How to Stop Trump from Stealing the Elections

sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world. From the Deep State radio, I am David Rothkoff and I'm the host and we are joined this week by a group of folks who are going to talk a little bit about the elections and the election news kind of way. And then a little bit about the bigger issues associated with whether we're even going to have

elections in November and what that's going to look like. Including, of course, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center, how are you doing Rosa? I'm super duper, David. Super duper, that's pretty fantastic and we are joined by another friend, regular and colleague

“and collaborator, Mike Tomaske, the editor of the new Republic, how are you today, Mike?”

I'm going to pass on super duper and I don't know, you know, life's, these are strange times, David.

There's always somebody like this in the crowd, well, maybe we'll get a more upbeat response

from Mike's colleague Emma Jensen, who is a staff writer at the new Republic, covering Democrats in Congress and she writes the brand new and very good, TNR, Blue Book Newsletter, which kind of talks about what's going on with Democrats in Washington. It's like the Politico, Blue Book, except it's not just hunkering down for access and, you know, and trying to both sides, everything.

Did I summarize that properly, Emma? I think that's a really good summary. Yeah, it's trying to be a little more substantive than what you might get from other daily

“new sources, not saying names, but also getting into what you need to know on any given”

day as someone on the left are interested in Democratic politics. Well, it's very gentle of you now today, names. I know. I'm just thinking. Please, I like you, names, I like you, names, I like you, names, I like you, names, I'll let

you name them. Okay, okay, okay, well, I did name one of them. There's all sorts of newsletters in Washington, and a lot of them are just crap, and this is really good, and it is substantive, and it even, you know, it makes book recommendations about books by Nobel Prize winners, and talking about the future of liberal democracy.

It's not just, "Oh, happy birthday to this member of the fascist government." Right, Mike, wasn't that your concept? Don't more happy birthday to fascists? Correct, that's, that's, that's rule, I have a written list of rules, and that's number four, what are numbers one, two, and three?

No, yeah, but that's, that's the idea. We decided to start a morning inside dope newsletter, but covering Democrats, covering liberal and progressive think tanks and interest groups, which we have a little section on every day, what they're up to, and you know, talking about what people are doing to save democracy from these authoritarian's, and other newsletters do what they do, that's fine, they do

it well, but we do what we do, which is different. It's inside reporting, but with a point of view, written four people with broadly our politics, and so we think that there's a market there, and response has been very good so far, including yours, David, thank you so much. It's a, hey, look, it's a very, very good idea.

I remember the first time you brought it up, over an Italian restaurant we go to, and I

said, oh, that's a really, really good idea, it is, and you know, if you're not going

“to trash talk your competition, that's why Rose and I are here.”

Well, I have a very important, I have a concern that I'd like to raise about this, Mike. Did you say it's a morning newsletter, and does that mean that Emma has to get up really early in the morning and write it? Because it's so, I think it's a union. Well, what's your union, which is why, which is why she, yeah, and it's a union Rosa,

which is why she does not get up early in the morning. The only person who gets up early in the morning to produce content for this newsletter is one of the people at the New Republic who is not in a union who is management, I.E.

Thank God.

“Oh, I think God is, I would be, I would very, very concerned if Emma had to get up early”

in the morning.

This, in fact, is the problem of newsletters altogether.

Yeah, Ben Crocodile tears here for you, Mike. But did you want to say anything about that, Emma? I mean, how much you love your job and how it's great to be able to sleep in? Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth.

I love getting up at seven instead of four or five something, and I'm glad that Michael has the tough morning part. Yeah, well, Mike's gotten to the age where he doesn't really sleep much anyway. It's just... He's a massacist.

Yeah. Yeah.

No, I know, I know the truth, but anyway, look, there were elections yesterday across the

United States, and I've got a question, I'm going to ask a question, and I'll go to both you, Mike, and you, Emma, and then I want to broaden this out and to bigger question about what we can look forward to down the road. Here's my question, Mike, and Emma. I picked up the newspaper this morning, eagerly.

Admittedly, I'd been sort of doomed scrolling online watching these results. And there was a bit of a conundrum for me, like I picked up the New York Times, and essentially the headline was close race in which the mainstream Democrat won bad news for progressives. And then I remembered, back a week ago, to Michigan, where it was narrow win for progressives,

“bad news for progressives, and I'm like, what's going on here?”

I mean, you know, if I were looking for a big trend, the trend would be that far more people

voted for an overtly progressive candidate in both of these elections, then we've ever seen in an election in places like Michigan or, well, recently, in Wisconsin. And so, you know, what's what the media is? That's the way you guys covered it, is that what you think happened yesterday, Mike? No, that's not what I think happened yesterday.

I mean, I do think that, yeah, I look, she was whatever she was ahead in the polls, Francesca Hong, Francesca Hong, 20 points ahead in the polls, just a few days ago. So in that sense, it's a surprise, and that's news, I get that, that's fine. But, yeah, I wasn't shocked that it was much, much closer than the polls indicated. I think that when Governor Evers persuaded Crowley to get back in the race, and then when

she tripped up on the Thanksgiving thing and didn't have a good explanation for it, remember, these are very sophisticated primary voters, you know, these aren't low information, general election voters who are making up their minds on the last weekend, based on what color somebody's tie is.

“These are very informed voters, and I think they saw her handling of that and saw that maybe”

she's just not ready for prime time and maybe we could go with the safer person. What that means about the broader progressive versus moderate thing is being overstated for sure in today's papers, and you know, the progressive wanted Senate primary in Minnesota by a mile, and then the progressive want a house race in Minnesota. So yesterday was a split for it, as the previous week was.

Yeah, and I've got a lot of the mainstream media people who cover these kind of things. Really, you know, they've been hanging out here in Washington with mainstream Democrats for decades, those are the people who pay the bills, and they tend to want to both sides everything. But Emma, something else strange has happened, both in Michigan and Wisconsin, and it's

got to make your job a heck of a lot more boring. And that is the minute the election was over, Francesca Hong embraced Crowley's candid to see. There were pictures of all of the Wisconsin Democrats together. It was like the minute it was over in Michigan, you had, oh, everybody would ran in the

race together, and the governor and the senator, and it looks like the Democrats are in a ray, isn't your job boring if the Democrats are in a ray, Emma? Yeah, the whole point is, you know, to write about Democratic disarray for some people, at least, but no, you get all these pictures of the unity breakfast, and I wouldn't necessarily want to be sitting there in between some of those candidates, but at the same time they're

going to unite against Trump and his surrogates, and at least, I mean, at least they're having a meal together, at least they're having a meal together, because we know they're not going to be sitting down together at Thanksgiving. Nice, nice low blow David, you know, I did want to comment on the New York Times has

of America, and which they have gone under cover and revealed that people in DSA sit around they argue with each other quite a lot, I thought, yeah, I know, it's really, and sometimes

they listen to bad music and their taste and food is not always up to snuff, according to

New York Times. Well, you know, the New York Times does most of its reporting at diners in Ohio. Well, I was concerned about all these revelations, it's, it makes it very hard to feel good about voting for any candidate, backed by DSA. It's this point.

Well, it's, you know, coming from somebody was named after Rosa Luxeberg.

“I think you, I think, I think you're obligated to vote for DSA.”

Well, I, I did spend, as a pink diaper baby, I spent a good deal of time at DSA meetings as a, as a child, so the, the, the, the, the revelatory news that they sit around and argue with each other was, you know, didn't really shock me that much. It is, however, in stark contrast to the types of hard hitting reporting, the time has

done on, you know, the proud boys and so on where they're always kind of going like, my goodness,

you know, it turns out that when we interview these people, they're just sort of sad and misunderstood and slightly misguided up only because Laura, then back to the center. There's been a somewhat different tone on the articles about this DSA, which it is astonishing to me how much of a bogey man DSA has become for, for mainstream Democrats, I think the, the worst thing one can say about DSA is that they, they do tend to be a little nerdy and argumentative.

Yeah, and they want, they want all these awful things for Americans like health care and better schools and pod holes filled in the roads and oh my god, they're such, they're such

“crazy, that's why Mike, do they make everybody so friggin crazy?”

If you're enjoying this episode and want to get even more out of the DSA network, you need to check out our sub-stack. The DSA network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio, the DSA daily, where it's matter need to know sila consciousness, AI, energy, and climate, and the daily blast. Sign up to get notified every time a new episode drops and stay up to date on the latest news and expert analysis. Right now, we're offering 20% off of a DSA network

membership. Payed members get an ad free listening experience, select episodes two days early, 50% off of David's need to know sub-stack and more. To get your 20% off, go to DSA network.substack.com/awgist26. That's DSA network.substack.com/awgist26. I think most people of a certain age, those of us on this call, in this meeting of that age, accepted, the word socialism still calls to mind certain things, you know, that people think of and associate with and it's

very hard for those people to imagine that other people, younger people, in particular, can get over that mental or psychological hurdle of the word socialism. Because, you know, if you're of that age, it means state ownership of the means of production. It means maybe, you know, it means having a very inefficient economy. It means maybe throwing people in jail in many cases in the cases of some regimes. But it just doesn't mean that anymore. You know,

“it doesn't mean that. But when I think of socialism, I think of Scandinavian health care,”

I mean, and sort of it too. And they're, and herring. So, very many herringes. Harry, oh no, well, if we're going to have to eat herrings, then I completely reject that revolution off. But, but no, I mean, of course, the irony here is that the DSA platform, fairly closely resembles platforms of the Republican Party on certain issues, you know, back in the 1970s or 80s, you know, it's, it's not exactly a hot bit of radicalism.

Well, not just the 70s or 80s, you know, or, I mean, they, they, what they want the kind of taxation schemes of, you know, radicals like Dwight Eisenhower, Emma, Emma, do what do you want to say? I will. I was just going to note that I'm hopeful at some point that this tie to could eventually start turning. I, I'm not naive that it will completely change. And I think

Michaels right on the nose that there are a lot of people who are never going to accept anything

that is called or adjacent to socialism. But I would point out that there was just a recent poll, I think that found Zoron Mamdoni is a approval rating at something like 69% among New Yorkers, and it just keeps getting higher, and he has been going viral on social media for fixing random

governance like that that is extremely quick and responsive could help at some point. But you got to admit, Emma, you're going around, you're talking to Democrats all the time. What I talk to Democrats in Washington, if I talk to establishment Democrats, here are some real live quotes I got. Abdul Elsayed is backed by the Iranians. This is a Russian operation. They're trying to destroy America. They're poisoning the well. They're the reason that there's

such toxicity. They're the reason that people said nasty things about Haley Stevens appearance. In other words, the criticism of the progressives from the mainstream Democrats updo an

including this New York Times story. They talked about third way raising $15 million in order to

target progressives. It seems pretty overwrought to me, Emma.

“Oh, I completely agree. I think you're completely right. I don't have any better explanation for it”

than anyone else. But my only hope is that we can elect some of these people like Elsayed and that they will do a good job governing and that maybe that will make some sort of a difference. But I'm not particularly optimistic that some of that rhetoric will go away. Especially around Elsayed. It's been really vitriolic and Islamophobic. I think there are two things that are kind of at odds with one another are pushing in

different directions here. One is the longstanding mystery of Americans. Issue by issue.

Americans are left of center on certain the on economic issues. Issue by issue. You ask them things like, well, would you be willing to pay more taxes to get better services? How do you feel about this policy or that policy? Issue by issue, large majority of Americans, including including of Republicans and self-described conservatives tend to support what we would think of as a certainly social democratic, if not socialist economic policies. But that doesn't reliably

translate into voting behavior, which is partly a product of our particular electoral system and it's partly a product of broader cultural norms and the impact of labels and so on and branding.

“That's one thing. But then the other thing and this is what I think is”

maybe starting to surface not with standing social media disinformation, not with standing

political advertising and successful, both positive and negative branding campaigns, you know, reality sort of bites at a certain point. And I think we're seeing both for some Republicans and for on the left, you know, at the end of the day, people do get really tired of grandstanding about abstractions when what they're looking for is somebody to fix the pot hole, you know, or do whatever, do whatever, whatever the burning local issues are. And we are seeing

I think a little bit more of a rejection on both sides of candidates who sort of talk big and don't do anything in favor of candidates, whatever their political party who are actually being responsive to voters' day-to-day needs. Exactly right. That's exact. The big trend that I see is that people want their problems addressed. They don't want billionaires' problems addressed. They don't want bullshit. They want their problems addressed. Paul candidates who run that way

get good response. But Mike, you know, I'm sure, you know, as the editor of the New Republic, you go through carefully, every article that goes through and you listen to every podcast. And the most recent podcast with our friend Greg Sargent, the headline is Trump Blurts out via plot to steal midterms as Geophears grow unnerved. It seems like, you know, kind of New York post headlines. But that's the New Republic, I guess. And but, you know, Trump did, you know,

“the some crazy right wing or said, well, you should just declare national emergency and then take”

everything over. And somebody has Trump said, well, stranger things have happened. And so we are sitting here, 80 day, 80 odd days away from the election. And there is a non-zero possibility that the president of the United States is going to fuck with these elections in some way that we have not seen before. Does that concern you today? Of course it does. I mean, you know, anybody has to concern anybody with a pulse who cares about

democracy. You know, we've seen the previous threats about sending ice agents to certain polling places. The insurrection act looms over us, you know, Trump has not invoked that. He could invoked that

insurrection act is really broad and really vague and really opaque and he can use language in the

“insurrection act to do practically anything. The only thing I'd add is that, you know,”

anybody who thinks, ah, he won't do that. I don't know, dude, like, look at the record, you know, I used to say, ah, he won't do that and then he did it and then he did it again and then he did it again and then he did it again and then he did it again. So I no longer say he won't do that. I mean, after he did mid decade gerrymandering, which, you know, is not supposed to happen under our constitution. You know, then all bets are off. All bets are off. So, you know, if he thinks he's going to get

drugged and the Republicans are going to get drugged in these elections, I don't know exactly how he

delays elections. I mean, the elections are run by states. So, you know, the state of Vermont is not going to go along with Donald Trump nor will about 25 other states. But the other states, I don't know, you know, what would, you know, the states with Republican governors and Republican legislatures, what would they do? It's, it's a frightening prospect. I noticed he don't mention your home state there and I think it deserves a bit of a slam. Okay. Well, if anything were up for

grabs in West Virginia, I would have mentioned it. But, you know, West Virginians are going to be paying more attention to how the football team is doing. Well, no doubt, no doubt, but Emma, you know,

“on the one hand, the Democrats, you know, who, you know, you must be content with, but, you know,”

Democrats have state secretaries of state out there pushing back on these Trump things and lots of court cases and Mark Elias with court cases. And, you know, you have this sense that there is some kind of movement to protect democracy. But on the other hand, they're Democrats. And there's all these institutional Democrats and they're like things will take care of themselves and I have faith in the American people and that kind of thing. Do you get the sense that the political practitioners

to whom you speak are as concerned about these things as, as, as Mike just described that he was? No, I don't think they are. I think there are Democrats. There are some younger, more progressive members in the house, for example, who are concerned about this and who, you know, if there is a Democratic house majority in January might be able to actually do something and would be eager to. So that gives me a little bit of hope, but, you know, when I'm on the Senate side talking to senators,

“there's just low level feeling of, like, what is the lack of complete lack of urgency?”

There's just a low level feeling of, of low levelness, of low levelness and, um, Pete, Pete Heck's death would say it was low tea. Democrats are low tea. Yes. He might be right about that one, actually, um, but yeah, I, it can certainly hurt. Well, it should concern you. Rosa, you know, you've run scenario exercises about this and I recall last year after such scenario exercises saying to you, hey, Rosa, I don't think Democrats are really ready for what's possibly coming.

I don't, I think their low tea is possibly what I said. And you said you were, you know, you shared that concern. Has anything happened? Has there been any have allowed you to know? I mean, I think so there's good news and there's bad news. Um, I think we've done more than nothing, right? Um, and I do think that local level, election officials are much more sophisticated than they were certainly 10 years ago and even a couple years ago. Um, I think that, uh, there has been

at the state level with state attorneys general and Democratic governors and attorneys general, much more concern and planning to stay in touch and just sort of think about advance about threats. And uh, so I think that's all to the good. But I do think that it's so hard. I mean, this is maybe this is just human nature, right? And this is the, you know, the mystery of why whenever you get some absolute catastrophe, whether it's, you know, the Rwanda genocide or the Holocaust or whatever, you know,

that you, you get the sort of why didn't more people leave or do something. And the answer is because

nobody can ever believe it. This is the manti python. No one, no one ever expects Spanish in

it's coming. It's coming. It's coming here all the signs here all the other societies in which these

“really bad things happen really, really fast. Here's why you need to worry about it. People just like”

can't keep that in their brains for more than about 20 seconds. I remember writing an article for Mike Damascus six months ago that the president would hide in a catering cart and he rejected it. Exactly. Right, really should have short-sighted a total lack of imagination. Um, but it's true, you know, I think that um, the tendency, people's incredibly strong tendency to assume that things will stay more or less the same, that there will be some kind of mystical self-correction

the guardrails of democracy, which by magic just pop into place in times of peril will just do their thing and and we don't all need, you know, why are you running around Rosa and David and you know, Michael and Emma being so hysterical calm down. It'll be fine. Like, it is so hard to shake people out of that. We would do these simulations, which are actually quite good at shaking people out of that for a really short time. You know, and they kind of walk out of

they're going like, oh my God, we're in deep shit. We're in trouble. We need to, we need to immediately dedicate all of our energy to this and then a week later they're kind of back to the same old

“same old than the sense of urgency has just been lost. Not for everybody, obviously. I think there,”

you know, there are, you know, this goes to what I first said that we're more prepared than we were

not as prepared as we should be, but more prepared than we were. You know, there are, thank goodness, there are people who have maintained that sense of urgency and have done something about it, but, but not enough, not enough. And my big worry, which, which very much mirrors, Mike's worry, you know, there's still such a tendency to sort of, I keep hearing people say things that just blows my mind that people still say this stuff. Like, well, but wouldn't that be illegal?

You know, well, like, but like, states run the elections. So like Trump can't order the national guard to intervene or whatever or have the interaction act invoked in order the military. Like, you can't do that because it would be illegal. And I keep, I keep thinking, when has that ever bother Donald Trump? You know, the answer might be, yeah, it would be illegal, but, but this is the Trump move over and over again. We've seen it over and over again. You do something that's illegal.

And every, you know, we go to court. Everybody, all the good guys go to court and say, well, that's illegal. You can't do that. And most of the time, eventually, the courts are like, yeah, you, you, you can't do that. President Trump, you shouldn't have done that. But by then, he's already done it. You know, it's over. The damage is done. And you can't walk it back or you can walk it back, you know, 30%, but you've already changed, you know, the changes of the ground are, it's too late.

They're irreversible. And some kind, you know, in some cases, obviously, we've seen people lose their

“lives, and it's irreversible. But, and that's what I worry about most. That the note, anybody who thinks”

the illegality of any particular act is something that will stop Trump is, is just has not been paying attention at all in the last year and a half or indeed the last decade. It won't stop him. The courts may eventually intervene, but it doesn't matter if the courts intervene a week later,

or a month later, or a year later, you know, if the problem is, well, do you have, you know,

troops at the polls or ice at the polls or whatever, what has happened has happened and a tad an impact on the outcome. And saying later, or you shouldn't have done that, doesn't do anybody any good. You know, I have a great idea for you, Mike, and you don't have to pay anything for it. Now, I think the way to cover the costs is just to get Emma to wake up a little earlier. And she can, she can handle it then. But I think, you know, in the blue book, you know, this

great news letter, you should have a regular section called the, you know, electionometer, or like the fascism, Jim's Day Clock. And every day, you could sort of say, well, you know, how close we are to not having an election, and then it can move, and then you could have little things under it. Today, we move closer towards having an election because the court did this, or Todd Blanche, you know, canceled, you know, New Jersey. We've moved away from it.

But you know, I mean, we could just keep an eye on it. And it just wouldn't cost you to think, because Emma is into this already. I am nodding. What is the answer to it? What is the answer to it? Is it? Yeah. Well, that's good, because you have a union there. But I mean, I guess the point is, is this a focus of your coverage from now to the election? Is this something you're especially

addressing? Mike. Yeah. I will, yes, of course, from the perspective of what are the Democrats doing about it, you know, as Sean Connery said to Kevin Costner in the, you know,

Brad. So I think, you know, that'll be our posture. But it is true that too many

“elected Democrats are just a little too complacent about this and can't really face up to it.”

Now, the rank and file on the other hand, the Democratic rank and file is very alert to this and very concerned about all this. And they want leaders in their party who will share their passion about this and talk about it and fight and do something about it. And that's another reason that the progressives and the Democratic Socialists are kind of catching on because they tend to speak more directly and fearlessly about these kinds of things than the moderates do.

I wouldn't say they have a monopoly on it. You know, there are many mainstream Democrats who talk pretty well about this sort of thing. But let's put it this way. The ones who don't are the centrist and they don't inspire confidence that they're going to protect the democracy. No, that inspired confidence that they'll come up with a new act regulating the emissions of law

and motors. You know, that's not going to deal with the crucial issues. Anyway, I'm a last word

to you. Well, just to Michael's point about the strength of the rank and file right now, in Minnesota last night, in the Democratic primary, they had nearly doubled the turnout of the Republican primary. And I think that's just the latest example of how intensely fired up Democratic voters are. And obviously, that doesn't make the Senate map any easier necessarily, but it's a real advantage that the best candidates are already plugging into and are going to

keep doing so until November. Yeah, really, really good point. I wish we could go on and on. We have

“this limited time here. But if you want to hear more good discussion of this kind of thing,”

not only do you have everything we're producing here at DSR, our daily deep state radio.

So, consciousness words matter, need to know all those things. But we also have the show that we do. We produce on behalf of the New Republic, the daily blast with Greg Sargent, every single day. In fact, I know our team of podcast knows is already getting ready to go and put together today's episode any minute now. And that's got good stuff. And then, of course, every day you've got TNR's blue book, which Emma is putting out, which is invaluable and it couldn't come at a better time.

And so we encourage you to TNR to TNR's blue book to TNR's daily blast. Nation bar across the top where it says politics and culture, et cetera. It says up there the blue book.

“And you can click on that. And on that page, you'll find a way to opt in. It's important that you”

opt in. It's free and it takes three seconds. Okay. Now, excellent point. How is your novel doing now? Well, I don't know about sales. It's not on the best seller list as far as I know. But, you know, I'm getting good reviews on Amazon. And, um, you know, my friends like it. And here it is, right over here. It's really funny. It's a good thing. It's very funny.

See, she got that too. All right. Enough of this shameless promotion. It is great to see you, Mike. It is great to meet you, Emma. It is excellent to see you, Rosa. It's good to see all of you. And please join us for everything else we've got here, including as you know, every Friday, the DSR Daily is live on Substack. And we have a guest every week last week. We had Mary Trump. And this week, our colleague here, Norm Ornstein, is going to join for that live session.

And all of you guys love Norm. I just don't know. I'm real jealous when I do a podcast with him because everybody's like, Norm, so great. And who's the other guy? Anyway, it's okay. I can live with it. It's my life story. But join us for that. And we'll see again real soon. Thanks everybody, bye-bye.