Name: Trump says GOP should 'take over the voting', backs nationalized elections
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T16:59:16.000Z
Duration: 10 min 46 s
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Adverbs of manner

President Trump is now openly calling for the federal government to take over elections in more than a dozen states.

Basic passive voice

It is prefaced on this, his lie that he won the 2020 election.

Adverbs of degree

Listen to what he told podcaster Dan Bongino, who was his deputy FBI director until just a month ago.

The Republicans should say, we want to take over.

We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many 15 places.

The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

The Constitution explicitly grants the states, not the federal government, not Republicans, the right to run their polls.

This comes after the FBI searched an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, last week and seized the 2020 ballots.

Sources now tell CNN that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was on site during the operation, put the president on the phone with with some of the FBI agents who carried out that search.

Gabbard now says the president asked her to be there and that during the call, he did not ask any questions of the agents or give any orders.

CNN's Elena Treen is live at the White House.

Kate just spoke with one of the Fulton county commissioners there who says every single election has been fair and free.

But now you have this situation with the FBI picking up those, those votes, and

you have the President of the United States making a really disturbing claim.

Yeah, look, in some of the conversations I've been having, Sarah, of course, you know, what the president is saying, particularly about this idea of nationalizing elections is just almost certainly not going to happen.

It would require changing the Constitution.

And many Republican lawmakers, of course, see the way that this, the election process works in the United States.

And having the states be the ones who really get to side a lot of the key parts of that is not, is not going to change.

But what this does really, this rhetoric is continue a trend and a pattern that we've seen the president continue into his second term in office, which is to continue and, you know, cast doubt on the integrity of the election process in the United States.

I know he continues to believe this, he still remains rages about this behind the scenes, this idea that, you know, elections in the United States can be rife with fraud.

He still often talks about the 2020 election and falsely claims that he had won it.

But then also this idea that perhaps there's some broader conspiracy that Democrats are engaging in to try and prop up undocumented immigrants, for example, in certain states, and

that could also be affecting the election process.

But I think what we're seeing, what we saw happen last week in Fulton County, Georgia, is one part of this.

But we've also seen the president take other steps.

One is that the Justice Department is now demanding that several states, including Minnesota, turn over their voter rolls, their full voter rolls, as the Trump administration is really trying to build a national voter file.

We also know the president last year had, you know, pushed forward with these executive orders.

He signed an executive order in March to make significant changes to to the electoral process in the United States, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship and demanding that all mail ballots be received by the Times that poll close on Election Day.

I will say that effort has largely been rebuffed by the courts.

But again, this speaks to the broader pattern that the president has been doing, really having his administration in his second term try to put more influence on these election processes.

Again, I will say this is something that Republicans, at least a lot of the lawmakers I've talked to on Capitol Hill in recent days or in recent hours have been saying more of a rhetoric thing.

They wish the president wasn't talking about this.

They want to be focusing on other issues ahead of the midterms.

But still something, of course, we're likely to see continue by this president moving forward.

And this isn't happening in a vacuum because in the special elections, the Republicans have gotten trounced a few times.

And so there is that, as well as the 2026 midterms are fast approaching.

Elena Trin, thank you so much for your reporting there from the White House.

President Trump is taking his false claims about the 2020 election result and kicking it up a notch, it seems now, now ahead of the midterms, he's calling on Republicans to nationalize voting, to take over the voting in more than a dozen states, he says, essentially saying that he wants to throw out the Constitution and the powers explicitly given to states by the Constitution when it comes to our elections.

The FBI searching an election office in Fulton County, Georgia.

You're seeing video of it here, seizing 20, 20 ballots.

He's the chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.

It's a position he also held during the 2020 election.

The president now saying that he's you're going to see something, you're going to see something in Georgia.

You're going to see some interesting things coming come out in Georgia.

Well, that's what I was afraid of last week when I heard that Tulsi Gabbard had come to Fulton County, Georgia, for an FBI raid.

It made no sense to me, given how full her plate is.

So at that moment, I didn't see her personally, but I heard that she was on the scene.

I knew at that moment that something bigger than just the FBI confiscating boxes of 2020 election material was going on.

When I thought at that time that this must be about the 2020 elections, but

more importantly about the 2026 and 2028 elections.

We felt all along here that there was going to be a move to take over elections in Fulton County, Georgia, and

You wrote about this kind of laying out what happened last week and with a clear message.

And I'm saying it again now, stay the hell out of Fulton County.

What, though, would a state take over now of Fulton county elections?

Well, I think it was so, so much dissent here in Fulton County.

It would, I think they would control how we run elections.

It would probably reduce the number of early voting precincts that we have and the things that we do encourage voting.

But listen, I'm no constitutional scholar, but

I do know that the states control elections, not Congress, not the White House, and

So he's treating the Constitution as if it's a suggestion, and it's not.

And further, I will say that this is this whole issue with the raid was more about a distraction to what's really going on.

And I think this is really more about power on his part than it is about policy.

But what I would say to him and others here, even I was at our Capitol yesterday trying to just making sure that there was nothing going on at our state legislature on the Republican side that I was not aware of, because that's where it's going to start here.

So I would say to other states and counties who find themselves in a situation like ours to be vigilant because this is real.

I was told that I was a target, still am a target of this investigation.

We in Fulton county, we run fair elections.

Every legal vote is counted and I said, then leave us alone.

And something I took particular note of is you also wrote this.

Since 2020, they Fulton county have run 17 separate elections without complaints.

Of particular note, they conducted a near perfect presidential election in 2024, when Donald Trump won the state of Georgia that year.

None of the conspiracy theorists and troublemakers had anything negative to say, which is an important thing to point out.

What you're getting at is you think that the real motivation here is.

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Trump says GOP should 'take over the voting', backs nationalized elections

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