US president Donald Trump called in a new interview for the Republican Party to “nationalise” voting in the United States, an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.
During an extended monologue about immigration on a podcast released by Dan Bongino, his former deputy FBI director, Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalise the voting.”
Under the US constitution, elections are governed primarily by state law, leading to a decentralised process in which voting is administered by county and municipal officials in thousands of precincts across the country.
Trump, however, has long been fixated on the false claims that US elections are rife with fraud and that Democrats are perpetrating a vast conspiracy to have immigrants lacking permanent legal status vote and lift the party’s turnout.
Trump’s remarkable call for a political party to seize the mechanisms of voting follows a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections, as he and his allies continue to make false claims about his 2020 defeat.
Last week, FBI agents seized ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election centre in Fulton County, Georgia, where his allies have for years pursued false claims of election fraud.
Trump reportedly spoke on the phone to the FBI agents involved in the Fulton County raid, praising and thanking them.
The US justice department, which has been newly politicised under Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file.
In March, Trump signed an executive order that tried to make significant changes to the electoral process, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship and demanding that all mail ballots be received by the time polls close on election day.
But that effort has largely been rebuffed by courts.
On social media, Trump has pushed for even more drastic changes. In August, he wrote that he wanted to end the use of mail-in ballots and potentially the use of voting machines.
The president’s claims of election fraud have been debunked over and over, by both independent reviews and Republican officials. A review of the 2024 election by the Trump administration that began last year had found little evidence of widespread voting fraud by noncitizens as of last month.
Trump’s escalated remarks about elections come at a moment when Democrats have outperformed the GOP in a series of contests. New Jersey and Virginia elected Democratic governors in landslides in November, and on Saturday, a Democrat won a special election for a Texas state senate seat by 14 percentage points in a district Trump had carried by 17 points in 2024, an enormous swing.
Sensing that Republicans were vulnerable to the traditional midterm backlash against the party in power, Trump last year kick-started an extraordinary effort to gerrymander congressional maps to give his party an edge. The push, which started in Texas but has since expanded to both Democratic- and Republican-controlled states, became a central part of the president’s midterm strategy.
Trump has made little secret of his interest in expanding the federal government’s role in administering American elections. Last month, he told the New York Times that he regretted not dispatching the national guard to seize voting machinery after the 2020 election.
During his interview with Bongino, Trump tied his desire for partisan control of voting mechanisms to his administration’s agenda to find and deport immigrants lacking permanent legal status from American cities.
“If Republicans don’t get them out, you will never win another election as a Republican,” he said, referring to immigrants living in the country illegally. “It’s crazy how you can get these people to vote. If we don’t get them out, look, Republicans will never win another election.”
There is no evidence that a significant number of noncitizens have voted in any American election. A 2024 audit by Georgia’s secretary of state found that just 20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote in Georgia were not citizens, and only nine had ever voted.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
