President Donald Trump is moving systematically to change the rules governing American elections — and creating a lose-lose situation for democracy in the process.

If he succeeds in changing election rules, he could tilt the playing field enough that the GOP maintains control of Congress regardless of whether most voters want that outcome. If the courts stop him, he will have more ammunition to claim that Democratic victories relied on fraud — and to pressure GOP officials in the states and Congress to throw out those results.

The magnitude of the gathering risk goes far beyond his pressure on Republican states to gerrymander new Congressional districts, or even his repeated threats to ban mail voting. Those threats against mail voting exceed his legal authority so obviously that election law experts agree there’s virtually no chance courts would uphold such an effort.

As a result, there’s a natural tendency to treat Trump’s fulminations as empty bluster. But that would be dangerous. If anything, the possibility that he could somehow prevent Americans from voting by mail is less ominous than the deeper meaning in his tirades: that he wants to seize centralized control over election administration from the 50 states.

Should Trump try to bar mail voting through unilateral executive action, it would run head-on into the Constitution’s elections clause. That clause gives states the authority to set “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” while reserving authority to Congress to supersede the states’ decisions.(1)

In the elections clause, “Who is not mentioned as having any power over federal elections? It’s the president,” Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School, told me. “And that’s for a reason: because we want to share power in our system and we don’t want the president to have authority in this situation.”

That’s why the most dangerous element of Trump’s recent social media diatribes about voting is not a specific threat, such as ending vote-by-mail, but his broad assertion of untrammeled authority over how elections are run. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote on Aug. 18. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President … tells them.” That claim inverts the election clause’s plain language.

“He doesn’t have the constitutional power to take over and run elections,” Benjamin Ginsberg, the former general counsel for the Republican National Committee, told me. “But what he can do is continue to try to delegitimize the election system so he can make up his own results.”

Threatening vote-by-mail is just one small piece of a much broader attempt to seize power over election administration from the states. In a comprehensive recent report, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law catalogued an array of aggressive federal actions, including: making unprecedented demands for access to state voter files; issuing an executive order (now blocked by lower courts) demanding that states require proof of citizenship when registering voters; establishing special units in the Justice Department and US attorney offices to combat “election fraud” and prosecute local election officials if they resist changes the administration is seeking; and supporting efforts from conservative groups to require voter purges in Democratic-leaning and swing states.

Wendy Weiser, the Brennan Center’s vice president for democracy, said debating whether any one tactic is appropriate or legal risks obscuring the larger danger. “If they assert this power (over election administration) there are myriad tools that they are going to use to try to target voters, to interfere in elections, and to intimidate public officials, to achieve the outcome they want,” she said. “No one tool stands out as the most important to me. Every breach opens up the door to greater abuse.”

Even darker possibilities loom. California Governor Gavin Newsom has predicted that Trump will seek to intimidate voters by deploying federal immigration and perhaps military forces into Democratic cities around Election Day next year. Many of the election law experts I spoke with worry that Trump’s escalating threats to send the National Guard into blue cities to combat crime are a dress rehearsal for occupying those cities during the 2026 election, something that could discourage voters from turning out.

The other prong of Trump’s heads-I-win, tails-you-lose vision would kick in after Election Day. Just as he did in 2020 — and was preparing to do if he lost in 2024 — Trump also appears to be laying the groundwork for challenging Democratic victories in 2026 through his unrelenting (and unfounded) accusations that elections in blue jurisdictions are riddled with fraud.

On paper, the safeguards against unfairly invalidating a Congressional victory are substantial. But Trump has “shown he can just make an outrageous allegation that’s not true and move the machinery of government from there,” said Ginsberg, who is now a visiting fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution’s Restoring American Institutions project. Groups that work on election integrity tell me they consider it inevitable they will be in court after the 2026 election defending results Trump or his state allies are trying to disqualify.

The 2020 election survived Trump’s efforts to overturn it largely because enough Republican officials, from county clerks to his own attorney general, stood firm against his baseless demands. Watching how GOP officials at all levels have bowed to Trump in his second term, no one can have much confidence they would prove as resolute in 2026 — or 2028.

(1) Trump has also suggested he will press Congress to ban mail voting nationwide, which would be within Congress’ authority, but such legislation has no chance of overcoming a Senate filibuster.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for The Atlantic, The National Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He has won multiple professional awards and is the author or editor of seven books.

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