THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DOESN'T SEEM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AUTHORITARIANISM AND RAGEBAIT

Today, Axios reports on what its headline calls "Trump's last-ditch hunt for voter fraud." "Last-ditch" is the key here:

The Trump administration says Americans should prepare between now and Election Day for a wave of new arrests and prosecutions over alleged non-citizen voter fraud.

... The Trump administration is deploying hundreds of federal investigators and attorneys to pursue President Trump's long-running fixation — and test a broader Republican claim that tougher enforcement will uncover far more illegal voting.

"This initiative is a tier one priority," a Justice Department official told reporters on Tuesday. "It's a top priority for the attorney general and for the White House."

Wait -- you guys are just starting to do this now, when early voting has already begun in a couple of states, and will soon begin in many others?

Well, no -- they've been at this for a while, but they aren't getting very far, according to Axios:

Across the country, there are now 1,600 open cases of potential voter fraud and 160 people have been arrested, a Homeland Security Investigations official said Tuesday.

Even if you assume that all these open cases will lead to arrests and convictions -- which you shouldn't after seeing how the administration tried and failed to use prosecutions to create the impression that vandalism damaged the Reflecting Pool -- remember that we live in a country where more than 155 million people voted in the last presidential election. Sixteen hundred people is .001% of the 2024 electorate, and 160 people is .0001%. That's not enough to decide the outcome of the midterms. And only some of these people were immigrants charged this year.

DOJ has charged 24 immigrants this calendar year following the prioritization, according to agency press releases. The accuse

So, understandably, this isn't a big national news story. But individual cases serve as Fox News ragebait. Yesterday, Fox reported:

An Indian national was federally indicted by a grand jury in Minnesota for knowingly making the false claim to be a U.S. citizen to vote in the 2024 general election....

Mukeshkumar Somabhai Chaudhari, according to a DOJ press release earlier this month, falsely claimed U.S. citizenship by signing a voter signature certificate required under state law to vote in Minnesota and voting Nov. 5, 2024....

"Once again, DOJ is proving that if you look for election fraud, you find election fraud," Chad Ennis, vice president of Honest Elections Project, told Fox News Digital Tuesday. "The left loves to claim election fraud does not happen. But here we have yet another instance of a noncitizen illegally registering to vote."

Fox is trying to sell this story as Minnesota, hotbed of fraud! -- even it notes that Chaudhari was indicted on state charges in Minnesota five months ago, an indictment Fox reported on at the time. And it's trying to sell the story as Team Trump will find massive amounts of fraud, just you wait -- but who's buying this story, apart from (in all likelihood) Donald Trump himself, along with his fellow rage-addicted Fox addicts?

This isn't intimidating legitimate voters, and it isn't getting the kind of wall-to-wall media coverage that might precede a serious electoral crackdown. That might still come, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that Trump simply doesn't have a plan for seriously intervening in the midterms on or before Election Day. His people know they can mollify him by doing something, anything, to suggest that fraud is being rooted out, and they're feeding him (and the right-wing media) that ragebait. There are low-priority stories in mainstream news outlets, but otherwise there's nothing happening that's likely to prevent the election from taking place.

And no, this Democracy Docket report doesn't impress me:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is close to fully enlisting the 1,000 federal election monitors it announced earlier this year to observe the upcoming midterm elections — the largest such contingent in U.S. history, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon claimed.

The monitors will be department lawyers and other “trained legal staff,” she said in an interview with the far-right media outlet Real America’s Voice Monday.

“I’ve called for, and plan to send, 1,000 to the general election jurisdictions that we’re selecting. And I’m really excited to say that we have — we’re pretty close to that number of people who’ve raised their hands,” Dhillon said.

As I said last month when the Justice Department announced the plan to deploy 1000 monitors, that's a tiny number compared to the number of precincts in America. "More than 95,000 polling places were used in the 2024 general election," the National Conference of State Legislatures has reported. Just in Texas, which is a swing state this year, there are more than 9000 precincts.

On social media, I've been told I should worry more about this:

... I think an overwhelmingly large fraction of all polling places are in solid blue or red regions, and/or serve comparatively few voters.

I don't think 1000 monitors is enough to swing things all by itself, but you add in the local cops, and various self-appointed vigilante groups, all focusing on tossup regions in swing states, and it could be quite significant. Just scaring non-white people away from showing up would work for the GOP.

But where's the evidence that local cops and vigiliantes are being lined up to do this? Where are the calls for citizen intimidation? There'd be signs of this by now. I see nothing besides this smattering of monitors.

As for the monitors themselves, The Washington Post reported this in mid-August:

For Michigan’s primary this month, the Justice Department sent monitors to four Democratic-leaning cities — Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing and East Lansing. Democrats openly worried that the monitors would interfere with the primary, but state officials said they behaved professionally and did not cause problems.

I'm not saying that Trump is powerless now -- immigrants who are being brutalized in various ways know that, as do many other Trump victims. But Trump couldn't get the SAVE Act through a Republican Congress. He deployed a plan to interfere with mail voting so late that he couldn't get it past a Republican Supreme Court. In July he delivered a prime-time speech charging China with election interference, then his administration seemed to drop that narrative, and today he's greeting President Xi Jinping on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, ahead of a two-day summit with the Chinese leader. There's no effective follow-through on election interference efforts.

This is why I think any attempted steal will come after the voting, not now or in the run-up to Election Day. Trump doesn't seem to have a well-developed plan. If he really wanted to do this, he needed to have a plan many months ago.