These states avoided ICE as Trump eyes a bigger prize

Last month it was Greenland. This month it’s Nevada’s election. Donald Trump’s always trying to grab something he has no right to grab.

One way Trump could help assure Republicans retain their grasp of both the House and Senate would be to do something about the cost of living.

But affordability obviously bores him.

So instead of focusing on that, Trump has been bloviating about how he wants to “nationalize the voting” and take charge of elections in multiple states.

“We should take over the voting in at least 15 places,” he said.

He hasn’t named all of them. But you know Nevada’s on his list.

It always is.

Trump began trying — by lying — to undermine democracy in Nevada and discredit the state’s election procedures (and workers) during the 2020 campaign, when it dawned on him that Joe Biden would beat him in Nevada, just as Hillary Clinton beat him in Nevada in 2016.

Trump’s been attacking Nevada voters and their elections ever since, most infamously by organizing an attempted smash and grab on Jan. 6, 2021. The criminal assault on the Capitol was an attack on democracy and the rights of voters in the entire nation. But the voters most directly violated by Trump’s insurrection were voters in Nevada and the six other states where Trump ordered fake electors to send fake certificates to Congress. It was the votes from those states that Trump tried to nullify.

Currently Nevada is one of the states Trump’s weaponized and paradoxically named Department of Justice is suing and badgering to obtain confidential data about voters. It’s part of Trump’s effort to intimidate officials into disenfranchising voters who might be deemed not reliably MAGA by Trump minions.

In the hands of the Trump administration, the data of course would also be bitterly twisted through lies and deceit into false allegations built around one of Trump’s favorite fictional characters, the mythical non-citizen voter.

In addition to whipping up fear and loathing among one part of America for the other, DOJ harassment of Nevada also is a malicious effort to throw more shade on an election system Trump has spent years trying — and lying —so hard to destroy.

In his bellowing this week about wanting to “nationalize” the elections, Trump is echoing a performance he gave for a few news cycles in August. Announcing he was going to get rid of mail ballots — a declaration he said was inspired by one of his flirty chats with Vladimir Putin, no less — Trump said on Truth Social:

“…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.”

Trump’s proclamation, rendered in his customary off-with-their-heads Queen-of-Hearts dramatics, prompted state election officials, including Nevada’s, to point out that the Constitution of the United States explicitly empowers states to administer elections.

You might expect a governor to be protective of rights authorized to states in the Constitution — as a former Nevada Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, was this week.

“Nevada has the capability and experience to conduct elections in every county, and I trust our state is best equipped to collect ballots, count votes and certify our elections,” Sandoval said, in his capacity as co-chair of Democracy Defense Project in Nevada.

Current Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, by contrast, said nothing.

To be fair, for Lombardo, when it comes to protecting his state from Trump, saying nothing might be an improvement.

During Trump’s holy war against mail ballots last summer, in which Trump was declaring states “must do” whatever he says, Lombardo gushed “I would — of course — support President Trump’s efforts to end universal mail-in voting.”

“Ooh, but Lombardo must be Trump-whispering and that’s the only reason ICE isn’t going bonkers in Nevada like it has been in Minnesota,” is a thing people seem to think.

Maybe so, maybe no.

It’s worth noting there has also been no Minnesota-style ICE “surge” in Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina. All are battleground states like Nevada, some with substantial immigrant populations, none with a Republican governor.

Also worth noting: though the first year of Trump’s second term seems to have been very, very long, he’s got three more.

And yet another thing worth noting is a statement Tuesday by Steve Bannon, a member of Trump’s shadow cabinet of right-wing media personalities who seem to have as much sway with the president as his official cabinet of, well, right-wing media personalities:

“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.”

Trump’s role models are not just autocratic kleptocrats (or kleptocratic autocrats) but mob bosses, so he threatened to take Greenland “the easy way” or “the hard way.”

Greenland, Denmark, and the other NATO nations stood up to him, and he declared a phony victory and backed off.

Standing up to Trump can work, as Europe, China, Brazil, the Wall Street Journal, Jerome Powell, Harvard, and Minnesota, to name a few, have demonstrated.

Sucking up to Trump is pointless, because he can’t be trusted.

Not only is there no guarantee that sucking up to Trump works. It’s also unforgivable public policy.

Whatever consideration Trump gives to international relations, tariffs, interest rates, snooty universities, or whatever other shiny object momentarily attracts his diminishing faculties, the central issue that has always been dearest in his heart — a priority both overriding and underlying the actions and edicts of His Malevolence — is democracy’s destruction.

If he’s allowed to accomplish that, then destroying other things — Congress, the courts, the Constitution, the press, your freedom, your rights, your savings, your safety — and attaining supreme authority over the U.S. (or what’s left of it) comes easy.

• Hugh Jackson is editor of the Nevada Current, part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.