The Daily Blast: Trump’s Plot to Rig Midterms Gets So Unhinged that Even Fox Is Rattled

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What? I'm talking about the story with the story. Oh, yeah. [music playing] This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic,

produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent. [music playing] The science 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 that news organizations for not carrying him live. In doing this, Trump accidentally revealed that he fully expects the media to help him

so distrust in our elections.

That's an essential precursor to his rigging plot.

And remarkably enough, even Fox News bought a participating in this, another sign of how deranged his scheming has become. Harvard political scientist, Ryan Eno, says arguing that the right way to think about this

is to face forward. If we're going to overt the worst, we need to prepare for it right now. So we're getting into all of it. Ryan, good to have you back on.

Yeah, thanks a lot of beer. So let's look forward. In his speech, Trump made wildly deranged claims

“about intelligence documents supposedly showing”

that our elections are deeply vulnerable. He also insisted that China had compromised our election data and said the deep state is covering it all up. Numerous media fact checked and debunked all of it, but that aside, Ryan, what do you think Trump

is signaling about his future intentions here? You know, we can't overstate how dangerous this is. Democracy doesn't work if people don't have faith in 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 sew down these elections,

either to take actions as the president, the use of government to try to undo the result of the elections, of which he loses, or to encourage his supporters to undo them through violence, like he tried to do in 2020.

And we're going to get into the specifics of all that in a second,

but let's first listen to a couple things. Here's Trump during the speech, raging at news organizations for refusing to carry him live. There's no third-wheel country that has elections, like we are in a rare move in BC,

and ABC fake news are 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, 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. And here's Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullin, echoing Trump's anger out of press conference the next day.

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? So the fact that Mark Wayne Mullin felt obliged to keep pushing this nonsense shows

Trump continued to rage over it, because that's the only reason these guys ever say anything. It's too minister to the audience of one.

“But Ryan, I think something's getting lost about this.”

Trump isn't merely angry because the networks refuse to give him attention. He's angry because he needs the media to broadcast his lies about our election system, precisely in order to help him spread this trust in the outcome, right? 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 there are many ways taking a stand for democracy. They're saying we are not going to broadcast,

think that everybody knows the lie. And the media has learned not to broadcast Trump's lies.

But on the other hand, what we're seeing is we're seeing just how dangerous it is

“when a president goes full authoritarian like this.”

Because it's not just about him up there ranting on television. He can use the federal government to coerce media or media firms like these, like CDS and NBC and everybody else into doing his bidding. Because they could very well be punished. The fact that we have the Secretary of the DHS up there pushing this,

what does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with compelling media organizations to carry the, 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. I want to underscore your point by reminding everybody that in the clip we played,

Donald Trump actually said that these news organizations should lose their licenses for failing to carry his speech live.

And Mark Wayne Mullin accused them of refusing to share vital essential information with the American people.

It's a more convoluted than Donald Trump says. It's the subsidiaries and the affiliates that have the licenses. 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?

Oh yeah, 100% that's exactly correct.

“And it's important to emphasize just how unprecedented this is, right?”

I mean, this is a clearly authoritarian move.

And there's never been a president in American history.

It's done this. I've said if you don't broadcast what I want, I'm going to essentially put you out of business. And you know, that's the reason we have things like an independent license commission, which at least we did until Trump came along. And the Supreme Court cited with his unilateral authority to take away its independence.

But this is even if you take away all those grander things about democracy, this is just essentially school yard extortion, right? Like, you know, it'd be really bad if you didn't do what I want. You know, maybe you'll have an accident. You know, next time you're walking home or something like that, right?

And everybody knows what he's implying in that case, right? It's very clear. And so yeah, you know, ultimately these these these media firms say care about their bottom line. And if they're worried about losing the broadcast license, which we seems to be now, that there's some evidence that Trump could at least try to exercise the other authority,

then they might comply with what he does next. Now, you know, it could go to the courts. And hopefully the courts would ultimately side with with these organizations,

because the first amendment protections are very powerful,

but they don't want that headache, right? And this is why so many so many organizations and civil society that know they could ultimately prevail and courts in the courts would take the take the easy way out, essentially. And that's the problem how we end up in these situations. Donald Trump is essentially saying, look, the next time I give remarks that are designed to so distrust in our elections,

you demo better carry and otherwise the full weight of the federal government's going to bear down on you. So yeah, 100% and look, I mean, it's really worth emphasizing this thing about the DHS, right? The DHS, it was supposedly set up essentially to protect Americans against terrorism, right? And of course, you know, critics at the time pointed out that this was something that could end up having overreach, but it never really realized that until Trump took it over and turned it into,

“essentially, his private secret police sports, right?”

And so here you have an agency where it's threatening the, it's threatening news organizations, it's threatening, it's threatening the independence of elections. If you listen to more of what was said in that news conference about it, they're going to examine the voter rolls and things like that.

And people have this real fear, which is probably still low-covidity, but there's a real fear that you're going to have things like ice agents, and these other sort of shock troops, a Donald Trump showing up at polling places, trying to intimidate people from casting their ballots. And once you get DHS involved in things they have no place in,

like the administration of elections, that becomes a real, real concern in a real threat to our democracy. Just to underscore what you were getting out there, during the press conference at which Mark Wayne Mullin sided with Trump's theory against the news organizations,

from state officials in terms of election administration,

even going so far as to say that if they don't protect our elections, they may face prosecution. I just want to make one more point about what you're saying there, which is that it gets even more of a while when you consider how Mark Wayne Mullin talked about this. He had the goddamn goal 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. He accused the news organizations of selling out the country and its national security by refusing to share vital information with them. It's exactly backwards what they did do was actually, in a way, a patriotic gesture, refusing to participate in this Trump/Mark Wayne Mullin effort to gaslight the country.

Yeah, and look, I mean, you're exactly right. And it fits a really disturbing pattern because this is sort of the, you know, the refuge of bullshit that every authoritarian turns to, right? So you've heard these paintings in Turkey, you heard him in Russia, you've heard him in Hungary,

a authoritarian leader is they always claim it's about national security, right?

You know, somebody is threatening our national security in this sort of convoluted logic. And that's hard for people to argue against because they don't want to be on the wrong side of the day-generating our citizens, right? The book, you know, if we're willing to turn over the legitimacy of our elections, because somebody, you know, raises the flag of the rest of the national security,

“if the media is not well-to-do as job, then that's how we lose our democracy, right?”

And that's what's the, is it, is being attended here? And something that we really have to be aware of, then we have to call, to use this word again, we have to call this bullshit when we see it, and that's clearly what's going on. 100%. Now, here's where this takes a weirdly darkly comic turn.

Even Fox News has attended, developed it all this. Fox stated explicitly right after the speech or during it, that it wasn't in a position to evaluate some of Trump's most incendiary claims, and according to both Aaron Rupar and Media Manors, who monitor Fox pretty relentlessly, Fox declined to carry Mark Wayne Mullins' presser rehashing Trump's claims,

and it gets even better. CNN's Bryan 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, you know, "Oh, my God, we better be careful here, because of course they had a major settlement against them,

to the tune of, I guess, $700 million in lawsuit brought by Dominion over their false election claims.

Bryan, what do you make about that?" Well, there are two things I'd say about this. First is, you know, I know sometimes things like civil lawsuits get a bad wrap. If people are going around and sue each other,

“but we actually see that the purpose of these in a well-functioning country, right?”

Because Fox very clearly said things after the 2020 election, that were defamatory towards some of these election administrators, and they were punished for these civil suits, and they wanted to avoid that, and that's our court system working. Now, the other thing I would say about it though,

is this fact that Fox thought it was just bad politics, and you see a lot of Republican politicians saying this, too. You know, there's a lot of science at members of Congress want Trump to move on, and they all know what he's saying, it's 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? You know, Trump thinks that the American people are a lot dumber than they actually are, which is sort of one of the tragedies of his whole administration, as how stupid he actually thinks the American people are. But the American people aren't buying this.

“So you can see this in the polls, like even only about half of Republicans actually say they believe this, right?”

And I'm not sure even that half actually believes what they're saying they believe, right? And so people really aren't buying this, but Trump keeps trying to sell it. And what really was unfortunate about that though is what it signals is that Trump is probably, or he very well could want to move beyond the politics in order to try to make this happen, right? So you can't convince Americans that other party is crooked.

And so that's when we start worrying that in order to satisfy these delusions that he's having, that if he's going to do things like, you know, which was reported to be considered in 2020, like have the national guard sees bounces or have, as I suggested,

you know, purportedly to try to stop the legal voting or something like that.

And so at that point, you're interfering with the election that you can't win legitimately, and in which the American people are rejected you in order to impose your well, essentially on the country. And at that point, we're not living in a democracy. 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 Mark Wayne Mullin talking this way is so alarming,”

and we should focus on the context as well. The FBI has already seized ballot boxes in Georgia. Trump himself has already said he wants Republicans and the federal government to take over elections.

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, you know, stage showdowns and select places to create atmospheres of crisis and terror and 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?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have to take everything seriously. And it could be these things are all low probability events. And in many ways, I believe they are, but the fact that we're talking about them seriously, and the fact that these are direct threats to our democracy means that we have to take them seriously.

You know, we take low probability events like airplane crashes seriously, because they're so catastrophic, right?

And they can actually happen.

And so, we also have to consider what actually we know what Trump wants. And he singled us 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, you know, eventually said we're not going to, we're not going to go along with this, right? We, we are going to do his been in and then members of Congress

that actually ended up in his own party that had been inside within as well, right? But a lot of those people are gone. There's none of those people in this administration anymore. And they're all loyalists. They're all people that essentially are there because they will do whatever Donald Trump wants.

And so there's none of those roadblocks in the way, right? 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,

that we have something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago, but we have essentially a masked secret police going around terrorizing American citizens, terrorizing democratic cities on the flingiest of pretext. It's just a simply political terror, right? And that's operating in the United States right now.

And so there's obviously people that are willing to do those types of things. And if he told people, I don't know if everybody would do it, but there are certainly people that if he told them, those ballots are illegal, you go seize them, that they would, they would go do that, right?

And so, you know, we can imagine that happening in, in, it's not hard to know whether they target. They would target democratic cities that were, in, for example, in contested senate races where they knew they would, 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 are the constitutional system. You know, me is 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?

Like you can't, you know, fortunately, this is where having a small fellow government becomes fortunate in a really big country. You know, there's not enough people to go, you know, to steal every ballot box and then every dispersal election.

You could come up with ways that could happen. And if you fertilize a national guard and things like that, but then things like that are slow moving. So it's just, it's hard logistically to make happen.

“But I think that one way, we, we have to treat as a reality.”

And one way we guard against that right now is exactly what we're doing. As we're talking about it, and we have to, we have to make on people like governors in these states aware that this is a real reality. And let them plan for it, right? Where we need to put them on the record to say,

if somebody legally tries to interfere with an election in your state, what will you do?

and even in red states, I'm thinking about Georgia, for example,

stood firm because they believed in democracy more than what they believed in, you know, Donald Trump's lies. And so we, we need to have people go on the record now that they believe in democracy. And they believe in the local administration elections,

which has been a correspond of the way elections have been administered in the United States for its entire history. And in many ways, we see the wisdom of that now. And we have to ensure that that process will have, um, lab integrity moving forward.

Right. You could see the media putting pressure on Republicans in places like Ohio and Texas,

which have critical Senate races that will decide Senate control,

pressuring Republicans to, say, whether they will stand up against any effort to seize ballot boxes.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, and I think that's very well said, right?”

Because, you know, nobody should agree to that, right? And, and, and you would hope somebody would be very willing to say right now that we are going to stand up to that, right? And we need elected officials or the Democrats or Republicans to be going on the record right now to say,

we are going to protect integrity of our elections. We believe in the integrity of our elections. That's how we all got here right there, elected under that system that Donald Trump is attacking. And we're going to protect and move in forward.

Because that is our constitutional duty. Well, Ryan, speaking of that, do we need to hear Democrats, maybe all the governors, all the senators, all the house members, and all the secretaries of state stand up in unison, maybe even hold a joint press conference and say,

this is an emergency. Do we need to hear them say Republicans,

“now you must say where you stand on all of us?”

Do we need to hear them say the president just signaled an effort to steal the midterms? And we are in an urgent situation right now. Do we need to hear them? 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 here in one side,

if they're only here in the lives of Donald Trump,

they might not realize that, first of all,

they might not realize it was our true, which is a little shocking to us, that, you know, here a lie often enough, it kind of sees some of 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, because frankly, you know, Donald Trump tries anything up against it. If he tries to steal the election through taking ballot boxes, through interfering with photos casting their ballots, if he tries to do anything,

“then people frankly need to take to the streets, right?”

I mean, this is our democracy under threat. And in November, if that happens, then people need to be propelled prepared to stand up against it using, you know, 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 to start standing up for our democracy now, not later after something has happened. Well, I think the upshot here is that we all have a lot of work

to do to get ready for what might be coming. Ryan, you know, thank you so much for all that. It was really bracing stuff. You're welcome. It was pleasure to be here.