Miserably unconstitutional in political self-preservation mode, President Donald J. Trump following a Texas State Senate contest that went against his party, whined that Republicans should "nationalize" elections.

On Saturday, a Texas Democrat won his state senate contest by 14 points in the same district that Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, another sign of Trump failing badly with American voters. In November of last year, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger trounced their Republican opponents in New Jersey and Virginia respectively.

Predictably, as he continues to cry about the results of the 2020 election when he lost to Joe Biden, Trump this week - after his latest loss - wailed that “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The law seldom troubles this convicted felon with a history of trying to interfere with lawful elections results, but, of course, under the United States Constitution, state law primarily governs American elections, a check by the founders of the country against despotic power.

Trump's fear, expressed in a podcast with Dan Bongino, coupled with his disregard for the Constitution, put New Jerseyans on high alert this week, especially within the context of the Trump Administration's militarization of the streets of America.

"I don't care what he wants to do," said InsiderNJ legal analyst and revered defense attorney Joe Hayden, who marched for American Civil Rights with Dr. Martin Luthor King in Selma, Alabama. "He can't legally do it. The federal government can't take it over. He can ruminate all he likes, but he is constricted by the U.S. Constitution.

"By nationalizing the elections, he's going to have the national government look at the voting rolls," Hayden added. "He can ruminate with his sycophants around him but legally and constitutionally he can't do it - not without a fight to the death."

"Nationalizing elections is not something you can do by fiat - it would require

legislation at the state and national levels," said elections lawyer Rajiv Parikh. "There are different systems for different kinds of elections, by means of constitutional power delegated to the states. To nationalize something like that would require deep legislative action."

New Jerseyans see the convergence of Trump's efforts to unconstitutionally control the election process and the aggressive expansion of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within his administration. An agency working with a $6 billion budget ten years ago suddenly beefed to $85 billion thanks to Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill, which installs armed, quick-triggered, and panic-prone men in masks on the streets who - in the time of Trump - are amassing a record of terror and murder in Minneapolis.

"As they go on, they're going to be more and more desperate because they're losing the voting public," Hayden said of Trump and his MAGA Movement backers. "We can't be scared. We have to have resolve about not abandoning the Constitution."

New Jerseyans see the clear trajectory of ICE deployed expressly to intimidate people at the polls and suppress the American vote in those places where people do not support the President.

Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, a candidate for Congress in the 12th District, where U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman is retiring, told InsiderNJ, "We know this is where Trump has been headed. He said, remember, if they voted for him the last time they would never have to vote again. This is Trump working on carrying out his expressed desire to not have any elections again. We are on a slow march to dictatorship. This is something every citizen should be concerned about. Elections are constitutionally the responsibility of the states. We should never have imagined a Supreme Court decision granting him immunity, this man who was indicted and convicted.  The acts we see now around our nation - the ICE raids - are not just about immigration. They are laying the foundation for giving the President an excuse for dispensing with elections and implementing martial law. He sees no way Republicans can hold onto office if there are free and fair elections and he's trying everything he can by any means necessary to hold onto power."

Like Hayden, and energized Democrats in neighboring CD-7 intent on defeating Trump ally incumbent U.S. Rep. Tom Kean, Jr. (R-7), Mapp said he is prepared to rise peacefully and lawfully in defense of the Constitution.

"I can't imagine that this would be the end of the experiment we have had for 25o years," said the mayor. "We have to protest. We cannot sit idly by and pretend it's not happening. It's real. It's happening every single day. Silence is not the way out of this. Inaction is not the way out of this. We have to rise up on a daily and weekly basis in opposition to these draconian actions. We must do it peacefully. We should take the nonviolent path of Dr. King as opposed to 'any means necessary' by Malcolm X. We should not give Trump the excuse he seeks. That's the ultimate goal he is pursuing for these midterms. He wants to be able to say, 'people are being violent and therefore' he has to deploy the military and declare martial law. That's his goal. We have to protest every day, and at the No Kings marches coming up in a couple of weeks. Do not give him an excuse. We will have free and fair elections this coming June and this coming November. I call on every American to be very mindful of the fact we have to speak up and speak out in a peaceful manner and not give Trump a reason to take action against the values we have long fought so hard for in this constitutional republic."

State Senator Joe Cryan (D-20), also of Union County, concurred that Trump's words

and actions "are all part of the strategy of voter suppression, in that part of the country that doesn't favor them, where he has a harder time. It's the worst of us in action."

Trump continues to obsess over Georgia, where he lost the 2020 election to Biden, and where the FBI continues to scour for leads that would deny the results of a contest ratified by a Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. After his loss to Biden in Georgia, and four days prior to the Jan. 6th desecration of the United States Capitol when Trump's MAGA followers attempted to block Vice President Mike Pence's lawful and peaceable certification of the 2020 election, "Trump pressured Raffensperger to change the election results for the state of Georgia to make him the winner. Trump told Raffensperger, 'I just want to find 11,780 votes.' Raffensperger repeatedly rebuffed Trump's attempts to pressure him."

In response to the President's latest anti-democratic, anti-elections comments, Somerset County Clerk Steve Peter said, "He doesn't know the Constitution or to the extent he knows the Constitution he doesn't care about it. What's disturbing is his enablers chuckle every time he says something blatantly unconstitutional. The founding fathers put that proviso in there based on the crown of England. They put it in there for a real reason, and that reason is still valid."

It's the reason at her swearing-in ceremony that Governor Mikie Sherrill took pains to make the following statement:

The list of grievances in our Declaration of Independence included these charges against the king:

He has refused his assent to laws.

He has obstructed the administration of justice.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

"This election proved that the people of New Jersey recognize the parallels," Sherrill added. "That we see a president illegally usurping power. He has unconstitutionally enacted a tariff regime to make billions for himself and his family, while everyone else sees costs go higher and higher. Here, we demand people in public service actually serve the public instead of extorting money to benefit themselves and their cronies."

Peter noted the specific provisions of New Jersey law to decentralize control of elections and provide checks and balances.

"The New Jersey law has a split between a Board of Elections and the County Clerks Office and a Superintendent of Elections, and basically when you were in grade school, if you'll remember, and you graded each other's papers, we do the same thing," the clerk told InsiderNJ. "I send out the vote by mail ballots on Election Day. The Board runs the polling places. The board tabulates the VBMs I send out and I tabulate the machine ballots. The board is composed of three Republicans and three Democrats."

FOR MORE ON HOW THE PROCESS WORKS, PLEASE GO HERE.

Those provisions make elections fraud difficult and significantly diminish the likelihood of systemic fraud. Trump in his 2020 debate with Biden - and as part of his ongoing effort to create cynicism around election results - cited a voter fraud case in Paterson, but that was a case of alleged illegal ballot harvesting by a candidate for office, not a case of a board falsifying election results.

Trump's continuing attempts to distract and flood the zone with misinformation and to

change the dialogue from more intense scrutiny of his presidency, rife with scandal and failure, and his sniveling, legally unsupportable public ruminations about ending constitutional elections, cannot obscure his intensified conflation of an administration's deadly immigration enforcement tactics, the stepped-up presence of men in masks with guns in our communities, who killed two peaceful protestors in Minneapolis last month, and what to him and his political handlers can only be absorbed as trending five alarm fire election results. In utterly unintimidated New Jersey, the President's militarization inside the United States leads one place: to the militarization of "elections," but for legal, peaceful, and powerful public opposition.