- Why is MAGA obsessed with voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting? A NYT essay suggests as a rationalization for Trump losing in 2020, despite lack of evidence, or rationale;
- While Heather Cox Richardson sees it as a reaction to the losing appeal of white nationalism and ICE, a ploy to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate;
- An essay about the “edgelords” of the GOP, trying to rationalize the destruction of progressive ideas;
- JMG on Trump’s Columbus statue and obsession with watching out for missiles;
- And the opening movement of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha.
Two items today about why MAGA are obsessed with the idea of illegal voting. Despite the lack of evidence.
NY Times, guest essay by Stephen Richer, 5 Feb 2026: What’s Really Driving These Bogus Claims of Voter Fraud
This week, President Trump called on his party to nationalize American elections, an unconstitutional move that he said would be justified because of the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” he said.
No president has so baldly proposed to intervene in state elections, but the charge that noncitizens are illegally casting ballots is sadly commonplace. Elon Musk claims on X, without evidence, that significant numbers of illegal immigrants vote. Rudy Giuliani erroneously alleged that my home state, Arizona, had allowed “probably about 250,000” votes from noncitizens in 2020, despite the fact that Arizona has long required proof of citizenship to vote in state elections.
Yet there are virtually no prosecutions of illegal voting, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen of course.
Happily, there is new compelling evidence debunking the false claims. Recently, a number of states have undertaken investigations into noncitizen voting, cross-checking voter rolls with citizenship status, and found it virtually nonexistent.
Utah, Idaho, Louisiana.
These investigations affirm what is simply common sense. People largely aren’t willing to risk their status in the United States — the land of economic opportunity — for the ability to cast one more vote out of hundreds of thousands or millions in a state and hundreds of millions in the country.
This is the same reason that illegal immigrants are actually far less likely to commit any kind of crimes than citizens. They need to be on their best behavior lest they be caught and deported. This never seems to occur to conservatives, who are certain that illegals are bad people, if only because they entered the country without all the proper paperwork and are thus illegal. Being illegal in that sense doesn’t mean they’re dangerous, of course; their ‘crime’ doesn’t hurt anyone. (And no, they’re not taking others’ jobs; by being part of their communities, they are becoming consumers and are indirectly creating that many more jobs. While declaring them illegal just means they’re probably not paying taxes. At root, it’s about xenophobia.)
So why then?
The constant talk of noncitizen voting is more likely about scoring political points and bolstering fund-raising.
And:
For President Trump, the myth of noncitizens voting is part of the broader story he’s concocted to avoid accepting that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
Of course, Trump also blames voter fraud, which is different. It’s like RFK blaming both vaccines and Tylenol for autism. Whatever works in the moment, to whatever group he’s speaking to.
Concluding:
Everyone — Democrats and Republicans — should use the new state-level proof that noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent to push back against the real danger to our democracy: craven politicians using the issue to undermine our free and fair elections.
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Heather addresses the same topic today (last night). Putting things in context.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: February 4, 2026
On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.
Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
So they think that a Democrat flipped a Republican district is due to voter fraud, and not to the dismal performance of the Trump administration and the savagery of ICE?
They’ve been making such accusations for decades.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.
Roger Stone, Mike Johnson: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. … Can I prove that? No.”
This would be the standard Republican/conservative intuition that other people, those unlike themselves, are bad.
And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election.
With surveys of various election jurisdictions around the country. And then Heather reaches a different diagnosis of the problem that the piece above.
The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.
So: white nationalism is becoming less popular, so paint the other party’s voters and illegitimate. Next: resentment.
For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.
Again, Republican politicians appeal to white resentment and then once in offers pass policies that favor not voters but the wealthy. This has been going on for decades.
But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.
MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.
Heather goes on with history, beginning in North Carolina in the 1890s, that followed similar patterns as what we’re seeing today.
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How do you rationalize regressive values?
The Atlantic, Laura K. Field, 5 Feb 2026: The Intellectual Edgelords of the GOP, subtitled “The mainstreaming of transgressive ideas is the culmination of a yearslong conservative project.”
Calling the Trump administration fascist has become a cliché, but some federal departments seem keen on the comparison. Consider the administration’s messaging on social media.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Facebook account recently posted a recruiting notice for ICE under the banner “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN”—the title of a white-nationalist anthem by the Pine Tree Riots (“By blood or sweat, we’ll get there yet”). The Department of Labor recently posted a video montage referencing American battle scenes under the tagline “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American”—a slogan close to the Nazi-era Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.
Then recalling Christian imagery, the Flight 93 Election essay, and so on. And various thinkers rationalizing that Trump, however flawed, was better than a nation under Hillary Clinton.
What unifies these thinkers is a totalizing and conspiratorial conception of modern liberal politics. In this view, very little in the existing order is worth redeeming. Some even argue that the most patriotic way forward is simply to burn it all down.
All of this intellectual boundary-breaking can be intoxicating, especially against the backdrop of a wider culture that has at times tipped into stultifying speech codes and groupthink. But the rebellion has also spurred a race to the bottom. This is how a group chat among young Republicans devolves into talk of loving Hitler.
…
Prominent conservatives have publicly discussed the value of shifting the Overton window. In 2023, Christopher Rufo hosted a debate about whether to broaden the tent to include racists and other extremists—a “no enemies to the right” strategy.
And so on. The bottom line here, apparently, is that the right-wing movement is fracturing; it’s not a cohesive position. It’s more about rebellion than a cohesive policy. The final lines here:
That kind of edgelordism has become the currency du jour in the GOP, from the Ivy League through the streets of Minnesota. The MAGA new right seems to be betting that the American polity has a deep reserve of untapped nativist rage—which can be harnessed in the service of their culture war against the liberal status quo, or of ICE’s more tangible goals. But if current polls are to be believed, the administration seems to be underestimating the everyday decency and patriotism of the American public.
Boundary-pushing ideas can be invigorating, and opportunities to question and resist received wisdom are essential to any free and democratic society. But the pursuit of transgression for its own sake can easily derail sound judgment. The risk is in presuming that anything subversive or sensational is also true and meaningful, and that anything conventional is a lie that must be smashed down. That is a brutal way to inhabit the world—and, I hope, a losing one.
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From JMG.
- WH: We’re Placing 35-Foot Gold Statue Of Columbus Because The “Woke Fake News” Tried To Destroy Him. In other words, he wants to preserve the most simplistic take on history possible, never mind anything we’ve learned in the past 500 years;
- Trump: “I Don’t Like Sleeping On Planes Because I Like Looking Out Of Window Watching For Missiles”. This is bonkers in so many ways. And scroll down for more bonkers comments from the same speech, about prayer, rigged elections, the Bible, voting for Democrats, deaths in Minneapolis, threats, how he brought back the word ‘Christmas’, prisons, religious liberty, the right to get even … and more
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A thrilling 18 minutes. From one of Glass’s early operas. Stick with it.
