Trump Bucks Base on AI

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0:47All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code podcast. Taxes and fees apply. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. And this Friday, our top story is the Supreme Court wading into midterm rules just 39 days out from Election Day. And they are bolstering Trump's effort to use federal powers to impact voting and potentially counting ballots. The court clearing the way for states to use a federal database arranged by the Trump administration. It's basically a list that draws on info like Social Security files or other material gathered by DHS.

1:25Now, this is a new Trump effort. Most elections in history went forward without a federalist. And on the one hand, the federal government has certain powers to track information and circulate it. The court ruled to uphold that today. But on the other hand, I'll always keep it clear with you as we try to understand what's happening in our country. Normally, a federal government might have some of those powers collating information, circulating it with federal state interactions. Doesn't sound all that wild, right? But let's be clear about reality. President Trump has low credibility on voting and democracy because he fomented and pardoned a criminal insurrection and sedition, which was convicted.

2:09And its effort was to overthrow his 2020 loss. We all lived through it. And he's been caught lying and spreading disinformation about that election and the terrible crimes convicted that day, as well as about future elections. It's sort of his thing. And critics argue that this rule effectively is another bid to create potential new tools to distort the midterm elections, just as he has tried to distort, lie about, and overthrow criminally, at least according to some of his supporters criminally, past elections. And so it is not an exaggeration to say that many people who've looked at this issue, other nonpartisan and legal experts, said that in theory, there could be a time in history where a federal government would be able to do this stuff, but with enough actual malice here, there's no reason you would give these powers to this leader.

3:03That's some context. Critics also warn states could try to use this database to stop people from voting or to throw out their ballots, which is a serious issue. At the same time, and in prepping our coverage today, I wanted to make sure to explain to you exactly what this is factually without any alarmism, even though we have this serious overhang of Trump's history that I mentioned. But at the same time, recent use of this list suggests it has not operated on some massive scale, nor with the kind of numbers or impact that would swing most elections. We have a lot of data on a lot of past elections.

3:39We hold elections every two years federally in this country and a lot more local ones. So we know a little bit about this from the past. And to tell you these facts is not to minimize by any means the seriousness of what Trump might want to have happen and what he might try to do. But here are the facts. Texas used this type of list on their 18 million voters and then asserted or flagged that 2 ,700 of them might not be citizens. So first, that is under 0.1 % of the state's voters. It's a tiny, tiny slice, a tiny drop, a droplet, that would be unlikely to shift any races, even if those voters were perhaps prevented from voting or their votes weren't counted.

4:24So that's just the numbers as an electoral matter. As for the law and the truth, you should know 600 of those flags in the Texas example turned out to be wrong, and they were applied to valid citizen voters, best we can understand from the record, which means about one out of every five voters flagged by this list was wrong, which is a terrible error rate. Courts would find that to be an unacceptable error rate if you were processing actual ballots. As I said, that was about flags. That's a problem for counting every vote. Now, why would the White House be pushing so hard on a plan that is potentially only going to be a droplet of a drop in, say, Texas?

5:03Critics argue this isn't just about what might ultimately happen with the list in reality. It's also about potentially discouraging people from voting in advance or pushing confusion and disinformation. I'm going to get into those questions with our expert in just a moment. I want to mention this ruling does come after several notable defeats for Trump at the same high court. Even with a Republican majority there, the court has handed Trump a loss on the more sweeping bid to distort mail ballots. It also blocked a controversial Republican-drawn map in Missouri as unfair and unusable. We are getting close to the midterms.

5:41It is striking and to many people concerning that the Supreme Court would go out of its way to allow this new thing from Trump, given everything I just told you. On the other hand, the court has stopped other things that it thinks clearly exceed federal authorities on elections. With that context, as sober as we can be, I want to bring in former federal prosecutor and writer Ankush Kordori. Your view on this ruling? Look, I think that the court got it wrong on the merits. I think it's a bad idea to allow a tool like this to be used in any way. At 20%, error rate is horrendous. These are people's votes.

6:20We should not be playing games around with them. There is one factor that mitigates the impact of this ahead of these November midterm elections, in addition to the other things you flagged, which is that because we're within a 90 day window prior to the midterms, the states cannot use bulk matching to through this tool. So the fear a couple of months ago, as this was all bubbling up among elections law analysts and scholars, was this the bulk matching concept that the states would be able to put in large numbers of potential voters and then to generate the sorts of errors that you you just identified.

6:57Because we're in a 90 day. What non-lawyers, I'll let you finish it. What non-lawyers call a purge. Right, right. But because we're within a 90 day window of the midterms, a separate federal law prevents the states from undertaking programs to purge their voter rolls. So if the states are obeying that law, they should only be able to use the tool at this point for individualized queries. Right. So that is going to minimize the effect of making this tool available to the states in the run up to this election. But, you know, we can we ought to think about the next election as well. Right. So this may be back on our radar in a more serious way in just a matter of of months.

7:35But to my mind, you know, the significance of the ruling is not just because it will affect and potentially disenfranchise even a single voter. That's a bad outcome. But, you know, I don't really even understand why the court indulged this, why the Republican appointees indulged this, given the stakes here. And it's unfortunate that if you read their opinion before you get to Justice Jackson's dissent, they don't give any consideration to the prospect of voters being disenfranchised as they weigh the equities here. It's all about the federal government and what the federal government wants. And, you know, that's only one element of the equation and is not the most important element of the equation.

8:14Yeah. And Justice Jackson's dissent speaks to that, what she called non-existent harm on the federal side and the no concern about people having their right to vote interfered with or halted, which is a big deal in America and given our history. As you know, when we look at things factually, it's not to minimize the issues, but to make sense of a ruling. I called it a potentially as small as a droplet in the actual impact. Where do you come down on that? I think that's about right. Fortunately, you know, the mail-in ballot rule is not going forward as a result of the Supreme Court's ruling. That was the more significant, I think, threat that observers were concerned about.

8:55This one is relatively modest, particularly given that we're in that 90-day window. But of course, there are still other issues that continue to arise in the, you know, months, weeks running up to this election. All of this, you know this as well as anyone, is a result of Trump and the Republican Party pushing these changes in rules, pushing these this mid decade redistricting. The litigation landscape remains unsettled as a result of all of these efforts, which are simply about trying to prevent Democrats from gaining more seats in the midterm elections, which they're on track to lose. the magnitude of that loss remains to be seen, whether it's one or both houses remains to be seen or neither potentially conceivably.

9:38But that's what's motivating all this. And it's, you know, it's concerning to me that the Supreme Court is indulging any of it. They're supposed to not be changing the rules of the elections in this period. Now, this court has not obeyed that principle called Purcell principle. It's become very, yeah, it's become very inconsistently applied. So I got a minute left. Is it fair to say that you view this legally as bad, but small for now, potentially larger later if unchecked? Yes. Yes. That's exactly how I see it. As we sit here now, I'm thinking about election day, ballot seizures, voting machines, that sort of thing, which we really need to be very, very diligent about and vigilant about still.

10:25Yeah. I don't know if you know this, Ankhush, but around here, when we're done with our work, if we want to have a drink, we want to get a little tipsy, you know, we go to a bar nearby, drink responsibly. It's Friday. But when we want to be absolutely sober, we book you for your sober legal reasoning. Thank you, sir. Thank you. We appreciate Ankhush, and we wanted to go through that as really the top story, but with context. Then you go to what's happening in the actual midterms. Republican panic. Trump on defense. He's going to places like Alabama and Oklahoma, which are supposed to be safe enough that they wouldn't worry about them.

11:00He won by double digits there last time. This ain't last time. Ominous vibes from many Republican insiders. Time reports, sentiment among them shifting from nervous to, quote, fatalistic, a pile up of bad news as many convinced they're heading toward an electoral disaster. One Republican told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Even in Georgia's Senate race, it looks so grim at this point. It's about making the patient comfortable. Politico notes the cracks in what was once a Republican firewall, and both parties have their own trauma about firewalls, right? Democrats have had times where we were, they were told, everyone, they were telling the press, hey, you guys, this is the firewall.

11:40And we were going, well, what does that mean? And the answer was, well, it only works if you're winning. One Florida county chair said they're hemorrhaging. As for Trump, well, political mojo that might have been there as recently as 24 when he did win by a point and a half nationwide ain't there now. He had this China meeting that seemed completely out of touch with the midterms. Now he's saying the Democrats are the quote commie reds, but well, you make sense of the pictures yourself. He's backed AI and data centers in ways that have Republicans absolutely angry because you don't need to policy-wise say these things.

12:18He's just saying them. I have even more on that coming up. But he's also shrugging off the pain of inflation and the war and ignoring those questions today.

12:29Mr. President, did you call on President Xi to stop buying oil from Iran?

12:33Naomi Klein:Any new guardrails are going to lie. Mr. President, why are you banning media outlets? Why should U.S. taxpayers pay for ads about U.S. That's what it looks like. Keep in mind that when you hear the question shouted, why are you banning media outlets at the leader of China and the U.S.? Any other time, it would have been a question for the autocratic leader of China. Today, it was a question left unanswered for the American president. That is one of the many problems he's facing with what Republicans say is a fatalistic view of a potential blue wave. Our friend Molly Jong-Fast is here on All of This.

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14:33We're back with The New York Times. Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics Podcast. Welcome. Thank you. Did it feel like a long week for you? It was an endless, an endless week. And yet here we are on Friday. You see the president's problems we showed there. Yes. But also a complete refusal to address anything. Yeah. No. And a real focus on renovation projects and parties and dinners and not things that when you have a voting public, you're 39 days from the midterm, you have a voting public that is freaked out about the price of gas, the price of diesel and, you know, inflation writ large.

15:08You've told them you're going to make things cheaper. And then all of a sudden you are nowhere to be found. You're just doing Marie Antoinette style. swanning around swanning around well you have a pod we mentioned i want to show where the podcasts are because it really is a leading indicator and they tend to move faster than some other media and we heard trump did well in 24 if you look at the references to trump on the conservative podcast basically there you have the election and you have the red crash they don't even want to talk about it. Yeah. And that's because, remember, podcasts, you see your reader, you see your reader, you see your listener feedback, you hear it much quicker than you do even on television, right?

15:52Because you can see people comment on your podcast, people push back in real time. And so these viewers, and remember, we saw this early with Tucker Carlson. Like, Tucker Carlson gave an interview with NPR this week. He, you know, he's a very intentional, I mean, there are many problems with Tucker Carlson. Do not get me wrong. And I disagree with him on many things, but he's very intentional, very intentional about what he does. You have a problem with the lying or the anti-Semitism? I'm going to start with anti-Semitism. There's many problems. Yes, many, many problems. But if you look at him as a weather vane, you're saying what?

16:28As a weather vane, you're seeing that once the Epstein, once Trump failed to release the Epstein files, you could see that he was he was sort of transmitting the schism in MAGA. And we saw that really with him. And we've seen that since with YouTube, you know, the YouTube people and even like the break with Ben Shapiro, where MAGA has sort of abandoned Ben Shapiro. It's you know, we've really seen a split there. But I think the real problem for Republicans is that you and you even see it in other Republicans, this midterm environment is starting to affect Republicans like Roger Marshall. Like, Kansas should not be a swing state.

17:06Yeah, it's wild. And he is, you can see him sort of, we saw him booed at a debate. Yeah. We saw him, you know, he's just really having trouble finding his footing. And these are senators who have never had to really fight for their seats. Right, which makes them soft politically. And I don't mean, that could happen, we've seen that happen to members of both parties. Right. But you haven't run in a while, and then suddenly, what they're calling the potential blue wave, It's early. Nothing's happened yet. But at least in the spending, we're seeing the markings of, oh, they're really worried in the red states.

17:35If you remember when Obama first came out on the scene as a candidate. Yeah. Talked about how pundits like to slice and dice our country when we're all really one. Right. Well, I'm going to do some slicing and dicing. Yeah. Because sometimes we still do it. We do it. Even though he said, don't always do it. It's the work of the pundit and industrial complex. Yes. Yeah. Look at men. OK. I mentioned the podcast where Trump also was able to connect and rattle around. It wasn't always like young men were so into conservative politics. Conservatism was associated, if anything, with being a little older.

18:05You get older, you want your lower taxes. Here's Trump's approval on men under 30. Okay. 37 % doesn't get you anywhere. Unfavorable 55%. This is a total swing from 24 where if you walked around and found a young man in America in November 24, more likely than not, he was down with Trump. He would say, well, I don't like all of it, but he's funny and he's cool. And I saw him on 17 podcasts. Right. Now it's 55 negative. What does that do to the midterms? It's not good for Trump. And I would say, look, Trump got to all of those podcasts. He went into the manosphere and he got on the podcast and he made a promise.

18:42He said, I'm going to make things cheaper. And what did he do? He did the exact opposite. He started a war which made gas and diesel more expensive. He started a trade war, which made trade more expensive, which made things you buy more expensive. So now these guys are like, I voted for him to make things cheaper, and he did the exact opposite. And look, I mean, the men are not the only group that are, you know, he had made these inroads in these swing voter groups, right, like Latino voters. And we've seen he's just shedded all of those voters because he couldn't deliver on the promise. The final number I want to show you is interesting because even people who think of themselves as factual, say they read a couple papers, make up their own mind, often get vibes.

19:29That's what we talk about vibes, right? And so when Biden was really doing his worst in the term, people remember that as like terrible and rejected by the country. Remember? I would say that was the vibe. Yeah. And then, of course, was run out of office as a candidate for that reason. Right. Fine. That was the vibe. Right. What if I told you, as I put the net approval on the screen for everyone to remember that however bad you thought Biden ever did and how rejected he was, Trump is double underwater. Yeah. Double. You see, first term, you remember, oh, Trump came back off minus 11 and won the election.

20:04That's how the country works. OK, he did. But he's doubled down where Biden ever was. And yet not everyone, particularly in certain circles, is aware of that because of the vibe of what? I guess he's loud and comical. I think you when you go down, you do not see MAGA signs the way you used to. Like there's a real sense that people are sort of there. And I think the panic with which Republicans are in this midterm, the spending, the anxiety, the sending Trump to red states, the worry, you know, about Iowa, about Texas, about states they have not had to worry about a long, long time. Kansas is a good example, too.

20:43I think there is a real sense that these guys are really just in panic mode now. Yeah. I appreciate you coming by on a Friday. Always. By the end of the hour, we'll have Wyclef here. So say hi. Very cool. Our thanks to Molly going from that to the AI profit problem and why inequality and affordability are actually now entering the mainstream criticism of this AI era. Also, new warnings about Trump's role in all this. We have a very special guest, the acclaimed writer and sometime activist Naomi Klein, next.

21:29Question. Do you ever feel like we're living through dark times that keep getting darker? from the way harsh capitalism clearly works to all this technology stuff and the AI pressure to the many, many problems in our democracy, which we talk about quite a bit around here. But it's something larger cracking. A strange part of living under a president like Donald Trump, among many other issues, is his general refusal to change course even when it's in his political interest. Republicans this week just wishing He would say something critical about AI, given the environment, or just say words vowing to address affordability, even whether he acts on them or not, but at least as a pitch.

22:16Instead, this week, he's embracing this very unpopular AI agenda and the billionaire demands for money and power. his base recoiling, notes even the usually pro-business financial times, and that has Republicans in tight races breaking with Trump on technology specifically. Now, there isn't some major tech bill heading to his desk from Congress right now. Trump could claim that he at least shares the public concerns here about labor, jobs, equity. Instead, he used the UN's big stage this week to not only defend the artificial intelligence agenda as is in America, but then sounding more like a kind of business Silicon Valley marketer than an independent leader, he focused on proposing a rebrand on the wording of AI rather than, say, addressing the concerns that a lot of Americans could get hurt or lose their jobs.

23:13He's focused on helping the industry and says he wants everyone and to start calling it, instead of artificial intelligence, call it superintelligence. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence, being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called superintelligence, changing the name. Changing the name. Here and after... It is that, you know, proclaiming a name change. You'll notice that with all these real world problems, he seems much more interested in renaming lakes or government buildings or now the words AI.