Mary Trump Warns Donald Trump Is Using Federal Power to Take Over Elections

Mary Trump says her uncle is using executive orders, Justice Department lawsuits and threats of prosecution to take over how American elections are run. The midterms are less than four weeks away.

On an episode of The Mary Trump Podcast, the psychologist and author walked through the administration's campaign one step at a time and kept coming back to the Constitution.

"The Constitution gives states and Congress primary responsibility for setting the rules of federal elections. Presidents do not run them," she said.

The court record mostly supports her. Judges have blocked key parts of both of Donald Trump's election orders, and the Justice Department has lost most of its lawsuits seeking states' voter rolls. But in August the Supreme Court let the administration move ahead with his 2026 order in the states that had sued to stop it, a ruling she did not mention.

What the Constitution Says About Elections

The Elections Clause, in Article I, Section 4, gives state legislatures the power to set the "Times, Places and Manner" of congressional elections and lets Congress "make or alter such Regulations." It gives the president no role.

Two federal judges have relied on that point. Ruling against the first order, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper wrote that "[t]he Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," the Associated Press reported.

Mary Trump also called the president's fraud claims baseless. In November 2020, election officials working with his own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said there was "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." He still says otherwise. "It was a rigged election, can't have rigged elections," he told the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

"Non-citizen voting in federal elections is already illegal. And although there are documented cases of voter fraud, they are vanishingly rare," she said.

A Timeline of the Push and the Court Rulings

Here is the sequence from the court record:

• March 25, 2025: Trump signs "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections," requiring proof of citizenship to register and barring mail ballots that arrive after Election Day.
• April 24, 2025: U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocks the proof-of-citizenship requirement, Bloomberg Law reported.
• June 13, 2025: Casper blocks the citizenship and ballot-deadline provisions after a lawsuit from states.
• By Feb. 2, 2026: Kollar-Kotelly permanently blocks two more citizenship provisions.
• March 31, 2026: Trump signs a second order directing DHS and the Social Security Administration to compile state-by-state citizenship lists.
• June 25, 2026: U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocks the citizenship lists and mail-voting provisions for 23 states and Washington, D.C., Votebeat reported.
• July 2026: The Justice Department warns election officials in all 50 states that they could face criminal prosecution for knowingly retaining noncitizens on the rolls or facilitating their voting, NBC News reported.
• August 2026: In a separate case, Talwani bars the Postal Service from carrying out the order's mail-voting restrictions nationwide.
• Aug. 24, 2026: The Supreme Court lifts Talwani's 23-state injunction by a 6-3 vote. The majority said the states lacked standing to sue yet and did not decide whether the order is lawful. The nationwide Postal Service injunction remains in effect.

The Voter Roll Lawsuits

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for their full, unredacted voter lists, which include birth dates and partial Social Security numbers. Mary Trump said the administration had lost 21 straight cases by early August and appealed 16.

It has lost more since. As of Oct. 1, the government had lost 26 of the 31 cases, CBS News reported.

The SAVE America Act and the Midterms

The president has also pressed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register. In June, he refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill until it passed. "I think it's so unimportant by compared to the SAVE America Act," he told reporters.

Mary Trump said the pressure campaign shows Republicans are "freaking out about the coming blue tsunami."

Democrats lead by 8.1 points in PolitiKool's polling average of the generic congressional ballot.

"If we get real solid majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress, Donald's free ride might just be over," she said.