"No — vote by mail or vote in person. I'd rather have them vote in person, but they can vote by mail if they want, because we seem to have no choice because a lot of people want to vote by mail, but a lot of very good people also want to vote in-person. You can do either. But what we're concerned about is there seems to be — not seems to be — there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail."
President Trump has described mail voting as "inherently corrupt" and has said for years that his 2020 defeat was the product of fraud including mail ballots. He votes by mail himself. In March of his second term he signed an executive order directing the Postal Service to require states, at least 90 days before a federal election, to notify USPS whether they intended to allow ballots to be sent through the mail, and then to submit a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days out. In August 2026 he posted the line above. That same month a federal judge blocked the Postal Service from enforcing the new rules. In mid-September the Supreme Court declined to allow the rule to take effect, in a one-paragraph order upholding the lower court — the sequence recorded in entry #46, in which the government won a stay on the premise that the rule was hypothetical three days after the rule had in fact issued at 9 p.m. on a Friday. Trump called the decision a "big loss" for Republicans and wrote that Democrats would now have "open field" to cheat. On Saturday, October 3, he posted a video to Truth Social: "If your state has early voting, do not wait. Go out and vote. Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day, November 3rd, so we can defeat the radical left 'Dumocrats' in a midterm victory that is too big to rig." The accompanying post read: "Republicans must WIN the 2026 Midterm Elections, and we must use every appropriate tool — Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, we must 'swamp' the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout! SO IMPORTANT — PLEASE GET OUT AND VOTE." On Monday, October 5, in a South Lawn gaggle before departing for the Nebraska rally, he was asked about the apparent about-face and gave the answer above; the pool report was filed by Mallory Wilson of The Hill, who recorded him saying "I'd rather have them vote in-person, but they can vote by mail if they want… a lot of people want to vote by mail, but a lot of very good people also want to vote in-person." In the same gaggle he criticized Maricopa County's ballot mailing. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed that Monday put his approval at 32 percent, holding at September's record low, with registered voters preferring Democrats to Republicans 44 to 37 and independents favoring Democrats 37 to 21 with 28 percent undecided. Some Republicans have argued for years that discouraging mail voting suppresses turnout among rural conservatives who live far from polling places.
Filed it as hypocrisy, which is accurate and is the smallest reading available. "Trump drops longtime aversion to mail-in voting with GOP trailing in polls" was the frame, with the fraud claims recapped as background and the reversal attributed to bad polling. The reversal frame assumes he changed his mind. The transcript shows he did not. The instruction to vote by mail and the assertion that there is cheating in voting by mail are in the same answer, seconds apart, and he strengthened the fraud claim mid-sentence — "there seems to be — not seems to be — there is." He is telling supporters to use a method he says in the same breath is being used against them. Not one outlet printed both halves and left them standing next to each other. Second, nobody asked the obvious question about "we seem to have no choice." Who removed the choice? His own executive order attempted to, a federal district court blocked it in August, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb that in September. The absence of an alternative he is describing is the failure of his own rule, and entry #46 established that the Court was told the rule was hypothetical after it had already issued. The sentence is a description of his own litigation record and it was read as resignation. Third, "too big to rig" is both a turnout instruction and a pre-positioned explanation for a loss, delivered in one clause, and it was quoted as a slogan in stories that did not note it is the second half of a conditional. Fourth, in the same gaggle in which he told the country to vote by mail, he attacked a specific county's ballot mailing by name. No story placed Maricopa in the same paragraph as the instruction.
Entry #40 recorded the elections-emergency thread. Entry #46 recorded what happened to the USPS rule and what the Supreme Court was and was not told about it. Those entries were about machinery — who controls the ballot, who tells the court what has already happened. This is the first entry in that thread where the machinery has conclusively failed and the posture has adjusted around it without the underlying claim being withdrawn, and that combination is the whole point. If mail voting is corrupt, asking tens of millions of people to use it is not a concession; it is an instruction to generate ballots the instructor has already characterized. Twenty-nine days out, with approval at 32 percent and a seven-point generic deficit, the President of the United States has told his own voters to cast ballots by a method he says is rigged, in a system his administration tried and failed to rewrite, while naming a specific county's mailing as suspect. Entry #66 recorded him saying on October 2 that his party should "pretend I'm running." Entry #69, filed today, records him saying on September 30 that he is not running at all. This entry records the third posture of the same week: he is not on the ballot, the party should act as though he is, and the ballots he is now asking for are the ones he has spent six years saying cannot be trusted. All three were said on camera, within six days, and none of them was put beside the others.