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President Donald Trump on Tuesday renewed his call for the federal government to take control of election administration nationwide, openly challenging the Constitution’s delegation of election oversight to the states and reviving concerns about the expansion of presidential power in his second term.
Speaking after a bill-signing ceremony in the Oval Office and flanked by Republican leaders in Congress, Trump responded to questions about comments he made a day earlier endorsing the “nationalization” of elections by urging lawmakers standing behind him to act.
“I want to see elections be honest,” Trump said. “If you think about it, the state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”
It was the second time in as many days that Trump floated federal control of elections — remarks that come against the backdrop of his repeated false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him through widespread fraud.
Calls for federal intervention
Trump again claimed, without evidence, that fraud in large Democratic-leaning cities such as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit cost him the 2020 election — assertions rejected by courts, election officials and his own Justice Department during his first term.
“The federal government should not allow that,” Trump said. “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”
The comments appeared to go beyond existing Republican proposals to tighten voting requirements and suggested direct federal involvement in election administration — a responsibility the Constitution largely assigns to states and local governments.
Trump first raised the idea publicly in a podcast interview released Monday, in which he said Republicans should “nationalize” elections in at least some states.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Republican leaders seek to narrow remarks
Republican leaders in Congress sought earlier Tuesday to downplay Trump’s comments, tying them instead to GOP legislation that would require voters nationwide to provide proof of citizenship.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., both declined to endorse the idea of federalized election administration.
“We know it’s in our system: The states have been in charge of administering their elections,” Johnson said. He described Trump’s comments as frustration with what he called failures by Democratic-led states to ensure “free and fair elections.”
Thune said Trump was referring specifically to the SAVE Act, a Republican-backed bill mandating proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.
“I think the president has clarified what he meant by that,” Thune said. “There are other views, probably, when it comes to nationalizing or federalizing elections, but I think at least on that narrow issue … that’s what the president was addressing.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that framing, endorsing the SAVE Act and claiming — without evidence — that jurisdictions allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections create conditions ripe for fraud. Documented cases of voter fraud in U.S. elections are exceedingly rare.
But Trump’s remarks Tuesday evening, delivered with Johnson standing directly behind him, suggested a broader ambition than Republican leaders had described.
A charged history
Trump’s comments revive one of the most combustible issues of his political career.
His sustained false claims that he won the 2020 election fueled efforts to overturn the results and culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, when his supporters sought to block certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump has continued to assert that the election was stolen since returning to office. According to reporting by The New York Times, he also spoke by phone with FBI agents who seized voting machines in Fulton County, Georgia — raising renewed questions among critics about his use of federal power to advance political aims.
Opponents of Trump’s second term have increasingly described his actions as authoritarian.
“Donald Trump called for Republican officials to ‘take over’ voting procedures in 15 states,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote on social media. “People of all political parties need to be able to stand up and say this can’t happen.”
