The signs are mounting that Donald Trump is preparing a serious effort to steal the midterm elections outright. A key tell came during his rambling speech about our election infrastructure a few days ago, in which he raged at news organizations for not carrying him live. In doing this, Trump accidentally revealed that he fully expects the media to help him sow distrust in our elections. That’s an essential precursor to his rigging plot. And remarkably enough, even Fox News balked at participating in this, another sign of how deranged his scheming has become.
Ryan Enos: Yeah, thanks. I’m glad to be here.
Enos: We can’t overstate how dangerous this is. Democracy doesn’t work if people don’t have faith in the legitimacy of elections, because things can go wrong. And all signs are that Republicans are going to lose at least the House in the upcoming election, and maybe the Senate. And obviously Trump wants to avoid that. So it looks like he’s trying to sow doubt in these elections, either to take actions as the president, to use the government to try to undo the result of the elections in which he loses, or to encourage his supporters to undo them through violence, like he tried to do in 2020.
Donald Trump (voiceover): There’s no third world country that has elections like we—in a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about. Because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country—and that’s true, you can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.
Markwayne Mullin (voiceover): The major networks not willing to carry the President of the United States address to the nation on election security. How shameful is that? What are they trying to cover up?
Enos: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think there’s two ways to look at his anger at the media. On the one hand, it shows the media is doing the right thing, right? They figured out what Trump’s up to. They know he’s going to lie. And they’re in many ways taking a stand for democracy. They’re saying, we are not going to broadcast—everybody knows the lie, and the media has learned not to broadcast Trump’s lies. That’s the independence of the media, a bedrock of our democracy.
The fact that we have the secretary of DHS up there pushing this—what does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with compelling media organizations to carry the president’s lies? It just shows you all the levers that the president can pull in order to get his authoritarian agenda going. And it’s really, really dangerous.
But the basic point stands here, that now these news organizations may hesitate the next time Trump says, I’m going to be giving some remarks on the corruption of our election system. They may say to themselves, he threatened us last time, we don’t want to have the headache of protecting our licenses, and so we’re going to carry it this time. And then Trump’s plot of using the news organizations to spread distrust in our elections could work. What do you think of all that?
But even if you take away all those grander things about democracy, this is just essentially schoolyard extortion, right? Like, it’d be really bad if you didn’t do what I want. Maybe you’ll have an accident next time you’re walking home or something like that, right? And everybody knows what he’s implying in that case. It’s very clear. And so yeah, ultimately these media firms, they care about their bottom line.
Now, it could go to the courts, and hopefully the courts would ultimately side with these organizations, because the First Amendment protections are very powerful. But they don’t want that headache. And this is why so many organizations in civil society that know they could ultimately prevail in court—the courts would take the easy way out, essentially. And that’s the problem, how we end up in these situations.
Enos: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look, it’s really worth emphasizing this thing about the DHS, right? The DHS was supposedly set up essentially to protect Americans against terrorism. And of course, critics at the time pointed out that this was something that could end up having overreach, but it never really was realized until Trump took it over and turned it into essentially his private secret police force, right?
And once you get DHS involved in things they have no place in, like the administration of elections, that becomes a real, real concern and a real threat to our democracy.
I just want to make one more point about what you’re saying there, which is that it gets even more vile when you consider how Markwayne Mullin talked about this. He had the goddamn gall to say with a straight face that he’s essentially trying to protect the national security of the United States by pressuring news organizations to carry this stuff.
Enos: Yeah, and look, you’re exactly right. And it fits a really disturbing pattern. Because this is sort of the refuge of bullshit that every authoritarian turns to, right? You’ve heard these same things in Turkey, you heard them in Russia, you heard them in Hungary. Authoritarian leaders, they always claim it’s about national security, right?
And that’s what’s being attempted here. And it’s something that we really have to be aware of, and we have to—to use this word again—we have to call this bullshit when we see it. And that’s clearly what’s going on.
And it gets even better. CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that many at Fox just didn’t want to hear Trump talk about the 2020 election anymore, and thought it was bad politics for the GOP. And of course, some at Fox thought, my God, we better be careful here, because they had a major settlement against them to the tune of, I guess, $700 million, in a lawsuit brought by Dominion over their false election claims. Ryan, what do you make of that?
Now, the other thing I would say about it is this fact that Fox thought it was just bad politics. And you see a lot of Republican politicians saying this too. There’s a lot of signs that members of Congress want Trump to move on. And they all know what he’s saying is not true, but they unfortunately feel obligated—they can’t cross him on this issue, right? And what that signals is that the American people aren’t buying this, right?
And so people really aren’t buying this, but Trump keeps trying to sell it. And what’s unfortunate about that, though, is what it signals is that Trump very well could want to move beyond politics in order to try to make this happen, right? He can’t convince Americans that the other party is crooked. And so that’s when we start worrying that, in order to satisfy these delusions that he’s having, he’s going to do things like—which was reported he considered in 2020—like have the National Guard seize ballot boxes, or have, as I suggested and other people suggested, ICE officers show up at the polling stations, purportedly to try to stop illegal voting or something like that.
Sargent: Right. Well, let’s talk about the specifics of the threat. There’s a lot of chatter about how Trump might use his security services like DHS to maybe seize ballot boxes and try to interrupt the count of votes. And the way they would do that is focus it in states where control of the House and Senate will be decided. And that, I think, is why seeing Markwayne Mullin talking this way is so alarming.
Now, there’s also the talk about ICE showing up at polling places. I don’t take that as seriously. It’d be hard for them to cover all the polling places that they would need to—although it’s possible they could maybe stage showdowns in select places to create atmospheres of crisis and terror in certain precincts or whatever. But is seizure of ballot boxes something you take seriously? And if so, what can be done about it right now? How do we prepare?
And so we also have to consider what we know Trump wants. And he signaled this very clearly in 2020, when he tried to overthrow an election in which he had legitimately lost. There is no doubt that that’s what he did—the historical record is clear. And we know that essentially what stopped him was members of his own administration, to their credit, people like Mike Pence and Bill Barr, who eventually said, we’re not going to go on with this, right? We aren’t going to do his bidding.
And because of that, if Trump decides he wants to order people to do extraordinary things, like seize ballot boxes or something like that, it’s hard to imagine that people are going to say no. You know, we’ve already seen, for example, something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago—we have essentially a masked secret police going around terrorizing American citizens, terrorizing Democratic cities on the flimsiest of pretexts. It’s simply political terror, right? And that’s operating in the United States right now.
And so we can imagine that happening. It’s not hard to know who they’d target. They would target Democratic cities that were in, for example, contested Senate races, where they knew they would take out a bunch of Democratic ballots. And the math on it’s not hard to figure out. Now, the advantage we have against such things is the constitutional system—it means that we have this big, dispersed electoral system. And this is part of what you’re alluding to with ICE. The numbers in many ways just don’t add up, right?
But I think one way we have to treat it as reality, and one way we guard against that right now, is exactly what we’re doing—we’re talking about it. And we have to make people like governors in these states aware that this is a reality and let them plan for it, right? We need to put them on the record to say, if somebody illegally tries to interfere with an election in your state, what will you do?
Sargent: Right. You could see the media putting pressure on Republicans in places like Ohio and Texas, which have critical Senate races that’ll decide Senate control, pressuring Republicans to say whether they will stand up against any effort to seize ballot boxes.
We believe in the integrity of our elections. That’s how we all got here, right? They are elected under that system that Donald Trump is attacking, and we’re going to protect it moving forward, because that is our constitutional duty.
Enos: Yeah, I think we do. Look, I think they all need to stand up. One thing we understand very clearly from decades of political science research is that people take signals from these politicians to understand what is going on, right? And if they’re only hearing one side, if they’re only hearing the lies from Donald Trump—first of all, some people might not realize those aren’t true, which is a little shocking to us, but repeated often enough, it kind of seeps into their consciousness. But moreover, not everybody’s going to realize what a threat to democracy this is, right? And how much people need to stand up against it.
And in November, if that happens, then people need to be prepared to stand up against it, using the power of citizens, but also the power of our elected officials. And so that starts with awareness, right? People need to be aware that this is a threat, and start standing up for democracy now, not later, after something has happened.
Enos: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
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