How to Protect the 2026 Elections from Donald Trump

0:00We should talk about the terrible troubles of our friends and colleagues at the Washington Post. Evan, you are a product of the Washington Post Foreign Service. Yeah. You know, my parents were posted to Moscow. My dad was a Washington Post reporter in the 1970s. And the idea that you would try to dismantle an institution in order to save it is bizarre and offensive. And disingenuous. Yeah. And frankly, I don't understand how this in any way accords with what Bezos was saying in those early statements he made about wanting to invest in a great American institution and democracy dies in darkness.

0:46Well, of course it doesn't. I mean, and I have to applaud Marty Baron, the former terrific editor who just came right out and said it. He said, this isn't about Bezos losing money on The Washington Post. This is about Bezos trying to please Donald Trump. And it is about money in a larger sense in that Bezos wants a lot of things for his companies from Donald Trump's administration and fears retribution. And that is what's changed is we've got these billionaires. They've bought up the news organizations and they are basically undermining them and replacing trusted sources of independent news with propaganda.

1:27It's just a tragedy. They actually fired a young correspondent who's on the front lines freezing in Ukraine right now. Meanwhile, the publisher of The Washington Post couldn't be bothered to join the Zoom call and is photographed walking the red carpet at a pre-Super Bowl event. Yeah, I love that he's at a Super Bowl event when they're killing the sports section. The sports section. But, you know, and I too, I was married to The Washington Post. My husband was the national editor in there for many decades. And it takes a lot to have a paper of the stature of the Washington Post. It took generations to build it.

2:10Well, I guess the rule of thumb for me is I've been thinking about Evans reporting. Never trust a man with a$500 million yacht to own a national treasure news organization. Well said. We know where his priorities lie. Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer. Hey, Evan. Good morning to you both. Hi, Jane. Hi there. Oh, great to be with you. Great to be with you. Although our subject today, I would say, is sobering in the extreme. Donald Trump has begun the inevitable campaign against the 2026 elections already.

2:59Never mind that there's still snow on the ground. This week, Donald Trump told us that the elections this fall would be rigged. Just the other day, he came out and said that he wanted to, quote, nationalize elections in 15 states. A few weeks ago, he told The New York Times that he regretted not seizing voter machines after the 2020 election. As we all know, last week, his Justice Department sent FBI agents to raid the Fulton County, Georgia election offices in search of evidence about the 2020 elections, still trying to prove that he won a presidential contest that he lost. The question, it seems to me, is not if he's going to launch a campaign to undermine the integrity and Americans' faith in our elections, but simply the question of how and in what way.

3:57And yet the concept that the president of the United States could actively sabotage a future election, you know, people shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes at it. They're not sure. Are we being panicky, alarmist? How seriously should we take these extraordinary words coming from the mouth of the president? His ally, Steve Bannon, said on his podcast the other day that we're going to have ICE, quote, surround the polls come November. I mean, how seriously do we take this? Well, I think we have to acknowledge that we are now on a dangerous collision course here. We've seen Donald Trump's popularity falling.

4:38We see the days diminishing between us and the election. His desperation is growing. And we've gone from talk, kind of loose, crazy, delusional talk about how he won when he absolutely lost in 2020 to action. We're beginning to see things that were unimaginable, seizing ballots and going into a voting center in Fulton County, as you mentioned. They've also gone, it turns out, into Puerto Rico. And there is crazy talk about the possibility that there's sort of international interference that they're investigating. We've got Tulsi Gabbard on the scene of all things. So basically, the time has come.

5:24It seems to be moving into the real threat category, which is why today I think we got to talk about it. We have, to help us unpack all of this, really, I think, a first-rate guest, Rick Hassan. Rick is a professor of law and political science at UCLA. He's the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, which means there's no one better to help us understand what's genuinely dangerous, what's overstated, what to watch for next. Rick, we're so glad to have you. I'm glad to do it. You know, what a week to have this conversation. You know, it's crazy stuff. So, Rick, thank you so much for being with us today.

6:05We really are glad to have your wisdom and expertise because we are a little bit in panicky mode. It seems to us that Donald Trump is once again calling an election rage in advance in the effort to create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, well, I think that the right emotion is one of vigilance and not fear. Fear is demobilizing. And I think now we have a lot of time before the midterms. And now's the time to prepare and to think through what could happen and to make sure that we can protect our elections from the federal government. And the fact that we have to have that conversation just shows you how much our democracy has deteriorated.

6:45That's exactly right. Right. So let's start out just with some level setting in terms of the facts here. Just this week, Donald Trump said he wanted to, quote, unquote, nationalize elections in 15 states. I know there's this thing called the Constitution that seems to prohibit it. But give us a sense quickly of the scope of what you think is actually possible for Trump to do in terms of undermining the elections versus what is just literally not going to happen. Well, so let's just talk about the law. what he might try to do might be different than the law. So what we know legally is that the Constitution leaves to states the power to set the qualifications for voters, as well as to run elections, with one exception.

7:29In Article 1, Section 4, the Constitution says the Congress can override the states. And Congress has done that in congressional elections. For example, For example, Congress passed a law back in 1842 that still governs us today that requires that members of Congress be elected only from single-member districts. You can't elect multiple members of Congress from one place. So it is possible that Congress could do much more to make our elections more uniform, to make them national. What's important here is that the president has no role to play in this process. There have been a couple of lawsuits that have been brought against an executive order that Trump issued that purported to exert some authority over mail-in ballots and over a federal agency that creates a registration form.

8:15And multiple courts have said the president has no role to play. So as far as the law goes, he can't be nationalizing elections. An executive order is not an edict. He has no power over elections. Well, we have seen that they are collecting, that is the Justice Department, or trying to collect voter information that's proprietary in the states and that they even sort of tried to make a deal in Minnesota. We will take the ICE agents out if you give us this voter information. What is the game plan here? So we don't know because the Justice Department is not telling us. My best guess is that this is a reprise of what we saw in Trump 1.

9:00You may remember that Trump formed a voter fraud commission headed by Vice President Mike Pence and noted vote denier Chris Kobach. And they were trying to collect this information. And the purpose there appeared to be to create a pretext to pass a law that would require documentary proof of citizenship before voting. These kinds of laws that require you to produce your papers, your birth certificate, naturalization paper, this is not a voter ID law. This is about voter registration. And we know from experience in Kobach's own Kansas, that they're very, very disenfranchised. I mean, 30 ,000 people who are otherwise eligible to register a vote were kicked out.

9:38So I think this is going to serve as a pretext. They're going to show that there's a lot of dead wood. There are a lot of people listed in multiple states because people don't always contact the officials when they move. They're going to try and use it as a pretext to pass something like the SAVE Act. So that, I think, is the endgame. And they also might use it to claim they've done some kind of forensic analysis and there's fraud in the elections and then try and do other things. And that's really what I'm most worried about is a pretext of fraud to potentially seize ballots as they're being tabulated.

10:10I think that's the weak side of where things are right now. Well, this idea of a pretext of fraud also gets us to the subject of what just happened in Georgia with the raid on Fulton County. There was a very strange fact, which we've talked a bit about before you came on. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was there and also put the president on the phone, evidently, with FBI agents. What does this have you thinking? Why is the director of national intelligence there and what do you want to know about that? So I think there's both an optimistic story to tell here and a pessimistic story.

10:47The optimistic story is that Trump has tasked Tulsi Gabbard with being kind of a voting fraud point person. And this is going to keep her busy. She's a noted conspiracy theorist like Trump. She's going to spin her wheels. You know, she also went to Puerto Rico recently to look at voting machines there, potentially to find some Venezuelan connections to spin out fraud. So maybe this is nothing more than, you know, just what Steve Bannon, who said ICE would be at the polls on Election Day, said, flood the zone with shit. This is just like a distraction. It's a way to placate Trump. That's the optimistic story.

11:23The pessimistic story is that this is a dress rehearsal for what could happen after the 2026 elections. You know, after voters vote, there is plenty of work that has to be done by election officials in tabulating the ballots. That's a process that takes a long time. It takes especially a long time where I am in California. I can imagine a situation where the control of the House of Representatives comes down to some races in California that are not yet called because there's a ton of ballots to be counted. And Trump purports to use federal authority to try to seize ballots. Once ballots are out of the hands of election officials, once the chain of custody is broken, we can't be confident that the results are going to be accurate.

12:05You know, I want to follow up on that because this is actually one of the scenarios that's been keeping me up at night, and I want to sort of stress test it with you, is this question of they want to stop the counting, right? This is even back in 2020, Donald Trump is saying stop the counting because once a race is called. Once it's certified, of course, it becomes much, much harder. But if there's uncertainty about races, then you can't say, well, Democrats have won control of the House of Representatives. So is there, walk us through, like, is there a real scenario for what happens from election night forward into January when the new Congress is supposed to be inaugurated?

12:45Like, I'm starting to worry about Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who literally owes his job to Donald Trump this week when Trump talked about nationalizing the elections. Mike Johnson didn't say, you're insane. That's crazy. Of course, we would never do that. No, he complained. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle. And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts.

13:18It just, it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream. But so tell us about how Republicans might try to stop their defeat in taking control of the House. Is that literally possible? Or are we just getting ahead of ourselves? Well, the first thing I'd say is that what Mike Johnson was talking about, where it appears the Republican is in the lead, and then those leads evaporate. That's not fraud. That is the fact that it takes a long time in some places with a lot of mail-in ballots, like California and Arizona, to count those ballots. And we know that in more recent elections, for reasons we can talk about, Democrats tend to be more likely to vote by mail, and they tend to vote later than Republicans, which means the early vote counts that come on election night skew more Republican, and the later vote counts skew Democrats.

14:09It's not as though a candidate's in the lead and loses her lead. It's that the race is too early to call and there are more ballots to be processed. Now, in terms of what Mike Johnson can do, the important thing to recognize is that the Senate and the House are very different. The Senate's a continuing body because only a third of the Senate are elected in each two-year federal election cycle. The House starts all over again. Mike Johnson is not the Speaker of the House on January 3rd, 2027. They're going to have to figure out who is. Now, there could be a lot of fighting over that. There could be battles over who's going to get seated.

14:44It could be very messy. It could be very ugly. And they could try to claim in close elections that, in fact, if a Democrat was declared the winner, it was actually a Republican. This is much more likely to happen if it's a very close race for control of the House. And it may be a blowout. We don't know what it's going to be. But if it's very close, we could see some imaginations. But just like Donald Trump doesn't have the unilateral power to nationalize elections, Mike Johnson won't be Speaker of the House, and he can't decide, as he did last year, to not seat a member of the House for a while and try and drag that out.

15:17Rick, you linked in one of the pieces that you wrote about to an extraordinary little clip from a woman named Cleta Mitchell. Cleta Mitchell is a lawyer, a Republican lawyer. She is sort of at the forefront of pushing the idea that there is election fraud and she's very much working with Trump. My question is, she talks in this clip about how there may be a sovereignty crisis and that the president may need to step in. But look, I mean, the president's authority is limited. The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections, except that where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States, as I think that we can establish with the poorest system that we have, then I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.

16:17What is she talking about? Is this something that could really happen? Are you, how worried should we be? well clata mitchell is one of the people who was actually with trump on that infamous call to brad raffensperger the secretary of state of georgia in uh 2020 just fined me 11 780 votes so this is not a person i think that could be trusted with election integrity and if she's saying stuff about you know trump kind of having a break the glass moment and try to mess with elections by declaring martial law or something like that i mean there's no sovereignty crisis exception to the constitution You know, what would this look like?

16:55Would it look like sending troops into the streets? I think the recent events in Minnesota show how risky that would be and show that the American people will not take a kind of interruption. I think people will walk over glass to vote if the Trump administration tries to physically interfere with elections. That's why I think it's much more likely to see interference on the back end after voters have voted. and then, you know, Trump can try and declare a sovereignty crisis. He's going to have to find a judge who would find probable cause that would allow the seizing of ballots. And I actually think that now is the time to be preparing for this.

17:29I think states and localities should think about getting injunctions from federal courts against Donald Trump to prevent him from interfering with the tabulation of ballots. Like, in advance, beforehand, you know, there's enough reason to think that Trump, from all of these things we've been talking about, that Trump might try to interfere with the elections, that he has no power to do it, and to get the courts involved to make sure that our elections can be fairly counted after votes are cast.

17:59Okay, so we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, more of our conversation with Rick Hassan, professor of law and political science at UCLA. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

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19:09You started off this conversation talking about vigilance and taking precautions. Now, you just laid out the way that injunctions could be valuable in that process. One of the lessons we've learned about contested elections going all the way back to 2000 is that speed counts, doing things, being ready to go, having a plan, knowing exactly what you're going to do is essential. There are a lot of people out there who listen to a show like this and they wonder, well, what can I do as an American citizen if I'm concerned about this? What do you say to people who are trying to figure out how they should marshal their energy and their focus in the months ahead on this question?

19:45Yeah, well, you know, our elections are super decentralized, which I used to see as kind of a weakness. That's still a weakness in some ways, but it's also in this sense a strength, which is that it's much harder for a would-be authoritarian to take over those elections if they're decentralized. That means there are lots of opportunities for people to get involved in being a poll worker, in being an election observer. They're both partisan and non-partisan election observers. It's really important for community leaders, business leaders, church leaders, union leaders, to be bucking up the local election administrators, making sure they have the budget to count their ballots fairly and quickly.

20:20I think we should pressure our legislatures to improve the speed and the accuracy by which votes are counted. There's plenty to do in many states. Pennsylvania notoriously is one state that does not pre-process their mail-in ballots, which means it takes a longer time to get votes. California just has a huge volume. We need more resources. So people also should vote early if they have the opportunity. That creates less problem on Election Day. Whether that's voting by mail or many places, you can vote in person. I think that's a great option for people. If you have that option, vote early in person.

20:55That makes it less likely there'll be problems on Election Day. And then after Election Day, we have to be vigilant. You know, if Trump is trying to go into places and seize ballot boxes, I mean, if this is literally what's going on, the people need to be in the streets. I mean, I think there are three bulwarks against potential federal interference with elections. We've mentioned all three, but let me just talk about them. One are the courts, two are the states and localities that actually run elections, and three are the American people. And hopefully we won't have to have our own break-the-glass moment and be the American people that have to stand between federal agents and local election administrators trying to count ballots.

21:32But, you know, that's kind of the doomsday scenario that I'm worried about. But Rick, you're a lawyer, and I assume that you have respect for the courts. But we've lived through Bush v. Gore, which was a situation in which the Supreme Court basically decided an election and said, well, hell, we did it. We should never do it again this way. It's not a precedent we should rely on. But how much faith have you got in the court? Well, I'm going to push back on that. I have a lot of faith in the courts on this question. I think we need to differentiate between voting rights, where the court has a poor record, the Supreme Court, especially now there's a case pending before the Supreme Court that could further weaken the Voting Rights Act, and pushing back against election subversion.

22:17That is, the attempt for an election loser to turn himself into an election winner. Now, Bush versus Gore, the margin of error in that election exceeded the margin of victory. And looking back on it now, 25 years later, you know, I don't think there was a right answer. And had the recount gone forward, probably Gore would have lost. But had we been able to count votes as people actually intended, then Gore would have won. That election was kind of a one-off. And it's before we understood exactly how many problems there could be with election administration. But if you look around, the Supreme Court did not buy into any of Trump's attempts in 2020 to overturn the results of the election.

22:54And in 2024, there was an attempt in the state Supreme Court race in North Carolina to overturn the results there. The state Supreme Court there seemed like it was willing to go along with it. But a federal district court judge, a very conservative federal society type, said, this is not how we run our elections. You can't change the rules after the fact. And we saw that in 2020 as well. Very conservative Third Circuit judge, Stephanos Bibas, said, you can't be messing with elections. I think that is a line that at least the conservative Republican legal establishment is not willing to cross. Given the checks that still exist in the Constitution in the form of the federal judiciary, what is it that Donald Trump has learned from literally years, six years now of calling the 2020 election a rigged election?

23:44If it's so hard to actually rig an election, why does he keep talking about it? is it purely a political goal to undermine our faith and credibility in the elections? Is he speaking to the electorate? You know, tell us what you make of this endless campaign to undermine our faith in the elections. It's hard to know what's going on in Donald Trump's head. First thing I'd say is it could just be an obsession of his that he really thinks he won. I think he honestly believes there was fraud. I mean, that's possible. But it serves some political purposes, you mentioned one, it undermines people's confidence in elections, which maybe lets him take more power.

24:24It also attempts to delegitimize the election of Democrats. So earlier this week, Donald Trump was speaking, and he made reference to, you know, where are the bad problems? He said Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta were his examples. Three majority-minority with a significant black population, majority-minority democratic cities. You know, this is meant to say when Democrats win, he literally said this at the, I think it was at the prayer breakfast, he said, when Democrats win, it's because they cheat. I mean, so this is a way to undermine comments. And then the worst possibility is that he's using it to lay the groundwork to try to mess with 2026.

25:05And we should talk about what the stakes are here. Why would Donald Trump, who's not on the ballot in 2026, want to mess with the elections? Because I think he's very afraid of Democrats taking control back of one or both houses of Congress, because if they do, they're going to make the last two years of a lame duck term very miserable, and he doesn't want that. How real is election fraud in this country? So I've been writing a book on the history of American democracy from 1964 to 2024. for. And in the 1960s, when the parties start differentiating themselves, and when there's real political competition between Democrats and Republicans, election fraud, which is mostly being committed by election officials, not by voters, election fraud starts to decline.

25:53And by the 1970s, with the professionalization of election administration, and certainly by the early 1980s, it essentially disappears on a large scale in American elections. We do see occasional attempts to try to mess with elections. They're usually on a small local level where it's possible to control the election machinery or it's possible that just a few ballots will swing the results of the election. But on a large scale, like trying to flip a state from one presidential candidate to another, it would be impossible to do this without it being noticed just because the scale of what you'd need for voters to make a difference, even in a small state, would be huge.