‘This. Is. Not. Normal!’ CNN’s Dana Bash Horrified By Trump’s Efforts to Federalize Elections

CNN anchor Dana Bash reacted with horror to President Donald Trump advocating for a federal takeover of elections, emphasizing that it would be a violation of the Constitution and urging her audience to take his comments seriously.

During an appearance on former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump recycled some of his baseless elections claims — saying he won states that were actually won by President Joe Biden in 2020 or Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, for example — to argue that Republicans needed to be “tougher” on election fraud.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places,'” said Trump. “The Republicans oughta nationalize the voting.”

As expected, Trump’s call to federalize elections — a function clearly delegated to the states in the Constitution — met with vociferous criticism from Democrats, watchdog organizations, and non-MAGA Republicans.

Bash discussed Trump’s comments with the panel on Inside Politics Tuesday, beginning by playing the clip from Bongino’s podcast and noting that the midterm elections “are only 272 days away.”

Elections are “meant to be a decentralized process,” said Bash. “That is literally how the founders of America wanted it when they wrote the Constitution to prescribe it that way,” but Trump “remains fixated on debunked claims about voter fraud in 2020” and “says he wants it to change.”

After playing the Bongino clip, Bash criticized Trump’s claim about illegal immigrants voting as “not true,” citing a 2024 audit of Georgia’s voter rolls that reviewed 8 million registered voters and found only 20 who were not citizens, and only “nine out of 8 million” had actually voted.

This was an important issue, Bash continued, and it was necessary to not just pay attention to “the fantastical things that this president says,” but also watch the actions of his administration.

CNN senior reporter Edward-Issac Dovere agreed with Bash’s take, saying that Trump “is serious about this,” pointing to his well-established habit of “object[ing] to elections that he didn’t win — we all saw what happened on January 6th.”

“People are very, very concerned,” he said.

Bash read from Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, which establishes the powers state legislatures have over elections, subject to legislation by Congress, and then quoted several comments by Trump about elections in which he lamented not sending the National Guard to seize ballot boxes in 2020, said “we shouldn’t even have an election,” and repeatedly shared baseless and debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

“You wrote, ‘When Trump makes election threats, it’s best to believe him,'” said Bash, quoting the headline from an article CNN politics senior reporter Stephen Collinson had published earlier in the day.

Collinson said that it was vital to look at the current “cycle of election threats through the prism of what happened in 2020,” noting that it was “about this time, six years ago,” that Trump had started making suggestions that “there could be fraud,” accusing Democratic states of being unable to “fairly administer elections,” preparing his supporters for “the idea that an election that the president loses would not be a fair election,” and starting “to lay the groundwork for, if not legal challenges, political challenges to the election.”

Article I, Section 4 “does not mention the president,” Collinson continued, “because the founders were worried about an ultimately all-powerful autocratic executive taking over the mechanisms of the elections in the states in a way that would fracture the whole purpose of the Constitution: the idea that you don’t have a central king like figure that administers the politics of the rest of the country.”

Later in the segment, Bash brought up the FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, executing a search warrant for 2020 ballots.

Fulton County “was the epicenter of the president’s unproven allegations of election fraud,” said Bash, and the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had said that the search and her presence there “was requested by the president” and she had “facilitated a phone call between the president and the FBI agents” who were conducting the search.

“This. Is. Not. Normal!” exclaimed Bash, clapping her hands with each word. “This is not normal in any way, shape or form.”

“It’s not only not normal, it seems to be violations of procedures that are in place,” Dovere concurred. He pointed out how in 2020 people had said Trump was “just having trouble accepting that he lost,” so “just let him get through it — and then we saw what that led to with January 6th.”

The situation was even worse now, he added, because “we have not just the president here, but many administration officials who are very actively supporting his efforts, and facilitating all sorts of things that are meant to raise questions.”

The potential for problems was not just limited to Election Day, Dovere argued, bringing up Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) long delay in swearing in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) after she won her special election.

Johnson “said it was because the shutdown was going on at that point, but that raised questions for people of what would happen if maybe he or others could say, ‘Well, there were questions with elections,'” said Dovere. “What if the margins are really tight after the midterms and there are a couple seats that will decide Republican or Democratic majority? These are things — and of course, after January 6th, after the riot happened, there were hundreds of members of Congress, Republicans, who still voted to say that they had trouble with the election. So that’s the mindset that is going through here.”

Bash vowed that her show would “stay on this story aggressively” before going to commercial break.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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