Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
But then Trump wrecked Leavitt’s spin by confirming that, yes, he does want Republicans to “take over” the elections. Meanwhile, in the background, Steve Bannon is saying, in effect, that ICE will, in fact, be doing voter intimidation in the midterms.
Rick Hasen: Good to be with you.
Hasen: So, we don’t know exactly what Trump means by “nationalize the vote.” It’s possible for the United States to have a system where we run our elections the same in every state—at least Congress would have some powers to do that in Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution.
Sargent: Well, he certainly has a lot to worry about there. Let’s listen to how Karoline Leavitt tried to spin it when asked what Trump meant by all this.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): What the president was referring to is the Save Act which is a huge common sense piece of legislation that Republicans have supported, that President Trump is committed to signing into law. It provides very common sense measures for voting in our country, such as voter ID.
Hasen: Yeah, sure. They can’t get their story straight—just like they can’t get their story straight about why Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is, you know, at the Fulton raid where they’re seizing actual ballots. I mean, there’s a lot of reason to be worried about what this administration is going to do, even if there’s not going to be some plan to have the federal government actually take over elections.
Sargent: Right. And to your point about how Trump has said that the states are the “agent of the federal government”—Trump actually said that after Leavitt had spun that way. Trump wrecked her spin, in essence. Here’s what he said to reporters. And note that when he says “the people behind me,” he’s talking about Republicans in Congress.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I want to see elections be honest and if a state can’t run an election I think the people behind me should do something about it because you know if you think about it a state is an agent for the federal government in elections I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that horrible corruption on elections and the federal government should not allow that.
Again, even if all this is bullshit and crazy and not going to happen in one way or another, it’s disgusting for him to single out specific Democratic areas. He’s saying explicitly that places that don’t vote for him should have their election administration taken over. Can you talk about what you think he could actually do to sort of make good on the general threat of trying to rupture the elections in some sense with the federal government?
So let me talk about the things I’m actually worried about. [I’m] not worried about “nationalizing” elections. I’m not worried about Trump running for a third term in 2028. I am not worried about ICE all over the polling places. The person who said that—Steve Bannon—he’s the one who’s famous for saying, “Let’s flood the zone with shit,” and that the media is the enemy. I mean, this is just kind of a lot of disinformation.
The thing I’m most worried about is after the voting is over. After the voting is over, the votes have to be tabulated. There’s going to be a lot of mail-in ballots; [they are] going to have to be processed, especially in places like California or Arizona, where they get a lot of mail-in ballots. It takes a long time to get through them. There’s going to be a period where you might see that the results show that, so far, [a] Republican [is] in the lead for [a] congressional race, and it switches to a Democrat as more votes are counted.
He could try to pressure election administrators to throw out categories of ballots, or try and get state legislatures to do that. I mean, there’s all kinds of things he could do. You know, if it looks like Republicans actually are close to controlling the House, there might be a battle in the House itself over who can be seated and what the rules are going to be for determining contested elections.
Hasen: Yeah, and this is an old Republican playbook. I remember back in 2004—this was the Kerry-George W. Bush race. The Republicans were threatening to send 35,000 challengers to polling places in Ohio, and Democrats were trying to block them—all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice John Paul Stevens said, “Everyone should behave,” but, “I’m not issuing an injunction to stop this.”
Sargent: Yeah. And now that we’re seeing ICE shoot people in the streets, they’re taking on this really outsized, you know, threatening image—rightly so—in the minds of a whole lot of Americans, including disengaged ones. And so when they hear “ICE at polling places,” it could have a dissuading effect, even if it’s not going to actually happen. I want to play audio of Karoline Leavitt talking about Bannon’s threat. Listen to this.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): That’s not something I’ve ever heard the president consider, no.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November. I that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of locations. It’s a disingenuous question.
That’s just such a garbage way to respond, but what I want to try to bear down on here is that it’s not unreasonable in a general sense for people to be looking—and reporters to be looking—at the sum total of what Trump is saying and what people like Bannon are saying, and worry that they actually want to use federal power in whatever way they can to disrupt the elections. That threat is live, and she’s trying to tell us that that’s not a reasonable thing to fear.
Sargent: Well, you can’t say that if you work for Donald Trump, though, can you?
Sargent: Well, another good example of that is the arrest of Don Lemon, the former CNN reporter who was just arrested for reporting on an ICE protest in a church. That was clearly all about pleasing the audience of one.
So, another example of this is what we saw with the Fulton County raid where Tulsi Gabbard, who’s the Director of National Intelligence, was present at the raid. They’ve been giving different explanations for why this would be. It’s very odd for someone who is supposed to be looking at foreign intelligence to be involved in some kind of domestic law enforcement operation.
Sargent: Well, look, I don’t want to joke about this, but just for a second—they’re trying to give Tulsi Gabbard something to do. Let’s face it. I mean, if you’re actually serious about stealing an election and pulling off a really complicated operation, you don’t send Tulsi Gabbard in. You know what I mean?
Sargent: Well, to return to something you said earlier, there is a very serious dimension to all this. The comic relief around Tulsi Gabbard aside, tell us a little bit more about this potential scenario in which federal law enforcement seizes ballot boxes after the voting. What would happen? What would be the legal recourse? How would it all unfold?
So this, to me, seems like a live operational thing that could happen more than, you know, thousands of ICE agents in the streets of Detroit.
Hasen: Imagine that the 2026 midterm elections are close and, in places where there’s a swing district, we don’t know if a Democrat or Republican won a House seat. Trump says there’s fraud, and tries to get a search warrant to seize the ballots that have not been fully tabulated yet—to announce the winner and so that the federal government can “take over” elections, to come back to where we started this conversation, and actually count the ballots, he could say.
So it’s going to be very, very messy. So what can be done about it? I think states and local governments need to be prepared for this. I would suggest trying to get injunctions against the federal government to keep them away. I would suggest that lawyers for voting rights groups and Democrats be prepared to go to court. I mean, it may take people in the streets protecting the offices where ballots are being tabulated. To make the Brooks Brothers riot—from the 2000 disputed election where some people were trying to storm an office where they were recounting ballots in Bush v. Gore—that would look very tame compared to what, you know, we might see in 2026.
Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Rick Hasen’s blog—it’s at electionlawblog.org. He’s one of the best out there at analyzing all this stuff. Rick, really good to have you on, man. Thanks.
Hasen: Well, hopefully we can talk about something more cheerful next time.
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