How Trump Could Break the 2026 Elections

27:16I mean, if we're in a true wave and 40 seats are changing hands and the Senate is changing majority, probably at that point, if you try to send the FBI to do something, it would look both, it would be both hopeless, but it would also look obviously illegitimate. But if the election, if it's not 40 seats that are changing hands, but just six, and you have an idea in the week before the election, which those six are likely to be, could you do something then? Could you send Tulsi Gabbard and the FBI to Charlotte and Tucson and a few chosen jurisdictions and seize machines there? Would that have any positive outcome for them or is it still hopeless?

27:54Yeah, so I think that is a scenario that's been discussed where you don't go to every 9 ,000 voting jurisdictions. You don't go to all the precincts. You don't go – certainly don't go to all the polling places. But you do go to the competitive swing races for the United States House and you do something to disrupt them. And perhaps in that instance, you could present law enforcement on such a significant level that election administrators would just have to throw their hands up and say, we can't operate in this environment or we can't operate without our machinery such that you can never get a conclusive result.

28:30I still don't know how at the end of the day, you make the ballot say something different than what they said. But just seizing everything and not even allowing the process to go on, I mean, that would be pretty extraordinary. But that would have obviously a disruptive effect. And then I guess we would never really know who won those contests. contests. And I think that this is especially vulnerable in California, where California usually takes about two weeks to complete their count because they have almost everyone votes by mail and a large percentage of people either drop off their mail ballot on election day, or they even mail it, they postmark it on election day, and then it doesn't even arrive until several days later.

29:14And so if the administration already knows that it's going to come down to just a few swing districts in California moves in there. California, of course, is already ready to be seen as sort of the liberal boogeyman. And so maybe the narrative writes better there. Based on your experience in Arizona, how far down this highway will other Republican officials go? When Donald Trump and the people around him and Carrie Lake were saying these things, these crazy things about the elections in your state, did most Republican officeholders sort of shrug wearily? Or did they say, well, it may not be true, but it's our team that's saying the thing that is not true.

29:49So we have to be full throated. Do not underestimate the importance of politics for a politician. David Mayhew said, politicians are single-minded seekers of re-election. And that is more true than I wanted it to be. And I learned that when I got into office. And Republicans care about the opinion of Donald Trump because he is uniquely powerful within the Republican Party. And so almost every single Republican that I spoke with after the 2020 election in terms of elected Republicans knew that there was very little to Donald Trump's allegations of a stolen election. At best, they stayed quiet. At worst, they went full-throated along with it because they knew it was a path to political riches, whether higher office or fundraising and so on and so forth.

30:45And so I was just consistently disappointed at how few people there were who were willing to stand up and say, no, two plus two still equals four, even if the president doesn't want it to be so. How robust are the state courts and the federal courts in election administration? So I do think that this is one thing that we can take some solace in and that was very consistent and strong from 2020 onward is that I know that people take issue with courts of appeals and with the United States Supreme Courts on some highly politicized issues. But in terms of election denialism, in terms of saying that, for instance, again, that dominion tabulation was connected to Hugo Chavez, there was not a single state or federal court that indulge those fanciful lies.

31:35And so still, I think that if there's one place where we consistently win because we have all the facts and we have all the law, it's in the courts. And so I still have put great faith in the courts. I still have a lot of confidence in the courts. And I do think that that is one of the bulwarks against anything that might happen in the 2026 election. Can you decode the role? How is it the director of national intelligence? has any role in anything to do with an election? Well, I think all the formalities and lines have been blurred quite a bit in the Trump administration. And even this one is a bit confusing because President Trump said that he had no idea why Tulsi Gabbard was there.

32:19And then the next day at the national prayer breakfast, he said, well, Pam being Pam Bondi, the attorney General had asked her to be there. And then a number of other people have had shifting analysis as to whether or not she was supposed to be there and what she's been doing there. But I think Tulsi Gabbard realizes, as many have realized before her, that Donald Trump cares deeply about this. And less important than coloring within the lines or only doing what is in within your purview is showing Donald Trump that you care about this and doing quote something about it. And so I think that for her positioning within the Trump administration, it was a smart move.

33:01Now, will he eventually expect her to produce something there? I think she could be in a little more challenging position because I think that most of this is being done by the Justice Department and the FBI. And they would say maybe this is our stuff, but out. But I think being there certainly helped her in Trump world. Yeah. But there is a strength. I mean, the FBI is an institution that is being broken before our eyes as well. And good officers are being driven out. Bad officers are being hired. The FBI is being turned into an arm of very, very partisan justice. I mean, how much confidence do you have in them?

33:35And you've seen them in Arizona. What do you think is likely to happen in 2026? I have a lot of confidence in the FBI and the Department of Justice as it previously existed. And I still have a lot of confidence in a lot of the people there. These people are amazing. They really believe in the role of the agencies. They believe in doing justice. They're highly professional. They're highly skilled. Unfortunately, as you said, those people are leaving. And if you look at the New York Times story, I think just a day or two ago, about what's going on with the applications to the Department of Justice.

34:16It's very telling. One, the number of applications is way down, and they're struggling to recruit the same high-quality, high-caliber people that they were previously. And two, as part of the application process, applicants have to answer questions about which parts of the Trump agenda they like most, how they will advance the Trump agenda. And this is just so anathema to anyone who really believed in the Justice Department's mission and the FBI's mission that I do think it will have a corrosive effect. I just don't know how long it will take to get to the tipping point where those are the types of people who are running ops.

34:53What is the SAVE Act and why do the Republicans care about it so much? Yeah, there's a few pieces of legislation right now that Republicans are trying to put forward to supposedly close gaps in problems that they see with election administration. One's the SAVE Act, one's the SAVE America Act, and one's the Make Elections Great Again Act. The SAVE Act is aimed primarily at proof of citizenship when registering to vote. So under the National Voter Registration Act, the NVRA, which was passed in the 90s, if you want to vote in elections in the United States under federal law, you just have to attest under penalty of law that you are a United States citizen.

35:40You don't have to show documented proof of citizenship. The Republicans want to change that such that you have to show either a passport or a birth certificate when registering to vote. Now, I actually think that there's something to that idea. I don't think that's an unduly onerous burden, but the way in which they've drafted it is problematic. The way in which they're trying to impose it is problematic. And there's also a lot of states' rights people who say, well, I actually think that this should be best left to the states. And there also is something with this that is a little like, politicians are older than they used to be, like not dealing with the present day America.

36:18If the vote were restricted to people who have a valid passport for international travel, wouldn't that skew the electorate much more toward the Democrats than toward the Republicans? I mean, in 1996, having a passport probably did indicate you were Republican leaner, but not in 2026. So I should first say that this is predicated oftentimes on a false notion that there are large numbers of non-citizens who are participating in American elections. And that's simply not true. It's not true by the number of people who've been prosecuted for this, but it's also not true because a number of states, even in recent weeks, have affirmatively investigated the number of non-citizens on their rolls.

37:01I wrote about this in the New York Times and just simply the numbers aren't there. And then secondly, yes, I'm not even sure that the political calculus is right. As you've noted before, the demographics of the Republican Party have materially changed even from where they were in 2016. Republicans are no longer the disproportionately educated, disproportionately affluent country club party that maybe we once envisioned them. And they are actually potentially less likely to have passports because they're not living in coastal cities and taking those international trips. And so I do think that that's another curious wrinkle to the SAVE Act.

37:40Now, maybe Republicans would say, well, that's not our goal here. And our goal is just to further secure elections. I would say we need to clean up how it's being done technically. and I still don't think that there's a great justification for it. And a lot of people say, well, Stephen, voter ID polls really well. And I say, it does. This is not voter ID. Voter identification is what you do when you show up to vote and you take usually a driver's license and you say, I am the person who is registered to vote. Save Act is about when you first register to vote, whether or not you have proof of citizenship, which might, as David said, be a passport or it might be a birth certificate.

38:27So what are the other acts that the Republicans are interested in? So the mega act does things like it's this whole laundry list of sort of things that the Republicans have talked about in the elections context for a while. Stuff like banning ranked choice voting, stuff like banning states from sending out mail ballots to all registered voters. Things like banning states from allowing mail ballots to come back after election day if they've been postmarked on election day. So my complaint against this isn't necessarily policy item for policy item, but it is very much a federalization of election administration.

39:07And if there's one thing that separates sort of the Trump camp from the McConnell camp is the McConnell camp would say it was wrong when Democrats tried to do it with H.R.1 in 2021. It was wrong when I probably looked at this way back earlier in my political career, and it's wrong now. And the Trump people would say, we want to change election administration. We want to do it through executive order even. And even if we can't do it through executive order, then we want to do it through federal legislation. Well, I think there are also, the Republicans are in the group of, we remember a world where Republicans were more likely to have a passport than Democrats were, but that was a world of long ago.

39:45We're mad about mail-in ballots because they helped Biden in 2020. Because in 2020, there was a special circumstance where people who took COVID seriously were more likely to vote by mail than people who didn't take COVID seriously. And Democrats were more likely to take COVID seriously than Republicans. But what also seems weird about this for Republicans to make such a fetish of it now is in normal times, who's most likely to vote by mail, active duty military personnel and older people. So you think, well, gee, I mean, if I'm a Republican, why do I want to make that more difficult? Yeah. So the irony, well, this is an irony.

40:20And in Arizona, it was the McCain machine that we used to call it that really, really got mail voting down to a science for a while. And it was all the people we like to say in Sun City or out in Gilbert, which are sort of towns further removed from the central core of Phoenix who didn't want to go into a voting location, who didn't want to get out of their 55 plus communities, who wanted to mail in their ballots. And so a lot of these narratives have flipped. It's interesting to this assembly like me who's been watching this for a little while. It's not always rational, but I'm trying to meet it where it is.

41:01Yeah. I mean, these are things, I mean, you can debate the SAVE Act. You can debate these other measures. In a way, you can't debate someone who believes that Hugo Chavez from beyond the grave is tampering with American voting dials. That's right. And again, my complaint with the SAVE Act is often about the predicate, the false predicate, which is that large numbers of non-citizens are voting in our elections. And that, again, that has been demonstrated time and time again to be false. Now, we can have, absolutely, we can have a public policy debate about what's the appropriate amount of documentation for proof of citizenship.

41:39Public policy debate. But too often in the Trump world, in election administration, we're debating facts that shouldn't have to be debated. Let's wrap this up with, take us back to what happens on a voting day in most of America. after. So you show up, you stand in line, you execute your vote, however your accounting does it, and then you leave. And then you never, you don't think about it until you turn on the TV. What happens after you leave that room? So if you vote at a voting location, you'll either fill in your ballot with a hand mark, you'll hand mark it with a, with pen and you'll fill in the ovals, or you'll have a touchscreen and then it'll print a piece of paper, and then you'll feed it into a tabulator at the voting location.

42:25Let me pause you right there. So even though you've used a machine to generate the ballot, the ballot remains a paper ballot. Correct. Again, so 98 % of Americans have a paper ballot of some form, whether that's filling it in yourself by hand or whether that's touching ovals on a screen and then printing it off and still having a paper ballot. Right. And here in my precinct in Washington, that's what we do. We touch the screen. We get a piece of paper. Then what happens? And then you're going to go as the voter and you're going to make sure that it has all of your selections as you intended. So it would say for this race, you voted for this person.

43:06For this race, you voted for this person. For this race, you voted for that person. And then you're going to feed it into the tabulator. You're going to feed it into a little mini tabulator that is at a voting location. at the end of the night stop who supervises this county or city workers who have been trained to do this who are bipartisan teams oftentimes depending on the jurisdiction they've been offered up by the county republican party or the county democratic party but these are almost in most circumstances a bipartisan team of paid temporary county or city employees so they're not they're not full-time city or county employees, people have been specially recruited for that one day service.

43:50Correct. For working a voting location, those are ordinarily temporary workers. And there'll be a Republican and someone named by the Republican, someone named by the Democrats. That's right. Okay. And they're watching what's going on. That's right. And there's a whole bunch of procedures. Usually you have to document a whole bunch of different things. But at the end of the day, you're going to take all of the ballots that have been run through that tabulator. And you're going to take the memory device from the tabulator itself. And you're going to wrap that memory device in tamper-proof packaging, make sure that it can't be damaged, make sure that it can't be tampered with.

44:29You're going to give it to a bipartisan team and they're going to take both those ballots and that memory device to a central count facility. So that will be either within your county or within your city where all of the different voting locations go into in order to aggregate the results. And when they aggregate the results, not only will they load that memory device into this main server to add to the other votes that have come in, but they'll make sure that the number of votes that it recorded is the same as the number of ballots that were returned from that voting location. such that if the memory device reads 1 ,123 ballots have been read on this, there better be 1 ,123 ballots that are in the drawer where they went after they were tabulated.

45:18So that's one component of it. There's a whole bunch of other components because obviously some people vote by mail, some people get a mail ballot and they drop it off. But an important part of this is we don't just load those into the elections management server, print the results and then say, well, hope everyone enjoyed their election. There's always going to be post-election audits that are going to be open to public observation and are going to be done in a bipartisan manner. So here we really get to the core of the Hugo Chavez claim, which is that the tabulation equipment itself took votes that were for Donald Trump and it awarded them to Joe Biden.

45:57And we know that's not the case because what we do is we select random batches of ballots. We see what the machine count was on them. And then we give those physical paper ballots to bipartisan teams of Republicans and Democrats who hand count them and they make sure the machines got the count right. One of the complaints that the Trump people have was they couldn't bring their bands of enthusiasts into those counting rooms. Yeah. So one, every county differs in terms of how many observers it allows. But in terms of people who actually work the process, we in Maricopa County, we welcomed all types.

46:42If you were somebody who didn't believe in the validity of elections, that's fine. We still took you in. But we didn't just take you and your five buddies and just send you off to one voting location. We take you in, we train you, we talk with you, and then we integrate you into other teams, teams of people from different backgrounds, teams from people of different politics, teams from people who have been doing this different lengths of time. And there is a little bit of that sort of almost watchfulness over each other. And I think one of the really beautiful things about election administration is that in almost all instances, the people who come in and are part of this process develop a camaraderie with the people that they work with, and they develop a sense of pride in the results, and they develop a sense of defensiveness in that they were part of this process.

47:34And so I say to anyone who is still questioning how these things work, either go and get a tour of your elections facility or better yet, figure out how you can be an observer for your political party or figure out how you can participate in at least one part of the election process. You mean convert cheap cynicism on Twitter into actual civic participation? And maybe not only will you have a better understanding, but you might be a better person at the end of the process. Yeah. And, you know, just there's some great social science studies about people who are serve on a jury walk away with a better perception of the criminal justice system.

48:14And while this hasn't been as studied in the election worker context, from my anecdotal experience, I firmly believe that is true. And it is something that is constructive. And it's something that will actually teach you rather than just retweeting or resharing the rumble video or the true social posts or the Twitter posts. In Maricopa County, how many people are involved in the process in a big year, like in a presidential year? So for the 2024 presidential election, we had about 2.6 million registered voters in Maricopa County, and we had over 3 ,000 temporary workers helping with that process.

48:55That's everything from the people who are working at a voting location to people who are driving box trucks to people who are working in our warehouse to people doing signature verification to people who are actually taking the ballots out of their return mail envelopes in bipartisan teams and smoothing them out and making sure there aren't rips or gum on the ballots before we put them into the tabulators. And so really, it's a very time intensive process. It's a very redundant process, but it's a pretty remarkable process. And there are lots of ways to get involved. And I think that you'll find that far from being complicit in a grand international scheme that seems fitting for a Mission Impossible movie, I think that you'll find that it gets a little boring after you've been tiring, after you've been doing it for hours and hours and hours.

49:48But it's important because that is how we can affirm the validity of the of the election. So in just your one county, just Maricopa, we need to get 3000 people to be involved in the conspiracy. And so that is really another reason why our system is hardened against broad scale attacks, because I mentioned there are about 9000 different voting jurisdictions in the United States. And each of those voting jurisdictions, they're not as big as Maricopa County. Maricopa County is only smaller than Los Angeles County in terms of elections jurisdictions, but they have a number of people working. And so to have a conspiracy, you would have thousands and thousands of people in on it.

50:30And my experience with most political secrets is as soon as more than three or four people know about it, it's probably getting out. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me today. I learn so much from you every time we speak. I'm grateful to you for speaking to me today. Thanks, David. I really appreciate it. Bye-bye.

50:54We are not talking about personal AI assistants to cut the time needed to draft a document. We are talking about the leadership aspect. Some companies, when they connect the right data and the business logic, they are able to operate in that way. But it requires bringing all the enterprise corpus and context into Glean. That was a message from Glean at the Agent Transformation Summit. Glean connects knowledge, systems, and context so AI can actually get to work. Learn more at Glean.com. This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI.

51:33Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

51:55Thanks so much to Stephen Richer for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. Now, as I mentioned at the top, this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first of six volumes of Edward Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I won't claim to have read every word of all six volumes, nor have I listened to all 126 hours of the audiobook as recorded by Charlton Griffin, who is an incredible hero. I've listened to a lot of them, and I strongly recommend the audiobook. It is a fascinating way to spend time, but it's a lot either way, whether you read the six volumes or listen to the 126 hours.

52:34But I've dug deeply enough into the book to have absorbed its message for our time, and And that's what I want to talk about today, because this book remains, or this series of books, remains not only a tremendous monument of history, not only a great milestone in intellectual development, it continues to shape discourse in our own time in ways that are powerful, but also sometimes a little misleading. So let me explain what I mean, why this book is so relevant, and why I'm talking about it today. Edward Gibbon was a man of the Enlightenment. He was a secularist. He was someone who had what we would call a broadly liberal, that the word would not have been used that way in his time, but a broadly liberal view of politics.

53:17He was a man of great tolerance. He was an easygoing man, the opposite of a persecutor, the opposite of an advocate of any kind of arbitrary or absolute authority. So in that sense, a very modern figure. But in another way, as an historian, he was quite an old-fashioned figure, a backward-looking figure. His book written in 1776 or begun in 1776, the last volume was published a dozen years later in 1788, is very much under the imprint of the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli, who lived 250 years before Edward Gibbon, and through Machiavelli to the classical literary tradition of the Romans and the Greeks.

53:54When Gibbon is explaining the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he, again, is a very modern man. He uses not only literary evidence, he uses coins and inscriptions and all the techniques that were made available by archaeology as it existed in his time. And many of his ideas, as I say, are very strikingly modern. But his central explanation of what happened to the Roman Empire is backward-looking. It's the Machiavelli explanation. What he thinks happened was that there was a decline in the civic virtue of the Roman people. And this decline in civic virtue was the key culprit of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

54:29What did he mean by civic virtue? What he meant was a kind of self-denying, materially austere commitment to active citizenship, active participation in public life. There was more of that early. There was less of that later. As that civic participation declined, so did the Roman Empire. And many people who read his book in 1776 and after took from that reading a message that was in some ways very helpful to building modern societies, and we all should be active citizens, but also misleading because it created an idea that people are more virtuous at one period, less virtuous at another. It made the story of the success or failure of societies very much a matter of individual behavior and less of institutional success.

55:11Now, again, Gibbon was in no way a naive person. He understood the importance of institutions. One of the big villains of his book is the rise of the Christian church, which in his telling diverts Roman attention from this worldly to other worldly activities, from being willing to work on behalf of the commonwealth in the here and now to looking for some kind of reward in heaven for being less willing to use weapons to serve in the military and more inclined to privatize their life. And there's obviously some truth to this. Christianity did change the way the Roman civilization worked, but it's not clear that there was any less involvement in civic life, in Roman life, in the 400s or 500s than there was in the 100s when he begins his story.

55:52but what he did introduce and this is really the thing we need to be cautious of was a kind of biologization of history an idea of decline and decadence decline makes sense when we talk about individual creatures after a certain point in our lives we were all on the path of decline leading to extinction and he introduced he brought concepts from the idea of art and science the idea of decadence into history in a way that biologized the development of societies and this is an idea that in our time can lead to some pretty sinister complexes. This hunt for decline and decadence as a way, and this desire to reaffirm society by somehow purging us of the things that make us freer, that give individual life more scope.

56:34Again, not blaming Gibbon for that, but these are ideas that through Gibbon have haunted the discussion of political science and economic development and historical development. I think as we return to this mighty work from 250 years ago, There's a lot to benefit from, including above all the extraordinary labor that went into producing this giant work that is still so fascinating to read, still so eminently quotable in a literary style that resonates to this very day. But the reason the Roman Empire declined and fell was not because the Romans were virtuous at one time and less virtuous at the other.

57:09They were met with concrete problems in the here and now, problems of climate change, problems of plague, problems of the faster military development of their neighbors. Romans started with a big organizational advantage over the less organized societies on their borders. As the Romans developed, as the world developed, those neighbors caught up and equalized the military balance, and the Romans were not up to the task. The Romans also developed problems of succession. They couldn't provide orderly ways that didn't involve coups and assassinations and civil wars of making sure that executive power flowed in continuous ways through bureaucratic systems.

57:45Partly that was because of the material primitism of the time. Partly that was because just the scale of distance on which they had to work. But partly that was an institutional failure that was inherent in the way they organized the world and that we can learn some lessons from. The world is always old and always new. Human beings age, but societies don't. And if there's a lesson to be learned from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it's to think less about decline and fall and think more about how do we preserve and maintain the success of the society that modern day people have, Americans and people in other democracies.

58:21How do you preserve what you have as institutions? How do you keep alive the incentives to maintain the active citizenship that Gibbon taught as so important? Anyway, those are my reflections on 250th anniversary of this amazing work. But go read some of it, more of it, all of it if you can yourself and see what you think. Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you want to do so, is by subscribing to The Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues. Please share and subscribe to the program and share it on social media if you're so minded.

58:54And you can follow me on social media as well, at David Fromm on X, Twitter and on Instagram. See you next week on The David Fromm Show. Oh, and one last word. I wish a very meaningful Valentine's Day to all who celebrate this often difficult but potentially very rewarding holiday. Thank you so much for joining me this week on The David Fromm Show.

59:37This 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. We are not talking about personal AI assistants to cut the time needed to draft a document. We are talking about the leadership aspect. Some companies, when they connect the right data and the business logic, they are able to operate in that way. But it requires bringing all the enterprise corpus and context into Glean.

1:00:16That was a message from Glean at the Agent Transformation Summit. Glean connects knowledge, systems, and context so AI can actually get to work. Learn more at Glean.com.