March 31st 2020

By Laura Clawson

Daily Kos

Donald Trump called in to Fox & Friends Monday morning and openly admitted that if more people vote, Republicans will lose. Democrats are pushing for vote by mail so that people don’t have to risk coronavirus to exercise their right to vote. Asked about “special interest projects” added to coronavirus relief bills, that is right where Trump’s mind went.

“The things they had in there were crazy,” he said. “They had levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” You might think it’s amazing to hear a politician in a democracy saying that democracy is bad, but Trump joins a long line of Republicans saying that too much voting is bad.

Rep. Thomas Massie objected to the same provision in coronavirus response, tweeting that “Universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it.” Because apparently our republic as we know it is dependent on it being easier for rich white people to vote.

In 2018, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith "joked" about voting at colleges, saying, “there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”

In 2019, House Democrats introduced a bill making Election Day a holiday for federal workers and “provid[ing] election administration assistance,” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sneered that it was a “power grab” by Democrats. Because, again, nonpartisan efforts to make it easier to vote scare the crap out of Republicans.

But you can also go back to the 1970s, as Rick Perlstein does, when President Jimmy Carter proposed voting reforms from same-day voter registration to abolishing the Electoral College and Republicans rose up in outrage, with one influential columnist calling it a plan to “blow the Republican Party sky high.”

You can look at all the times over the past decade that Republicans have acknowledged that the point of voter ID laws is to suppress voting by people of color and younger people—because they might vote for Democrats.

And you can go back to where we started, with Donald Trump referring to “levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Republicans depend on people not voting because they can’t win otherwise.

Posted with permission