New Orleans What every business executive knows, but the President Trump has either forgotten or ignored, is that so-called “executive orders” are just a word salad on a sheet of processed tree bark, unless you follow through on the details. These aren’t small things. Checking with legal is important, so you know where you stand. You also have to make sure others are able and willing to implement the instructions. If not, it’s forgotten in a minute and placed in the circular file, or these days, simply deleted.
Trump in his rush to create some level of supreme powers as president, aided and abetted by his staff of ideologues and sycophants, is using executive orders tactically within his overall strategy. It’s more about “stop me, if you can.” It’s “let me see what I can get away with.” This is definitely a new way of looking at the office and the executive branch, and it’s scary.
Almost solely based on Trump’s perpetual sense of grievance and falsehoods about his own elections, the latest outrage, as he continues to refuse to accept his defeat in 2020 and pretends that he won a landslide in 2024, are his attempts to reshape and restrict voting. He now wants to demand that Americans would have to provide “proof of citizenship” in order to register to vote. He also presumes as a federal official that he can direct state and local election officials to record and verify such information, none of which he has the power to demand. Piling on to this mess, he tries to order that all of the votes be counted on election day.
A reality check is in order. There is almost no incidence of undocumented immigrant voting in US elections, despite huge efforts to root out this non-existent problem at the state and local level. This continues to be a fictional fix to something in truth, not broken. As for the ballot counts all being done on election day, Trump wants to pretend that mail ballots can all be received on election day, when many states use the date of the election as the postmarked proof that the ballot was timely marked. When the ballots are received, they are counted and included in the final tally. Trump, once again, is just throwing something up against the wall, and it won’t stick.
Whether we like it or not, states under the Constitution and long legislation and practice, run elections, not the federal government. For better or for worse, that’s why we have such a hodgepodge of laws covering elections, registration, list maintenance, purges, and more at the state and local level. Trump is just shouting in the wind, when we look at what actual power or authority he has here. Lawsuits will be filed, and they will win.
Sadly, some secretaries of state and election officials will see Trump’s toothless order as a suggestion for what outrage they might mimic to restrict and narrow the electorate for coming federal elections. That’s where the method in this madness is tragically revealed.