[ExI] Trump, in an Escalation, Calls for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ Elections

Tue Feb 3 18:16:13 UTC 2026

Your reply is offered in insultingly bad faith.

Whatever the Democrats did, they never tried to use government
coercion to make it illegal (or merely practically impossible) to get
Republicans elected.  The selective enforcement that Trump has
proposed is one of the mechanisms by which one-party rule has come to
pass in other places before.  Yes, I do mean that it would be less
suspicious if he proposed to federalize all elections, as is done in
those other countries you refer to, though it'd still be problematic
(because it would require an amendment to the US Constitution, so if
he tried to bypass that route - which would take longer than he has
until this November's elections, and he knows it - and simply
federalize by fiat regardless of the law, that would be evidence
enough of ill intent).  But the proposal out there is explicitly for
selective enforcement.

(And no, I don't agree with everything the Democrats have done.  You
are right that elements such as no-sunset emergency powers should be
curtailed.  But changing wholesale into an authoritarian regime won't
fix the problem; it'll just make it far worse, and harder to fix.  On
that note, the accelerationist argument that electing really bad
government will make people wake up and elect better government has
proven not to work either: not only do people not wake up, but putting
a bad enough government into power can make it tough to get them out
of power.)

Yes, gerrymandering to starve Republicans of representation has
happened - but the minority could still vote Republican, and if enough
people were cheesed off at the Democrats, they could still vote
Republican and the Democrats would honor it.  Which, you may notice,
is exactly what happened - and Trump isn't the sole example of this,
by a long shot.

The history of the Republican party - even just in recent decades -
can not credibly be described as never before "actually fighting to
win".  Every election I've voted in, they've been fighting to win.

By "banning fresh air and sunshine" presumably you refer to the
lockdown during COVID?  Fresh air and sunshine were never banned, and
your phrasing it that way is evidence of your bad faith.  You could
wander around outside all you wanted - so long as you were not near
people who were not confirmed uninfected, and you yourself weren't
potentially infected.  It was mass gatherings of people that were
prevented, because every time that happened, a lot more people got
sick - many of whom died, many were crippled for a long time, which
was the most important difference between COVID and ordinary
influenza.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 11:53 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> When you step back from the churn and chaos of daily headlines and look at the medium-term longer patterns, the only recent change in the long term dynamics is that the Republicans have now joined the Democrats in the "let's make long term structural changes to the country that will give us a permanent majority" game. They're actually fighting to win, for the first time in perhaps decades. This is unprecedented in the lives of most now living, so it's understandably novel and slightly shocking.
>
> Democratic republics are demonstrably unstable over a period of decades to centuries. And honestly, I'd prefer the inevitable tyrannical monarchs /not/ be the ones who wanted me locked in my house indefinitely for refusing an experimental injection, and who tried to fight an airborne respiratory disease by <checks notes> oh yes, banning fresh air and sunshine.
>
> At this point the only real hope is our new machine overlords, whom I welcome. But there's no guarantee on that.
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 9:38 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> It's more the specific how than the general principle.  Notice that,
>> unlike those other countries, he is not (currently) proposing to
>> nationalize all US elections.  His intent with those "fifteen places"
>> is to prevent enough Democrats from being elected to retake control of
>> the House - in other words, to prevent his party from losing control
>> even if that would have been the result of free and fair elections, so
>> as to implement one-party rule in practice.
>>
>> Libertarians are against government-enforced one-party rule, last I
>> heard, for reasons including that it allows governance to be decided
>> privately by a few people (party officials, most of whom are never
>> subject to election by the general public after one-party rule is
>> established) while ignoring the will of the majority.
>>
>> The Republicans who are in favor of this consider the "proposed
>> powers" of being in power forever with no consequences should they
>> rule corruptly.  The "disaster" they refer to is from their
>> perspective: if they say "national disaster" about this, it's really
>> more "personal disaster".
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 11:17 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat
>> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > The federal government manages elections in Canada, and basically every other country in the world.
>> > "If we proposed this, it would be awesome, but he wants it, so it's terrible" is doing a little too much work here.
>> >
>> > [Also "our proposed powers and legal infrastructure would be a national disaster if the other party was ever elected" is not the flex they think it is, and is really a fully general argument for principled libertarianism.]
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 3:59 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.
>> >>
>> >> Trump, in an Escalation, Calls for Republicans to ‘Nationalize’ Elections
>> >>
>> >> The comments, made on a conservative podcast, follow a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections.
>> >>
>> >> https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/politics/trump-nationalize-elections.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JVA.en-q.1F5B4oljkawg&smid=em-share
>> >> _______________________________________________
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