Why Trump Issued Executive Orders on Voting

So he could have something to lie about later

A short take. President Trump has issued Executive Orders restricting mail-in ballots and requiring voter ID in elections. I haven’t read the orders; they are beyond his authority, so the details don’t matter. What matters is not what’s in the orders but, given that they have no legal effect, why they were issued. The answer is here in my subtly-name post “I Hate Mail-in Voting.” The subtitle for that article is this:

The test of an electoral system is whether it can credibly be lied about.

Trump has issued these executive orders so that he can claim that elections not run in accordance with them are “rigged,” that they are somehow invalid, that his party still controls the House after the midterms, and that its candidate won the presidential election in 2028, whatever the outcome reported on the fake news. I hate mail-in voting because Trump can issue an executive order purporting to ban it and lie about the effect of ignoring that order only if mail-in voting exists. Trump says mail-in voting is bad not because he believes it is bad — any correspondence between what Trump says and what Trump believes is always coincidental — but because his voters can be made to believe it is bad. And that is…