Sometimes it’s hard to know if a reporter’s question comes from an antagonist lamely trying to expose supposed hypocrisy in President Donald Trump or from a sycophant teeing up a softball for him to knock out of the park.
At his White House Cabinet meeting on March 26, Trump was asked why he voted by mail-in ballot from Mar-a-Lago when he is seeking a nationwide ban on mail-in ballots via the SAVE Act — legislation being slowly killed by Democrats on Capitol Hill. The bill includes several election reforms to make the voting system less susceptible to fraud, including, most importantly, a national requirement for voters to show ID to prove they are citizens.
As is endlessly but necessarily repeated, we all must show ID for any number of daily transactions, such as buying a drink, getting a job, or traveling on a commercial flight. (Traveling by air may, of course, become redundant because of Democrats’ obstruction in another area, the Department of Homeland Security. They’re refusing to fund DHS because they don’t want illegal aliens deported, and one effect is to stanch pay for Transportation Safety Administration workers, which is making air travel a nightmare to be avoided).
But back to the White House press conference. Trump confirmed his use of a mail-in ballot, saying, “I did … because I am president of the United States … but I appreciate the question because I know it was well-meaning.” Critics might, in a further piece of disingenuousness, treat his words as an expression of arrogance amounting to, “I’m the big guy, and I’ll do what I want. The mail-in ballot ban is for little people.”
But it wasn’t that. Remind yourself of what the mail-in dispute is about. The ban is intended to prevent fraud and stop ballots purportedly from eligible citizens being sent in by crooks hoping to steal an election. There is no way of knowing if a ballot paper from an unknown Joe Blow is from an eligible voter or not. But election authorities can be reasonably confident that a mail-in ballot from the president comes from a citizen entitled to vote, not least because the Constitution requires the president to be a natural-born citizen of the United States. Of course Trump’s mail-in ballot was okay!
In any case, as the president pointed out, the SAVE Act includes many exceptions to the national ban. Mail-in ballots are permissible for members of the military, people away on business trips, the disabled, the sick, the halt, and the lame.
Democrats argue that with the SAVE Act, Trump and Republicans want to disenfranchise minorities and women. For reasons either unexplained or uncompelling, they argue that it’s harder for racial minorities to get ID, and that women will be prevented from voting because marriage changes their name from the one on their birth certificates.
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But black voters support voter ID by a margin of 80% to 20%, as does the general population, and rightly regard it as racist to suggest they’d find it more difficult than white people to comply. Women who change their names at marriage have to change the name on their driver’s licenses, too, so what’s the obstacle?
Arguments against voter ID deserve to be brushed aside with a contemptuous sweep of the hand, which was pretty much how Trump dealt with the White House reporter’s inane question.
