On a sweltering Monday in August 2025, President Donald Trump announced his intention to sign an executive order that would eliminate mail-in ballots and end the use of what he called "Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES." The announcement, made via Truth Social and echoed in interviews with Fox News, immediately sent shockwaves through the American political landscape and reignited fierce debates about election integrity, voter access, and foreign interference.
According to POLITICO, Trump’s pronouncement came just days after a high-profile meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. In a subsequent interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump praised Putin and repeated the Russian leader’s debunked assertion that the 2020 U.S. election was “rigged” due to mail-in voting. Trump told Hannity, “He said: ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’” Trump further claimed that Putin told him, “You won that election by so much.”
Trump’s alignment with Putin’s rhetoric did not go unnoticed. A Reuters poll released on August 20, 2025, found the president’s approval rating had dropped to a new low of 40 percent, with 54 percent of Americans saying Trump is too closely aligned with the Russian leader. According to Reuters, this growing sense of unease among the public is fueled partly by Trump’s posture on Russia and Ukraine, as well as his repeated attacks on the legitimacy of American elections.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, lashed out at the media for what she described as a failure to acknowledge Trump’s “world-historical peacemaking efforts” and “smashing successes” in Russia-Ukraine talks—claims that, as Reuters and POLITICO both point out, have no basis in fact. Leavitt went so far as to suggest that European leaders had rushed to Washington, D.C. to prevent the U.S. from selling out Ukraine to Putin, a narrative international relations expert Nicholas Grossman described as “wildly absurd.” Grossman told Reuters that these spins and the visible anxiety among European leaders reflect “an unnerving combination of Trumpian megalomania, his genuine desire for a future world marked by a weak Western alliance and strong autocracies, and his utter indifference to the U.S. public’s apparent rejection of that vision.”
Trump’s latest move to roll back mail-in voting has alarmed election officials and security experts alike. As POLITICO reports, the president’s plan would force the U.S. to either hand-count millions of ballots or implement online voting—both options fraught with risks. Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Village at DEF CON, warned, “There is no feasible way to hand count U.S. general elections. Humans are slow and error-prone and also sometimes dishonest. … You would need to take a significant part of the whole labor force and dedicate those to election work for weeks.”
Representative Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Administration Committee, echoed these concerns, stating that hand counting ballots “is an open invitation to being able to mess with the results.” The logistical nightmare of hand-counting, coupled with the security vulnerabilities of online voting, could open new doors for foreign interference—especially from Russia, which has a well-documented history of meddling in U.S. and European elections. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and Moscow has been accused of similar efforts in Romania, Moldova, and Georgia in recent years.
These fears are compounded by recent actions taken by the Trump administration to weaken the nation’s election security apparatus. As POLITICO details, the administration froze initiatives at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that were designed to secure votes and counter misinformation. In February, the FBI team responsible for responding to foreign election interference was disbanded. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold did not mince words: “Trump had already made our elections less secure.” She added, “Russia attacked our elections in 2016 unsuccessfully. Russia is not a friend of the United States, and if the U.S. president does not realize it, this just shows how deranged Donald Trump’s leadership style is.”
The White House, for its part, insists that Trump’s efforts are about safeguarding democracy. Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement, “President Trump wants to secure America’s elections and protect the vote, restoring the integrity of our elections by requiring voter ID, ensuring no illegal ballots are cast, and preventing cheating through lax and incompetent voting laws in states like California and New York.”
But critics from across the political spectrum have pointed out that Trump’s executive order is likely to face significant legal challenges. Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution grants states the authority to conduct their own elections, making any federal attempt to override state control a near-certain target for litigation. As POLITICO notes, about one-third of voters used mail-in ballots in the 2024 elections, making Trump’s proposed ban not just controversial but also potentially disenfranchising for millions.
Former President Barack Obama’s aides have also sounded the alarm. On the “Pod Save America” podcast, co-host Jon Lovett warned, “The constitution is explicit. It’s not just clear. It is explicit. It says that legislators are in charge of running federal elections. And actually what Trump is saying here is in conflict with another crackpot right-wing legal theory, which is the independent legislature theory… our level of concern should be very high.” Lovett added that Trump could exploit weaknesses in the electoral system before the 2026 midterms and the 2028 general election, even floating the possibility of not leaving office in 2028.
Co-host Tommy Vietor expressed broader worries: “I’m more broadly worried, like you are, about Trump trying every way possible to take control over the voting process or just find ways to make it harder for Democrats to vote especially in cities. Like that’s the endgame I think.”
Trump has also suggested that U.S. elections could be canceled if the country were at war during the next presidential election, a notion that drew swift condemnation from legal experts and commentators. “Whatever he does here, he is going to try wherever he can...to figure out the weaknesses that he can exploit,” Lovett said on the podcast.
Meanwhile, European leaders have grown increasingly anxious about the implications of Trump’s foreign policy. While Trump has insisted that there will be “no American boots on the ground” in Ukraine, he has been vague about other forms of support. European allies, including Germany, France, and the U.K., have been similarly noncommittal, continuing to discuss the shape of future security guarantees for Ukraine as Russia’s aggression persists.
As the U.S. barrels toward the 2026 midterms, the stakes for American democracy—and its place in the global order—have rarely felt higher. With Trump’s approval sliding and public trust in the electoral process under strain, the next chapter in the nation’s political saga promises to be both contentious and consequential.
