Judge Halts Trump Midterm Plot

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0:30Every day brings somewhere to be, and everyone counting on you to get them there. With seating for up to seven, the 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee L keeps busy schedules moving, from early practices to late-night games and the triumphant ride home. Available 4x4 capability helps you drive safely and confidently when weather shifts or plans change. The laughter, high fives, and shared wins become the memories you cherish. In the 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee L, Jeep and the Jeep Grill are registered trademarks of FCA US LLC. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber, and this is a week that's featured Donald Trump looking often like a powerless lame duck, from setbacks for major matters, like Trump's negotiations in Iran, to the smaller items like the rejection of his effort to rename the Kennedy Center, ripped down and covered, as you see there, or even get control of his reflecting pool saga.

1:20All of this continues with the news tonight, a legal loss thwarting the midterm plots he's been pushing. Democrats have been surging. Hakeem Jeffries could become speaker if they win. And Republicans are fretting about losing in November. So Trump has been trying to meddle in what would be the ballots for that election. We can tell you the news, though, a judge dealing him a major loss crushing and blocking the attempted executive order on mail-in voting. Now, let me tell you off top tonight. This loss is rooted in the Constitution. The president has no power to change this. Not the current president, not future presidents.

1:58This happens to be a Republican president who wants to do it. But if a Democrat tried the same gambit in the future, our system says no. Now, like many of Trump's fanciful executive orders, just trying to write down that he wished he had more power than he gets under the Constitution does not create that power. It actually doesn't do anything for him. And the judge is reiterating that, which is something everyone learns in law school. The president does not control elections or rewrite their local rules because the states alone determine voter eligibility requirements. The judge writing the Constitution doesn't grant the president any powers over the elections.

2:35And the states know that. And the judges know that. Obviously, their job is to interpret the law.

2:44Trump's lawyers know that. We'll take this back to me. Yeah, I'm going to explain this in a second. But Trump's lawyers know that. Trump's lawyers basically let him barrel towards this loss rather than saving him the embarrassment, because as I'm telling you tonight, this was going to happen. You weren't going to just suddenly rewrite the Constitution to get control of elections. And now I'm going to explain what we showed you for a second, because this is really another humiliating example of Trump getting punked just by the law. And it's like an iconic scene in The Wire that is often quoted, including in this meme where the guy without the power is told, yeah, you want it to be one way, but it's the other way.

3:27The judges have the power here. They are the character telling Trump that it's not the way he wants it. It's the other. Now, that's the headline, if I were to simplify it with a pop culture reference, which we admit we do around here sometimes. I'll also tell you the details. The new ruling blocks federal officials from what are now Trump's frozen demands to make his own list of approved voters or do that through DHS, to probe officials who might give ballots to those people. Well, they're supposed to get those ballots. It also stops the plot to try to steal the race before Election Day using the Postal Service in a ridiculous sort of brazen effort that would try to deny people their ballots by mail.

4:07Now, Trump has tried before to turn the nation's mail carriers into some kind of voter suppression team. It's an echo of a failed plot from 2020. Donald Trump has long fixated on this. And nowadays, and this has come up a lot, so you probably know, but I'll remind everyone, the largest states in the country, mail ballots to everyone like California. And in the most recent election, which Trump won, by the way, roughly a third of the ballots in 24 came by mail. So this is how we vote. A MAGA plot to deny mail voting is a plot to deny voting, period. And that's a plot to end democracy. And I take no joy as an objective news anchor and reporter in telling you that the sitting president has been caught trying to end democracy more than once, if you're counting.

4:59So that effort fails. Other judges dealt Trump a loss on the bids to try to seize voter rolls from states. He's 0 for 10 in these cases. And this matters because we've all thought about what's going to happen when you have someone who's already led and pardoned a violent insurrection gearing up for elections that seem like he might not win. And we know how he's responded to losing before. It matters, though, because as I've shown you, coups are not a solo activity. The 2020 plots that we've measured and shown you those arrows charting them, they required literally thousands of people, including that failed insurrection.

5:34And they only came after many government staff refused to break the law for him. So the new rulings I'm telling you about, which matter a lot for our democracy, no matter who wins, and if Republicans win fair and square, that's our system. We just need to have a democracy, not a dictatorship. The new rulings strengthen the resolve of people inside the government if they are going to be asked in the next one or two elections to potentially break the law again. It will deter those who rationally think about the jail time they could get if in a future administration there's a real DOJ that looks back at what they've done if they were to do it.

6:09Now, Trump's postmaster general was talking up the proposal I just mentioned, which is now dead in the water legally, denying the ballots to people who otherwise would be able to vote in America if the Trump officials don't get the extra voter info they've been demanding in this shakedown. If a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list over to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposal? Under our proposed regulation, no. You're telling these states either give the federal government this information, trust the federal government, trust the Trump administration.

6:48We'll take good care of these. And if you don't do it, you can't mail absentee ballots. You're going to make a decision that people cannot vote by mail. that's unacceptable. That plan, you heard the reference to a proposed regulation, is now DOA. And this happens a lot in the Trump era. You have people who are performing for the so-called audience of one. They go give their hearing testimony. They say, yes, that's the proposed regulation. But like Mike Pence and others, whether they actually at the end of the day want to risk going to jail once courts say no is a very different matter. That so-called proposed regulation dead in the water.

7:26Now, when an executive order is flatly illegal, it does get stopped in court. Other plots can turn more on the details, on their validity. And that brings me to the second part of what I want to share with you in our opening report tonight. Because, for example, it's perfectly okay for the DOJ and the FBI to monitor polling locations to prevent voter suppression, right? To keep an eye on how things are supposed to go. But it's not okay for them to do voter suppression. Sounds pretty obvious, right? So when Trump does admit that he has improper motives for the DOJ or for certain government officials involved in the elections, he actually makes it harder for his DOJ to carry them out.

8:08And I'll say as an aside, this is why following the news or politics these days is so strange, because on the one hand, you see the president admit to something like that, and you are someone who supports democracy, you might say, gosh, that's terrible. On the other hand, if you want this to be fixed, it's actually better for the system that Trump blurts these things out and gives the courts and the system a chance to thwart and respond to them rather than if he were, I guess, quieter. So that pattern has become a strange part of the long-running but often failed efforts to get the DOJ to bend the rules.

8:42And now I bring you another piece of news tonight. You can add this to the evidence pile. Trump admitting he wanted a Watergate-style plot, that he's pursuing this, that he did this to try to get the DOJ to do him a favor to meddle in the California race. I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California, and I said, do me a favor. Take a look. They're trying to steal that election, too. But the U.S. attorney called. We want to check your votes. About an hour after the call, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won. So had I not made that call, Steve Hilton would right now be watching the election from home.

9:26Trump, in his way, trying to take credit, suggesting that somehow everything shifted an hour because of one phone call. This fits with some of his magical bragging that he does on the campaign trail. But he's also confessed to making that call to politicized meddling. This is the kind of smoking gun material that doomed Nixon in Watergate and certainly did cause Trump even more trouble in his first term. that's back when the DOJ was more independent, when it still appointed special prosecutors to investigate the sitting administration to avoid a conflict. That's why we had the Mueller probe. Now, Trump has thwarted those kind of investigations so far this term.

10:02But as we're reporting tonight, this is the problem we face. There is no reason to minimize or normalize what I just played for you, Donald Trump's confession. It echoes the confession he blurted to anchor Lester Holt all the way back in 2017. Do you remember that one? When he said, and this is Trump's confession, that his administration had been lying in a cover-up about the reason they made the unusual decision to fire an FBI director, James Comey, in the middle of his term. Trump's DOJ had insisted and put in writing that Comey was fired for mistakes that didn't have to do with the Russia probe of Trump's campaign.

10:40And then Trump admitted it was Russia. admitting a lie or making liars out of his DOJ leadership, a confession that haunted him as many of his aides were later indicted in the Mueller probe. I was going to fire Colby knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won. Confession. They had already said it wasn't about that. They had a different cover story in writing. And then he admits it's about Russia and the Democrats and his anger and his political goals.

11:26That was a journalistic interview that mattered. It yielded damning information. It led to the convictions, accountability, deterrence, because the DOJ system was working then. And people like Paul Manafort went from being the number one official in the 2016 Trump campaign to going on trial, getting convicted, being incarcerated. Well, today we know Trump has ground down the DOJ. Comey's not just fired. He joins these others on the enemy's list charged. A guardrail, though, has held in that juries, grand juries in the courts have still required evidence. And most of these cases have been losing.

12:01While Trump's very tardy bit to get the Senate to now do what maybe the courts will not, to try to push new laws, to bend the rules, to maybe save or change the outcome in the midterms where Republicans say, and no one knows till there's voting, but Republicans say they're worried about losing. Well, that brings me to a final piece of evidence tonight that ties it all together. Because Trump's hope or prayer or demand that the Senate pass his voting plot drew a new fact check from the party's top leader who says people like Trump, who want that voter bill, the Save America Act, are not going to get it, and they need to get a grip.

12:41The facts on the ground are very clear. There are not the votes to nuke the filibuster, and there aren't going to be 10, 10, 100 votes to all of a sudden support the Save America Act. It's just, well, they're just hard reality. and I think people at some point have to come to grips with that. You're not going to get it. He's telling Trump, you got to come to grips with that. How would you sum up that tough message tonight? You want it to be one way, but it's the other way. A tough message some people have to learn more than once. Jelani Cobb and Michelle Goldberg join me on those hard lessons in 90 seconds.

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14:45I tie it all together with Trump wants it to be one way, but increasingly it is the other way for all of the concern about how the other branches have failed for years. On these stories tonight, I think the evidence shows the courts and the Senate to some degree are saying, no, it's the other way. It's the other way. So there are a few things that I think are significant here. One is that even red states don't like the idea of turning over their voter rolls to the federal government. Like, there is a bridge too far. The other is something we remember way back to the 2016 election, something that people had historically thought of as maybe a kind of bureaucratic throwback or something that was a headache or inefficiency or whatever.

15:32But the vastly decentralized nature of American elections actually works to our advantage here, because there are so many different levers and there's so many different things. It's not easy. It's not a kind of like single switch kind of flip one switch and you can put your thumb on the scale for a national election. God knows they have tried, you know, with multiple kinds of avenues. But I think that this is the ways in which a system that would otherwise seem archaic winds up actually beginning to seem brilliant. I mean, I also look, I mean, as you said, you know, people there's a lot of red state opposition to various parts of this.

16:12People in red states vote by mail. My parents live in Arizona, where almost everybody votes by mail, which is, you know, a very, very purple state. And I also think that the Republicans probably don't want to pass the SAVE Act. This is the kind of voter suppression law that Donald Trump is holding hostage, this bipartisan housing bill, because it would also create a lot of problems for their own voters because of all how onerous it is to sort of prove citizenship, especially if you've changed your name. And then I think the final part is just that Donald Trump, he came in with this kind of terrifying amount of political capital and he has, you know, squandered it as flagrantly as he squandered money as a casino owner.

16:57And so now you have him, you know, with kind of extremely low poll numbers. There is this fascinating story in The Bulwark about how his campaign is doing this kind of outreach to QAnon. And, you know, with this sort of QAnon themed social media campaign. And they're all like, screw you. You know, I feel like when you've lost QAnon, right, you're not somebody who kind of has this, you know, movement behind you anymore. QAnon, hard to find, hard to lose. But once, as you say, we've gone through the life cycle of that. And it speaks also to the weakness of everyone on the right bracing for a loss.

17:37Now, we've all covered and you teach students and I'm sure you advise people at The Times and others who seek your counsel about not getting ahead of reality because reality will tell us the story. But I want to show briefly Tucker and others who think the reality is, and Trump is acting like, they are on the way to losing. Tucker, where this leaves the future of the MAGA movement. The future of the MAGA, well, that's over. There's no future of the MAGA movement, obviously, we're done.

18:12I mean, the only thing I'll say is that the MAGA movement has been like, you know, the villain in a movie at the end where, you know, like the villain is dead. But no, it's not. Actually, it's about to like jump back out of the grave and come get you. And so, you know, it's rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated many times previously. But I do think that there's something here, you know. So what has happened, you know, historically or generally with this administration is that the machinery that's meant to create electoral equality has been taken over in order to create electoral inequality.

18:48The same sorts of claims have been, you know, I think that some elements of the Republican Party are aware of the ways in which this could go the opposite way. And what I mean by that is that, you know, when you look at a state like Alaska, which voted for Trump and their reliance upon mail-in ballots because it's Alaska, like, do you really want to get on board with that? There are lots of local people. There are lots of statewide people. There are congressional delegation. Nobody is unaware of the ways in which they are dependent upon this. And you can create a system that winds up disadvantaging them, not just in 2026, but 2028 and down like long after Donald Trump has left the White House.

19:33Yeah, I mean, I think, look, but I also think that Donald Trump in some sense knows that this is coming for him. And, you know, obviously we can't be sure a lot of things could still go wrong for Democrats. You know, some of the congressional generic polls are closer than you would like or think given Trump's unpopularity. Nevertheless, I mean, the most likely outcome is Democrats taking at least one branch of Congress and Donald Trump spending the next two years in, you know, sort of endless hearings and subpoenas and investigations. Kennedy said as much when he tried to pressure a libertarian member of Congress to drop out of the race, saying, you know, I don't want to spend, you know, the Republican needs to win because I don't want to spend the next two years.

20:25in hearings. And so and I also think it's important for all of the kind of people in all of these agencies that are tasked with carrying out Trump's will for that to become increasingly real to them. Right. That everything they do now, they're going to be sitting in front of a congressional committee answering for. Yeah. And Jelani, the judges, though, are also giving a very clear guidance. I mean, I mentioned the almost absurdity, but we have to be serious and be ready, of weaponizing the mailmen and mailwomen and mail workers of the country into a voter suppression force. But the judges ruling against this and there being hearings and it being on record really does put pressure on those individuals to hand out the damn ballots.

21:10And if they get an illegal order from the president's office, which happened in 2020, like Mike Pence did, to disregard illegal orders because the judge has already ruled. Right. But I mean, it's also, you know, how do you build a constitutional crisis? Yeah. You know, in three easy steps, because, you know, this is, you know, the territory we start saying, who do you listen to? And so when we think about, you know, Mark Kelly and all the heat that he took for saying that you should disobey illegal orders, which seems to be very straightforward. Like the only time you could have a problem with someone saying that is if you intend to tell people to do things that are in fact illegal.

21:48Illegal, right. And so the other part of it that makes me a little bit anxious and curious about how this plays out is the consistent weaponization of the DOJ and how that will be a factor, the kind of X factor and how all this plays out, launching investigations into election returns or whatever. I mean, that is not a kind of far out scenario. That could be part of the equation, too, that we're looking at beyond the midterms. Yeah, it's what I mean, when I show those arrows and remind people, that's a civic exercise. So the folks are ready. Last time, the DOJ arrow got stopped by Bill Barr, whatever you think.

22:26That's right. Right. Yeah. This time, these type of leaders of the DOJ may not. And so then everyone has to be ready to interpret that. The DOJ yelling something is not the same as reliable sources or journalists telling you it's a fact. Or even the Supreme Court, what everyone thinks of it, ruling at the end of the process. It's just their campaign arm now. And it'd be dealt with with the same skepticism of a convicted campaign, basically. Michelle and Jelani, I want to thank you both on this convo. We'll see you by the end of the hour for something a little different. There is a growing consensus in America, left, right and center, that Trump lost the war.

23:01Even the comics agree. But this deal almost makes it seem like we lost the war. Do you remember what happened last time we tried to tell him he lost something? He tried to kill Mike Pence. He tried to kill Mike Pence.

23:20President Trump's decision to initially wage war on Iran took many by surprise. Then his rushed efforts to unwind the war he started have come with all kinds of U.S. setbacks. When this tentative deal was first announced, plenty of serious people went to study the details first. It's not an overnight black and white thing. It can be complicated. And then we saw the U.S. and Iran clashing over what the deal really meant, what was coming next. But now that we've had some time and the details have come out and sunk in, there are some takeaways. Broadly speaking, it's no secret that Iran has gotten many of the key things it wanted.

24:00And it's, of course, kept its regime intact. And that Trump's team has offered money and more time and even oil leverage to Iran going forward. So we have experts and insiders, foreign policy vets, and really leaders in both political parties coming together to reach that rare thing in America these days, a shared consensus. And I'll tell you what it is. It's that Donald Trump lost the war. The conservative National Reviews headline, the U.S. loses its war against Iran. The conservative Washington Examiner, feeble Iran deal, a fitting end to a foolish war. Criticism of basically ever launching it.

24:43Longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove says that Trump's deal is a political and foreign policy disaster, that it's weaker than Obama's deal, which is salt in the wound. He certainly knows that. Now, you could say that's also the political wins. But take the highly respected New York Times editorial board, which crunches foreign policy and goes through the evidence. They came up with a headline that matches the conservative one I showed you, President Trump lost this war, noting the failure to achieve the goals that were offered, which included unconditional surrender, which could be bluster, but also regime change, which is a thing that countries sometimes tried to do and which they said they were going to do and which they failed to do.

25:25They lost any bit of regime change, if anything, hardening a younger version of this regime. They didn't destroy the military either, although you could say they degraded aspects of it. Now, many diplomats and national security experts often discuss these matters with more, well, diplomacy, right? It's kind of their job. And so they may not shriek the headlines that we're seeing here. They talk about it in different terms, that the U.S. has a strategic disadvantage in this deal, or that it benefits Iran more in the future than it obviously benefits the U.S., and that Iran now has continued to show a geostrategic ability to flex power over the Strait of Hormuz, something that Trump's actions allowed them to do, which before they weren't doing.