Trump obliterates an aide’s efforts to downplay his comments – again

 https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/05/politics/leavitt-trump-contradict-nationalize-elections

Trump on Tuesday laid waste to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s efforts to pretend he didn’t say something as controversial as he did. And this has become an altogether familiar exercise.

The controversy du jour in the Trump administration right now is Trump having floated nationalizing elections.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump told former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino in a podcast episode published Monday. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

So up stepped Leavitt to suggest that Trump hadn’t actually said what he said.

She claimed Trump was instead referring to Congress passing the SAVE Act, a bill that aims to combat noncitizen voting in federal elections – something that is already illegal and that experts say rarely happens.

And sure enough, Trump on Tuesday made clear that he meant what he said. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins what he meant by nationalize the election, he made no mention of the SAVE Act and doubled down on the idea of the federal government asserting a more expansive form of control