worse

Hello and happy Thursday. I’m Times columnist Anita Chabria, filling in for Washington bureau chief Michael Wilner. Today we are talking about circling the drain, and whether its possible to escape the flush after the swirl has started.

Yes, I’m talking about President Trump’s latest latest grab at the levers of power, and whether it will pull us all down. Trump floated the existentially disturbing idea recently that the federal government should “take over” elections.

“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said Monday on a podcast, making no attempt to keep election integrity nonpartisan.

This came shortly after the federal government raided a Georgia election office, still doggedly pursuing the very fake conspiracy that the 2020 vote was rigged against Trump. Lurking in the background of photos of that abuse of power was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a longtime peddler of conspiracy theories including that Ukraine housed secret U.S. biolabs.

It’s not just possible but likely that Gabbard will find “evidence” of fraud in Georgia because she has been claiming election interference since at least 2016 and reality has seemingly never been an impediment to her beliefs.

So some sort of report or “proof” probably will appear in coming months that Trump was right all along and that Democrats have tricked us all by stealing votes across the country.

That will be the basis for Trump to demand Congress “secure” the midterm election, and we all know how good they are at standing up to him.

But before we go there, let’s do a quick refresher on how Democrats supposedly steal elections, because that’s at the heart of what comes next.

It’s the immigrants, stupid

Trump (drawing from preexisting conspiracy theories promoted by many folks he has now placed in powerful positions) blames undocumented immigrants for his loss in 2020.

Under a long-running conservative election fraud hoax, Democrats allegedly made some sort of secret deal to allow Black and brown immigrants to illegally enter the country, if they would then promise to illegally vote en masse for Democrats.

“If we don’t get them out, Republicans will never win another election,” Trump said on that same podcast. “These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally, and it is amazing that the Republicans are not tougher on it.”

This narrative has been proven false literally dozens if not hundreds of times in courts across the country, and by the rational minds of those who understand how impossible it would be for a conspiracy of this magnitude and complexity to go undetected — much less actually work.

Long before Harmeet Dhillon, the San Francisco Bay Area lawyer now demanding voter data as head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, used her official power to pursue this false conspiracy, she spent years upon years filing lawsuits and doing media appearances making the same claims.

And time and again, she and others were swatted down by courts (and common sense and evidence) because illegal immigrants working in collusion with Democrats to steal the vote is not a real thing.

But now election deniers are in power, and the gravitational pull away from truth is accelerating. Conspiracy is reality as we get closer to the ballot box.

ICE them out

And if immigrants indeed are stealing elections in between raping our women and eating cats and dogs, there is an answer: ICE.

Who better to secure ballot boxes than a masked, terrifyingly unaccountable armed federal force of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that maybe answers only to Corey Lewandowski (the shadowy political operative always at Kristi Noem’s side) and Stephen Miller?

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that Kavanaugh stops — basically stopping folks for living while brown or Black — are legal, these agents have probable cause galore. Add to that a new, legally unfounded directive that they can detain folks at will, without a warrant, and you have the perfect force to suppress an election.

Imagine if on election day, ICE roams the street in Democratic-leaning, nonwhite neighborhoods, stopping and even detaining folks as they go to polls. Demanding papers, dragging away dissenters.

“Your damn right,” Trump hanger-oner Steve Bannon said recently, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Would you go to the polls in that scenario? Would you allow your 18-year-old to go or your elderly parent? I’d think twice, even as crucial as this vote is.

And here’s a bit of outrage you can aim at Democrats: Congressional leadership considered including a ban on ICE at polling places as part of their proposed deal to keep government funded — but didn’t. Once again, for those in the back, Democrats could have tried to stop this, but chose not to.

But wait! That’s not all!

Why can’t we just mail in our ballots, you ask. Well, that would be because changes by Trump to the U.S. Postal Service, and how ballots may be counted, are going to make it harder to ensure that mail-in ballots are received and counted as they traditionally have been handled. So mailing your ballot may work out fine, or may not.

And there you have it, that’s how a free and fair democracy spins into the vortex of authoritarianism, where elections are held, ballots are counted, but reality is lost.

You are antigravity

But folks, we are not there yet. Today is not that day!

There are things you can do, aside from peacefully protesting. People can start to make sure that their identification is in order (as Orwellian as that sounds) and help others to do so as well.

It’s likely that in some places at least, voter identification laws will make it harder to cast a ballot, and people will need to start getting birth certificates, Social Security cards or other paperwork now in order to comply with those rules. Ask who in your community needs that kind of help and how you can provide it.

People are going to need ways to vote in person and support doing it. If you are an employer, would you consider giving folks time off to vote, since poll lines may be long? Would you sign up to help those without transportation get to polls? Would you help with voter registration drives to get people signed up to vote?

And you can be certain that election conspiracy believers will be observing the vote, as they always do. Can you train now to be a responsible and fair poll watcher, to ensure there is balance and fairness in these observations?

The one thing we can’t do is believe Trump is unstoppable, that the point of no return has already passed, and democracy is flowing out the sewer pipes into the sea. In fact, we have 271 days to reverse this.

It will take mass participation on multiple levels — but it can be done.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Supreme Court, with no dissents, rejects GOP challenge to California’s new election map
The deep dive: Fulton County in Georgia Challenges the F.B.I.’s Seizure of 2020 Ballots
The L.A. Times Special: California doctor sent abortion pills to Texas woman. Under a new law, her boyfriend is suing

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. Jeff Bezos Wednesday gutted his newspaper, the Washington Post. Its motto is “Democracy dies in darkness,” but also, democracy dies in layoffs by billionaires who can afford to send their wives into space for fun, but don’t want to pay for journalism that criticizes a dear leader.

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