After we recorded, a court blocked the new Virginia map, but that is likely temporary as it will be quickly appealed.
Donald Trump exploded in crazed fury over the results in Tuesday’s referendum in Virginia. After Democrats narrowly passed a mid-decade redistricting there, which could mean four additional House seats, Trump ripped the result as rigged and begged the courts to step in and nullify it. Yet this comes as Republicans are admitting that this debacle is Trump’s fault. And that captures something essential about this moment. Republican cheating gets a lot harder when Democrats seriously fight back against it with hardball of their own.
Brian Beutler: Good to be back.
Beutler: It’s very promising that Democrats, once confronted with Trump’s order to Texas to further gerrymander Texas, didn’t simply wail about the unfairness and failure to respect norms, and just said, if this is a race to the bottom, then we’re racing to the bottom together. And it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Democrats would do that, because it’s not how they’ve done things in the past. It wasn’t really sort of their bent, especially in the first year of the second Trump term.
And I think it dawned on Democrats that if through chicanery, but quote-unquote legal chicanery, Republicans managed to fight the midterms to a draw, not give up any power, that that would help cement the autocracy. And then it’s not a question of the midterms, it’s a question of every election in the future. Viktor Orbán just lost in Hungary after 16 years. Well, who in Democratic politics today wants to carry on if it’s going to be 16 years before we can undo all this. So they kind of had to act.
I think Democrats should take from that that they made the right move in every possible way. Donald Trump is essentially saying, we will not operate fairly and we will not, you know, hew to what the voters want in any sense. We will do whatever we can to essentially rig the system in a non-democratic and authoritarian way going forward. And Trump just said it openly, and that just basically should steel Democrats for more of this.
But when he is saying an election was lost because it was rigged, he’s almost always operating from a position of weakness. And it’s not popular with anyone other than people who are already bought into Donald Trump.
Sargent: So we shouldn’t overlook one of the craziest things about what he said, which is he said the referendum language was deceptive and added, “I am an extraordinarily brilliant person and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.” You have any thoughts on that, Brian?
And that it would be a power grab on behalf of Donald Trump, which is why the rest of his tweet—or post, or Truth, or whatever—is sort of written as a plea or a demand to the Virginia Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court, whichever has the final say, to do my work for me, throw this out, and here’s a pretext for you.
Beutler: Right. Exactly.
Beutler: The fact that Republicans are coming out of the woodwork now to say this was a bad idea all along, I think conveys awareness on their part that this was, A, a big enough affront that it was going to invite a backlash from Democrats and that they were going to respond in kind.
Sargent: Yeah, I think we should underscore for people who aren’t following this as closely as we do that Republicans are worried because if they follow Trump down this road and start doing extreme gerrymandering in more states, it takes the safe Republicans and takes away some of their Republican votes in order to rig the map and then leaves them in a less safe environment, particularly with Trump tanking so badly.
Beutler: Yeah, except it’s unclear what they can do because it’s done, right? I mean, there might be more—like maybe the results in Virginia and the fact that Donald Trump is pulling these polling numbers, 32, 33 percent, is going to persuade somebody like Ron DeSantis in Florida that it’s not worth doing this. Trump might want it like, you know, we have to thump our chest just as hard, we can’t be forced to back down, it’s not macho to do that. And he might realize, yeah, but we’re punching ourselves in the face if we do this.
Sargent: So let’s go big picture on the long term. Some political scientists have argued for what might be called defensive hardball, in which pro-democracy Democrats and liberals opt for extreme measures in order to right-size the system against other extreme measures that are already ongoing. It seems like this could unfold at two levels. Let’s take them in two pieces. T
Beutler: So you can see in the way Democrats structured their response to what Republicans did in Texas—what Donald Trump ordered Republicans to do in Texas—that they have this sincere idea that gerrymandering should not be allowed, that districts should be drawn fairly. And so when they get to power after the midterms, assuming they win, and Republicans sort of regret having tried to steal these seats, they can promote the kinds of ideas that would make elections fair going forward and offer it to Republicans as a way to say, if you want out from under these maps before the next election, work with us on this.
And they can, obviously, if they win, end Republican efforts to pass anything like the SAVE Act. They can rest easy for the time being about national voter suppression laws or voter ID laws. They can try to bargain with Republicans about removing voter suppression laws with, I guess, the idea being that, like, if you push us far enough, now you see it.
Sargent: Well, that’s the first level. And here’s the more challenging level, the second level. Presumably, you could see Democrats using hardball to seek accountability for Trump world’s crimes and also build in deep protections against more authoritarian rule. You’ve written really well about that. In a nutshell, what does that entail?
What can they do about that? They need to get comfortable with large segments of the government being defunded if people in agencies, leaders in agencies, are following Trump’s orders not to comply with proper oversight—then those offices are going to have to be shut down until they start following the law, essentially.
Sargent: And Brian, also court reform and Department of Justice reform. Those are big ones too. Just to wrap this up, what would you do there?
So a tweet like the one Trump sent about the Virginia election being rigged could cost politicians in the future the ability to hold office. I think a reform like that would be good. Obviously, you need as a threshold matter to get rid of the filibuster and then expand the Supreme Court, because none of the institutional reforms that will make democracy fairer will survive this court, which is the most corrupt in U.S. history. And many of the efforts at accountability—to investigate, prosecute, and possibly even imprison senior Trump officials—are likely to withstand appeal only so long as the judiciary is not controlled essentially by loyal Trumpists.
Beutler: Yeah. I try to be delicate about this because I think that for the most part, people in Democratic Party politics got into politics for good reasons. They want to make people’s lives better. They want to coalition-build, they want to form consensus, they want to work across the aisle—and they really mean it. And they’re ambitious and they think that they can solve problems. And they didn’t get into this to be fist-fighting all the time with Republicans.
Sargent: Well, they’re learning that every day and that’s a good thing. Brian Beutler, always good to talk to you, folks. Check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message—it’s great on this topic and many other topics. Brian, good to have you on.
Beutler: Thanks, man.
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