“I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” President Trump said on Tuesday. He then cited Detroit, Philadelphia, adding, “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the vote. If they can’t count the vote legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.” His comments came a day after he told podcaster Dan Bongino, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Trump’s remarks are fundamentally at odds with the Constitution. The elections clause grants states the right to decide the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” and assigns oversight exclusively to Congress; and the Tenth Amendment enshrines the principle of federalism—that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But Trump has never shown much fealty to, let alone understanding of, the Constitution.

Some might therefore dismiss Trump’s rhetoric as an idle threat or perhaps the rantings of an aging madman. But we cannot dismiss it. The threat is real, as evidenced by Monday’s news that Trump personally oversaw an FBI raid of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, where agents seized “truckloads” of ballots, along with voter rolls and scanned images. Trump’s DOJ has also demanded voter roll information from 44 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license and Social Security data, and has initiated lawsuits against 24 districts when they refused to comply.  

Beyond the immediate concern that Trump intends to interfere in upcoming national elections, his comments and actions are a stark departure from previous Republican positions on states’ rights. Just a decade ago, when Trump first sought the presidency, the Republican Party platform included complaints against the Obama administration for “bullying of state and local governments.” It declared allegiance to the notion of........

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