How to Stop Trump’s Plan to Steal the 2026 Elections

25:22I think it's in the shoebox in my mother's closet. So you'll hear people talk about documentary proof of citizenship. And of course, only eligible citizens should vote. Indeed, only eligible citizens overwhelmingly do vote. But actually demanding this kind of paperwork turns out to be something that a lot of people wouldn't have. And it's not the case that it necessarily affects only Democrats or only Republicans. The same thing with voter rolls purchase. I mean, if you say we're going to make it a little bit difficult for people who don't own their homes to vote and a little tougher for renters as opposed to homeowners and especially long established homeowners.

25:57Again, in 2005, it was a good premise that people who had lived in their house for a number of years were probably Republican leaders. I'm not sure that's still true in 2025. You know, I don't think that in some senses that the kind of careful parsing of political demographics is what is behind all of this. It's kind of more of a muscle memory and emotional impulse that we see playing out. And sometimes it has actually caused quiet ruptures inside the president's own coalition. When his executive order on requiring a passport was blocked, when Congress blocked the SAVE Act, the president put out another post on social media saying, I'm going to do an executive order ending vote by mail.

26:44And this is because, and I'm going to do this. And by the way, the state election officials are merely agents who work for the president. And their job is merely to cap the votes as agents for the president. Again, James Madison and the other boys who were at the Constitution had a different idea, but there never was an executive order, and they backed down very quickly. And I don't think it's too much of a leap to surmise that the Republican Party operatives and state chairs who have said, look, we finally crawled out of the hole where you told everybody voting by mail and voting early was a terrible, corrupt thing.

27:19That's how Republicans often voted before this was politicized. you know, it was the snowbirds in Florida, older voters were more likely to take advantage of these military voters, military voters. These are conveniences that aren't unsafe. They're actually perfectly secure and people like them. And so I think there was, from what I understand, pushback within the Republican party saying, don't do this. Don't do this thing. Yeah. It's not just, and with among older voters, it's not just snowbirders who are comparatively affluent who vote by mail. It's also people who are quite a bit older and who may be more housebound.

27:51So people over 80, they may have a lot of reasons why they don't want to go mobilize all the paraphernalia they need to be mobile on a particular day chosen by other people if they can do it from their home. And those people may well be Trump voters or Republican voters. One in three voters in this country right now vote other than in person on election day, and that's consumer choice. Let me ask you about the most ominous and fraught possibility, which is this is a precedent that is much cited on the Republican side. And I'll just jog your memory because I'm sure you know this story better than I do.

28:27But in 1984, there was a very contested race in the state of Indiana. Came down to a few dozen ballots difference between the Republican and the Democrat. American voting institutions, just as we all discovered in the year 2000, are not that accurate. And it became very much a kind of metaphysical question about whether the Republican or the Democrat had really won this race in 1984 in Indiana. And the question was, given that the answer was, in the end, ultimately, it's kind of blurry in the way. I don't know if there's a punch machine or whatever it is, but you can't ultimately know down to the single exact vote what exactly the intention of every last voter was.

28:59So if there's a separation of, I think, a few dozen, who decides? The Democrats then had a majority in the House, and they said, you know what, we're going to have a committee of two Democrats and one Republicans, and they're going to examine, if I'm remembering this right, became a big hullabaloo. And finally, the Democrats just asserted, look, the Constitution says the House determines its own qualifications. That means ultimately the Speaker of the House decides who gets seated. The courts have no role. Nobody has any role. The Speaker decides, and the Democrats took the seat. And the Republicans all vowed there will be payback for this someday if we ever get a speakership in a tightly contested race.

29:33And that's, I think, something that a lot of Republicans have in mind or are thinking about in 2026, that if it really comes down to it, if it's on a knife edge, that Speaker Johnson says, you are seated and you are not. Well, you're right. Then it's the counting of the votes and the decisions about who gets seated. It's sort of like a congressional analog to January 6th. And these are some of the kinds of things that happen very rarely that keep election law nerds up at night. I think there would be a pretty significant difference between one seat decades ago where that might have happened. And the idea that if voters really speak in a loud voice in an election, but then the party that lost simply says, well, we're just not going to count those.

30:17We're just not going to count those wins. Sorry, Calvin Ball, we won. I think that the response from the public and the courts would be very strong. I think on that kind of scenario, I don't think that that would just slip by and the Democrats and the courts and others would not not just sort of say, well, you know, better look next time. If the voters have spoken and for some reason there was an attempt to scult what they said. Well, let me pause you. I'm not talking about a scenario. This is if the 26th outcome is that there are millions more ballots cast for Democrats and Republicans across the country and the Democrats pick up 37 seats, this plan won't work.

30:52But if the Republicans can show some strength, if the balance comes down to five or six seats where the separation is a few hundred or a few thousand votes, then this plan does work. or work better? Well, it works if there's not pushback. It works if the courts don't step up. And I think the courts have understood more than they had back then the kind of political shenanigans and the political chicanery that can happen with the machinery of elections. You know, it's the 25th anniversary coming up of Bush v. Gore. And to me, the most significant takeaway from that intense recount and then the Supreme Court and other court battles is that both parties came to realize, hey, you know, the machinery of elections as of 2000 and before, as you were describing, was pretty rickety.

31:42And there were a lot of problems. And there actually was a lot of effort to clean up the voter rolls, to make voting more secure, to make the machines better, and a lot of these other things. So that really we're in much better shape than we were a quarter century ago, even as both political parties mobilized more around these issues. So I think that the answer to something like that would be that Democrats, in the chance that that were to occur, that all control would come down to one or two seats. Democrats have considerable power to tie up the Congress. The courts would get involved, I think, in that instance, and voters too.

32:19I think the ultimate answer, though, is making sure that people have their ability to vote, that there's confidence in the system working, that there's trust in the way votes are cast. That's why when you look at all this stuff that President Trump and his administration are doing, it's always kind of a question of like, well, why are they doing this? They think they're going to actually, you know, what are they doing with all this? And the answer to me seems ultimately that they are trying to stir doubt and create a cloud of suspicion to make it easier should there be the opportunity to push election officials and others to cave.

32:56And, you know, in 2020, it didn't happen. But I think that they think if they can cast enough doubt, make enough people think that their voter rolls are clogged with non-citizens or illegal voters or ghosts or whatever, then they can confuse matters enough. Well, and I mean, if you want to be worried, that's where the politicization of National Guard becomes such an issue. One of the things that has been, I think, very painful to watch here in Washington, D.C., where I'm talking to you, is the National Guard gets deployed in Washington, D.C. quite often for presidential inaugurations every four years.

33:28There are often various kinds of emergencies where the National Guard comes out, and they come from all over the country. And by and large, in my experience, and of course the 9-11 experience, people accept them and are often quite happy to see them. You know, they've got a job to do. And Washington is a city that thrives on visitors from across the country in uniform to not. This time has been different. There's been no, I think, or very little hostility to the National Guard. But there's a lot of quizzical lines like, why are you here and what are you doing? And we don't like the imputation that President Trump is making that the city can't govern and police itself in normal times.

34:04But if they are out in many places, especially in swing districts in 2026, that puts the National Guard in a false position. And it changes the way Americans think about meeting the face of their army when the army is paid for to defend them. And when you talk to people with experience in the National Guard, they will say this is not what these folks signed up to do. They signed up to do disaster relief. And the other things that we do rely on for the National Guard, you know, I think that what President Trump has done with the use of the troops, the National Guard, and in limited instances, the active duty military, is he's done it to show that he can do it.

34:46He hasn't really sent tens of thousands of troops into Occupy Portland or anything else of that nature. It's more to make the point that he is using the military. And it's important to note, as you've written and others as well, this is utterly illegitimate to use the military domestically as a show of intimidation or force or for normal, regular, everyday law enforcement matters or other things like that. When you go to a place like Chicago, I was there a few weeks ago talking to people there. They weren't happy about the National Guard being used in this way, but the National Guard was not there in such large numbers.

35:21They were kind of going around taking snapshots of the tall buildings. But what was really dangerous and really disruptive has been ICE and CBP and the way they have swooped into neighborhoods and done the mass deportation with minimal regard for civil liberties and maximum willingness to tear gas people and all those other things. And again, I think that when you look at ICE and the size that it will expand to under the budget that's been passed, this massive potential domestic force, I think that's something, if there is another Democratic president or another Republican president who's not Donald Trump, they're really going to need to grapple with what's been created and how to bring it in line with the Constitution.

36:09And ICE does really see itself as answering to the president, not to the government. And it's they're wearing masks, so we don't know. But it's it's it certainly seems more that way. And the National Guard are regular folks. They're coming from their regular lives. They're normally under the command of the governor of the state. It's very apolitical. It's a citizen service thing. But this is where governors and mayors especially have an important role to play. Police, state troopers and others can protect elections. And it's an important role for them to play. And this is where it's really been vital that governors have come to understand their role in this federal system, that they can protect their own people and make sure that they protect voters.

36:54This may be another benefit of vote by mail, is that it's harder to intimidate people with trouble at the polling place. Well, let's talk about governors and mayors and local elections, because a lot of the mischief in American elections has occurred at these lower levels. In fact, one of the reasons we have this illusion that there are things called red states and blue states or that the country's neatly divided between red states and blue states is because the state levels are often so gerrymandered that states that are really quite closely divided, like Texas, look bright, bright red. And that's a phenomenon of political hijinks at the state and local level.

37:31And there are a lot of Republicans in Massachusetts. There are a lot of Republicans. And, you know, we have this development of the country into rigid blocks of red states and blue states. And if you're a Democrat in Texas or a Republican in Massachusetts, under the current system, you get little representation. And the voting lines can be drawn in ways to intensify that. And this seems to have been a phenomenon post-2000. It seems to have accelerated. And maybe it's better computers that are to blame. But it seems to have accelerated since 2010. Better computers, wimpy or Supreme Court justices.

38:02For a long time, they knew this was a real problem. They said we were going to issue a standard. They said we can't come up with a judicially manageable standard. And in a 2019 case called Rucho versus Common Cause, they said, actually, it's too hard. We are just not going to police partisan gerrymandering. I should mention another topic which could have an impact on redistricting and much else is the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court seems poised, based on their questioning in a recent argument, to really severely weaken, at the most likely scenario, what is left of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

38:45Can you walk, for those who don't follow it, what was the 1965 Voting Rights Act? What did it do at the beginning? And in what ways has it been pared back since 1965? The Voting Rights Act was one of the most successful laws in American history. It was the product of the civil rights movement of John Lewis and others who bravely marched for voting rights at a time in the South when the Jim Crow segregation meant there were very few black people who were allowed to vote. And what the Voting Rights Act did, above all else, was to say that states that had a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get permission from the Justice Department or the federal courts before they could change their voting practices.

39:29This was called preclearance. And it was hugely successful and really transformed the South and the whole country, really, starting in 1965 was when we really could be said to have had a multiracial democracy in this country. In 2013, in a case called Shelby County, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, gutted Section 5, meant you couldn't use it anymore. And he basically said, oh, this kind of racism, that's a thing of the past. The South has changed. The country's changed. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissent, said, well, that's like standing in a rainstorm, holding an umbrella and not getting wet and saying, therefore, oh, I don't need an umbrella.

40:12I'm not wet. In other words, that kind of equality in voting flourished because of the protection of the Voting Rights Act. Well, they eliminated preclearance, but there was a part of the law that was still left called Section 2, which meant you as a voter, as a civil rights group, or the Justice Department, people like that, could bring a lawsuit to protect voting rights. Quietly, with much less fanfare, in a case in 2021, the Supreme Court made it much harder to use that for voter suppression laws, but it still could block racial discrimination in redistricting and to stop what's called the dilution of the political power of communities of color.

40:51This is a case called Calais. They actually asked for a re-argument, and they made it pretty clear that, you know, while I don't think it's likely they're going to actually declare the whole Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. They're going to make its use in protecting voting districts that will elect Black and Latino candidates much, much harder. And some analyses have said in the New York Times and elsewhere that this could add to the Republicans, you know, 15 seats in the House of Representatives. I'm not sure it's quite that dramatic, but that would be the consequence of something like this.

41:26Can it also backfire on Republicans? Because one of the effects of the Voting Rights Act was you'd have a state like Mississippi, which is approximately what? Not quite, but nearly half black. I don't remember off the top of my head how many seats Mississippi would have. But because you had to guarantee the black voters a certain number of seats, that the people, the majority, the racial majority could cram them all into a finite number of districts and then take the rest of the board for itself. Once the Voting Rights Act is gone, those black voters don't disappear and they haven't lost their right to vote.

42:00They now participate in politics across the whole state in new kinds of ways that could create a kind of dummy mander by a different name. You know, there was a period a few decades ago where civil rights groups and the RNC were both urging the creation of more black majority or black supermajority districts to make sure, not in partisan terms, but in representational terms, that there would be members of Congress and other legislators who really represented those communities. We don't really know what would happen. And, you know, a lot of us are thinking about what would come next. And in partisan terms, you may be right that it's hard to predict.

42:38I think that there are are other kinds of ways to strengthen the law. A lot of these decisions made by the Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act are not about the Constitution. They're about the way those statutes are worded. The court seems to find any chance it can to gut this law. But one of the things that can happen and should happen on this and on other voting issues and redistricting issues is, I said the Supreme Court backed away from its responsibility. But to me, there is no substitute for national standards on redistricting that applied and should apply to red states and blue states alike.

43:14The Supreme Court wouldn't do it, but Congress emphatically has the power under the Constitution to set national standards on redistricting. That would affect partisan gerrymandering, would also help with racial discrimination and gerrymandering too, as well as the Voting Rights Act. And the legislation that came quite close to passing in Congress a few years ago, the Freedom to Vote Act. It was a kind of an omnibus bill on voting and a number of other things, but it had in it a ban on mid-decade redistricting and a ban on partisan gerrymandering everywhere in the country. If it had passed, what's going on right now on redistricting wouldn't be legal, wouldn't be happening.

43:54It passed the House. It had a majority in the Senate. This was a bill that Senators Sinema and Manchin, while supporting the bill, said they wouldn't change the filibuster rules so it would pass. The Democrats have said that if they get control again, they will find a way to get this passed even with a majority vote. And that would have big impact. Let's wrap up with two summary questions. As you look at the year ahead, the political year ahead, what has you most worried about a threat to free and fair elections? And second, you can take a pause after this one. Should there be free and fair elections?

44:29And should there be a new kind of post-Trump House of Representatives or even two houses of Congress? What kind of changes should that Congress be thinking about as a way to make elections free and fair for the future? What has me worried is the reality that we have now a federal government working actively to undermine the integrity of the elections. And what eases that worry is when I see people in communities, people in states and across the country actually getting ready to defend those elections. because Trump has his plan, but I think a lot of the rest of us have our plan and know what to do to protect free and fair elections.

45:05In terms of the future, I think this is a moment where the electorate has made really clear, election after election, that it is deeply unhappy with the institutions and with the way things are going in the country. The thing that is noteworthy to me about the 2024 election is that it was the first time since the 1800s that the incumbent party lost the White House three times in a row. Different parties, right? Democrat, Republican, Democrat. That doesn't happen. That suggests a real deep unhappiness. And Donald Trump, in his way, intuited this and has responded to it. Democrats have consistently missed it different ways each time.

45:44But it's pretty clear there's a hunger for real change. I don't think it's a question of left or right. I think it's the kind of thing, as has happened at other periods, such as a century ago, where reform-minded people of all political factions and in both parties can really try to make changes. So I would encourage everything from national standards to stop partisan gerrymandering, national standards to make sure that there is not racial discrimination or vote suppression. I think that dealing with the role of the Supreme Court is pretty important. As I think you know, I strongly feel that an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices would be a good accountability measure.

46:24It's a really worthwhile thing to note that it reflects kind of a core American value that nobody should be having that much power for too long. The most recent Fox News poll showed 79 % of the public supporting term limits. I think that after scandal is when you get reform. Not always, but that's when it happens. And if we do it right, we can make this a season of renewal, even though things occasionally look dark on any given day. Michael Waldman, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you, David. Bye-bye.

47:06A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Worzel, onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

47:43is thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

47:54Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always-changing relationship people have with technology, and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Michael Waldman for joining me today on The David Fromm Show.

48:30As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book of this week is not a book at all. It's an article. An article from an area of literature I don't read that much in, the literature of management studies. But the goings-on at the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, the Department of Defense, as it's legally called, the Department of War as it now styles itself, forced my attention to this question of management. Now, one of the things that you have probably noticed is that the Department of Defense, the Department of War, has given many different explanations for how and why it came to be that a boat that was allegedly smuggling drugs was struck not once by the United States Armed Forces, but a second time after he'd been disabled, after he'd been capsized, killing all survivors aboard.

49:14There have been many stories, but all the stories have one theme, which is that the secretary in charge, the secretary of defense, the secretary of Warzey, Stiles himself, repeatedly disclaims personal responsibility. If you like the operation, well, you can credit him. But if you don't like the operation, or if any blame attaches to it, or if any legal liability attaches to it, that was somebody else's decision. He wants credit for anything that went well, but he wants to avoid any blame or liability for anything that went wrong. And as I said, this sent me to the area of management studies and to an article called How Responsibility Shapes Career Success in Leaders.

49:50Zenger was a professor at the Stanford Business School. He was the founder of an important management consulting firm, Zenger Folkman. But he wrote this in 2024. More than 40 years ago, a colleague of mine, Dale Miller, conducted a study that compared two groups of executives. One group was identified by their colleagues as highly effective and ready for promotion, while the second group was initially considered ready, but upon further reflection was deemed unready or unsuited for that role. Now, here comes the important part. Each group received a deck of 62 statements describing management behavior.

50:26Each was asked to sort the deck in a forced choice bell-shaped curve, going from the most effective to the least effective behavior. The highly effective group's top choice was the statement, Accepts full responsibility for the performance of the work unit. This item was chosen far more frequently than statements about delegation, planning, staffing, time management, or technical skills. This choice also illustrated the sharpest distinction between the two groups. The managers who had been passed over for promotion attached far less importance to responsible behavior. Now, Pete Hegseth has not been passed over for promotion.

51:03He has been promoted and over-promoted from Sunday morning talk show host to Secretary of Defense with the new title that he's awarded himself as Secretary of War. But you can see that the behavior that Zenger describes of not wanting responsibility for the performance of the work unit, that describes him perfectly. I think there's a clue there, as with the silly prizes Trump wants for himself, the refusal of the most important attribute of leadership, not a silly prize, but actual responsibility. That defines what is going wrong with so much of the United States government. And that just defines so much of what is going wrong with the United States military today.

51:41Thanks so much for joining me this week. I want to add two personal notes before I sign off. One, you may have noticed this week and last, a slightly different look for the David Frum show. We have a new camera and a new set. I hope both meet with your approval. I also want to mention, as regular viewers, readers, listeners will know, my wife and I are big dog people. This past weekend, we lost a dog who was very close to us, who meant more than any just one animal could mean. And that is the dog that belonged to my late daughter, Miranda. The dog's name was Ringo. I wrote a piece about Ringo for The Atlantic last year called Miranda's Last Gift.

52:19And with Ringo very much in my thoughts, if you would like to read the piece and if you've met with any kind of difficulty at The Atlantic paywall, just send me a note at producer at the David From Show dot com. And I'll make sure you get a gift link to the article. And with The Atlantic in mind, I hope you will consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That's the best way to support the work of The David From Show and of all my colleagues at The Atlantic. I hope you'll consider also following me on social media at David from on X or Twitter at David from on Instagram. There's a Facebook page as well.

52:49Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. See you next week on the David Trump show.

53:18This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology.

53:59And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.