Dan Balz of The Washington Post writes about Trump’s executive order seeking control of elections. Trump has complained about election fraud since he won in 2016; he couldn’t believe that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so he insisted that millions of undocumented immigrants had illegally voted. Although he set up a commission to find election fraud, it found none. When he lost in 2020, he shrieked again about a “stolen” election, but no one ever found any evidence of fraud that would change the outcome, and even his close associates disagreed with him. But after four years of lying about 2020, he recently issued an executive order to change state election laws, which are embedded in the Constitution.

Balz wrote:

Almost no part of government is immune from President Donald Trump’s thirst for power and control. Last week he signed executive orders aimed at the Smithsonian Institution, the District of Columbia and the administration of elections. No president has sought more change in more institutions more rapidly, through executive orders than Trump.

The order on elections is more than 2,500 words and at times densely written. It may have received less attention than warranted as it was issued amid the controversy over how sensitive military operational details were shared in a Signal chat group that accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic.

The order is illustrative of how the president is attempting to govern, largely through dictates rather than legislation. It is rooted in Trump’s long-standing, though false, claims that the election system is rife with fraud. Its legal foundations are questionable. But like other executive orders the president has signed, it could produce chaos and change before it is fully litigated.

Trump’s reach for power overrides any ideological consistency, though there is nothing new in that. He is dismantling the Department of Education, arguing that states and local governments should run the nation’s schools (which they already do). Now he is attempting to order state and local election administrators to adopt his rules for running future elections.

The Constitution grants most power over elections to the states. When Democrats were pushing a multifaceted voting rights bill known as H.R. 1 during the administration of President Joe Biden, conservative opponents decried the measure as a federal takeover. So far, there’s been no notable public outcry on the right over the federal takeover that Trump is seeking.

“This is clearly an attempt to federalize election administration to a historic degree, as was H.R. 1,” said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Certainly liberals and Democrats are going to press the federalism button really hard. And you will get probably some Republican secretaries not pressing it quite as hard, but privately, many of them are going to be pushing back.”

Another election analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid opinion described what he saw as the goal of the order: “It is to reduce turnout by people he thinks won’t vote for him,” the analyst said.

As we can see, billionaire publisher Jeff Bezos has interfered on the opinion pages, but not the news coverage.