David Frum

Therefore, vote by mail maybe must be punished.

He may also be thinking, and this is pretty sinister, but it's not, I think, beyond the realm of imagining that if what you want to do is a crackdown on voting in 2026 in the congressional elections.

And if you want to use ICE and other agencies to intimidate people at polling stations, you'd better remove the vote by mail option because a lot of people who might be afraid to confront federal force at the polling stations may still be willing to vote if they can put their ballot in an envelope and mail it safely and in privacy.

And not have to worry that because of the accent of their voice or the color of their skin, they will be wrongly accused of voting illegally and detained and held for however long the government wants to detain them.

So they have that fear.

They vote by mail.

Their vote still counts.

They are American citizens, naturalized or native born, but with just a different accent or a different skin color.

So maybe that's what Donald Trump has in mind.

But whatever he's got in mind, whether it's some...

strange or crazy reaction to his defeat in 2020, whether it's a strategic plan to stop or harass voting in 2026, or whether it's just a misconception of who votes by mail that, in fact, it is a Republican-leading constituency that mostly uses this option.

Whatever his motive, the point is he's holding hostage, he who started the war or who intensified this war, he's holding hostage the national security counterterrorism budget of the United States in a war with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.

in a war that he timed and that he chose.

It just seems a bizarre abdication of responsibility.

Now, if you watched my dialogue with Tom Nichols last week, you've noticed I have a lot of sympathy for at least the stated goals of confronting Iran to punish the world's leading state sponsor of terror, to stop the Iranian nuclear program, and to deliver the promised help to the brave people of Iran who rose in January against an oppressive government, one of the most repressive and aggressive governments in the world.

They rose in hundreds of thousands and were killed in the thousands.

The President of the United States promised to help them.

And I think even when the president is Donald Trump, the promises of the president should be made good.

But the anxiety that Tom and I discussed last week and that I've discussed in articles with The Atlantic is these guys, these guys, these guys are supposed to lead the war.

They don't seem capable of organizing a lemonade stand.