President Trump's increasingly hyperbolic attacks on voting by mail, amplified by Attorney General William Barr and the Republican National Committee, have triggered alarms that the country is heading toward another contested election.
Trump appears to be gearing up to cast doubt on an outcome that doesn't go his way. Primaries marred by hours-long lines, voting machine malfunctions and controversies over absentee ballots have many bracing for a meltdown starting Election Day. A much bigger surge of mailed-in votes in November virtually guarantees the results won't be known for days, setting the stage for a crisis in voter confidence if the results are close enough to be challenged, as happened in 2000.
Yet for all that, voting rights advocates mobilizing to secure the election and neutralize Trump's divisive voting rhetoric have surprising and influential allies in their corner: many leading Republicans.
GOP governors, Republican election officials and prominent conservatives are increasingly pushing to expand voting by mail. They're also forcefully rejecting Trump's baseless claimsthe practice is "corrupt" because it invites fraud and foreign tampering — and helps Democrats, to boot.
"I think it's very sad and very disappointing that with almost five months to go, the president seems to [want to] try to delegitimize the Nov. 3 election," former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican, told NPR after Trump's recent escalation of attacks on mail-in voting. A former Homeland Security secretary, Ridge co-chairs a new nonpartisan group, VoteSafe, formed this spring to push to expand mail-in voting and assure safe in-person voting during this pandemic-plagued election.
When the Republican National Committee recently released an error-riddled adthat suggested without evidence that voting by mail is "rigged up" to "churn out" ballots for voters with no eligibility or signature requirements, former Republican Rep. Zach Wamp of Tennessee didn't hold back.
"Shame on you!" Wamp tweeted at RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. "I've been a GOP activist at every level for 40 years. This is bull crap +our party deserves better."
Wamp starred in his own adrecently as part of a $750,000 "Making Voting Safe" campaign to urge lawmakers on Capitol Hill, particularly Senate Republicans, to increase funding for election administration during the pandemic. Congress has granted the states $400 million so far. The House has voted to allocate $3.6 billion more as part of its latest, $3 trillion coronavirus economic recovery package, but the Senate will not move to negotiate a much-less-expensive alternative until late this month.
"Many Republican governors are expanding absentee voting options, and they need Congress's help," Wamp says in the ad, paid for by Issue One Action. Wamp co-chairs Issue One's bipartisan ReFormers Caucus of former members of Congress and administration officials promoting fixes to the political system. (The advocacy group operates The Fulcrum but has no say in its journalism.)
The Republican governors of Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Ohio have all encouraged major mail-in voting expansions in response to the pandemic.
Absentee voting has been around since the Civil War and has gained traction recently amid broad bipartisan support. Conservative Utah is one of five states to conduct its election entirely by mail. More than half the states already allow "no excuse" absentee voting, and about half of voters have cast ballots by mail this primary season, compared with 25 percent in 2018.
Absentee voting "comports with conservative principles," argues a recent white paper released by the R Street Institute, a generally right-leaning think tank
In "The Conservative Case for Expanded Access to Absentee Ballots," R Street scholars argue that voting absentee is partisan-neutral, cost-effective, secure, popular and inclusive of voters who are elderly and disabled. More Republicans are speaking out to defend mail-in voting in part out of self-preservation. Notes Matt Baca, director of VoteSafe: "The president is scaring his own voters away from an opportunity to cast their own ballot."
There is still plenty of partisan disagreement over mail-in voting, of course. While most Americans support giving voters the option to vote by mail, enthusiasm is stronger among Democrats, who have also been less likely than Republicans to vote in person during this year's primaries.
After Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate mailed absentee ballot request forms to all registered voters ahead of the June legislative and congressional primaries, his fellow Republicans in charge of the Legislature stepped in in to prevent a similar mailing for the general election. And in battleground Michigan, a group of Trump backers staged a letter-burning to protest the state sending all 7.7 million registered voters an application to vote absentee in November
Partisan splits in voter behavior may help fuel conspiracy theories in a close election, prominent election law scholar Richard Hasen has warned. After Pennsylvania's primary a month ago featured more Democrats voting by mail, and more Republicans voting in person, Hasen noted on his ElectionLawBlog: "If this pattern holds for November and nationwide, it means that Trump could be leading in places on election night only to have the outcome change as absentee ballots are counted in coming days."
Nevertheless, voter enthusiasm for voting by mail is unlikely to disappear after the pandemic.
The recent attacks on mail-in voting "are very problematic and destructive with regard to voter confidence," acknowledges Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute. "Election administration must be free from partisan politics."
But she adds that voters from both parties have made their preferences clear: "I do think that this has fundamentally shifted the way that Americans are going to vote going forward." Indeed, Trump's own actions may speak louder than his words — he himself voted by mail in the recent primary.
Carney is a contributing writer.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.