Alarm bells are ringing
Trump wants to undermine US elections
02/06/2026 – 05:24 amReading time: 3 minutes
Donald Trump announces that he will take control of the elections in some areas of the USA. Lawyers are sounding the alarm. But a law could come to the president’s aid.
This week, US President Donald Trump had a rare moment of truth. He needs election victories for his “ego,” said the 79-year-old on Thursday at a “National Prayer Breakfast” in Washington. Shortly before, he had called on his Republican Party to undermine the electoral system guaranteed by the US Constitution. Apparently to save him a defeat in the midterm elections for Congress in November, which according to polls is imminent.
Trump’s statements in the podcast of former FBI deputy chief Dan Bongino, an ultra-right activist, made waves. “The Republicans should nationalize the vote” and thus “take control,” said Trump. This is necessary in at least 15 places, he emphasized, without naming them.
In an interview with NBC on Wednesday, Trump followed up. “There are some areas of our country that are extremely corrupt,” criticized the president, naming the Democratic-run cities of Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta. If elections “cannot be conducted properly and on time, then something else must happen,” he threatened.
“Nationalize” elections? Alarm bells rang among constitutional lawyers. “That’s not up for debate,” says legal expert Justin Levitt from Loyola Law School. The US Constitution clearly states that the 50 states organize elections. Given the size of the United States, this is important for the separation of powers and preventing fraud, emphasizes Levitt, who worked for the administrations of Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
However, according to Article 1.4 of the Constitution, Congress has the right to issue rules for elections. Trump didn’t mean anything else, said his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
This is contradicted by the fact that Trump repeatedly claims, untruthfully, that the election was “stolen” from him after his first term in office in 2020. In his speech at the “Prayer Breakfast,” Trump also accused the Democrats of “rigging” the vote in favor of their candidate Joe Biden. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he threatened that those responsible would soon be “prosecuted under criminal law.”
On January 28, the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots and other materials in the state of Georgia. The aim of the investigation: to question Trump’s election defeat in the southern state in the 2020 election.
At the same time, Trump repeatedly claims that states governed by Democrats – including California and New York – allow masses of undocumented immigrants to vote in order to secure votes for “left-wing” candidates. There is no evidence of this, but that is also behind Trump’s mass deportations.
The Democrats, for their part, are blocking a Republican bill in the US Senate that would in future allow voters to prove their identity using photo ID in order to prevent fraud. That sounds sensible and has long been practice in Germany and many other countries. According to US civil rights activists, this “Save Act” would lead to the exclusion of numerous voters – especially those who are traditionally considered core voters of the Democrats.
