The Brief: Trump Seizes on SCOTUS Decision to Mess With the Midterms

Trump Fires Three EAC Commissioners

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court handed down a pair of decisions finding that 1. Trump could exert tremendous control over independent executive branch agencies, including firing their commissioners and 2. the Fed, also an independent agency, was different. Since then, the question of where Trump would strike first has lingered.

Now we know. Last night, Trump forced out all remaining commissioners atop the Election Assistance Commission — two Democrats and a Republican — just months before the midterms. In a statement to ProPublica, an unnamed White House official gestured toward the same logic the Supreme Court used, saying that Trump “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”

The agency largely does the fairly anodyne work of providing election security support for states and distributing funding. But it has figured prominently in Trump’s attempt at a federal takeover of voting.

In a sweeping 2025 executive order, Trump directed the EAC to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to voter registration forms. He also ordered the agency to use its power to distribute funds to pressures states to require that all ballots be received by Election Day, not simply mailed to officials by Election Day.

That executive order and another 2026 order on elections have largely been blocked by the courts.

The question, writes election law scholar Rick Hasen, “is what Trump might try to do with the EAC without commissioners. Most boldly (and I would argue illegally) Trump could try to direct the commissioner-less EAC to do his bidding, for example by stating that the EAC must amend the federal voter registration form that states must accept for federal elections to include documentary proof of citizenship.”

“If he tries anything like this, it will be high profile and very important litigation that will end up at the Supreme Court on the emergency docket over the summer,” Hasen added.

Allies (Accidentally?) Call Trump Administration’s Bluff on ‘Antifa’

David Kurtz already noted this story in his Morning Memo yesterday, but I wanted to draw attention to a darkly comedic section of the Washington Post report about an effort by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to get foreign nations to attend a conference on far-left groups, an initiative that seems to be the brainchild of counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka. 

Specifically, diplomats for the nations who were invited are confused because “Antifa” and left-wing violence are not major problems in their countries.

Some said, too, they were unsure why they had been invited. “We don’t have antifa,” said one European diplomat.

“I don’t think we can find any reason why we would be interested in attending such an event,” said another.

“Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country,” said a third.

The fact that the administration has cast “antifa” as a well-organized and powerful threat with extensive foreign ties — bemusing allies — goes to the core of what is really going on here. As the Post report makes clear, the administration theorizes that if international left-wing groups can be designated foreign terrorist groups, it will open up new avenues and tolls for cracking down on dissent in the U.S. It will be interesting to see which foreign nations, if any, cooperate with these machinations.

We’ve already seen some efforts in this direction, which TPM’s Josh Kovensky covered last year.

Tabs

• When federal agents killed a man in Houston during a traffic stop this week, they were searching for a completely different person, the New York Times reports. Passengers in the vehicle dispute the government’s claims that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo tried to use the vehicle as a weapon, the Washington Post reports, and no other evidence has emerged to support that claim.

Man of the Hour

It’s Victor Marx, a ministry leader who works to free people from demons, asserts that he goes on high-risk missions around the globe to save women and children, claims to be the fastest gun disarmer in the world, and said he killed a person as a child. (When asked by Denver’s 9News how many people he’d killed as an adult, he replied, “Does it matter?”) Last night, he won the Republican primary to become Colorado’s governor. Congrats, Victor.