In August 2016, writer and actor Joe Bob Briggs (real name John Bloom) wrote an article for an online magazine to explain to befuddled and angry journalists why Donald Trump was climbing in the polls on his way to the presidency.
“Donald Trump is Human Luminol,” Briggs wrote, comparing the first-time candidate to the chemical sprayed on a crime scene to cause traces of blood to “phosphoresce like a red-headed hobo’s nose after seven bottles of Night Train.” Trump “finds whatever people are mad about and says ‘I can fix it.’ He probably can’t fix it, but he’s talking about things that nobody else wants to fix. He sees the blood on the floor.”
Ten years later, Trump is trying to fix something that half the country is mad about: election integrity, or the lack of it.
Some people don’t see anything and insist there is nothing to be seen.
So on March 31, President Trump sprayed Luminol all over the issue by signing Executive Order 14399. It was titled, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”
Can you guess who lit up?
The first lawsuit was filed the next day by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Two more lawsuits were filed on April 2 by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.
The NAACP sued on April 3, and a separate lawsuit was filed by California plus 22 other states and the District of Columbia.
With one sweep of his Sharpie marker, the Human Luminol president lit up the entire Democratic establishment, most if not all of the Democrats’ 2028 presidential candidates, and the nominally non-partisan groups that haven’t agreed with a single Republican decision since Lincoln decided to take in a play.
Completely separate from the legal arguments or the merits of the executive order, take a moment to marvel at the skills of the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum. He just engineered a nationwide unpaid media campaign in which every prominent Democrat will be on television from now until November 2028 appearing to be fighting to protect non-citizen voting and duplicate mail ballots.
The executive order directs the Homeland Security secretary to “compile and transmit to each State” a list of state residents who are confirmed U.S. citizens and will be 18 or older at the time of the next federal election. Then it directs the Postmaster General to “initiate rulemaking” to require mail-in ballots transmitted by the post office to be placed in “secure ballot envelopes” with election markings and unique bar codes that facilitate tracking.
Next the executive order requires the U.S. Postal Service to transmit ballots “only” to individuals on the “state specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List,” to ensure that “only eligible absentee or mail-in voters receive absentee or mail-in ballots” through the U.S. mail. Finally, the order directs the U.S. attorney general to “prioritize the investigation and prosecution” of any election official, individual or group that violates the law by “issuing or distributing Federal ballots to ineligible voters,” with the extra zinger of withholding federal funds from “noncompliant States and localities, as appropriate.
This will be in the courts for years.
Along with legal challenges on the merits, there can be – already have been – challenges related to who can sue, when they can sue, and where they can sue. Congress long ago established a separate process for challenging certain aspects of postal regulations that doesn’t go through the district courts. Some challenges go to the Postal Regulatory Commission, and then reviews proceed directly to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of the executive order was related to the timing of one of the lawsuits, not to the substance of the executive order.
There certainly will not be a resolution of the legal issues in time to affect the November election. Maybe in time for the 2028 election, but probably not. In 2020, New York and other states filed a lawsuit to challenge changes made by the USPS to its mail processing operations that potentially would slow the delivery of mail ballots. They were successful at the district court level, but an appeals court held that the district court did not have jurisdiction. That decision was reached on July 14, 2026.
Read the executive order as the work of a television producer and campaign manager – Trump has excelled at both – and it looks like a set of notes for thousands of TV interviews that all feature Democrats loudly insisting that non-citizens are not voting and mail ballots are totally tamper-proof.
Just wait until the argument turns to the established authority of the Postmaster General to issue regulations to prevent the use of the U.S. mail for fraud. Mail ballots could be mentioned in the same breath with fake lotteries and fraudulent investment schemes.
In that context, the administration can argue that standardized envelopes with unique barcodes are a reasonable method of preventing mail fraud.
We’re in for two years or more of this debate over whether there is or isn’t a need for postal regulations to protect election integrity.
Trump has framed the argument in a way that is certain to make Democrats look like they’re fighting to protect cheating in elections, and the Democrats who will be fighting the hardest will just happen to be in power in states where they never lose elections.
Enjoy the show.
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