Trump’s undermining of U.S. elections is not a simple partisan issue

It’s right there in his name: Sen. Mark Warner for months has been on a tear to warn Americans of President Trump’s designs to disrupt the midterm elections.

The Democrat from Virginia first got my attention in late March with a four-alarm op-ed in the New York Times. The sober, plugged-in Warner, the vice chair and a former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, began by noting that the United States has for a decade “rightly focused on shoring up our elections against foreign meddling” after Russia’s chicanery in the 2016 presidential race.

“But,” Warner added chillingly, “I fear that foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections. It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government.”

From Trump, that is. And the president’s dud of a prime-time speech last Thursday, mendaciously and baselessly calling U.S. elections “catastrophically short” of being safe from rigging, only confirmed Warner’s fears: that Trump is creating a pretext to usurp the states’ constitutional authority over midterm elections that are expected to go badly for his party.

And if Warner has fears, so should we all.

For days before Trump’s televised talk, in which he promised “really big news,”Warner prebutted the president’s expected points on social media. There is “no evidence of any successful interference in our voting systems,” he narrated in a video post. In another post on X, Warner wrote, “Trump is going to try and create a pretext for massive interference” this fall. “Buckle up. Follow the facts. Don’t let him stoke hysterics about an election that was audited, investigated, and fair.”

After the speech, Warner was quick with his rebuttal: “Well folks, as expected, Trump revealed essentially nothing new. His speech was just lies & long-debunked conspiracies about the 2020 election. This is all just a prelude to interfere in our midterms — don’t fall for it.”

“I think even the White House thought it was a flop,” Warner told me this week.

That doesn’t mean Warner is letting down his guard, or ceasing his warnings. Hardly. “Until there’s pushback, he’ll keep grabbing power,” he said when we spoke. “And if grabbing more power means interfering in the election, that may be what we’re looking at.”

Why pay attention to Warner? After a successful term as a moderate governor (in the process helping to turn Virginia blue), Warner was elected in 2008 to the first of three terms in the Senate and arrived boasting of being a “radical centrist.” He’s no bomb-thrower. Warner so resists partisanship that he once declined to head the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee.

And for three terms — Warner is up for a fourth term in November and the Cook Political Report rates his chances as “solid” — he’s forged working partnerships with Republican senators, including former Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, on national security and fiscal policy. Or he did, before Trump made such bipartisan relationships grounds for sacking in Republican primaries.

In the pre-Trump era, I covered Warner’s prolonged, ultimately unsuccessful struggles with Chambliss to sell a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan that would reduce the projected debt by $4 trillion over a decade. Then came Trump, who in his first term added more than twice that amount to the debt.

The combination of Trump’s autocratic outrages and a dearth of willing Republican partners has done what seemed impossible: radicalized Warner.

He told me his concerns about Trump took root last year, as the president purged intelligence and investigative officials simply for telling the truth. Like about Russia’s machinations to influence U.S. voters (in Trump’s favor) since 2016. Or about Trump’s maneuvering to overturn his 2020 defeat.

In January, when Trump was reminded during an interview with a group of New York Times reporters that in 2020 he’d threatened to use the National Guard to seize ballot boxes, the president blurted, “Well, I should have.” Later that month, his now-departed intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, accompanied the FBI on a raid to seize 2020 ballots and voting machine records in Fulton County, Ga., the heavily Democratic county that includes Atlanta — on Trump’s orders, she said.

Then in February, the Washington Post reported on a draft executive order that would have Trump cite foreign threats as the basis to declare a national security emergency and take over the midterm elections. It would require hand-counting paper ballots, re-registering voters with proof of citizenship, banning most mail ballots and authorizing federal agencies to identify ineligible voters.

By March, Warner had seen enough to write the op-ed that was his highest-profile heads-up to date about the president’s possible intentions. In it, he presciently described just what Trump would do in last week’s address regarding China: “selectively release fragments of existing intelligence collection, stripping out caveats and context in ways that create a distorted impression of a threat.”

It’s mind-blowing that the president who’s gutted the federal apparati for detecting foreign election-security threats would now be fishing for old threats to justify an election takeover. Or that he’d target China — where he visited just two months ago, toasted Xi Jinping as “my friend” and invited him to the White House in September — as the culprit. On Tuesday, Trump was dismissive when a reporter asked what consequences China might suffer: “It took place a long time ago. I think China’s maybe a little bit different today.”

Again, Warner shot back online: “Unbelievable — so Trump claims an election was stolen from him… now doesn’t seem to care? If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: all these claims of stolen elections are just a pretext to justify interference in the midterms.”

He takes heart that scores of civil society groups and “hoards” of lawyers are preparing for the worst. But, as Warner wrote in his op-ed, others in Congress, state and local governments, courts and the national security community must do their part. “Most of all, the American people must remain vigilant.”

We’ve been warned.

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