The Trumpapalooza tumbleweed: Why Republicans are staying away

0:02This is a global production. Trump is calling this his party because he thinks that it helps Republicans if his name is on the ballot. He doesn't give a shit about what anyone says in opposition to him. It will ruin our lives if we try and cross him. We won with him and we're going to die in flames with him. How loud has he been talking about how tough and great he is is kind of a reflection of his nervousness. The Republican Party as a whole has been furious with Trump. What the hell is happening in the United States of America? And you have to wonder what the hell is happening in the White House residence.

0:37President called me two nights before Thanksgiving last fall. And he said, Mike, we got to do a midterm convention. And I said, that's not a thing. And he said, make it a thing. OK, so we're going to do a midterm convention. September 9th and 10th. First time in history any party's ever done this. We're going to Dallas, Texas. Y 'all could have been anywhere in the country. And we're going to have everybody there. Two nights of earned media on national television. We're going to parade all of our stars across the stage. We're going to highlight the great work of people like Monica De La Cruz. OK, we're going to talk about what we've done for the people.

1:06And then the president's going to look right in the camera and say, I am on the ballot. So Trump is heading to a midterm convention in Dallas. And so are we. The only problem is no one else's. Donald Trump is going to be leading the bill on both nights. But Donald Trump's poll ratings are in the toilet. So how much help is a Donald Trump rally going to be for the Republican Party? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Maitlis. And it's Miles. And we've got to talk about the Republican Convention, which I think we can put in inverted commas because this is the first time that there has ever been a midterm convention.

1:54And it ain't really a convention where people are going to kind of nominate who their candidate it is for the presidency, because there is a sitting president at the moment. But it is, and this will shock you, I'm sure it is all about Donald Trump and not really about anyone else. And Miles, you're there. You are in Dallas, a keen convention goer. What's it like? Well, you know, John, I think that that probably tells you in brief everything that is happening here in Dallas. I am, of course, no friend anymore of the president of the United States, but folks like me are flooding into town. And the people who are not showing up are the Republican candidates who are supposed to be the stars of this convention.

2:42Politico did a survey the other day of 70 Republican members of Congress and asked them, will you be attending the convention? More than half either said no or that they were still checking their schedules. If you've ever hosted a party and people tell you they're checking their schedule, that's just because they're too scared to tell you no. They're not coming to your party. But like I said, there's a lot of pro-democracy figures coming to town. A lot of Democrats are coming to town. One of the reasons I'm here is I'm hosting an event with a dozen Epstein survivors who have brought with us all 3.5 million Epstein files to Dallas.

3:23And at that same venue where we've set up this pop-up library of the Epstein files, Senate candidate Democrat James Tallarico will do a press conference on Thursday morning. These are the folks who are coming to town. And it's already evident with the vibes here to say nothing of the fact that this administration is worried about whether they're going to fill seats in the arena. So Trump is calling this his party, really, the Trumpalooza or the Trumpalumper or something like that, because he thinks that it helps Republicans if his name is on the ballot. And I guess that's the unseen piece of this jigsaw.

4:01The Republicans that are staying away clearly think he is no help to them at all. But just a couple of weeks ago, we saw that case of Darlene Graham, the sister of Lindsey Graham, now deceased, the South Carolina senator who was trying to win the primary to win his seat. And at that moment, and I wonder if we can play you that clip, Trump said, pretend that my name is on the ballot. He's good at pretending. I mean, we don't get a lot of truth, but he's good at pretending. Pretend my name is on the ballot. And lo and behold, she wins the primary. She's through. I guess we don't yet know whether that helped her or even hindered her.

4:43Where do you think people are in terms of whether they need the Trump name on the ballot now? Well, I think rather than listening to Donald Trump and his supporters, you should find out what his opponents want to happen. And his opponents are relishing in how much Donald Trump is bear hugging the candidates in these midterm elections. Remember, as John noted at the outset, Donald Trump's poll numbers are historically low. He is in the low 30s, which is catastrophic territory for an American president. But then you just look at the other little data points here, Emily, like the fact that they were charging between$25 ,000 and$100 ,000 a seat at this convention from the actual candidates who need to be spending their money on running for reelection.

5:31And now to fill seats, the administration has been sending text messages. The Republicans, rather, have been sending text messages to random Dallas residents telling them they have free tickets to come see Donald Trump. And so many people didn't believe that was real, thought it was a scam that the local news here in Dallas has been running segments saying, if you get one of these text messages, don't worry. It is real. They are giving away free tickets. That tells you everything. But like I said, look at what Donald Trump's opponents want him to do in light of the vibes being off, if you will.

6:08People like Governor Gavin Newsom of California have said that he hopes Donald Trump will continue to bear hug these candidates and be the figurative name on the ballot in November. Take a listen. President Trump said he's going to hit the trail for Republicans hard down the stretch. Are you hoping that he gets out there? I think it'd be great. Yeah, I mean, that'd be spectacular. I invite him to California, wherever he wants to show up. I think it'd be fantastic. It is amazing how everybody's turning their back on him, members of the Republican Party, and how all these off-the-record comments and quotes, they want nothing to do with him.

6:46He lives in that fishbowl. He lives in the bubble of Sean Hannity and a few folks that just tell him how great he is. And he needs to get out. I think it would be amazing so he can understand how, you know, that he's an historic president. He's historically unpopular. And if he got out, he'd understand that. And maybe he'd change the ways. Maybe you do things a little bit differently and understand the struggles of real people. You can drive by one of these gas stations and see record breaking diesel prices and talk to some of these farmers. So that's Gavin Newsom. And he's hit on what is the core concern for voters, which seems to be oblivious to Donald Trump.

7:23And he just doesn't give a shit at the moment, which is the fact of the matter is that his war in Iran and his tariffs policy is driving up costs for ordinary Americans. And he's going, yeah, I know. I know. Tough. And I think that's I think it's a real tension there. And I was reading a really interesting piece on Axios this morning, talking about how, you know, Trump's on his own. There's no one in the White House who dares to contradict him. But they all know that on most of the issues he's wrong. And he's an 80 year old, irascible old man who doesn't want to be told he's wrong. He thinks he's right.

8:00He doesn't give a shit about what anyone says in opposition to him. And so whereas once you would get pushback or people trying to say, look, Mr. President, maybe it would be better if we did this rather than that. They just think, you know what, it will ruin our lives if we try and cross him. He'll come after us. We've just got to, you know, we won with him and we're going to die in flames with him as well. And there ain't nothing we can do about it. And that seems to be the fatalism that has sort of resulted in this convention taking place over the next two days. Because no one wants to say to him, you know what, Donald, this is better if it doesn't happen.

8:38And that's why you've got Gavin Newsom standing there rubbing his hands. I think Gavin Newsom has nailed linguistically how to speak to or about Trump, and that is to use superlatives, which we know Trump adores, but against him. So he calls him the most historic president. Yeah, he's historic. He's historically unpopular. He's got the highest prices. Yeah, you love high, you love big, but they are high gas prices. He's absolutely nailed that calm tone that goes right to the heart of all the things that Trump doesn't want to hear. But if you look at what others are saying on Trump's own team, Tom Barrett, Michigan, first term Republican, he's not going.

9:14He says, I can't control what the president's going to say at the convention, but I can control where I'm at. In other words, whatever shit he comes out with, I might have to do the damage control back in Michigan. Susan Collins, who we know is fighting quite a tight race in Maine. She's not going. A lot of the people that are actually seriously worried about their seats will not be anywhere near Dallas this weekend. And Trump has posted the Republican National Convention tomorrow night in Dallas is really hot. The American Airlines Center, home to Dallas Mavericks, is totally sold out. False.

9:49Everyone wants to be there. False. We're asking those candidates that are in tight races, up a little, down a little, even to speak. We want to save the stage for them. Well, he's going to save an awful lot of stage if they don't come. And the fact that he's speaking twice, I think Melania is not on the speaker list. It's a very strange assortment of who will actually end up on the stage. Do you know who we're going to hear from, Miles? Well, even Trump speaking both nights was a recent revelation. Originally, he was only supposed to speak on Thursday night. He was going to close out the event and J.D.

10:24Vance was going to keynote the first night. And that's how it was going to be. And then somewhere at some point behind the scenes, someone demanded that Donald Trump be at the top of the billing both nights. I wonder who that someone was. I bet J.D. Vance. Who made that demand. Yeah, probably. But as we were looking at the schedule here, I mean, you know, I'll see most of the Democratic members of Congress who are here in town doing fundraisers and events. A lot of them were planning to do events to counter program Donald Trump on Thursday. And then many of them came to town earlier when they saw that Donald Trump was also going to be speaking on Wednesday.

11:01So, you know, that is noteworthy. But look, if I've learned one thing about the guy and he did this so much with us in the first term, you can judge his sort of mental state. You can judge his level of panic by the volume of the projection. How loud has he been talking about how tough and great he is is kind of a reflection of his nervousness. And I'll give you an example of how I saw that begin this week, which was on Sunday. The president spent about 10 hours on social media. He was posting memes. He was posting videos of himself as Hulk Hogan, the wrestler. He was posting AI-generated videos of himself riding on horses with George Washington.

11:45He posted AI videos of himself as the Marvel character, the Green Lantern, creating a magic border wall. This is very surreal. I saw, I think it was a UK journalist, tweet out, what the hell is happening in the United States of America? And you have to wonder what the hell is happening in the White House residence when for 10 hours the man sits there posting on social media. But that, to me, showed his nervousness leading into this week. It was all of these images and iconography about how strong he was as the reporting was starting to spin up about how bad this convention was going to look for him this week.

12:21And you talked about all those kind of memes that were posted. And another which has caused enormous controversy is the one he's posted as him as the USA ice hockey player who has got Mark Carney as the Canadian ice hockey player on the floor. And he's battering him with his stick. And, you know, it just really. Isn't this Natalie as in travel with Natalie Natalie? Well, we don't know who's doing it, but he's posting this stuff. He is posting this stuff as if this is OK for an American president to be shown. I mean, when Canada is your kind of closest ally and you're splitting the head open of Mark Carney.

12:59I mean, it's just a weird place to be, isn't it? Miles, let's just talk about one thing. You mentioned James Tallarico. And I know you're going to be catching up with him a little bit later. But where do you see and where does he see his chances now in this race? Because, I mean, will people, I mean, presumably he's chosen Dallas because he realizes that Ken Paxton versus Tallarico is a fight that he would like to kind of get in on because Ken Paxton is probably not the strongest Republican candidate they could have come up with. And Trump thinks that he can win it for the red team at this point.

13:37What is your sense of that race? You know, I caught up last night with Beto O 'Rourke, who, of course, years ago ran for that Senate seat against Ted Cruz. And, you know, Beto said something very straightforward to me, which is James is in a lot better position than I was in. And that's for two reasons. One, as you note, the Republican opponent in this race, Ken Paxton, is extremely unpopular here in Texas. He is not liked by the party. He's not even liked by his former friends. He's not liked by his former colleagues. He's not liked by the voters. He's a very unlikable candidate here in Texas.

14:15You hear Republicans on the ground groan about him as their nominee. That's part one. Part two, though, is that Tallarico has this much more direct appeal to sort of independent voters in Texas. I think even more so than Beto did when Beto ran for that seat. And of course, you've got the headwinds against the Republican Party. Notably, a number of different surveys have shifted that race from leans Republican to now a genuine toss-up race. And we've got to go back to where we are here. We are in deep red Texas. The fact that Republicans are doing their convention here says everything. Conventions are normally held in a state that a party thinks is aspirational, a purple state that they might try to win over to their side.

15:03You rarely hold it in a place that is safe ground. The fact that that race or that convention, rather, is being held here in Dallas this week shows you how nervous Republicans are about losing the state of Texas. But look at what the other Republican senator in Texas, Ted Cruz, had to say about all of this. Oh, listen, we have a real race in Texas, but, you know, we have a real race in most states across the country. It's a midterm. But Texas is Texas. I am fully aware of this, but you know what? Texas, like other states, we've got a bunch of liberals in Texas. Now, we have more conservatives and more common sense Texans than we have liberals, but the liberals are really ticked off and they're energized.

15:44And I'll tell you, if you look at this race, James Tallarico, I think, is a dangerous candidate. I think substantively he is radical and extreme, but he's very good at seeming charming. He's very good at seeming innocuous. Personally, I prefer my wolves in wolves clothing, not in sheep's clothing. Ted Cruz finds somebody charming. That's a kiss of death right there. The old joke about Ted Cruz is why do people stake an instant dislike to him? It saves time. And look, I mean, the other thing about the other thing about that race in Texas is is that the Republican Party as a whole has been furious with Trump that he's sitting on this 400 million dollar war chest that he has built up in a pack that's available to the Republican Party to fight key races.

16:30And he's not opening the coffers at all. But he has spent a bit of money in Texas on trying to help Ken Paxton, because, of course, Donald Trump was the one who got behind Ken Paxton. Who got rid of Cornyn. And this is exactly, you know, going back to your point about Darlene Graham earlier on in South Carolina. This is the tension in the Democrat, in the Republican Party now, which is that Donald Trump has the power to get candidates over the line so that they are the Republican candidates. Sometimes. I mean, that's I think genuinely. But a lot of the time. Well, half the time it's worked in the primaries, at least half the time it's worked and half the time it hasn't worked.

17:04Most of the time it has worked. The problem is that he's then foisting the Republican Party with candidates who might do terribly in a general election. It's all very well in the primary process, having power over the Republican Party. But you've got to choose candidates that are electable. And why are we talking about Texas now? Because Ken Paxton, who Trump got behind, is not very electable against James Tallarico. And we even heard Ted Cruz there talking about how kind of seemingly charming Tallarico is compared to Paxton. Well, let me just mention the numbers really quickly here to give people a sense of perspective, because the Paxton campaign cannot be that happy at this moment.

17:44And I'll tell you what. Donald Trump is sitting on a half billion dollar political war chest. He's given less than 1 % of it out to Republican candidates. And so I'm sure the Paxton team was hoping and expecting that Trump's super PAC would come in and at least bring Paxton even with James Tallarico in fundraising. And I'll give you a sense of how big that gap is. James Tallarico has raised$68 million in this race. Ken Paxton, nine. He's raised nine million. And so you can imagine the Paxton campaign sees Trump's war chest, knows they're in one of the most important races in America, and could expect that Trump would have the ability to come in and bring that fundraising even.

18:30Well, the Trump campaign announced this weekend, or the filings came out, that they were giving$10 million to the Paxton campaign. Even with that$10 million, Paxton's going to be more than three times lower in fundraising than James Tallarico. This is not the kind of money Paxton needs to get put over the top. And Republicans across the country are frustrated that the president is holding those purse strings tight. Miles, I've started to read the words in some commentary, wave election. And the idea that this is going to be one of those rare events like in, I think, 1994 or 2006, where there is a massive swing away from the governing party.

19:11and that this is possible this time around, that there's going to be a wave election in the House where the Democrats will take it and possibly in the Senate too. Are you seeing it like that? Or is that just kind of fever talk that we get just after Labor Day now that we've started the election season proper? Well, I think you see it right here on the ground in Dallas, where you should see a completely different environment if the Republicans had the wind at their backs. It's not just the low turnout. Republicans that I was talking to yesterday near the convention center were talking about how there's nothing for them to show up for this cycle.

19:49There's a frustration that the president, that their party leaders have failed to tell the story of why they need to show up at the polls. And so you have this depressive effect on one side, on the GOP side, not a lot of enthusiasm about the midterm elections. And that shows up in the polls. Only about half of Republicans say they feel motivated to go vote in the midterm elections. But then on the other side, you have an incredibly motivated political party, and largely because of what the Donald Trump administration has done. The crosstabs of recent surveys show that most Democrats say this is the most important midterm election in their lifetimes.

20:30And why? Because they think their right to vote is in peril. And this is something we're going to talk about in the back half of the program today. But those threats to democratic rights and the threat to meddle in elections has got Democrats so fired up to go to the polls to defend their right to vote that it looks like, John, it is shaping up indeed to be a wave election. Yeah, we're going to try and talk you through how Donald Trump is weaponizing the Postal Service, essentially, to use to try and sow chaos at the ballot box and what he's doing in Missouri with the gerrymandering there. That's all I can tell.

21:23The News Agents USA. So we're going to talk a little bit more about what is happening in the Supreme Court with this whole question of the mail-in ballots. We know from past times, past elections, that Trump is very suspicious of mail-in ballots. We also know from past times that he quite likes, shall we delicately say, fudging an election results, even if it results in a riot. So this is something that voters are taking extremely seriously because the latest attempt to weaponise the mail-in ballots has been going through the courts for the last, what, sort of six weeks or so. And essentially, Trump is trying to make the Postal Service of America the defining decider of who gets to vote.

22:16And it is so complicated and so legally fraught that I'm going to throw this to Miles now. Now, Miles, you do it. Lucky Miles. Yeah, thanks. Just describe this multi-month legal battle to the listeners real quickly. I'll boil it down to this. This is really interesting in how it played out because you didn't hear much about this until the past few weeks in American politics. And that's because when Donald Trump dropped his executive order on mail-in ballots in March of this year, so many people thought it was so obviously unconstitutional. that it was seen almost like an incendiary press release that would get forgotten.

22:57There was no sense really in the American political life that this thing could actually come to fruition. And let me tell you why. About a third of Americans vote by mail and ballot. This executive order would give the president of the United States the ability to tell the Postal Service, don't deliver the ballots of the people I don't want you to deliver. Now, ostensibly, the administration says they are doing this in order to direct the Postal Service to make sure ballots of non-citizens, people who are not allowed to vote, do not get delivered. But of course, there's no oversight here. There's no transparency here.

23:36And the fear of groups that have sued the administration in federal court is that you open up the possibility for this power. What is to prevent this president or any president from simply reaching into the mailbag and taking out ballots they don't like in key states and thereby influencing the outcome of almost any election in the country? You don't need to be a lawyer to read this executive order and to read the United States Constitution and say, this sounds like it's not legal. This sounds like it's not constitutional. These have slowly made, these cases have slowly made their way through the courts.

24:13And the Trump administration, for most of this time since March, has been told by federal judges, do not do anything. Stop. You are not allowed to move forward with this until the case gets further along. Don't prepare to do this. Well, it came out the other week that the U.S. Postal Service had been quietly defying a judge's orders and preparing to implement this policy in the election. A federal judge said stop. The Trump administration sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court and said we need to carry out this executive order to stop illegal aliens from voting in the United States. And now we are waiting on the Supreme Court to make that decision.

24:56But as you noted at the top, Emily, make no mistake, if this were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, it would be the single most sweeping change in the history of American elections. That's why I would say don't bet that Donald Trump is going to end up victorious on this. Just explain something to me, though. Why would it mean, I mean, apart from sowing chaos and sowing a sense of distrust in the whole voting system, the whole mail-in system, why would it necessarily prioritize the votes of Republicans? How would that actually happen? Well, look, the fear of Democratic groups is that the president will direct the Postal Service to basically purge ballots from the polls that are ballots from people in the political opposition.

25:42The administration has requested the voter rolls from every state in the country. Those are the lists of people who are registered to vote in every state. It's not terribly difficult to find out who's registered to vote for Democrats and who's registered to vote for Republicans. And a little bit of nefarious activity behind the scenes in that database could result in hundreds, thousands, millions of ballots not being delivered and votes not being counted for candidates on the other side, on the political opposition. There's another piece to this too, Emily, which is that last week a whistleblower came forward here in the United States, someone within the United States Postal Service, who said, basically, even if you ignore the constitutionality of this, right now the system we are building inside the Postal Service is incapable of carrying out this executive order without causing complete chaos.

26:39This is what the whistleblower said. They said the system is designed that if one of the ballots in a batch is determined to be invalid, then whatever batch came in, the whole batch gets sent back, meaning potentially tens of thousands of ballots at a time could get rejected. And I suppose this is the other part of the piece, which is that if this was a battle about how the presidential election was going to be fought in November 2028 and you had plenty of time for legal argument and a decision to be taken. And then whatever machinery that needs to be put in place is put in place to accord with what has been agreed.