Jim Beam column: Elections dead end for Trump

Published 7:18 am Saturday, February 7, 2026

Trying to figure out what President Donald Trump plans to do about the nation’s elections is anyone’s guess. The president said at one point he thought the federal government should take over elections, but he changed his tune in later interviews.

When Trump was interviewed by NBC News, he disavowed his earlier remarks, perhaps realizing states have constitutional protection for their conduct of elections.

“I didn’t say ‘national,’” he said. “I said there are some areas of our country that are extremely corrupt.”

Trump specifically mentioned Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit, the biggest cities in the three states that were pivotal in his 2020 defeat. He then accused Democratic officials of trying to cheat because they opposed the federal ID bill, known as the SAVE Act.

“If they don’t want voter ID, that means they want to cheat,” he said.

Before the next presidential election, voters will head to the polls in November for midterms, which will determine whether Republicans keep control of the House, the Senate or both for the final two years of Trump’s term.

David A. Graham in the Atlantic said in the past two weeks, the FBI conducted a search in a major Democratic county in a swing state, in service of debunked theories about fraud in the 2020 election.

The Associated Press reported that officials in Georgia’s Fulton County said Wednesday they have asked a federal court to order the FBI to return ballots and other documents from the 2020 election that it seized.

“This case is not only about Fulton County,” said Robb Pitts, the county chairman. “This is about elections across Georgia and across the nation.”

“The president himself and his allies, they refuse to accept the fact that they lost,” Pitts said. “And even if he had won Georgia, he would still have lost the presidency.”

Pitts defended the county’s election practices and said Fulton has conducted 17 elections since 2020 without any issues.

A warrant cover sheet provided to the county includes a list of items that the agents were seeking related to the 2020 general election: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.

The FBI drove away with hundreds of boxes of ballots and other documents. County officials say they were not told why the federal government wanted the documents.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said this week that he once doubted Trump would intervene in the midterms but now “the notional idea that he will ask his loyalists to do something inappropriate, beyond the Constitution, scares the heck out of me.”

Trump has tried to subvert an election before but current efforts are coming earlier, Graham said, more organized, and — crucially — employing the power of the federal government to help him achieve his personal political goals.

As Trump continues to clash with local officials in Minnesota, he also claims that he was cheated out of votes there.

“I feel that I won Minnesota — I think I won it all three times,” he said. “I won it all three times, in my opinion.”

Since May 2025, the Department of Justice has ordered 44 states and the District of Columbia to hand over voter rolls, though it has no statutory right to them, Graham said. Many states, including Minnesota, have resisted.

The Justice Department attempted to extort voter rolls from another Democratic state under threat of armed occupation, The AP said.

It came as no surprise that Louisiana was more than willing to give the DOJ whatever it wanted.

In another story, Graham said, “As bleak as these developments are, a few hopeful signs for the midterms have emerged.”

Graham said Trump has been publicly setting expectations for poor results for Republicans, a sign the GOP may lose. And his gerrymandering plans

in GOP-controlled states, in order to help preserve the House majority, seem to be ending up as basically a wash, after Democratic-controlled states responded in kind.

Third, and perhaps more important, Americans are disapproving of the president’s handling of immigration and the economy.

The 50 states have done a great job giving the nation quick and accurate election results. Finally, can we really trust the FBI with the Georgia election ballots it seized on orders from the White House and Trump’s politicized Justice Department?

Jim Beam, the retired editor of the American Press, has covered people and politics for more than six decades. Contact him at jim.beam.press@gmail.com.