Trump Escalates His Attack on Civic Institutions and Voting Rights

We are 131 days away from the midterm elections and as Democrats take in what last night's primaries mean for their base of support, Republicans are having some disputes of a different sort. Let me set the scene for you. Imagine, if you will, the President of the United States getting into a shouting match in a room filled with dozens of lawmakers from his own party. Imagine him calling one of them a lunatic and being so angry that one member described him as, quote, mad as a murder hornet. According to reporting from MS Now, that is what happened earlier today when Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill to have lunch with senators from his own party. The person he called a lunatic was this man, Bill Cassidy, the outgoing senator from Louisiana. Cassidy just lost his primary to a Trump-backed candidate last month. He's been a target of Donald Trump's ire ever since he voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial after the January 6th riot. Now, as volatile as we know Donald Trump to be, he was not yelling at members of his own party for the fun of it. This was part of an episode where he dramatically announced that he would refuse to sign a major bill on housing affordability, one that passed by a wide bipartisan margin and one which Republicans believe could help them in the midterms. In a rambling post on Truth Social, Trump called the housing bill, quote, of minor importance, end quote, and slammed both Democrats and bad Republicans for not passing his voter suppression weapon of choice, the Save America Act. The Save America Act would require proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote. It would sharply restrict mail-in voting, which, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, would block millions of Americans from voting, including possibly 21 million Americans who cannot easily access documents like a passport or a birth certificate, either because they don't have them, they're at a family member's home, or in a safety deposit box, or they were damaged or destroyed. And it would affect millions of married women who take their spouse's name because if their documents or ID feature a different surname, those would be invalid for registering to vote. The bill would also include a ban on transgender surgery for children and on transgender athletes in women's sports. If you're wondering what that's got to do with voting, the answer is nothing. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said many times that Republicans can't pass the legislation because there simply aren't 50 Republican votes for it lined up, let alone any Democrats signing on to get it to the threshold of the 60 votes that it actually needs to pass. And Senate Republicans could and did pass that bipartisan housing bill, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which would give Republicans, let me just do some quick math here, one broadly popular policy to campaign on in a year when the leader of their party sent shock troops to the streets of American cities, raised costs, and appears to be losing a war to Iran that no one wanted him to start in the first place. So naturally, after this fiasco, the president was asked, why? Why would you do this kind of thing? What kind of three-dimensional chess might you be playing here? By the homage on a table from so many Americans, is this election legislation more important to you than resolving the housing crisis? It's just every election is important. We're doing very well. They want a lot of communists to come in. I'm saying it a little bit differently, but the people that they're pushing are communists, and this country is not gonna have communists. Thank you. That, at the end, is the tell, the election. The legislation he blew up was about housing, but he's talking about elections, elections that his party are broadly expected to lose in November. All of this, the rambling, the closed-door meltdowns, the name-calling, the blowing up what could have been a generational accomplishment on the housing crisis, this is not the behavior of a president who's confident in his party or his position in power. This is the behavior of someone who is desperate and scared and preparing to steal an election because he thinks, with good reason, that his team is going to lose the election. So it might not be a coincidence that at the same time that Trump is clinging to his voter suppression bill like it's his only salvation, his head of the US Postal Service has announced that it will not deliver mail ballots in states that don't hand over their voter data to Trump. And if you're wondering what delivering ballots has to do with states handing over voter data to the federal government, the answer is the same as the last answer, nothing. Nor is it a coincidence that Bill Pulte, Trump's new acting director of national intelligence, is directing his very important agency's focus not toward the serious intelligence and national security threats that America faces, but toward elections, raising fears of yet more bogus allegations and investigations related to voting. But time and time again, Trump's attacks on elections are failing in court. Just in the last two days, two more rulings against Donald Trump. A federal judge in Boston today barred Trump from using an executive order to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. A similar provision is in the SAVE Act. A year ago, Trump had tried to tighten his control over elections, not through binding legislation, but through an executive order that was temporarily blocked. That block is now permanent. And yesterday, another judge in Maryland dismissed the DOJ's lawsuit seeking detailed voter data from the state of Maryland. So there's a lot to cover here. Joining me now is Melissa Murray. She's an MSNOW legal analyst and author of The U.S. Constitution, a comprehensive and annotated guide to the modern reader. Also joining me, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for being with us. Melissa, Donald Trump keeps trying to interfere with elections. Judges actually keep blocking him. However, we've seen things slip through. We've seen sometimes a court get it wrong. These are all dangerous things. If even one of these electoral interference measures goes through, it could meaningfully affect the outcome of the election. Yeah, that's definitely true, Ali. But the fact of these many lawsuits that the federal government is filing against the states seeking their voter registration data is by itself alarming. I mean, this is the federal government launching these lawsuits. A lawsuit may be a failure. It may not be successful. But what it does do is give some kind of legitimacy to an argument, even if the argument is absolutely off the wall. We all know that the Constitution does not federalize elections. Elections are left to the states to run themselves. But the president, by either issuing these executive orders trying to federalize the elections or filing these lawsuits seeking this data that would be a backdoor way of federalizing elections, is basically giving credence to this cockamamie idea that somehow the federal government and the president himself have a role to play in the administration of elections. And that by itself is a dangerous thing. And we ought to call it out for what it is. The fact that there are 30 of these lawsuits and that district courts all across the country have to continue batting them away and saying this is invalid and this is not permissible, that's great. But the fact that he keeps pushing this narrative only concretizes the idea in the minds of his base and other people who just may not know. And it sows confusion. It sows chaos. It is a dangerous, dangerous situation. Who just may not know. That's important. Angelo, this housing bill that Donald Trump refuses to sign was actually designed to be a real win for Republicans. They can go into midterm elections saying we actually tried to do something concrete to increase housing affordability. Donald Trump just doesn't care. Like, he just doesn't care about that. He says, he's saying, I'm not running for re-election again. You guys are. You need this bill. So you give me the SAVE Act. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I think the way that I was right, you know, he sort of made this calculus, right? If you can't win the voters, you go after the votes or if it's too much work to win the voters. And that's what this bill would have at least helped them do in theory, right? Is that it would have taken a very popular issue, an issue that people care about. It's top of mind, very popular piece of legislation and allow them to, in theory, get some popular support for it, get some voters. But that's not what it's about right now. And that's, I think, what we should stay laser focused on, as you've done in your intro and laid out so well, is that it's actually about going after the votes in one way, shape or form, using all the tools and levers of the federal government, as many pressure points as they possibly can. And if, you know, and this is where I think it's sort of a short term and long term, which is that in the short term, it's about the midterms going after the votes. Either he's going to be successful in pushing the SAVE Act through, which is obviously not likely to happen, or in disrupting the election or stealing it in some meaningful way. And even if he's not, it's still win-win for him. Because if the Republicans don't bow and capitulate to his pressure, and they shouldn't, they shouldn't, he's going to say, see, I told you so, you didn't do enough, you let them steal it again. So we have this short term problem, which is in front of us, we need to do everything we can to guard the against, you know, sort of the election being disrupted and all that. But when it's over, it's not over after the day after election day, when Trump loses and Republicans lose, he's going to claim it was stolen. He's going to flood the zone with all kinds of misinformation and propaganda. And he's going to use Republicans lack of follow through for him to actually buoy these larger assault and attack on our civic institutions and our voting. And that's the real threat here is that we have to sort of gird ourselves not just for a sprint to the midterms, but then what's going to be the aftermath of that, because ultimately we're dealing with a narrative, a story here that is quite sticky. I think Angel is right, Melissa, that the SAVE Act is really prickly for Republicans. It's just bad. A number of Republicans have actually done the math and realized that it actually stands to disenfranchise more people in their states than in blue states. Because of these weird rules where you're going to need a passport, a birth certificate, and if your name is different from your married name is different from your birth name. This is just a mess for everybody. We're also not in a country that has demanded us to have our IDs available. So Donald Trump is taking advantage of a known weakness to suggest that there's some danger in voting of non-citizens voting in America, which is statistically something that is just not present. I mean, as Angel and I've discussed, the problem in America is citizens who don't vote, not non-citizens who do vote. No, that's exactly right. I mean, so this act is a solution in search of a problem, and it will create a number of problems going forward. This will disenfranchise millions of women, as you say, who do not have the same surname that may be reflected on their identifying documents because they have married and taken their husband's name. It may disenfranchise individuals who don't have a passport. Many Americans don't have a passport because you don't actually need one. It may establish proof of citizenship, but you don't need one if you're not traveling outside of the country. And many people, as you say, don't have their birth certificates or things like that handy, and we've never had to produce these things. There actually is quite a lot of verification when you register to vote in various states. States have very different requirements, but they're all onerous. In New York State, for example, you have to show where you live and provide proof that you live there. So there are already mechanisms in place to ensure the integrity of the voter rolls, to ensure that the people who are voting are people who are authorized to do so. This seems ancillary, but what it does suggest, and the fixation on the SAVE Act suggests, is that this is a president who's very, very worried about this midterm election, who is already sowing the seeds for contesting and challenging whatever happens in the midterm elections as somehow fraudulent and impermissible. And that's the narrative that he's beginning to sow. That's the point of all of this, to sow that narrative and to cultivate it in the minds of his followers and others, and to let that take root. In much the same way, this idea that the 2020 election was stolen well before the election actually took place, they were already cultivating that narrative. Which is wild, Angela, because every time there's a Trump appointee who goes before Congress, they are asked a simple question almost always by one of the senators, one of the members of Congress, about whether they believe the 2020 election was fairly decided. And to a last one, these Trump appointees cannot say that. They always find some way around it. That's now the litmus test. But the bottom line is, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud when he told Republicans, if you lose the midterm elections, they'll impeach me again. Yeah, and I think that something Melissa just said before about sort of sowing the seeds, we saw evidence of that not that long ago with the Spencer Pratt LA stuff. All the nonsense about it being stolen and manipulated and all the cheating, that was not about Spencer Pratt, okay? It was about keeping the machinery of misinformation warm, keeping that engine running, because they know they're going to be deploying it in the months leading up to, and then certainly after the midterms elections. That's what it was really about. It was about making sure that thing continued to operate, and it did. All of the grizzle that they put into that machine, they spun out the same story over and over again. Not just sowing doubt, but actually creating a larger story about how elections are stolen and casting this sort of the doubt, the specter of something where people say, well, it's a little weird, and that's it. That's what it's about, but keeping the engine warm. There's nothing weird about it. We made it very clear when we started our coverage that night that it may be over a week before you know what some of these are. It's just the method of voting, the fact that this mail-in balloting works, but means it takes a few days. Relax. It doesn't mean anybody's cheating about anything. Thanks to both of you, Melissa Murray and Angelo Carusone.