President Donald Trump is focusing on issues like his claim the 2020 election was stolen which are “patently false” at the expense of issues that can help the Republican Party win upcoming elections — and a center-right think tank is warning the GOP to pay attention.“The 2020 presidential election results have been argued in numerous court cases and been the subject of myriad audits and studies, and nobody—no matter how hard they’ve labored—has proven that the election was stolen,” wrote Marc Hyden of R Street. “Why Trump simply won’t accept this is beyond me, especially considering his return to the White House, and he should remember that his stolen election claims helped Democrats flip Georgia’s two Senate seats in 2020.”In response to a request for comment on the midterm elections, White House spokeswoman Abigail T. Jackson disputed the criticisms that there is no voter fraud.“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters,” Jackson told AlterNet. “The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting. Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”Hyden did not only talk about voter fraud. He also claimed that he “won” the issue of affordability, prompting Hyden to ask how one can “win affordability” in the first place.“This feels like Trump’s George W. Bush moment,” Hyden wrote. “In 2003, the former president gave a speech on the Iraq invasion with a ‘mission accomplished’ banner behind him, which was a fateful decision. The Iraq war proved far from accomplished—much like affordability today, but that didn’t stop Trump.”Similarly, Hyden pointed out that prices have gone up in the year-and-month since Trump took office, in no small part due to his tariffs.“The Tax Foundation has some great research on this topic,” Hyden wrote, quoting the think tank as saying, “the Trump tariffs amount to an average tax increase per US household of $1,000 in 2025 and $1,300 in 2026.” Hyden is not alone among Republicans in warning Trump that his tariffs could be politically poisonous to the party.“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” wrote conservative commentator Mona Charen of The Bulwark earlier this month. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”Because Trump’s tariffs have raised the prices that the president promised to lower during the 2024 election, outsiders are concerned that he will try to steal the 2026 midterm elections since he will not be able to outright steal them. Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour earlier this month, conservative historian Robert Kagan described the GOP as the “party of dictatorship” precisely because of this predicament.“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don’t think he’s willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”Regardless of Trump’s claims that he can nationalize the midterm elections to ferret out the voter fraud he has yet to discover, legal experts say the president lacks any such authority.“Here is the reality: the president has no authority to run federal elections,” University of Kentucky professor Joshua A. Douglas said. “The Constitution, through the Elections Clause in Article I, Section 4, assigns that power to the states, while allowing Congress to make or alter election regulations. Courts have already blocked the president’s executive order on voter registration rules. Neither an executive order nor presidential bombast can override our decentralized constitutional structure.”
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