In what has been a polarizing series of comments, president Donald Trump has recently gone on record expressing his strong desire to “nationalize” elections in the US. Trump has cited a list of reasons why he wants this to happen, among which are claiming that there are large amounts of voter fraud present, that the election results the country is seeing now are being heavily skewed by immigrants and ethnic/racial minorities, and that it was actually him who was the rightful victor of the 2020 presidential election. 

However high the degree of validity and accuracy to Trump’s claims may be, it can be argued that the largest reason for his desire to turn election influence away from individual states is the prospect that Trump has become so attached to his executive power that he has no remaining desire to act within the USA’s democratic political norms. Such attachment means he does not see his opposition with any significant degree of legitimacy, and that his comments are disgracefully opposite to the norms which help ensure that democracy remains alive – the two most prudent of these norms being those of mutual toleration and forbearance. 

It is possible that, once having been given a taste of pure executive power during his first term as US president, Trump fell in love with this position to such a high degree that he has since lost any motivation to continue to play by the rules of the game of democracy during this time. As such, this may very well have been one of the driving forces that led him to his current public disdain and rejection of his opposition’s legitimacy – disdain and rejection that have gone so far as to drive him to call the Democratic Party “The party of hate, evil, and Satan,” among other insulting terms. Indeed, one can see Trump’s lack of opinion of legitimacy for his opposition directly in action with his aforementioned call to “nationalize” US elections, an action which would be both firmly unconstitutional and going against the Republican Party’s tendencies to support individual states’ rights. 

This notion that Trump sees any opposition to his power as so illegitimate that he is willing to take unconstitutional action against them can serve as an example of the democracy-killing factors which political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn of in their book How Democracies Die. While they say that many factors go into weakening democracy, the two most critical ones that they foreground for ensuring that such regimes remain strong are “mutual toleration” and “forbearance”, as was alluded to earlier. For mutual toleration, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, it is clear that this is now in no way a political norm which Trump abides by; not just limited to the aforementioned “party of hate, evil, and Satan” comment, he has called Democrats and many of their organizations “domestic terrorists,” and has consistently rejected their legitimacy in his comments ever since his first presidential term began. What is also clear is that Trump nowadays has shown almost zero desire to act in a politically “forbearing” way. Among other actions he has taken, it seems extremely likely that Trump’s recent desire to nationalize the US’s elections is the result of his willingness to use his political powers to their absolute fullest against the opposing Democrats. Or, put another way, he is not exhibiting any restraint in deploying (or wanting to deploy) his political prerogatives against his opposition, a notion that shows one the interconnected relationship which Levitsky and Ziblatt believe the two norms have – because Trump does not appear to view his opposition as legitimate (a lack of mutual toleration), he is expressing a much more fervent desire to use bolder, and at times even unconstitutional, means to ensure that he maintains power and that his opposition does not (a lack of forbearance). 

At the end of the day, it is hard to say that the most productive conversation to be having at this time is whether or not Trump’s original comments on the result of the 2020 election (and the results of the ones currently happening) are correct or not. Even if they actually are correct, the fact that Trump has even gone so far as to make these comments in the first place serves as a crystal clear warning sign that he has gone off the rails with attachment to his executive position of power. Per analysis of the writings of other minds in the political science landscape, it becomes apparent that Donald Trump’s call to “nationalize” elections in the US proves that he cares not for playing by the democratic rulebook, instead seeking to keep himself in power for as long as physically possible while keeping his illegitimate (in his mind) opponents out. His comments are nothing short of a slap in the face to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s norms for keeping democracy alive, and can even be considered as a desire to utilize executive aggrandizement. 

Where exactly along the line Trump developed this powerful attachment to executive power is unclear at this time; what is clear is that his presidency (not least his call to nationalize elections) poses peril to American democracy that has not been seen in quite a long time, or perhaps ever.