Trump Votes by Mail While His Administration Guts Voting Rights
President Trump voted by mail in Florida's primary elections this week, just weeks after branding the very same practice "cheating" while his administration fights in the Supreme Court to gut mail-in voting access nationwide. Palm Beach County records show Trump requested an absentee ballot, the second time he has done so amid his unfounded claims that mail-in voting contributes to election fraud. He requested his ballot in late July and returned it ahead of the primary election on Tuesday, The Hill reported citing Politico.
The contradiction is deliberate. His administration fights in the Supreme Court to gut mail-in voting access nationwide, yet the president treats Florida's system — the same system he attacks — as reliable enough for his personal ballot. This is not hypocrisy as personal failing; it is strategy. The ruling class protects its own access to the franchise while erecting barriers for workers, tenants, and the dispossessed.
A federal appeals court has now rejected, for the second time, the administration's custom of leaving interim prosecutors in place to lead U.S. attorney's offices to circumvent congressional approval. The Senate's advice-and-consent role — already a weak check on executive power — is treated as optional. By keeping interim prosecutors in place indefinitely, the White House installs loyalists without confirmation hearings, without public scrutiny, without the minimal accountability the Constitution demands.
The court took issue with what the administration calls a "custom" — a euphemism for a systematic workaround. The second federal appellate decision to take issue with the administration's custom of leaving interim prosecutors in place to lead U.S. attorney's offices to circumvent congressional approval signals that even the judiciary, stacked with Trump appointees, recognizes the brazenness. But the damage is done: offices across the country are led by prosecutors who answer only to the president, not to the law.
These are not separate stories. The mail-ballot restriction and the prosecutor end-run serve the same master: concentrating power in the executive while dismantling the mechanisms — voting, congressional oversight, independent prosecution — that could challenge it. The president votes by mail while his administration guts mail-in voting for everyone else. The White House installs prosecutors without Senate consent while calling the courts politicized. This is how democratic erosion works in practice: not through a single coup but through a thousand corrosions, each one normalized before the next begins.