Trump offers million-dollar bounty to intimidate voters
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
By offering cash for voter fraud tips in Mississippi, Donald Trump is weaponizing the state to scare citizens and protect a failing GOP midterm strategy.
Donald Trump is trying to buy the destruction of our democracy. He recently offered a $1 million reward for anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to a conviction. This is not a policy. It is a bounty. It is a direct attempt to turn neighbors into informants and scare people away from the ballot box.
A bounty for the ballot box
ABC News reports that Trump announced this reward while traveling to a rally in Mississippi. He is also pushing the SAVE America Act. This law would require proof of citizenship to register and ID at the polls. To make matters worse, Trump created a whistleblower program. It gives a 1% commission of recovered government money to tipsters. Trump himself decides who gets paid.
This is the January 6 Capitol attack by another name. It shares the same mechanism: weaponizing supporters to disrupt democratic electoral processes and overturn election results. He has spent years citing the 2016 election as 'stolen' and the 2020 election as 'stolen' to keep his base in a state of permanent grievance.
The goal is not "integrity." It is control. ABC News notes that Trump already instructed the DOJ to sue to block Alaska Senate results if a Republican narrowly loses. The Guardian reports that a US appeals court panel recently ruled against the administration regarding California mail ballots. This is a coordinated assault on the right to vote.
The theater of the elite
While he hunts for "fraud," Trump spends his time in a petty feud with Barack Obama. CNN reports that Obama mocked Trump's White House renovations. He said the building looked like "Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory." Trump responded by calling Obama "not a smart guy." He claimed the White House was in "terrible shape" and that he fixed it with "the finest artisans in the world."
This fight is a performance. It is designed to distract us from the money flowing downward. The Dossier reveals that this feud is a mask for a shared history of protecting power. In 1997, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama wrote to President Bill Clinton to oppose EPA clean air standards. He argued the rules would have a "significant economic impact" on Illinois.
Whether it is Trump's "pristine" walls or the establishment's corporate lobbying, the result is the same. The people in zip codes like mine in Flint are left with the filth. We get the poisoned water and the broken masonry while the leaders argue over the decor of the palace.
Panic in the ruby-red states
Trump is now campaigning in Corinth, Mississippi for Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. He is there because the GOP is scared. CNN reports that Hyde-Smith won her race by 10 points. Trump won the state by more than 16 points. But the margins are tightening. Scott Colom is running a competitive campaign that has forced Trump into a rescue mission.
The panic is real. Harry Enten told CNN that while Trump has 98% support within the Maga GOP, his numbers with non-Maga voters "plummet into the ocean." This is why the rhetoric is getting uglier. The Guardian reports that Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, called the racist attacks in the Michigan Senate race "grotesque and undemocratic."
The GOP is using fear because they cannot win on the facts of the economy. They are betting that a million-dollar bounty and racist dog whistles will scare enough people to keep Cindy Hyde-Smith in power.
The administration will use this manufactured fraud panic to justify stealing the midterms. They are building a legal and financial machine to overturn any result they do not like. Justice requires an end to these bounties and a real investigation into the weaponization of the DOJ. If we let a president pay citizens to police the vote, we are no longer a democracy; we are a surveillance state with a campaign budget.