DOJ makes DREADED announcement ahead of midterms

0:00Brian Tyler Cohen:The Department of Justice makes an announcement previewing their strategy to interfere in midterms. And I interview former Obama Communications Director and co-host of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So the question I get more than any other is about what the White House is going to do to interfere in midterms. And we just got a preview of exactly that. The Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dillon, sat down for an interview on Bloomberg's balance of power. And she said, quote, we began our election security work almost as soon as I was sworn in last April.

0:33Brian Tyler Cohen:This is an ongoing duty and obligation. The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hotspots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems. And we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary. We're going to do it to the tune of approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election. And this is just something that the DOJ does. Now, let's be clear. This is a voter suppression tactic, period. Here's why. Think about who actually gets deployed. There's not going to be bureaucrats. There's not a thousand bureaucrats sitting around.

1:04Brian Tyler Cohen:It's probably going to be the federal agents from the one agency that has more money than most militaries on the planet, which is ICE. So you've got a rogue agency answerable to one man that doesn't show their faces, doesn't wear insignia, whose entire reputation is that they are not afraid to shoot or kill Americans with impunity, who will likely be at the very polling places that Americans are expected to show up at in person in November, which might shed light on why people like Caroline Levitt outright refused to rule it out when asked. Thank you, Caroline. Steve Bannon recently said, quote, we're going to have ICE around the polls come November.

1:40Is that something that the president is considering? That's not something I've ever heard the president consider, no. So you can guarantee to the American public that ICE will not be around polling locations

1:50Brian Tyler Cohen:or voting locations in November? I can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November. I mean, 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 polling locations. It's a disingenuous question. But the fact that they feel they have to do this is just as big a story. Like clearly the Trump administration and the broader GOP have just given up on trying to win on the merits. So they feel like their only choice at this point is to just rig the rules of the game. Just look at the environment that they're operating in.

2:28Brian Tyler Cohen:You've got 10 Trump endorsed candidates who've already lost their own primaries this cycle. The president's approval ratings are underwater on virtually every issue that matters to voters. The economy, health care, foreign policy costs are higher across the board. Health care is less available. Food assistance is less available. Inflation's up. The Epstein files are being suppressed. The war that Trump swore he'd avoid is going on nine months now. And frankly, there's no way to hide any of that. There's no ad buy that erases inflation or the Iran war or, you know, a carrier full of sailors who've been stuck at sea for 250 days.

3:01Brian Tyler Cohen:When a party knows it can't win a fair fight over its record, it's got two options. It can try and change its record or it can just change the fight. This administration has made very clear which one it's choosing. And look, the Republicans will try and sell this move as election integrity, as they've been doing for years. that a thousand federal agents need to be posted up at polling places because something is wrong with how Americans vote. But the obvious question in response to that is something is wrong based on what? Where is the evidence of any widespread fraud that justifies a thousand person federal deployment?

3:36Brian Tyler Cohen:Doesn't exist. It's never existed. Study after study, audit after audit, court case after court case, including the ones that this very administration brought in front of judges who Trump himself appointed have failed to turn up anything remotely close to the scale of fraud that would warrant this kind of response. The absence of evidence isn't some gap in the story. It is the story. So if this isn't about fraud that exists, what's it about? It's about creating the appearance that fraud might be lurking because they need some thin pretense, some flimsy justification to justify federal agents standing inside polling places in, you know, specific communities that this administration has already landed on, has already decided to distrust probably black majority or young majority or Democrat majority districts in swing states.

4:25Brian Tyler Cohen:Surprise, surprise. That's not election security. That is the machinery, the basis of suppression, because the most effective way to suppress a vote isn't always physically stopping somebody from casting a ballot. Sometimes it's just making people afraid enough or uncertain enough or to feel watched enough that turnout in the quote-unquote wrong precincts just quietly drops on its own. Even Harmeet Dhillon, when she was pressed, couldn't produce the evidence that she was implying existed. She claims that states that have cooperated with DOJ's voter roll efforts supposedly show, and this is a quote, hundreds of thousands of dead people and quote, tens of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls.

5:03Brian Tyler Cohen:But she didn't name a single state, didn't cite a single source, and even admitted in the same interview that the DOJ needs to do quote, further verification before it can say whether anyone actually voted illegally. So the justification for a thousand agent deployment is by the administration's own admission, completely unverified. That's not responding to a documented crisis. It is manufacturing the impression of a crisis. And consider, too, if there was mass fraud, you know what we'd see? Prosecutions. And you know what we haven't seen? Prosecutions. That is as big a tell as you could possibly find, especially at the hands of a DOJ that will stop at nothing to prosecute anyone, regardless of how much evidence or lack thereof there is.

5:48Brian Tyler Cohen:In fact, DOJ has had every opportunity to make its case in an actual courtroom under actual scrutiny, and it's failed spectacularly. I've spoken with Mark Elias at length about the fact that there are 23 separate district court cases where DOJ sued states demanding their unredacted voter rolls, you know, complete with social security numbers, driver's license data, all of that. And DOJ has lost all 23. The Sixth Circuit rejected them, too. And just this past Friday, the full appeals court, en banc, wouldn't even rehear it. 23 losses in front of judges appointed by presidents of both parties is about as close as the legal system gets to saying definitively that there is nothing there.

6:26Brian Tyler Cohen:And the department's response, by the way, wasn't just to accept it. It was to start talking to the Supreme Court instead. Because again, when you can't win on the merits, you just find hacks whose hackery you can appeal to. So follow the actual sequence of events here because it tells you everything. DOJ went looking for evidence of massive voter fraud. it lost 23 times trying to get the data it claimed would prove it. It still hasn't produced a single verified case at the scale it's describing. And now, instead of the case for fraud, we get a thousand federal monitors at polling places anyway, announced with the same unverified claims that already failed in court, aimed at election hotspots that the department won't even name.

7:05Brian Tyler Cohen:When you can't win the legal argument and you can't win the political argument, you just change the rules of the game to benefit you. And that is the entire strategy in one sentence. If this White House can't win elections on the merits, you know, on the economy, on the Iran war, on a president openly telling grieving military families that their kids haven't sacrificed enough yet, the fallback is just to make voting itself feel like it's being surveilled. Not because there's real fraud, because the administration needs voters, especially in those communities that it doesn't like, to just hesitate, to wonder if showing up is worth the scrutiny.

7:40Brian Tyler Cohen:You don't need to rig a single ballot to suppress the vote. You just need enough people to believe that something is wrong, something is dangerous, and to make an example out of those people. So my advice to everybody, do not give them what they want. There will be midterm elections and they will be free and fair. We have God knows how many attorneys, prosecutors working to make sure that that's the case. And the Trump administration will not succeed at suppressing the vote no matter who they deploy. This tactic is a sign of weakness and a precursor to the fact that even the White House is preparing to lose come November.

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9:23Brian Tyler Cohen:That's 60 % off at simplisafe.com slash BTC. Plus, when you order, write in our show name when you get to the How Did You Hear About Us survey to let them know that I sent you. Don't forget, there's no safe like SimpliSafe. It looks like there's something of the end of an era as far as Trump's grip on the party is concerned. I'm joined now by Dan Pfeiffer, former communications director for Barack Obama and co-host of Podsafe America. Dan, you had posted in the aftermath of Corey Mills losing his primary in Florida. And I'm going to put this right up on the screen. Three more Trump endorsed GOP candidates lost their primaries last night.

9:58Brian Tyler Cohen:Trump's endorsement used to be a guaranteed win. No more. This is more evidence that Trump's grip on his base in American politics is loosening. So I want you to talk about that post that you made and Trump's waning influence in his own party. Sure. Like I will stipulate that the overwhelming majority of people that Trump endorses wins, but also the overwhelming majority of his endorsements are in completely safe seats. It used to be an absolute guarantee that in the most high profile of races, a Trump endorsement would be akin to victory. We have seen in several cases in recent weeks, including three times last night, where Republicans endorsed by Trump have lost.

10:38And what I think is interesting about it is like, if you're a Republican who cross the party like a Thomas Massey or a Bill Cassidy, like Trump can still win those primaries. But when Republicans are choosing between two different Republicans who haven't like, you know, committed some sort of mortal sin against the party, Trump's endorsement is, it isn't a guarantee anymore. Like we've seen it. And I think you can, it's just, if part of this, I can get into data if you want, but part of this is also just vibes. You can just feel it. Trump's a less dominant force in the attention economy, what he says people react to less, it carries less weight, people are less scared of him.

11:18And I think it's showing up in primaries too.

11:20Brian Tyler Cohen:Do you think that this is evidence of his waning influence or is this like an affirmative rebuke against Trump? I think it's waning influence because these are primaries between two mostly equally conservative Republican candidates. And if people think there is a better candidate that Trump does not like, they'll vote for that candidate. So it's more like his death grip on the party is loosening. Yeah. And so what are the implications then moving forward? Like, how are you thinking about his influence, especially as it relates to who he decides to declare as his heir apparent in 2028? You know, I think the people, Republican primary voters will take Trump's endorsement into consideration, but it may not be decisive in a primary.

12:09What will matter is whether he deploys his hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds or puts his thumb on the scale with the actual institutional Republican Party in terms of how delegates are counted or what the primary schedule is to help that person. But if people are just walking in, they may, you know, Trump's endorsement is one piece of data. It's not the only piece of data.

12:29Brian Tyler Cohen:In terms of like what he's doing, I guess, I guess the broader question is like he still as you said has overwhelming support among his base he's done virtually the opposite of everything that he promised on the campaign trail and so to what extent does it matter to what extent um is his continued refusal to abide by his campaign promises uh uh the the the increased cost you know continuing to stay bogged down in this uh foreign war in the middle east his refusal to release the epstein files is that will there come a point where where the the base is so inelastic because these are people who stuck with him through everything that he can he can you know basically commit any sin and it just won't matter well i think what happens over time is not that the base abandons trump is the base becomes smaller is that more and more republicans identify stop identifying as mega republicans yeah because you know i think in the way a lot of political analysts think about it they think a mega republican is someone who is anti-immigration, anti-trade.

13:36The MAGA Republican really just means you like Trump. And so you're seeing, so Trump's always going to have high approval among MAGA Republicans. That's not the most important question. The important question is how many Republicans identify as MAGA Republicans. And that's the number we should sort of watch. The other thing that I've been paying a lot of attention to and you do see is that Trump's strong approval among Republicans has been dropping steadily since he was sworn in. And so you have people who still say they like and they still approve of them. But strong approval is a proxy for enthusiasm in elections.

14:05It's a proxy for how much they care about them. And so, yeah, of course, you know, like in Republican politics, approving of Trump is part of your personal identity. But do you strongly approve of them or are you just kind of approve of them? And the number of Republicans who just kind of approve of them is going way up.

14:20Brian Tyler Cohen:So in terms of kind of the end of an era, I'm going to put another post on the screen of something else that you said from the other side of the aisle. And this is in the aftermath of Alexander Vindman, who had boatloads of money losing to a DSA-backed candidate in Florida for the Senate race. So that post says, Alex Vindman losing despite raking in a metric shit ton of money based on being a resistance hero does feel like the end of a certain era. And I know there's probably a degree to which that was tongue in cheek, especially given the fact that that, you know, that was the caveat. It was caveated by or qualified as being the resistance hero era.

14:56Brian Tyler Cohen:But do you feel like we are coming up upon a moment because there's such a glut of money in this ecosystem that having boatloads of money, having metric shit tons of money isn't isn't a guarantee of victory in maybe the same way it used to be? Yeah. So my tweet was referring to two things here. The first is, and it's kind of related to your first set of questions about Trump's death grip on the Republican Party. It also feels like he's losing a bit of his death grip on the Democratic Party. Like there was a time in which the thing that mattered most was for a Democrat was, does this Democrat stand up to Trump?

15:31And in this election cycle alone, we have seen Dan Goldman, who was the counsel for the Democrats during their first impeachment trial of Trump, and then rode the fame from that job into Congress, lose a primary. We saw George Conway, a very famous Trump apostate who has basically lived on MS Now over the years, only get 6 % of the vote in a primary in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And then you have Alex Vindman, who was the – he was a very, very brave person who stood up and testified against Trump in that impeachment, and he lost. And so I do think that this is the worst – I kind of think Democrats can see the light at the end of the Trump tunnel here.

16:10And so fighting Trump is necessary to succeed in democratic politics, but it's insufficient on its own. But the second point is we are seeing in a number of races where the candidate who is spending significant less money, notably Angie Nixon here in Florida and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, win despite that. And there are a couple of things going on here. One, there are ways, if you are very, very talented, to get your money out, to get your message out much cheaper. You can do it organically. You can go viral. You can have a real social presence. You can be someone who is always communicating in every platform.

16:48Abdul was excellent at that in his case. But also the bulk of money is spent on linear television ads. And linear television ads now reach a vastly diminishing group of people. They still matter. And I think one of the reasons why Francesca Hong lost is because she ran no ads down the stretch. But it's not the victory does not go the person who can raise the most money anymore. And there are ways in which I think this is going to matter in the 2028 primary where candidates who are understand the attention economy, who are clever about getting their name ID up and their message out, will be able to succeed without raising the most money.

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18:29Brian Tyler Cohen:And it's not just clothing. Quince has become my go-to for everything from hotel-quality bedding and bath essentials to premium cookware and travel must-haves. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash btc. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash BTC. So in the event where Trump has this, what, 400, 450 million dollars just sitting there as his war chest, and this is, you know, compared to a DNC that has an anemic, I mean, they have like negative funding.

19:07Brian Tyler Cohen:I think they're in the whole$3 million. Like, I understand why Trump is sitting on that because he wants to be able to deploy it when it's going to be most effective for him. But will he like, could we be in a situation where he's held on to it so long and we've entered an attention economy where simply being able to perform well organically and authentically is going to be enough that you don't even need these boatloads of money. And he will have kind of like held on to it too long because now we've entered an era where you can pretty much do it for free if you're good enough. If you've got the Riz that AOC has, that Abdul has and so on.

19:42I think that he has sat on it much longer than he should have because investing the money in the campaigns earlier has exponential benefits. If you wait to the end, all you're doing is buying television ads at the most expensive rate possible. If you buy your ads early, they're cheaper. But if you invest in technology, organizing, staffing, those sorts of things you will use for the bulk of the campaign. And so he has not been – I don't think he's been particularly strategic about this. that money is going to matter. Like it definitely will matter. And it will be a help to Republicans, particularly in more Republican states or in some of the stretch districts where Democrats could catch Republicans sleeping, you know, like a Trump plus 12, Trump plus 13 district.

20:24They'll now have money to be everywhere. But it's still, once again, does not matter as much as it used to before. And I would be much more worried if Trump started the year with$500 million and only had$200 million in his account now because it meant he was deploying it strategically throughout the course of the year. Instead, he's sort of, he's basically keeping it in an account that doesn't really gain interest for a year and a half now.

20:44Brian Tyler Cohen:Okay, so like a couple things on that. First of all, that is basically the theory of the case with Ben Wickler and Wisdoms. Like they had a long-term strategy to continue building up the party so it wasn't just throwing money at ads that go in one ear and out the other, you know, in October or November of an election year. This is what it looks like when you organize year round. And that's what turned Wisconsin into, you know, the state that had often been a thorn in the side of Democrats into a pretty reliably bluish state when it came to a lot of these, you know, statewide elections, state Supreme Court elections.

21:18Brian Tyler Cohen:A lot of those went went our way. And that's because we had somebody like Ben Wickler running that show. So another point is like, you know, I can't remember how many years ago it was, but but there was an election cycle where Stephanie Valencia basically watched and she noted this. And that's why she that was one of your colleagues in the Obama White House watched as in in some South Florida district. Democrats poured millions and millions and millions of dollars into ads that, again, went in one ear, out the other that ran for eight weeks. And meanwhile, Republicans bought a radio station for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

21:54Brian Tyler Cohen:So pocket change compared to what the Democrats were spending. And now they have infrastructure that they can rely on all year long to basically proselytize people who are listening. And all the Democrats had to show for it was like, again, making making a bunch of TV stations rich, filthy rich in the lead up to an election. And then the last part is like, you know, in large part, like the importance of the work that you and the guys at Crooked do is like creating that infrastructure so that it's not just throwing money at ads that are not going to impact people. Like we are in a different kind of economy where people are are building up their worldviews based on their trusted voices that they listen to 365 days out of the year.

22:34Brian Tyler Cohen:People aren't just tuning in to you like in November to figure out what to do. They're in large part reading message box all year round. They're listening to Pod Save America all year round. And that's how you have to operate in this ecosystem. And yeah, to your point, like just throwing money at these ads is not going to be it in 2026 or beyond. Yeah, that's exactly right. Like there, if I, there's one thing that I could wave a wand and do would be to convince the donors who have been giving the super PACs millions of dollars a year for decades now, just to run the TV ads, to invest in something that has more lasting value, which is, it's so ironic because all the people who have these millions of dollars to give got it for making really smart investments in things that have long-term value.