy over here, and being crazy over here and that they're not related to some sort of larger plan or effort. Whereas I think what we are seeing is this roadmap for how our country loses free and fair elections. Which is I have never been one to believe that, you know, Donald Trump is going to cancel the midterms or cancel the 2028 presidential race. Russia, as we know, has elections. Saddam Hussein was elected head of Iraq when he was dictator there. Instead, what I think we are watching is subtle and not so subtle efforts by Republicans across the country, including in the White House, to change who gets to vote, how they vote, and subtly shape the electorate for 2026 and 2028, such that Republicans can lock in an illegitimate minority rule.
MADDOW: That, of course, proceeds in parallel with Trump's yearslong effort to try to normalize the questioning of otherwise normal election results. So if you are narrowing, as you say, the number of people who can vote and the means by which people can vote, and you have normalized this idea that election results are inherently suspect and shouldn't be trusted if they don't favor Trump and his causes, that stew gets pretty toxic pretty quickly whether or not elections are canceled. I mean, you get, I guess the question is how you — where you see the line being drawn as to whether or not elections still count as free and fair once you're playing in these sorts of categories.
GRAFF: Absolutely. And I think you also need to fast-forward through some of the developments that we're seeing this year. You know, the hiring of 10,000 new ICE officers represents a sort of super-empowered professional thuggery in cities across the country where federal law enforcement has been a light, if any, presence. You know, we have armed National Guard troops headed from red states into blue cities right now, just as they did in Los Angeles earlier this spring. You don't need to discourage all that many people voting in all that many places across the country to radically reshape national politics.