Suspicious Minds

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 21, 2025

 

One of the reasons the idea of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” endures (although it shouldn’t) is because it’s easy to mistake the president’s ignorance for malevolence.

 

We’ve never had a leader so richly endowed with both, so it can be difficult to tell his diabolical authoritarian schemes from hamfisted but earnest policies built on poor assumptions and poorer information. Accuse him of fascism in a given case and his apologists might smugly respond, sometimes with justification, “He’s not fascist, he’s just stupid. TDS!”

 

Take his crackdown on Washington, D.C. That’s a malevolent authoritarian plot to make Americans comfortable with the idea of being policed by a military that answers to Donald Trump, I argued last week, but I concede that ignorance supplies an alternate explanation. Because the president resides in a thick reality bubble and believes the solution to all problems is “more force,” it’s possible that sending the National Guard into the streets of the capital is his genuine best idea for reducing crime.

 

He might honestly believe that Washingtonians are happy to see their city militarized when they very much are not. He might sincerely assume that beefing up law enforcement with troops will lead to more illegal guns being seized locally when that isn’t true either. He might earnestly surmise that crime in D.C. is so wildly out of control that suppressing it requires sending in National Guard units from red states whose own cities, ironically, have much higher crime rates than Washington’s.

 

Not fascist, just stupid: I doubt it in this case, but it’s possible. The same is true for Trump’s sudden revival of an old hobby horse, his jihad against mail-in ballots.

 

That revival comes with an impeccable fascist pedigree in the person of Vladimir Putin, who baited the president when the subject came up during their summit in Alaska. “You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting,” Trump claimed Putin told him. Two days later, as if to prove how easily manipulated he is by America’s enemies, he announced on Truth Social that he’s “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”

 

Of special note was this passage: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

 

Fascist or stupid? Journalist Garrett Graff read the president’s Truth Social post as nothing less than step one in a Putin-esque plot to scare Democratic voters off from turning out next fall. “Everyone has to vote in person,” he imagined Trump thinking, “and urban downtowns will be filled with ICE checkpoints and intimidating National Guard troops to ‘double check’ that only citizens vote.” That’s possible—who among us would rule out anything at this point?—but it could also be an example of “TDS.” There’s no sinister Trumpian plot, perhaps; it just looks that way because the president sincerely doesn’t know how anything works, starting with election law.

 

Fascist or stupid? How suspicious should we be of Trump’s intentions here?

 

Team Stupid.

 

If you’re on Team Stupid, you have two strong points in your favor.

 

One is that Trump displays no interest in law, even constitutional law, and therefore has no reason to know what it does and doesn’t say about, for instance, overseeing elections. I don’t think he believes in law as a concept, really. “Law” is what the American people will let him get away with, not what’s written down in books.

 

And he’s right about that. It’s those of us who believed otherwise who turned out to be on Team Stupid.

 

Still, I suspect Trump would be genuinely surprised to discover that there’s no direct role for the president under the Constitution in administering elections. The Founders left that to the states in Article I, Section 4 with a proviso that “Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” Go figure that former colonists who despised monarchical power and imagined state sovereignty as a bulwark against it wouldn’t trust American elections to a central authority, let alone a single individual.

 

So when I say that they would have been appalled by Trump’s idea that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them,” I’m not superimposing my supposed “TDS” onto their thinking. His claim is, on its face, antithetical to the Founders’ federalist constitutional vision. In imagining the states as vassals not just of the national government but of the executive specifically, it’s one of the most starkly un-American things a president has ever said.

 

It’s so un-American that I find it easy to believe he’s coming to the subject fresh, as unlikely as that is to say about a sitting chief executive. A less ignorant authoritarian who was seeking monarchical power for himself would have approached the matter more cleverly and subtly than tweeting, in so many words, “we should do the opposite of what the Constitution says.” It makes me think that not only has he never read the document, he’s never so much as considered what it’s designed to do. Score one for Team Stupid.

 

It’s also more than a little stupid that Trump persists in demagoging mail-in voting in 2025, years after the political tides have shifted in ways to make that practice less advantageous for Democrats.

 

Opposing mail ballots made cynical sense for him in 2020. Democratic voters were generally more cautious during the pandemic about entering enclosed spaces like voting precincts than their Republican counterparts. And because the left traditionally relied more heavily on lower-propensity voters like nonwhites, young adults, and the less educated, it stood to reason that being able to cast a ballot from home might do more to boost Democratic than Republican turnout.

 

Things have changed, though. COVID-19 has receded, easing progressive demand for voting by mail. And as demographic groups have shifted in response to Trump, with college graduates moving left and virtually everyone else moving right, Republicans have come to rely more heavily on lower-propensity voters themselves. Making voting more onerous in hopes of deterring those voters from turning out no longer clearly benefits the GOP, a party that registered more new voters in 2024 than its opponents.

 

Republicans wisely embraced mail-in ballots last fall and did a good enough job of it to outpace Democrats in swing states like North Carolina and Arizona. Now, suddenly, after Vladimir Putin put a bug in his ear, here comes the president to undermine that effort by reverting to his old habit of discouraging supporters from voting by any means available. That’s the last thing the Republican Party needs before a midterm election, when Democrats are likely to be out in force and MAGA voters are apt to feel unmotivated by the fact that their hero isn’t on the ballot.

 

So why is Trump doing it? One of the few dependable things about him is that there’s always some barely veiled motive of raw selfishness that explains his actions. If he’s back to demagoging voting by mail, chances are that he sees an advantage to be gained for him and his party in doing so. And he might—if he’s stupid, still blindly clinging to the now-outdated conventional wisdom that held for most of his life about Democrats prevailing whenever voting gets easier.

 

Maybe he’ll awaken to reality after a few more election cycles of Republicans winning thanks to lower-propensity voters. Who knows? By 2032, the GOP might be campaigning against voter ID.

 

Team Fascist.

 

If you find all of that implausible, though, I understand why. Team Fascist also has a case here.

 

The president may know full well that only Congress can lawfully compel states to ban mail-in ballots. He also knows that Congress will decline to do so, partly because Democrats have enough seats in the Senate to filibuster a bill toward that end and partly because too many American voters support voting by mail to make it politically safe for Republicans to try to prohibit it.

 

No, Trump is not demagoging mail-in ballots because he thinks they might actually be banned, or because he thinks there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of replacing voting machines en masse with paper ballots. He’s demagoging them because he fears a blue wave next fall and wants to plant the seed early that any Democratic victory should be considered fraudulent unless the election is carried out to his precise specifications, which it won’t be.

 

It’s the same playbook as 2020. People won’t buy it if you turn around suddenly after losing an election and opportunistically cry “rigged!” You need to cry “rigged!” before the vote, to goose suspicions that something sinister is in motion. Then, when it seems to come to pass on Election Day, your chump supporters are primed to take it seriously.

 

“His vendetta against mail voting is less an earnest attempt to eradicate the practice by next fall than part of the Republican Party’s long-standing commitment to framing election outcomes it does not like as inherently illegitimate and suspicious,” Jay Willis wrote in a piece for Slate. As I noted last week, postliberals respect democracy only when it delivers victory for fascism; an election where fascists lose must be deemed unfair somehow, and the fascists stand a very fair chance of losing next year. The president is getting ahead of the argument.

 

He’s getting ahead of it in other ways, too. His ruthless redistricting ploys in Texas and other red states will supply him with an excuse for midterm defeat if any Republican state legislatures refuse to do his bidding. (“Weak Indiana didn’t want to win!”) And his out-of-the-blue demand for a new Census that excludes illegal immigrants from states’ populations gives him a pretext to discredit a Democratic victory as systematically tainted. The best he could do in 2016 to delegitimize Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory was to claim that illegals had voted for her by the millions. This time, he won’t need to make an accusation that outlandish. Our corrupt Census gave blue states more House seats than they deserved, he’ll say. Their new majority is unfair.

 

We might call that the “soft fascist” approach to a Democratic win. The president and his party will claim that the opposition cheated, but that’ll be as far as it goes. No one will much care because Trump always whines after he loses. It’s a talking point.

 

There are more aggressive approaches he might take, though. He could, as Quinta Jurecic speculated, threaten to withhold federal funding from states that don’t ban mail ballots and/or sic the Justice Department on election officials who persist in handing them out. Or he could go after Congress: If he’s serious about eliminating voting by mail, he might conclude that Article I, Section 4 isn’t much of an obstacle in an America where gutless, supine congressional Republicans have functionally dissolved their own branch of government to please him. If he demands that the House and Senate pass a bill prohibiting mail ballots and calls on John Thune to eliminate the filibuster toward that end, how confident should we be that Thune will say no?

 

I’m somewhat confident. But as the demagogic heat gets turned up on Truth Social and invertebrate senators turn jigglier, “somewhat” is as sure as I get.

 

Trump might go even further. The reason he’s pulling out the stops to avert a Democratic victory next fall isn’t to save face or to preserve the GOP’s legislative power; it’s to ensure that he spends all four years of his second term without a functioning Congress. And so, if Democrats win anyway, I can imagine him doing his best to salvage that ambition by declaring that he simply won’t recognize a new House majority that gained power by “cheating.” House Democrats can subpoena him and his aides, hold hearings on White House misconduct, and sanction him in every which way they can lawfully muster, including another impeachment—and he’ll just ignore them at every turn. Why, it would be immoral to reward a party that used fraud to win by cooperating with it.

 

The most fascist-y thing about him demanding that states run their elections according to his instructions, though, is that it’s the sort of precedent you wouldn’t dare risk setting if you intended to eventually cede executive power to the other party. After all, if President Donald Trump can ban mail-in ballots by royal decree, President Gavin Newsom could obviously mandate them via the same method. Presidential authority over state elections would also make it easier for a Democratic White House to rig the results nationally than it is in our current system, where authority is diffused across 50 jurisdictions. One would think a “rigged election” paranoiac like Trump would prefer the decentralized status quo for that reason alone.

 

He doesn’t prefer it, I think, because he doesn’t foresee his party ever relinquishing executive authority to Democrats. This is a guy who not only has merchandise already available promoting an unconstitutional run for president in 2028, but he has it on display at the White House and is showing it off to other world leaders. He half-joked, uncomfortably, with Volodomyr Zelensky this week about following Ukraine’s lead and canceling the next presidential election if the United States happens to find itself at war three years from now.

 

There will be no President Newsom, however American voters might feel about it, if Trump has any say in the matter. And if he succeeds in consolidating executive power over elections, he will have a say. A big one.

 

It’s not either/or.

 

So “fascist or stupid?” turns out to be a hard question to answer convincingly.

 

I’d argue that it’s a false choice. For years, the president’s critics have debated whether zombified conservatives-turned-Trumpists in right-wing media are sincere converts to populism or grifters saying what they need to say to maintain audience share and a luxe paycheck, but the probable truth is more slippery. They’re likely both. They converted insincerely for professional reasons, perhaps, but over time, the money and fame eased their misgivings and induced them to become true believers.

 

You’ve heard of “motivated reasoning”? Well, the MAGA propaganda machine supplies a lot of motivation to participants to reason in a certain way.

 

Trump’s approach to mail-in ballots might work similarly. He’s quite motivated to game next fall’s midterms, putting as many thumbs as he can muster on the scale to maximize the GOP’s chances of victory. And that motivation informs his reasoning: Whatever the Constitution may or may not say about the president’s power over elections, there’s no downside in forging ahead and daring a court somewhere to tell him no. The Constitution says a lot of things that he’s been allowed to ignore.

 

It’s not that he’s acting out of stupidity about Article I and federalism; it’s that they simply don’t matter politically. Outside of a courtroom, those concepts are barely relevant anymore. He doesn’t think about them because Americans have given him no reason to.

 

As for his strange hostility to mail-in ballots amid a Republican surge in low-propensity voters, that’s harder to explain as anything other than stupidity. But here’s a theory: It’s nostalgic in the same way that so much of Trump’s political program is nostalgic. The president’s most fervent belief is that America was better when he was younger—when museums didn’t scold you about slavery, when energy came out of the ground instead of the sky, when Alcatraz hosted prisoners instead of tourists, when Russian cities were named things like “Leningrad” instead of “St. Petersburg,” when vaccines took decades to develop instead of months. In Trump’s memory palace, American greatness ended in 1959.

 

So of course he’d also instinctively favor the old ways in which elections used to be held—paper ballots only, all cast in-person and never via those newfangled machines. Maybe he’ll succeed in taking us back to those primitive methods, the same way he’s taking us back on vaccination. And if he does, have no doubt: When he loses, he’ll still cry “rigged!”