Following his in-person meeting with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin last Friday, and again on Monday, President Donald Trump called for banning all votes by mail ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Friday, Trump said that Putin told him, “‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’ And he said that to me, it was very interesting because we talked about 2020. He said, ‘You won that election by so much.’”

Praising Putin and Russian elections, which have allowed the former Stalinist KGB agent to remain in power for roughly the last 26 years, Trump added, “But Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting. And he said there’s not a country in the world that uses it now.”

Voting by post is popular in dozens of countries. Since 2008, all voters in Germany have had the option of voting by mail, with about 47 percent using mail-in voting in 2021. In Switzerland, as many as 90 percent of voters cast ballots by mail. Canada has provided mail-in ballots to all citizens since 1993. Several other countries, including Australia, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Norway, Finland and France, also have exceptions that allow mail-in or absentee voting. Even in certain parts of Russia voting is allowed online and, in some cases, the ballot box will actually be brought to the homes of disabled or elderly residents.

Ignoring this, and the fact that millions of people voted for Trump and Republicans by mail in the 2024 election, Trump went on to smear hundreds of thousands of postal workers as dishonest and incompetent, saying, “It can’t be honest. It goes through a postman. It goes through somebody else, somebody else, somebody.”

Leaving no doubt that his efforts to restrict mail-in voting have nothing to do with election integrity and are instead solely aimed at suppressing voter turnout, Trump said:

You know, when you go to a really well-run voting booth, you go in, you have to hand a card, a picture, a this or that. You don’t have everything perfect, you get sent back, go get it.

Laying the groundwork for invalidating and challenging not only the 2026 midterm elections but this November’s New York City mayoral election, Trump concluded:

This mail-in voting, you can’t have a great democratic republic. You can’t have it. Well, maybe that’s why we’re going to end up with a communist mayor in New York. I don’t know. May — he probably is very happy with mail-in voting. But you can’t have a great democracy with mail-in voting.

In his White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday, Trump, unprompted, brought up his plans to block voting by mail, saying “mail-in ballots are corrupt… you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots and we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible, that we get rid of mail-in ballots.”

Trump said, “We are going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country, to end mail-in ballots because they are corrupt.”

Trump, repeating a blatant lie, said, “Do you know we are the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about, the only country in the world that uses them because of what has happened. Massive fraud all over the place.”

As he did during the “Stop the Steal” build-up prior to his failed coup of January 6, 2021, Trump recycled fascist conspiracy theories concerning the legitimacy of electronic vote tabulators. He said the “other thing we want to change is the machines.”

Following Biden’s 2020 election victory, fascists and Republicans, from Alex Jones to then-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, spread lies that foreign entities, from “communists” in Venezuela to “Italian spy satellites,” manipulated vote totals in favor of Biden.

Trump followed up his White House declarations with a post on his social media site that read, in part:

I am going to a lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.

Trump added that he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONEST to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” He said:

Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.

Trump’s fascistic assertion that states are “merely an agent” that must acquiesce to the desires of the president is constitutionally baseless. The Constitution enumerates no authority for the president to oversee elections. The United States, unlike many other countries, has state-run elections, with over 10,000 different election jurisdictions spread throughout states, counties, municipalities and townships. Ballots and voting processes are decided on by state legislatures, while only Congress, not the president, can “make” or “alter” rules for federal elections.

The post ended with Trump claiming Democrats would oppose his efforts because “THEY CHEAT.” He added that Democrats are “virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-in SCAM.”

Trump’s latest attacks are not isolated outbursts, but part of a deliberate strategy whose purpose is to delegitimize any election outcome that does not favor him.

In 2020, the supposed corruptibility of voting by post was the core pretext Trump used to claim the election was “stolen” and “rigged.” Thousands of fascists, incited by Trump and his allies in the Republican Party and corporate press, stormed the Capitol on January 6, demanding to “hang Mike Pence” because he dared to certify “rigged” election results.

Emboldened by Biden and the Democratic Party’s failure to prosecute Trump and his accomplices in the failed coup, Trump and the Republicans have accelerated their drive to establish a dictatorship in the last two months.

On June 7, Trump federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and ordered 700 US Marines to occupy Los Angeles, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gestapo, backed by the Los Angeles Police Department, carried out illegal and violent raids targeting workers and their family members.

Five days later, on June 12, California Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, was violently assaulted by federal agents after attempting to question Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference, at which Noem declared, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.”

On August 11, the Trump White House declared a “Crime Emergency” in Washington D.C. and ordered the D.C. mayor, Democrat Muriel Bowser, to “provide the services of the Metropolitan Police force for Federal Purposes.”

This was followed on August 16 by the first National Guard troop surge into the nation’s capital. Over the last three days, Republican governors from South Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee have pledged to send roughly 2,000 soldiers to aid the federal takeover of Washington D.C.

On August 19, the Republican-controlled Texas State legislature advanced new gerrymandered maps, ordered by Trump, that seek to replace five Democratic-controlled seats with Republican seats.