Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight.

By   Thom Hartmann

On Monday, (August 18, 2025) US President Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the chancellor of Germany and the prime minister of Great Britain—both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting—Trump said:

"Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We’re gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened."

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced over 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.

Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-bite TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.

Third, mail-in ballots—because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election—give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.

Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and underresourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150% longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200% longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself Monday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy,” Trump proclaimed. “If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: It’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress—not the president—overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Vladimir Putin, who reportedly told him that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing US election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, independents—exercise their right to vote.

But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: It’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: They will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: That’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy. 

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing LBJ’s peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act—which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts—teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

Riley Gaines has become the darling of the far-right by using transphobia before science to make bank from attacking the community.

By Hope Pisoni, Uncloseted Media

This story was originally published in Uncloseted Media, an LGBTQ-focused investigative news outlet.

At the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships, Riley Gaines’ and Lia Thomas’ teammates cheered from the sidelines as they watched the 200-yard freestyle. Gaines, the team captain swimming for the University of Kentucky, and Thomas, swimming for the University of Pennsylvania, tied for fifth place, both finishing the race in just under one minute and 44 seconds.

“We were all standing there cheering for [Gaines] on the podium and she just looked so pissed off,” says one of Gaines’ former teammates. “I was looking at my teammate and I was like, ‘Dude, this is the worst thing that could have happened."

Thomas was fresh off of becoming the first trans athlete to earn an NCAA Division I title and had become the target of controversy throughout the season, with organizations like Save Women’s Sports and Concerned Women of America using her success as a rallying cry against trans women’s participation in sports. Gaines’ teammate, who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about grad school applications, told Uncloseted Media that tensions had already been high prior to the competition but reached a boiling point when Gaines and Thomas tied.

“She, for months leading up to that, had this bias in her head, and I think that was the last straw that gave her the push to speak up about it,” says Gaines’ former teammate, adding that she could never have predicted that this would be the start of a lucrative career for her former captain.

Less than a week after the race, Gaines began skyrocketing to right-wing fame when she was profiled in an article by right-wing commentary website The Daily Wire, where she criticized the NCAA for awarding Thomas a trophy before her.

“The more I thought about it, the more it fired me up,” Gaines told the conservative media outlet founded by Ben Shapiro.

The next month, she would testify before the Kentucky senate in support of a bill that would ban trans women from women’s sports. By May 2023, she had appeared on Fox News 29 times and been hired as an official spokesperson for the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a far-right organization known for anti-trans activism.

Since the infamous race against Thomas, she’s sued the NCAA, headlined nationwide speaking tours and launched the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute. This month, Gaines appeared at the signing of Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans women from women’s sports, where he personally congratulated her for her activism and for being “at the forefront” of the issue.

As Gaines’ star has risen, her former teammate says it’s become too much to stomach. “I haven’t followed her, and I’ve tried to distance myself from it,” she says. “It’s just been insane how she has changed this narrative … into ‘trans people shouldn’t compete in sports."

Gaines’ meteoric rise reflects a strategy that far-right groups, including the anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), use to prop up young, primarily white, cisgender women and girls as figureheads in their movement to ban trans girls and women from sports.

While research surrounding trans women in sports is ongoing, Gaines and other right-wingers rarely cite it when pushing for laws that rollback trans rights. Instead, their rhetoric is fueled by transphobia and fearmongering about how trans girls and women are jeopardizing the safety of cis females.

This strategy seems to be working. Since 2020, 27 out of 50 states have banned trans students from competing on teams matching their gender identity.

“There’s a whole right-wing media machinery and money that started strategically using people like Riley Gaines to make these arguments around Title IX and [the idea] that trans athletes are ‘destroying’ women’s sports,” says Mia Fischer, a professor of communications and women & gender studies at University of Colorado Denver. “Anti-trans activism has made sports a key issue, and they’ve very effectively used it as a trojan horse to attack other trans rights.”

How sports became a target

Openly trans athletes are exceedingly rare, with fewer than ten competing in the NCAA, according to the association’s president. Despite this, leaked emails show that, as early as 2014, ADF was coordinating with the American College of Pediatricians—another anti-LGBTQ hate group—to produce pseudoscientific studies.

In one email, ADF requests a report that “make[s] the point that interpreting Title IX to include protections for ‘gender identity’ will harm girls by allowing boys to displace girls on competitive sports teams.” This argument would form the backbone of their legal and rhetorical strategy for pushing trans sports bans.

Multiple trans athletes told Uncloseted Media that their presence in sports was, for a long time, mostly irrelevant. But Fischer says that began to change in 2017 when two Connecticut trans girls drew controversy after multiple first- and second-place wins in the state’s high school track competitions, and some parents raised concerns about fairness.

ADF—a group that has advocated for conversion therapy and against marriage equality—jumped on this opportunity and helped the families of three cisgender Connecticut runners file a lawsuit in 2020, arguing that allowing trans girls to compete on girls’ sports teams violates Title IX. The plaintiffs in the ongoing lawsuit were quickly promoted by ADF and allied groups.

As with Gaines, they testified in favor of other states’ anti-trans legislation, published op-eds and appeared on Fox News. One plaintiff’s mother, who started a petition to change Connecticut’s policies around trans athletes, was featured on a panel with the Heritage Foundation—the organization that penned Project 2025—to discuss the importance of banning trans women from sports.

“That was a really scary time,” says Andraya Yearwood, one of the trans runners from Connecticut, adding that she received sustained harassment both online and from some parents. However, she said most teammates and competitors were supportive. “I knew people didn’t want me to run, but I didn’t know that it would reach such heights.”

Yearwood remembers online strangers telling her to quit running, calling her a cheater and sending her posts and videos that misgender her and call for her to be banned from her sport. At one track meet, she recalls hearing cheers from the crowd after she was removed from a race for a false start, and she says one woman verbally accosted her.

“I just stood there for a few seconds. I didn’t say anything,” Yearwood told Uncloseted Media. “I was too stunned to speak. Then I turned around and I kept walking. I just was like, ‘I’m not gonna pay you any mind. I have better things to worry about, like my race.’”

Riley Gaines’ rise to stardom

As ADF’s lawsuit moved through the courts, Gaines’ star rose. She successfully lobbied local governments for sports bans, was featured in campaign ads for Rand Paul and Ron DeSantis and landed a podcast called “Gaines for Girls” on Fox Nation. She also worked with International Chess Federation leadership to ensure trans women would be banned from their women’s events.

Gaines’ rhetoric wasn’t always so extreme. In her initial appearance in The Daily Wire, she consistently genders Lia Thomas correctly.

“I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career,” Gaines told The Daily Wire, “because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue.”

But as the far-right rewarded her, Gaines’ rhetoric became increasingly fueled by transphobia. Today, she misgenders trans people and laments watching Thomas “steal trophies from girls I’d known my whole life.”

“Lia Thomas is not a brave, courageous woman who EARNED a national title. He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman,” she tweeted in March 2023, almost exactly a year after her tying match.

This switch-up is not unique. Yearwood says prior to the Connecticut lawsuit, she had been friendly with Chelsea Mitchell, one of the plaintiffs. Weeks before the lawsuit was filed, Mitchell congratulated Yearwood in an Instagram message shared with Uncloseted Media.

“That really shocked me,” Yearwood says. “ [It] was a bit confusing.”

Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment.

“People become more ideologically indoctrinated,” says Fischer. “The influence of various anti-LGBTQ Christian conservative groups on these athletes becomes really clear, in that their views become more narrow, exclusionary, or even radical fundamentalist.”

There’s also a financial incentive for Gaines to lean into this rhetoric. Gaines was paid nearly $12,000 by Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign in 2023, and her center was awarded $20,000 for collaborating on a “Real Women of America” pinup calendar with Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer—which the founders describe as an “anti-woke” beer company.

Gaines has also participated in paid speaking engagements at over 50 college campuses, landed two separate book deals and has her own merch collection with the Leadership Institute, with “Save Women’s Sports” and “BOYcott” t-shirts selling for as much as $40.

“She’s developing her stance according to who’s supporting her,” says Gaines’ former teammate. “With her sponsorships and with the big people commenting saying ‘you’re doing great things,’ I think it was inevitable that it would have led to that.”

On Fox News, Gaines has even gone so far as to bully and misgender kids, referring to an eighth-grade trans girl as a “mediocre man.”

Later in 2022, Gaines became an official spokeswoman for the IWF, an organization founded in the 1990s by a group of conservative women who were working to defend then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas from allegations that he had persistently sexually harassed a former advisor. Over time, they grew into a broader conservative women’s group with the help of significant funding from right-wing donors. Recently, their primary focus has been anti-trans advocacy.

IWF is part of the Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition, a collection of organizations that sponsors Gaines’ “Take Back Title IX” college campus tours, where she gives speeches advocating against trans women in sports.

In one speech at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Gaines said that calling for trans women to be banned from women’s sports is “how anyone with any amount of brain activity would probably comprehend this information.”

The Leadership Institute and manipulating the narrative

In August 2023, Gaines launched the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute with the goal of “protecting women’s sports.” The Leadership Institute, a member of Project 2025’s advisory board and funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, is known for training conservatives to be effective activists and politicians. Notable alumni include Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence.

Last summer, the center launched an online training, where Gaines details how to use Title IX to “Defend Women’s Sports and Stand Against Gender Ideology.”

“Biological sex has been replaced in favor of transgenderism,” Gaines says in the video. “[People are] being silenced for believing in the biological reality that there are only two sexes.” Subsequent videos instruct viewers how Title IX can be used to “silence” or “censor” students who engage in harmful rhetoric, like misgendering or deadnaming trans folks, and how students can instead use it to push back against this “censorship.”

The center also has a roster of young female ambassadors who, like Gaines, have become influencers of the anti-trans movement. Among them are members of the Roanoke College Swim Team, who made headlines when they claimed they were pressured to accept a trans woman on their team. However, the College’s administration released a statement stating that the trans woman in question never joined the team and withdrew her request after receiving backlash.

Despite this, the team appeared on stage at one of Donald Trump’s final 2024 election campaign rallies, where the president praised them for their protest. “The brave members of the swim team stood up to the transgender fanatics,” Trump said.

Gaines herself also claims on her center’s website that she was forced to share a locker room with Thomas. “We weren’t even forewarned that we would be forced to undress in front of a 6’4” fully intact, 22-year-old male. As if that weren’t enough, we were effectively silenced by our universities with threats and intimidation.”

But Gaines’ former teammate says this is untrue. “NCAA gave us a heads-up that all the locker rooms were going to be gender-neutral, and there were three locker rooms that we could have used … So Riley’s villainizing Lia with ‘I was changing in the locker room when Lia walked in and stripped down,’ and I’m like, ‘Riley, we knew this was a possibility.’ Riley shaped the narrative in her way.”

Uncloseted Media reached out to Gaines via the Riley Gaines Center with an interview request and a list of questions but received no response.

Cherrypicking White cis women

“There’s clearly a lot of media training that these people have received,” says Fischer, noting that the right-wing’s selection of white, traditionally feminine girls and young women is likely intentional. “If we think about traditional gender norms, they fulfill all these signifiers that we traditionally associate with feminine white athletes. I think this is also why media then attaches to certain people easier than to others and is able to create this celebrity status around them.”

Yearwood believes that anti-Black racism was an underlying element to the backlash she received, with many attacking her by playing on existing stereotypes of Black women as more masculine in contrast to their white counterparts.

“Because a lot of black women in general are often hyper-masculinized in American culture, I think that also contributes to the scrutiny that we faced in high school,” says Yearwood. “They had really focused on our muscle definition as we were running, and some of the comments were comparing us to other famous black athletes like Lebron James."

Yearwood says most of the hate she has received has been from older people. She believes that is why there’s so much focus by the right wing to find people like Gaines who can persuade younger generations to oppose trans women competing in sports.

“It’s funny when grown adults target teenagers, so I don’t think that would gain as much traction,” says Yearwood.

As Gaines’ star continues to rise, Trump’s recent executive women's sports, order, which empowers federal agencies to enforce a trans-exclusionary definition of Title IX in any institution that receives federal funding, can now deny trans athletes all over the country the opportunity to compete in sports.

For Yearwood, the hate from the anti-trans movement and from influencers like Gaines was so intense that she chose not to continue running competitively in college.

“I spent months going back and forth about whether I wanted to do track, and after making the decision not to, it did feel like I was losing a part of me,” says Yearwood. “There’s still times that I do wish I could still run track, and still have that kind of camaraderie on a team.”

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