Loyalty seems to be a one-way street in Washington these days. Supporters vow to serve at the pleasure of the president, to march behind, or stand beside, a man that demands loyalty.
The Article I Section 4 was drafted by the Framers specifically to grant primary authority to regulate elections to the states, to the state legislatures. It also gave the authority to Congress to act directly, but one entity it didn't give any authority whatsoever to was the President of the United States.
CNN's Manu Raju pointed out that Donald Trump frequently touted low gas prices during his presidency, but when prices rose under Biden, he shifted to attacking the current administration. Raju stated, 'And the person who liked to talk about it a lot was none other than Donald J. Trump.'
"It'll guarantee the midterms," he told Republicans gathered in the ballroom of his golf course just outside Miami on Monday. "If you don't get it, big trouble." Trump insisted that building on strict national voter identification laws, banning mail ballots, and restricting transgender rights would secure Republican electoral success.
Affordability has been, understandably, the watchword for Democratic candidates over the last year. After downplaying inflation under Joe Biden, the party learned a brutal lesson when Donald Trump rode the cost-of-living crisis back to the White House in 2024. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani put affordability at the center of his own campaign and surged from the back of the pack to City Hall.
The New York Times recently reported that four conservative operatives spent the Biden years quietly building the legal and regulatory infrastructure to kill the federal government's ability to fight climate change. Russell Vought. Jeffrey Clark. Mandy Gunasekara. Jonathan Brightbill. They drafted executive orders. They got Heritage Foundation money. They solicited white papers from friendly scientists. They built the whole thing in secret so nobody could stop them before it was done.
"It has been baked in that the states are largely in charge of the election process, and that the federal government can set or override rules for that process if they wish, but it's very specific that that has to be done through Congress and not through lone executive action," said Justin Levitt, a constitutional and law of democracy scholar at Loyola Law School who was a non-partisan policy adviser for Democracy and Voting Rights during the Biden White House.
President Donald Trump didn't mince words on Truth Social Sunday, when he declared, America's Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World. We are either going to fix them, Trump said of American elections, or we won't have a Country any longer. Trump has called on the federal government to nationalize elections (which is against the Constitution), end mail-in ballots, and pass the SAVE America Act.