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February 6, 2026

By Stephen Collinson

Georgia's always on his mind

President Donald Trump speaks during the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, February 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) 

You might have noticed that Donald Trump won't let sleeping dogs lie.

His new obsession is the same as the old obsession — non-existent voter fraud. But it's one that threatens to lead American democracy back into danger.

In Trump’s presidency, scandals get overshadowed by other scandals as soon as they erupt. So while foreigners fixated on new twists in the Jeffrey Epstein saga this week, Americans were contending with multiple political storms. 

Perhaps the most ominous concerns Trump’s return to fracturing faith in the country’s voting system. He called for the nationalizing of elections, and said Republicans should take over administration of them in 15 places. Not surprisingly, this seems to refer to states or districts where Trump hasn't won.

This, of course, would be illegal. The founders cared so much about ensuring that an all-powerful executive couldn’t corrupt voting that they put their prohibition in the first article of the Constitution. America doesn’t have one election, it has 50 — one in each state. The states, not the federal government, administer voting.

Guess who has no say? The president.

Trump’s mouthpieces — as they often do — insisted he didn’t say what he actually said. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained her boss was really just backing a Republican bill that outlaws non-citizens voting in elections. No matter that this is already legal and rarely happens.

But Trump came steamrollering back, saying Tuesday that “if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” referring to a bunch of Republicans in the Oval Office.

Trump’s threats would be bad enough in a vacuum. But refracted through his bid to overturn the 2020 election, they are far more sinister. When the president warns he’s going to meddle in voting, we should probably believe him. Especially since thinking out loud about unconstitutional proposals is not the end of it. 

In a shocking move, FBI agents descended on Fulton County, Georgia, and took away 700 boxes of electoral materials, including ballots from the 2020 election. Trump still claims he won the Peach State six years ago, even though Republican leaders and several audits dismissed his claims as nonsense. That didn’t stop him asking local officials to “find” enough votes for him to win.

Even worse, cameras revealed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the search. What is America’s nominal top spy — whose main responsibility is overseeing intelligence agencies to prevent a new 9/11 —  doing down in Georgia? Gabbard insisted she’d been ordered by Trump to take part in a mission to end election fraud.

Gabbard is an enthusiastic proponent of the president’s fraud mythology and rejects the consensus of the intel agencies she now runs that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Her involvement highlights the real peril in all of this.

It’s not really about 2020. It’s about November’s midterm elections, in which Trump’s Republicans fear heavy losses could hand Congress to Democrats and make his final White House years miserable. A trumped up investigation that purports to find election fraud could become a pretext to use government power to intervene in the electoral system before the midterms.

And even if he’s rebuffed by the courts, Trump will have sown yet more distrust that could act as an accelerant for his inevitable claims that he was cheated again, if Democrats have a big night in November.

'I did a hell of a lot of good'

Trump has made the annual pilgrimage to the National Prayer breakfast. And as you would expect, his speech was all about the ultimate deity who has all the power — himself.

The president also delivered musings on his final Big Deal — whether he can barter his way into eternal bliss. Late last year, he’d quipped, “I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me (into) Heaven." With a roguish grin he added “I think I’m not, maybe, Heaven bound.”

But he seems to have experienced an epiphany. “I really think I probably should make it,” Trump he said Thursday, “I mean, I’m not a perfect candidate but I did a hell of a lot of good for perfect people.”

In a hardly prayerful speech, Trump went on to slam a Republican congressman as a “moron," questioned how a person of faith could vote for a Democrat and harped again on the 2020 election. He praised El Salvador’s brutal jails while fanboying its dictator Nayib Bukele.

And he marveled at the devotion of the Republican House Speaker.

“Mike Johnson is a very religious person and he doesn't hide it. He will say to me sometimes at lunch. ‘Sir, may we pray?’ I say, 'Excuse me?’ We're having lunch in the Oval Office." 

“God is watching over him," Trump said. " Don’t know about me.”

'The America I remember'

Last week, we asked for your impressions of Trump's wild January.

It didn't go down to well with our readers.

Jacqueline Moore said that she was "puzzled as to why no one is wondering why our peaceful protests in (Minnesota) are met with such hostility from the same administration threatening war on Iran for its crackdown on peaceful protests?” 

Susan Schwab, from Berrien Springs, Michigan, said that she wanted to return to "the America I remember, the one that is good, true, generous, and just, that welcomes the downtrodden, that opposes tyranny wherever found, that stands as a beacon of hope in an evil world.” 

Holly Swank Cummings wrote from Texas to say that despite everything, she's still proud of her country. And she had this message for the president. "Mr. Trump, you will fix this mess of your own creation … three years remain for you to get your house together and do some good in our tired, aching country.”

Dorian and Claudia said from Romania that the events in January were confusing. "In spite of all these," they went on, "we remain confident that the American People, as it has always done in its history, will get over these problems and will emerge stronger and united, after the conscience examination of course.”

John Lavasseur argued that the policies of the Biden administration had allowed millions of migrants to set foot on US soil illegally. But he called for the administration to target undocumented migrants who had committed criminal offenses, rather than those migrants "who are respectful and sincere (and) being supportive of this Country's laws and traditions.”

Another reader, Frederick, worried that the United States under Trump is "busy usurping power left, right and centre in the international space. For instance, who appointed the US to intervene in Iranian domestic issues?" He concluded “the recent threats to acquire Greenland by force is another case in point not to mention the invasion of Venezuela. The US has been allowed so much undeserved power across the world. This has to stop."

There were similar sentiments from Abdul Malik Abdulrahman, who warned that America is "speedily loosing her respect before the global community."