Ben-Yehuda is president and CEO of the Truman National Security Project, a progressive defense and foreign policy think tank, and the allied Truman Center for National Policy.
The United States has a long history of voting during periods of intense conflict and division. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton devised the absentee voting system to hold elections during the Civil War and to ensure soldiers on the front lines could exercise their right to vote.
Today, you might say, it's time to vote like it's 1864.
Last week, President Trump suggested on Twitter that the national election be delayed beyond Nov. 3. His supposed reason: a fear of fraud. Let's be clear about three things: First, The president of the United States does not have the authority to change the date of the election. That is a date set by Congress. Even Republican lawmakers have distanced themselves from the remark. Second, fraud associated with mail-in ballots is extremely low. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank has conceded this point. Third, the president is spreading disinformation to undermine trust in the democratic process.
Record numbers of Americans will turn to vote-by-mail options this year and there's much work to be done to ensure full enfranchisement. But the purpose of Trump's tweet is to cast doubt, distract and lay down rhetorical track in an effort to discredit the election and its outcome.
Consider the timing. His statement came on the heels of the country passing 150,000 deaths from Covid-19 — the highest number in the world. It was posted just minutes after the Commerce Department announced the national economy in the second quarter contracted more than at any time on record. And he tweeted just as 19 polls in swing states were released — every one of them showing former Vice President Joe Biden in the lead.
Trump is on the ropes and he knows it. And manufacturing controversy in such moments is his go-to tactic — as true today as it has been over these past weeks, when he deployed federal law enforcement to combat a threat in Portland, Ore., that did not exist.
Ultimately, however, the president's stated intentions themselves present a very real threat. These are well-worn tactics straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Indeed, the last year has brought a steady trickle of democracy-erosion, in which Trump has followed the well-worn path of authoritarian demagogues.
He has sowed doubt about the legitimacy of future elections; predicted election fraud; questioned the reliability of election procedures (in this case, absentee ballots, whose reliability is at least as good as in-person voting); suggested he might not leave even if voted out of office; invented domestic enemies whose defeat requires the aggrandizement of his own power — and, not coincidentally, the preparation of a domestic security force loyal to him; trampled local authority; and telegraphed to anyone familiar with the pattern that he is happy to gut the democratic process to preserve his position.
We cannot doubt that, given the opportunity, the president would follow further in the footsteps of those authoritarian strongmen — led by Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hungary's Viktor Orbán and Russia's Vladimir Putin — whom he has so publicly admired.
There is compelling evidence he might get that chance: Absentee ballots could take weeks to count after Election Day, offering ample space for accusations of "election rigging" as Americans' expectations of a rapid resolution are dashed. States might fail to certify their members of the Electoral College for so long that the election is ultimately decided by Congress rather than with voters. Federal law enforcement has threatened to send "monitors" around the country who might discourage voting, and local militias have threatened to do the same. And foreign governments, as well as malicious domestic actors, continue to attack our democracy without fear of reprisal.
In short, we face the greatest credible threat to a national election in our lifetimes. The chief architect of that instability and corruption: our own president.
The late great John Lewis told us, "Democracy is not a state. It is an act." This election's credibility will be bolstered in part by high levels of voters acting — by turning out in big enough numbers to produce a margin of victory too big to credibly challenge.
But we need to do more than vote. We need to vote now — to help reduce the flood of ballots to be counted in November and ease the burden on local election officials. Go to vote.org to see if your registration is current and request an absentee ballot. It's especially important for the 3 million eligible voters who live overseas and know all too well the implications of Trump's withdrawal from the world — but who vote at shockingly low levels, with just a 7 percent turnout two years ago. They should go to fvap.org to request an absentee ballot today.
But don't stop there. Help family and friends do the same. If you're healthy and able, sign up to work at your local polling location. The majority of poll workers are older than 60 and more susceptible to dire outcomes after catching Covid-19, meaning our polls are likely to be more under-resourced than usual.
Trump can't delay the election, but he can derail it. Voting early is the best thing to do to keep our election on track.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.