'Doesn’t bode well': MSNBC's Rachel Maddow exposes Trump's new scheme to rig midterms
President Donald Trump appears to be making moves to corrupt next year's midterm elections to benefit the Republican Party, according to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
The president demanded that Republicans draw new congressional districts for Texas to lock in GOP control of Congress, and the White House has pushed legislators to do the same in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire and South Carolina, but those aren't the only ways he intends to rig the vote, Maddow said.
"Trump also appears to be trying to establish a pretext for nullifying or delaying the midterm elections everywhere, demanding a new census and claiming the old one shouldn’t count," Maddow wrote.
Massive logistical hurdles would prevent a new census count from being conducted and counted before voting begins next year, and Maddow argued that Trump never intended for one to take place despite calling for a new one at mid-decade.
"The census is how we get congressional districts," she wrote. "If Trump can nullify the existing census by, for example, blaming the counting of immigrants or some other factor, he can lay the groundwork to claim that all the existing congressional districts in the country are somehow wrong and can’t be used — and therefore, we can’t have congressional elections using the districts we now have."
The president is trying another move that he might have learned from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump says told him that no other countries allowed mail-in voting. On Monday, he declared that he would sign an executive order banning the practice.
"Now, I would caution you again — as always — to watch what he actually does here and not just what he says he is going to do," Maddow wrote. "But if Trump is taking tactical advice from Putin about how to hold something that looks like an election but is not actually an election, that doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy."
