David Frum

It is a predictable response by the Iranians to this military confrontation with the United States.

They would try to turn on all of their worldwide terror networks

And the United States is without leadership and without a budget for the agency that is most responsible for keeping Americans safe against terrorism.

That's something you would think that would be thought of in advance, but apparently it has not been.

OK, all right.

Maybe they didn't think about it in advance.

But now, now that the war is actually here, you think there would be a big hurry to get the Department of Homeland Security on a counterterrorism footing to stop the inessentials like detaining grandmothers and shooting Americans at street corners?

And to focus on the core mission for which the DHS was created back in the George W. Bush years, counterterrorism.

Focus on that.

But no, no.

President Trump posted on his social media platform this past weekend that he would not sign any budget for the Department of Homeland Security unless he got first the passage through Congress of a voting measure to make it more difficult to vote by mail.

Now, why President Trump cares so much about voting by mail is a little hard to understand.

Let me just go down this rabbit hole for a second.

Who votes by mail?

Above all, active duty service personnel and older people, typically Republican constituencies.

So even from a narrow party maximizing point of view, this makes no sense.

But Donald Trump seems to be motivated by a fear that or by theory that he lost in 2020 because of vote by mail.

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.