Trump sics his wretched Department of Homeland Security on Nevada’s free and fair election

“We refute these claims,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said Friday in response to the latest baseless allegations and crude extortion threats hurled at Nevada and its elections from Trump and his lap dogs.

Aguilar found himself issuing more than one statement about Trump’s attacks on Nevada elections as the past week came to a close. The one quoted above was responding to snarling and barking at Nevada by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Mullin’s growling Friday came on the heels of Trump’s speech Thursday night, in which Trump reiterated for the eleventy-billionth time some of his favorite conspiracies — teeming hordes of noncitizens, all of them transgender of course, voting in elections, that sort of thing. (And yes, I may be mashing up some of Trump’s greatest hits there.)

“That was some bullshit,” Aguilar, in his capacity as chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said about Trump’s speech.

Aggressively ignoring that under the Constitution states, not Trump and let alone Mullin, are in charge of running their own elections, Mullin Friday dog-paddled in Trump’s wake and said states better do as Trump says or they’ll lose federal money, and state election officials might even be prosecuted.

The day before, Mullin had sent whiny letters to a few secretary of state offices around the country.

In the Nevada version of the letter, Mullin said a “preliminary review” indicated nearly 16,000 “noncitizens” are registered to vote in the state.

Aguilar dismissed that preposterous allegation as “wildly speculative at best” and accurately noted Mullin “hasn’t shared anything that backs it up.”

“The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar added.

The Trump administration lacking a fundamental understanding of things is generally a safe bet. (See Hormuz, Strait of.)

And Trump, Mullin, and the rest of the people in Trump’s administration who believe Trump’s election conspiracies and lies (or are pretending to believe them because it’s a job requirement) routinely demonstrate that any concern for elections functioning fairly and properly is the last thing on their minds.

Aguilar hinted at that a couple times near the end of the week. He described Trump’s warmed-over pig slop of a speech Thursday night as “the latest chapter in a predictable playbook crafted intentionally to undermine faith in our elections.” And in his response to Mullin’s remarks Friday, Aguilar observed that Trump and his apparatchiks “just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”

“Attempts to spread misinformation and create distrust make people question a process that works and threaten to stop them from participating and voting,” Aguilar said.

Yup. That’s our Trump.

Undermining public faith in democracy so people won’t vote and/or won’t trust election results is despicably loathsome and anti-American. And yet even that, which Trump has been doing for years, doesn’t match the intensity of Trump’s second-term radicalization or the callous and blatant disregard he’s showing for everyone and everything everywhere except himself.

In other words, it seems unlikely Trump is merely content with undermining public faith in democracy.

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to “take over the voting.”

For him to attempt do that, perhaps by deploying ICE or other, more competent armed federal forces, still might seem too outlandish and unimaginable, even for Trump. But so did launching a war on Iran and losing it.

As you may have heard, some Nevadans have chosen to believe Republican governor and self-styled Trump-whisperer Joe Lombardo will save us; that the governor’s staggering charm and mad skills of persuasion would combine with his purportedly Western lawman-style sense of uprightness and decency (“I’m Joe Lombardo”) to prevent Trump from, say, deploying shock troops to forcibly seize control of ballots, polling places, tallying procedures, and the election (even though as a consequence of such a takeover Lombardo’s reelection would be assured).

Yet the founding assumption underlying the “Lombardo will save us” proposition is that Lombardo’s influence with Trump is protecting Nevadans — including presumably its all-important tourism industry — from despicable actions by Trump’s immigration enforcement thugs.

Too bad the Lombardo-Trump accord, if in fact there is one, was evidently unbeknownst to the blundering ICE thugs who made international headlines with an ugly botched attempt to arrest a 57-year-old man at Harry Reid airport, suggesting to people the world over in the process that flying into Las Vegas is a dangerous proposition.

Lombardo didn’t thwart the ICE thugs at the airport. People did. And people, specifically Nevada voters, are the ones who ultimately will have to defeat Trump’s perpetual malevolent assaults on democracy in Nevada.

A version of this commentary originally appeared in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.