How Trump Could Threaten the 2026 Election

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0:32Hello, and welcome to The David Fromm Show. I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be former Attorney General Eric Holder. This week's book will be Agrippa, a novel by Robert Harris. I want to just issue a caution about the interview that you're about to see. We had a little trouble this week with the video recording. About half the video got gobbled up by the internet gods. So there will be some interruptions of the video flow. but you will be able to see most of the show in video. And of course, the sound quality is perfect all the way through. So if you're listening, you won't notice anything.

1:06If you're watching, you may see some interruptions. Please forgive us. We did the best we could. Before either the dialogue with Attorney General Holder or the novel, Grippa, by Robert Harris, I want to offer some opening thoughts about the recent state visit by the Chinese president and Chinese dictator to Washington, D.C. and his lavish reception by President Trump. I often think that when future historians try to make sense of the Trump era, among the things they will note is this was a real acceleration in the decline of American prestige and power in the world. The Chinese visit drives home what the challenge to American leadership in the 21st century has been.

1:45China is becoming a bigger and stronger country. There's no way around that, and that is potentially a very good thing. They have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a great gain for human happiness. They have produced products and services that are of use to the whole world. We're all better off because of China's rise. If China becomes a good global citizen playing by the rules, we will all benefit from the transformation in Chinese power that has happened since they broke with the rigidity of the Mao Zedong system and introduced some degree of market mechanism into Chinese economic life.

2:17But right now, China is turning a snarling face to the world. And we all have to worry about Chinese aggression, Chinese subversion, Chinese intellectual property theft, China just not playing by the rules of global trade. So there's a tremendous human achievement. There's a great human opportunity, but there is also a great danger. The difference between China and dangers that America has faced in the past is that unlike past adversaries, China is not only a military competitor to the United States, It is also a technological, economic, and financial peer. The United States has not faced a country that was simultaneously an adversary and a peer, really since it confronted the British Empire before the Civil War.

2:59And then you had the advantage of great common interests, great common language, many common values. Those things are absent in the relationship with China. If the United States is to balance China's power peacefully, it has to approach this problem in a very different way from the way it approached the problem of the Soviet Union. One more difference is that China is so enormously big, bigger population, an economy nearing the size of the United States. So to peacefully balance China, the United States just can't do it on its own. It's going to need to marshal a global coalition of some kind.

3:31And not just the familiar and easy coalition with like-minded democratic powers, powers of the European Union, Australia, Japan, Great Britain, others. To balance China, the United States has to work with more uneasy partners, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, India. Countries that don't necessarily share political systems with the United States, may not share values, and may not share a view of the world that is exactly like that of the United States in the way that fellow democracies did. So it's a hard problem. But the Trump administration has been all about severing those connections, both to the old familiar allies of the European Union and the other democracies, and of course to the new allies, where they have created point of friction after point of friction through their aggressive trade practices.

4:15They have left the United States alone in the room with the Chinese without friends that can rely on, without friends who can rely on the United States. And the consequence of that aloneness was on display at the state dinner, which is that Trump basically had to suck up to the Chinese. It was a disgusting thing to watch. There are the shameful incidents of mocking his predecessor to the Chinese leader. When you think, what do the Chinese make of this? They saw this is a political system that is isolated. This is a political system that is permeable. This is a political system that is based on one family's appetites.

4:47This is a political system we can push around and push the United States around. I think we can expect a lot more of this. This dinner marked a real way station on the progress of American decline. Let's hope it's a correctable one. Let us try not to fear that it is not a correctable one. And now my dialogue with Attorney General Eric Holder. But first, a quick break.

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5:58Eric H. Holder Jr. serves as chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He served as Attorney General of the United States from February 2009 to April 2015. Before that, he served three decades in public service with appointments to Senate-confirmed positions by President Reagan, President Clinton, and President Obama. Attorney General Holder was born in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in East Elmhurst, Queens. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University, and it's a great honor and pleasure to welcome to The David Fromm Show. Good to be here with you, David, and I'm glad to hear you mention East Elmhurst.

6:34I'm proud to be a Queens boy. I'm glad to mention it. Let me ask you about the thing you have been working on so intensely in this present cycle, which is how do you feel and how should people listen to you feel about free and fair elections in the cycle of 2026? Well, I think we ought to be concerned about the state of our democracy generally and the way in which our elections are going to proceed this year more specifically. I think we have seen that certain groups of Republicans have done whatever they possibly can to ensure a victory for them that might not necessarily be supported by the number of votes that they actually get.

7:15President Trump's determination to get five extra seats out of Texas by doing a mid-cycle redistricting, actually a mid-cycle gerrymander is an indication of that. We see what's going on in Missouri now where Republicans are going to the Supreme Court for the third time to try to stop the people of Missouri from determining whether or not they will support a redistricting, another gerrymander that Republicans have tried to put in place in Missouri. So I'm worried about that which Republicans have done. And then, you know, after the Supreme Court decision in the Shelby County case in 2013, the Calais decision in this last term.

7:59Republicans have used those tools that the Supreme Court has given to them to try to come up with ways in which they can disenfranchise certain people. Well, let's go step by step through your areas of worry. And I think you've alluded to three different things there. So let's go slowly through the first one, which is President Trump has threatened a series of deviations from all past election practice, grabbing ballot boxes, threatening to send troops, interfering with voting by mail, that category of previously unseen activity. How worried should we be about that one? I don't want to alarm people.

8:34I don't want to be hyperbolic or alarmist, but I think we've got to be prepared for just about anything. Donald Trump has shown that he's prepared to use all the levers of power that he has in order to ensure a result that he wants. And he cloaks this in this notion of concern about voter fraud, which is close to non-existent. And I think that they will potentially deploy ICE agents at or near polling places, potentially declare an emergency of some sort to try to use federal power. I've seen that the Justice Department now says that it has recruited 1 ,000 monitors or observers that they're going to deploy to various sites around the country.

9:20I think all determined, all in an attempt to come up with ways in which they can determine the outcome of elections in various states, regardless of what it is that the people want to do as indicated by the votes that they cast. We've seen President Trump invoke various kinds of emergency powers for the president in various kinds of situations where emergency powers have not been invoked before. Not natural disaster, but just something's happening that he doesn't like. And he then uses federal and presidential power in new kinds of ways. Could that intersect with free and fair votings in dangerous ways?

9:57Yeah, I think the potential is certainly there to do that. You know, declare an emergency of some kind. I don't know what it would be a national security emergency. I mean, He seems to focus on national security as a way to do the kinds of things that other presidents did not have the ability to do, whether it's tearing down, you know, the East Wing, building an arch, you know, excluding the press from the White House press room by because of some kind of national emergency. And so declare a national emergency and then do a whole variety of things to keep troops in places where they shouldn't be, before deploy ICE agents in neighborhoods where they need not be.

10:40You know, I think these are all possibilities that we need to be concerned about. And it is something that we on the Democratic side have tried to prepare ourselves for by going through, you know, a series of tabletop exercises to anticipate that which the president might try to do and then come up with ways in which we can push back against that and do so in a timely way. You know, not do something that will be effective two weeks after we go to court or do whatever it is that we do, but actually stop that which the president is trying to do, what Republicans are trying to do. And so they don't have the impact that they want.

11:20In these tabletop exercises, when you think about things that the president might do, there are precedents, not in the mainland USA, but in Puerto Rico and the northern Marianas territories, where elections have been delayed for some time because of natural disasters. Now, in those cases, the national natural disaster really happened and people were dislocated and the machinery of government was interfered with and there were more urgent priorities than holding a vote. And the vote was then after the delay was properly rescheduled at a future time and conducted in a free and fair way in those areas.

11:54But those are precedents for the use of executive power in not states, but territories. Is there any foothold there that a president could use in the mainland USA? Yeah, I mean, I suppose you could point to those rare instances where natural disasters have had an impact on the ability of people to cast ballots. But we also have to remember that we conducted national elections during war. I mean, you know, during Civil War, World War II. And so the resilience of the American electoral system has been tested in a whole variety of ways. Now, if a hurricane was to somehow, Hurricane Sandy was to, version two was to show up, I don't know, in New York, and that meant that people could not get to the polls, yeah, there are ways in which you could delay the vote.

12:45but I don't think that's likely to happen. And I do think that our history really shows us that there is little, if anything, that we can not handle and allow the American people to get to the ballots, get to the polling places and cast ballots as they always have when it's bright and sunny, whether it's raining or whether it's snowing. I think the American people are really charged up about this election. And I think that they're going to push through anything, whether natural or something fomented by this president. They're going to push through all of that to make sure that their voices are actually heard.

13:25Can you update us on the state of the gerrymandering push, counter push? It was initiated by the Republicans who did an off-cycle gerrymander in Texas, as you said. Democrats responded. And for a time, it looked like the Democrats actually were more successful. Now it looks like that balance of power has reversed itself. How do you read the gerrymandering war and what larger implications does it have that the two parties are engaged in this kind of contest each with the other? Yeah, I mean, we formed up the National Democratic Redistricting Committee that I've been chair of since January of 2017, all with the thought that we wanted to do away with partisan and racial gerrymandering, which if you look at in historical terms, both parties have engaged in.

14:06Republicans maybe more recently, certainly since 2010. And we were pretty successful. The New York Times said that, I think, in the 2022 election that Americans were going to vote on the fairest maps in a generation. We then saw the president try to go into a process by which there would be this partisan gerrymandering that has had a really negative impact on our ability to get that fairness. And as you calculate all the things that Republicans have done, all the things that Democrats have done in this, what I call, race to the bottom, Republicans end up with, I think, about a five-seat advantage as a result of the gerrymandering that they, the mid-cycle gerrymandering that they have done this year.

14:52Now, you have to understand that when Steve Bannon first looked at that proposal that the president made, they were anticipating that they might get as many as 21 additional seats. But as a result of what happened in California, the inability as a result of popular discontent, South Carolina, Georgia were not able to do what they wanted to do. A court victory in Utah was something that helped Democrats, people, Republicans in Indiana refused to go along with what the president wanted to do. But after you boil that all down, you end up with about a five seat switch to the Republicans as a result of this inappropriate mid-cycle redistricting.

15:34Is there any way for the national political system to draw back from this kind of behavior? There are certain limits on how far you can go. Neither party pushes the other to the extremist verge. Is there any way back? Or once you escalate, are you forever on a cycle of up-escalation, up-escalation, up-escalation? See, that's a really good question. And the answer is yes, there is a way to get back to, or maybe get back to a place where the nation has never been, but get to a place where the nation should be. And that is to simply ban partisan gerrymandering. And Congress can do that. Congress has the ability to determine the manner and means by which elections are held.

16:13And Congress could simply say we're banning mid-cycle redistricting, we're banning partisan gerrymandering, specify in the statute exactly how courts might interpret whether or not a particular state is in fact engaging in gerrymandering. And my hope would be that if the House is taken by the Democrats, that is a bill that they will introduce. I don't expect necessarily that Donald Trump would sign it. But if there is trifecta Democratic control after the 2028 presidential election, my hope would be that there would be a standalone bill that would simply ban partisan gerrymandering, ban mid-cycle redistricting, and get back to the way in which I think the founders intended, which was to, as you say, have the census done in the year ending in zero and then have redistricting done in the year after that.

17:11It's entirely possible. You mentioned in your introductory review of all that was going on the drawback of the Voting Rights Act. And that has interacted with partisan gerrymandering in ways that are complicated and often unexpected, where basically right-wing Republicans and minority Democrats develop a common interest against non-minority Democrats in moving minority voters into safe seats and leaving the rest of the state for the Republicans. As the Voting Rights Act has been reduced in scope by the courts, what does that mean for the future of free and fair elections in the United States? And how do you move to a more colorblind system of seat allocation while protecting the often infringed upon rights of minority voters to have their votes taken seriously and count equally?

17:57Yeah, you know, there's not a tension necessarily between trying to protect the rights of people of color and making sure that lines are drawn in such a way that they are more generally fair. To allow communities, various communities of interest to vote in a cohesive way is not inconsistent with having a system that is perceived to be fair. The Voting Rights Act was, I think, really, it was the crown jewel of the civil rights movement and allowed for the registration of African Americans, particularly in the South, the flowering of African American political power, and then after that, Hispanic political power.

18:39And that has made, I think, the nation better. The retreat by this Supreme Court, or the demolition of the Voting Rights Act by this Supreme Court, I think has had and will continue to have a negative impact on fairness around the country. But I also think it's an interesting thing. If you, again, ban partisan gerrymandering in those places where you have a history of racialized voting, polarized and racial voting, banning partisan gerrymandering has the equal effect of eliminating discriminating racial gerrymandering, particularly in the South. I think a lot of the things that have concerned this Supreme Court about the Voting Rights Act are really inconsistent with certainly the findings that Congress made, a series of findings that Congress has made when the bill was first passed and then reauthorized, and the reauthorizations were all signed by Republican presidents.

19:42This Supreme Court looks at an America that I don't think truly exists. When, you know, Chief Justice Roberts said that America has changed. Well, yeah, that's true. America has changed. We're different now than we were in 1965, but we're not yet at the place where we need to be when it comes to having race-neutral redistricting, race-neutral electoral processes, where everybody has the opportunity to cast a ballot. One study shows that Black folks are a lot more likely to have to wait in line for over an hour in order to cast a vote than their white citizen counterparts. And that's the kind of thing that I think we can't turn away from.

20:23That's just a reality that continues to show the problems that we have in this nation. Would you mind taking us on a short history of the Voting Rights Act, its reauthorization, and what the Supreme Court has done? So I think a lot of people have sort of a general sense of what happened, but the idea that this is not a history that begins and ends in 1965, but it's an ebb and flow over time. Could you just take us through that, starting in 1965 and bringing us up to the present? Yeah, 1965, you know, we see the Selma to Montgomery march after, you know, Bloody Sunday, where John Lewis and others had their skulls cracked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

21:00The nation sees that. Lyndon Johnson says that in a famous speech, we shall overcome, proposes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is passed. And the Voting Rights Act essentially said that in those jurisdictions that were covered, that was the technical term, that had a history of racial discrimination against African-Americans and allowing them to both register and to vote, that the federal government would have the ability to put upon those jurisdictions a preclearance responsibility such that if those states engaged in voting changes, moving polling places, closing polling places, other electoral processes, you had to get the approval of the federal government.

21:47And those, again, were primarily southern states. But interestingly, over time, parts of New York actually came under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act and other northern states. The Voting Rights Act was then reauthorized two or three occasions after. Let me pause you, because that original law was time limited. It was time limited, and it had to then be reauthorized. The last time it was reauthorized, It got just about three, four, five negative votes in the House of Representatives. It was passed unanimously by the Senate, that is the reauthorization, and then signed back into law, I believe by President George W.

22:30Bush. And this was after Congress had conducted really numerous hearings, thousands of pages of testimony, and then made specific findings. The Supreme Court in the 2013 Shelby County case made the determination that the coverage formula, that is to decide which states should be covered by the Voting Rights Act had been outmoded, outdated, and as a result, threw that out, which took away from the government the ability to use that preclearance authority. And as a result, we saw a whole range of things happen relatively quickly. 25 states put in place a whole range of voter suppression things. 1 ,700 polling places closed around the country.

23:17A great number of purges of voting rolls happened, about 40 % of which happened in places that had previously been covered by the Voting Rights Act, therefore disproportionately impacting people of color. And we have seen with the demise of the Voting Rights Act and its further attempts by or successful moves by the Supreme Court in the Calais decision just recently to do away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which said that if you can show that the power of people of color was diluted by moves that people in power took with regard to electoral things, that could also be challenged. The Supreme Court has essentially taken away that ability.

24:04It's essentially destroyed the Voting Rights Act. In spite of the fact that, as I said, Congress made specific findings. The court has, I guess in some form or fashion, made its own determination, its own findings without conducting hearings necessarily. And that I think has been, it's had a negative impact on the ability of African-Americans to get, and other people of color, to get the representation to which they are entitled. And right after the Calais decision, we saw a number of states automatically start redistricting in such a way that they drew out of power African-Americans, Hispanics, who were in seats that had been previously covered by the Voting Rights Act.

24:52What remains, if anything, of the Voting Rights Act? Not much. You know, there are still ways in which parts of the Act can be used. But I think realistically, in order to get back to where we were, a new Voting Rights Act has to be put in place. One was proposed and passed through the House, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It was filibustered in the Senate to come up with a new way in which a coverage formula could be determined, and that would be responsive to what the Supreme Court found issues with in the 2013 Shelby County decision. And so I think that's another thing that a new Congress would have to do.

25:33So there are ways in which you could get back to a more modern version of the Voting Rights Act, but it would require an act of Congress. Do you have any sympathy for the argument? The argument in 2013, as I understand it, was John Roberts said, and the majority for which he spoke said, you can't base 2013 voting rights law on the realities of the country as they were in 1963. Do you have any sympathy for that point of view? And is there any way that a legislative draftsperson could write a law and say, OK, John Roberts, we concede your point. Let's base the laws on the realities of today, not 1963.

26:09I mean, I do think, you know, when the court says that, if you look at that in a vacuum, okay, so, well, yeah, that kind of makes sense. But that ignores the fact that Congress actually conducted hearings, had people come and testify, made findings, thousands of pages of testimony and findings and exhibits. And on the basis of all the work that Congress did, they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. That was simply ignored by the court. Could Congress come up with a way in which they satisfy the concerns that were raised by the court in the Shelby County case? I think absolutely yes. You could come up with a new way in which you make coverage, the coverage formula apply to certain states based on a new history that is determined by tests that would be put in place by Congress that show that, in fact, states are doing things inappropriately.

27:02and then to have a negative impact on the ability of certain people, people of color. That's the focus of the act, that people of color have been treated unfairly. Yeah, Congress could certainly draw a new Voting Rights Act that would answer the concerns that were raised in the Shelby County case. I want to pick up a thread that you left tantalizingly dangling earlier in our conversation. You talked about how President Trump has given orders to the Justice Department to do things that you find ominous. You headed that building. You served that building for many, many years, and you headed that building, I think, for the third longest serving attorney general in American history.