President Donald Trump is escalating his crusade for voter-identification requirements after last week’s promise of an executive order to implement such a mandate before November’s midterm elections.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a briefing Wednesday said Trump is “discussing and exploring legal options for a potential executive order with respect to voter ID,” days after Trump said he would find a way to require voters to present identification across the U.S. “whether approved by Congress or not!”
Leavitt’s comments followed a Tuesday night Trump Truth Social post of an article about a local elected official urging the Georgia state government to take over voting in Fulton County, the target of a recent FBI raid and a precinct that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Trump is planning to travel to a different part of Georgia on Thursday to talk about the economy.
Trump’s recent fixation on elections and congressional Republicans’ willingness to largely fall in line are raising alarms for Democrats and voting rights groups, who see the recent moves as a potential existential threat to American elections and an extension of Trump’s past election denialism.
The topic has apparently been front of mind for the president. In a series of reposts on Truth Social that followed his initial post Wednesday, Trump shared unfounded claims about irregularities in the 2020 election.
