Donald Trump has finally announced that he will sign executive orders targeting mail-in ballots, a long-overdue move that most of the developed world already treats as common sense. Across Europe, strict controls or outright bans on mass postal voting exist for the simple reason that the system is ripe for abuse. Ballots floating through the mail, often unsupervised, invite fraud, coercion, and manipulation, and when confidence in elections collapses, so too does the legitimacy of the government.
So why did it take Trump this long to act?
The problems with mail-in voting are hardly new. In 2020, critics were shouting themselves hoarse about its dangers. Cases of ballots dumped, "found" in suspicious batches, or misdelivered were plastered across headlines. Even before then, security experts and election monitors had warned about the vulnerabilities. And yet, during his first presidency, Trump treated the issue reactively rather than proactively. He railed against mail-in ballots after the damage was done, but never made the decisive move to abolish or sharply restrict them when he had the chance.
This raises an uncomfortable question: is Trump simply slow to have the penny drop?
Some argue he is a blunt instrument, instinctively correct about threats to American democracy, but not equipped with the foresight to craft preventative measures. Others suggest that, in his first term, he was distracted by constant media wars, Russiagate, and impeachment theatre, leaving little bandwidth for sober, structural reforms. Perhaps it was political naïveté: Trump assumed the sheer absurdity of mass mail-in voting would be obvious enough to the public and courts, without realising that the system had already been normalised by a political class skilled in pushing the Overton window.
But whatever the excuse, the delay has consequences. By failing to address mail-in voting when he first had executive authority, Trump allowed the practice to metastasise into an entrenched part of the American electoral machine. What should have been treated as an obvious vulnerability, is now a deeply polarised issue, one side insisting it is the guarantor of "access," the other pointing out it's an engraved invitation to fraud.
Now, Trump is promising action. It is needed. Without secure, in-person voting as the backbone of elections, America will never rebuild trust in the ballot box. But the fact remains: this should have been done years ago. The truth is not flattering; either Trump was intellectually sluggish, politically distracted, or simply underestimated the enemy.
It's a peculiar irony. Here is a man who could build skyscrapers, casinos, and golf courses with ruthless efficiency, but when it came to the paper ballot scam, he was as slow as a man trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces still in the box. For someone who prides himself on "the art of the deal," the art of seeing the obvious seems to have been missing.
If the United States wants to avoid the fate of a banana republic, it cannot afford leaders who are slow to recognize the obvious. Mail-in ballots are a loophole large enough to drive a stolen election through. Trump may finally be ready to close it, but the delay has already inflicted damage that will take more than one executive order to repair.