The number of votes being investigated for fraud has surged this week — by 47 ballots.
Inquiries were revealed Thursday by the Justice Department, which said it was probing the fate of nine discarded mailed-in ballots in Pennsylvania, and the Republican attorney general in Texas, who unveiled indictments in a case of 38 people pretending to be disabled so they could vote absentee.
The probes show just how assiduously allies of President Trump are working to find and publicize cheating with mailed votes, a scheme the president maintains is so massive that it's about to rob him of an otherwise assured second term.
Trump on Thursday declined for a second straight day to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he's defeated, repeating his claims that easy mail voting is such a "whole big scam" that it will invalidate the election if he does not win. It is the most sustained assault on the bedrock of American democracy ever mounted by a president.
But the scattershot instances of suspected vote-stealing in recent years do not come remotely close to justifying such claims, which were further undercut Thursday when FBI Director Chrstoipher Wray told Congress flatly that the bureau has not detected any "coordinated national voter fraud effort."
The Pennsylvania and Texas examples don't amount to so much as a rounding error, even in close contests in either of those significant presidential battlegrounds.
It's also highly unusual to announce a partial set of facts at the early stages of a criminal inquiry, only to have to correct them later, as the top federal prosecutor in central Pennsylvania did Thursday — giving the impression a Trump political appointee was leveraging his law enforcement powers to help promote the president's case.
U.S. Attorney David Freed originally said officials in Wilkes-Barre appeared to have "discarded" nine mailed ballots, all for Trump and cast by military members, that had been "improperly opened" by Luzerne County clerks. (He later said seven votes were for the president and the other ballots were put back in their sleeves, contents unknown.)
State law says such envelopes can't be opened, or the signatures on them verified, before Election Day. But applications for absentee ballots get returned in envelopes very similar to those used to send in the votes themselves.
In his news releases, Freed said he was justified in releasing the information because of "the limited amount of time before the general election and the vital public importance of these issues."
The Justice Department's own guidelines call for something different. Criminal investigations of elections "must be conducted in a way that minimizes the likelihood that the investigation itself may become a factor in the election."
Although he got the details of both cases wrong, Trump mentioned the Pennsylvania instance in his remarks Thursday and also reports that three trays of first class mail, including some ballot envelopes, had been found this week in a ditch in rural northern Wisconsin.
He did not mention the felony indictment GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton had filed against Shannon Brown, a Democratic county commissioner in rural East Texas. Brown was charged with orchestrating a scheme two years ago to get 38 allies to falsely claim on their absentee ballot applications that they were disabled — one of the few available excuses to vote by mail in the state. (Brown ended up winning by five votes.)
Paxton has been leading the GOP effort, which has so far been sustained in a series of high-profile court cases, to keep the rules for mail voting as restrictive as ever — and Texas now stands as one of just five states that will require an excuse for a November absentee more explicit than fear of the coronavirus.
The charges, he said, are further evidence that "mail ballots are vulnerable to diversion, coercion and influence by organized vote harvesting schemes."
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.