As March came to an end, the Republican again ignored his own country’s policymaking process, again decided to circumvent Congress and again signed an executive order giving himself sweeping authority over the country’s elections systems. MS NOW reported:

Trump’s order requires the Department of Homeland Security … to create a list of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote. DHS would be expected to rely on information provided by the Social Security Administration, according to the Daily Caller, which first reported the Trump administration’s plans.

The U.S. Postal Service would then use that database to send absentee ballots to voters identified as eligible for mail-in voting, according to a White House fact sheet. The ballots would be mailed in envelopes with special codes only to voters enrolled in state-specific absentee ballot programs.

.....If Trump’s policy is ridiculous, and its failure in the courts appears inevitable, it might be tempting to brush off his latest gambit as pointless political theater.

But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the latest power-grab is part of a comprehensive effort to undermine public confidence in the nation’s electoral system and sow doubts about election results that Republicans don’t like. The president has played an instrumental role in fueling unnecessary public skepticism, and his executive order is likely to make a bad situation worse.

For another, Trump continues to position himself as the nation’s single most serious threat to the integrity of the electoral process.

On Tuesday morning, The New York Times published an op-ed by Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who made a convincing case that the most pressing danger to our elections isn’t coming from abroad; it’s coming from the White House.

“For months, President Trump has made his intentions clear,” the senator wrote. “He has called for the federal government to ‘take over’ elections, impose national rules and override state authority. Now we are beginning to see how he may plan to do this.”

Later that same day, the president helped prove Warner right.