Former President Donald Trump, who was in exile in Sealake Manor, did not behave like a retiree.

A week ago, he announced that his proposed media joint venture, Trump Media and Technology, had received the $1 billion promised by investors, compared with the $250 million promised before.

He is raising funds from his loyalists for a series of political committees that boasted that they had more than $100 million in cash on hand when they disclosed their holdings last time.

And he supports candidates for public office far more often than former presidents usually do: so far, there are 14 candidates for the Senate, 21 candidates for the House of Representatives, 10 associate governors, and 12 state members.

He also developed a keen interest in one of the most inconspicuous positions in state politics: Secretary of State.

In Georgia, he supported the challenger of Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Brad Raffensperger), who last year rejected Trump’s request to "find" more 11,780 votes-which he defeated The number of people required by Joe Biden.

In Arizona, Trump supported a Republican candidate who publicly declared that he was a member of the Oath Guardian militia, and went to Washington on January 6 to urge Vice President Mike Pence to reject the state's electoral vote. (He was also marching in the Capitol that day, but he said he did not witness the storm in the building.)

In Michigan, Trump supported a candidate who accused Biden of winning the state because he manipulated voting software to flip thousands of votes. (An investigation led by the Republican Party found her statement to be wrong.)

There is no randomness in the selection of the former president. All three games were in a swing state that Biden won.

In these three areas, Trump's supporters insisted that Biden's victory was fraudulent, although they did not find any evidence after more than a year.

When these positions were last increased, Trump did not provide support to the Secretary of State in Georgia or anywhere else. This didn't seem to matter to him at the time.

The reason is not mysterious: In most states, the secretary of state is the chief election officer and is responsible for administering voting laws. In many states, including Arizona and Georgia, the secretary of state is the official who announces the winner.

Trump stated that he has not yet decided whether to run for president again in 2024. But just in case, he wants to choose as many referees as possible before the game starts. If he finds himself contesting the vote count or trying to block electoral votes in a state, he wants someone to owe him a favor on the other end of the phone.

"What we have seen in the past year is a nationwide, coordinated campaign...it is trying to overturn the results of the last election [and] is now laying the groundwork for the possible overthrow of the next election," Michigan Democrats Minister Jocelyn Benson (Jocelyn Benson) said. State, said on MSNBC last month.

Tray Grayson, a Republican who served as Kentucky Secretary of State until 2011, pointed out that the Secretary of State has no right to change the results of the election.

"The function of this job is basically to calculate votes based on the law on the account books," he said. "Counting votes is counting votes."

However, all they can do is create doubt. If the secretary of state believes—or pretends to believe—that something is wrong, they can refuse to prove the election results.

This is what Trump wants Ravensberg and others to do: refuse to certify elections in their state to prevent some of Biden's electoral votes from entering Congress.

This small crusade that placed Trump's loyalists in the most humble office of the state legislature was not just a retaliation for Republicans who did not obey his orders. This is part of a greater effort to ensure that every Republican official from the senator to the city council is loyal to Trump's cause.

"We are taking over the Republican Party...one region, one region," former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon boasted last month.

The Republican Party’s new slogan may also be "Do not allow non-Trump Republicans to enter."

The question is whether Trump's followers will succeed in taking over without much struggle, especially when the struggle is around low visibility work at the bottom of the vote.

"Other Republicans may not want to risk competing with the Trump people," Grayson warned.

"How do you make people care?" he asked. "No one can lose sleep because of who the secretary of state in their state is."

Thank Trump, they should do it.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.