Transcription
This is Democracy Watch. Mark, we have a pretty shocking threat coming from Donald Trump. I'm going to put right here on the screen what he said during an interview with Reuters. He said, quote, "It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms. When you think of it, we shouldn't have an election."
So, I want to get your reaction to this claim by Donald Trump where you know that he starts to drop little hints in the leadup to an election about what his thought process is that now he's saying that we shouldn't even have an election. Everybody pay attention. I mean, this isn't a little hint. He is saying we shouldn't have an election. Two weeks ago, he said, "I should have seized the ballot boxes." Like the thing about Donald Trump right now is he's like that, you know, like the old the elderly, you know how they become like they kind of blurt stuff out. You know, they kind of like lose their social filter. He has lost his subtlety. He is telling us exactly what he thinks. He wants to rig the outcome of the 2026 election. That's why he started with the redistricting. That's why he said no more mail and voting. That's why he said he would be in charge of tabulating votes. As his popularity polls go down, that filter, which doesn't exist anymore, has now become we should have seized the ballot boxes. Maybe we'll do that again. The implication being and now popularity goes down further, inhibition uh further as he gets older and older every day. And it's we shouldn't have elections.
Now look, we're going to have elections, okay? Like Donald Trump can't cancel the elections, but he is telling us exactly how he views them. He does not want there to be free and fair elections. He'd prefer there not be any elections at all. But the rest of us now, you know, this is one of these things. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool us twice, Brian. Shame on all of us. Shame on all of you listening. If you all don't pay attention to this, if you all don't right now, hit the subscribe button to this channel and hit the bell so that when Brian and I keep telling you what's going on, you're alerted, then I don't know what to tell you. I mean, Donald Trump is saying the quiet part out loud. He's actually saying it quite clearly, coherently for a man who normally rambles. Brian and I are bringing this to you. I am the lawyer who fought Donald Trump in 2020, beat him after the the uh election 60 times in court. I have been litigating for 30 years. I have won cases in the Supreme Court. We are fighting against the Department of Justice right now in 204 uh cases. So like I know what I'm talking about. Brian covers this stuff every day. All of us need to pay attention and wake up to this.
>> Mark, to that end, Trump actually just made an announcement to give himself yet another pretext to be able uh to to subvert elections, this time in all 50 states across the country. Can you explain what that announcement was?
>> Yeah. Uh, you know, look, JD Vance himself, the vice president took to the podium uh in the White House briefing room to announce that Donald Trump and he were creating a new Department of Justice position that would report that would run JD Vance himself, the vice president, took to the White House briefing room to announce that he and the president were creating a new position, a new federal prosecutorial uh task force or special counsel, he actually at one point referred to it, that would lit literally, in his words, be run out of the White House. Okay, these are federal prosecutors run out of the White House. They would have nationwide jurisdiction. It would be they'd have all of the amorphous fraud statutes at their at their disposal and they would report only to Donald Trump and JD Vance. I mean, like we know what they're doing because they are actually telling us this.
>> Yeah. You know, democracy actually just published a long expose on this very topic about this new task force. I've written premium content. For people who want more of my analysis, they can subscribe at democracy for premium content. We are sounding this alarm. You and I do videos on this at this point almost every day. And that's why I keep saying the information is there for you. Brian and I are not extrapolating out. We're not like guessing out into the future. We are simply taking the information that this White House is putting out every single day and digesting it down for you on this channel, on my newsletters, on my website, on Brian Substack. So, you all need to just pay attention.
>> And I would highly recommend for folks who are watching right now, if you are not yet subscribed to Democracy Docket. It is the principal outlet that I rely on for all issues, democracy, voting rights, legal news, and on and on. So, I'm going to put the link to Democracy Docket right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. It is one of the fastest growing outlets that there is in politics right now. So, if you're not yet signed up, please go ahead, do yourself a favor, join the hundreds of thousands of others who are reading this and sign up. Um, Mark, on this point of of having this position, this fraud position, quote unquote, where where these, you know, this special master, whatever it is, reports directly to special counsel. Special counsel.
>> He wants his own Jack Smith.
>> Yeah.
>> Like that can do anything to any one of his political enemies. You know, you all reading about him going after this member of Congress or that senator, the people who signed, you know, who who had dared say the military shouldn't follow the legal orders. Tish James, Jame Comey. Now, what we're seeing in Minnesota with the governor and the and the and the mayor potentially. They want to take out of the equation the middleman. They don't want to have to go through the US attorney's offices. They don't want to have to go through Pam Bondi, who seems, by the way, oddly to have fallen out of favor. like I don't know what exactly she did to fall out of favor, but she's fell out of favor. They want to be able to run something out of the White House. That's what they've told us to do. And they are saying at the same time that Donald Trump is saying, "Why do we even bother having elections? We shouldn't have elections. If you cannot connect the dots between those two, then I don't know what to tell you."
>> And that's exactly what I wanted to dig into. This idea that we have Trump saying that we shouldn't have elections. We have a a a special counsel answerable directly to the president, vice president, not part of the DOJ where there's supposed to be a separation of church and state. answer directorable answerable directly to the president and vice president. We have Trump himself coming out and saying that uh they should have seized the voting machines in 2020. And so what do those things combined tell us about 2026 and 2028? Where should we be worried? Where should we not? Give some insight into into what you're drawing from all of this.
>> Yeah, I mean what it means is like I said, we're going to have elections because he can't cancel elections. He can't stop elections, but he's going to try to undermine them. And so let's walk through what that looks like. First, we've already seen what he's he's trying to do in the House of Representatives through gerrymandering, right? He he went to Texas, Missouri, North Carolina. Kudos to the good folks of of California who fought back and there are now five more Democratic seats there. Virginia took a big step forward uh in uh in the next step there will now be a ballot initiative. But those fights will keep going on. So that's piece one. piece two is that he has already said he's going to try to ban mail-in voting and certain voting equipment. We know the US Postal Service in the meantime is making the delay for mail-in ballots longer, right? So, we know that he's going to continue to target mail and voting. There's another case that's going to be heard before the Supreme Court that I'm involved in that also targets mail-in voting. So, we know that that that after we get past Jerry Mandering, there's going to be attacks on the method of voting. Then we have something that you and I have talked a lot about and it is probably the thing that worries me the most right now. We have the Department of Justice suing 24 states and the District of Columbia to try to get access to its most sensitive voter data. All of the information about you, your date of birth, your address, your social security number, your signature, as well as your vote history, where you what primaries you voted in, whether you're a registered Democrat or Republican, whether you voted by mail or in person. Right? So, they're trying to get that data. We just had a big victory in one of those cases actually in your home state. Federal judge in California rejected that effort. Same in Oregon. A federal judge there has indicated that he's going to reject it. But we're at the beginning of those fights and the Department of Justice is suing state after state and they are certainly going to appeal that up to the US Supreme Court. Now, why do I they want that data? Because challenging voters at scale, if we think of Donald Trump wanting to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters at a time, they need to know who the voters are. They need to know whether they're Democratic voters or Republican voters. So collecting this nationwide, building this nationwide database gives them the tool if and when they need to use it to disenfranchise say 100,000 Democrats here, 250,000 Democrats there. So I'm very worried about that. that. And then finally, you know, we focused a lot in the run-up to 2024 about the post-election and the certification problems, the issues about whether election nighters will refuse to sign certificates of election, whether there'll be an effort to seize ballots. What has Donald Trump talked about in the last few weeks? Seizing ballots. So, we need to all be ready for that.
>> As far as Congress is concerned, because we have this midterm election coming up, and I want to zoom ahead to 2028 to certifying a 2028 election. What are the implications of having um a Republican controlled Congress or even a split Congress versus having a Democratically controlled Congress as far as the certification of the 2028 election is concerned?
>> Oh, it's night and day. I mean, if you're worried about certification in 2028, you want a Democratic House and Senate because, as we all know, as we all witnessed in 2020 and then in the run-up to 2024, the House and the Senate are involved in receiving the electors, the slates of electors that come in from the states that have been certified by the states, and they are supposed to engage in a ceremonial process of opening those and counting those. Now, how ceremonial? Remember back in 2001, Al Gore counting the ballots and certifying uh the winner uh as George Bush. Remember Kla Harris opening up those b those uh those documents and certifying uh the uh Donald Trump the winner. What we know is that Republicans in the House in 2020, you know, we all know about January 6 and what Donald Trump did in in instigating a violent insurrection, but remember 130 House Republicans voted against certification, right? Like they were all for not accepting the results of that election. So having a majority of the House, a majority of the Senate be Democratic means that Republicans won't be able to pull those shenanigans. Plus, obviously having the gavl means you have a lot of control over the chamber and the way in which things are done.
>> Mark, going back to what you said just previously, this idea that the DOJ is trying to get voter information uh across the country. Right now, we already know that Republican states that red states are are voluntarily offering up that information to the DOJ. While while of course there's litigation from blue states trying to prevent the DOJ from getting that information, given the fact that the red states have already given that information up is is kind of the toothpaste out of the tube and that even if you have judges who say no, this information can't be transmitted to the DOJ, that the DOJ already has what they need from from red states. And so my my worry here is that because the DOJ already has that info, they can get to work in in um in suppressing the votes of you know what few Democrats are in those states and only entrench their advantage even further.
>> Absolutely. And that is something to worry about. I mean there are depending on the day the Department of Justice says there seven states sometimes say they're 10 states. So let's just say in that ballpark that have turned over this data and you know that is a a a blow to democracy in those states. And I'm not here to minimize that. But obviously preventing the California voter file from being turned over is a very different thing because we know that the Department of Justice worries about California. How do we know that? Because they sued California to try to block block the new map. Yeah. And so Donald Trump is always talking about voting in California. And we know that that is the lynch pin just given the number of seats to Democrats retaking the House. So, I want to focus you for a second on what the judge in California just a couple of things that he wrote. Now, this is a judge who is 81 years old. Okay? This is a judge who's been around a lot of cases. This is not some new appointee. This is not someone appointed by Joe Biden. You know, this is someone who's been around and is seen as very well respected and pretty moderate. He said, quote, "The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop. It is chipped away piece by piece until there is nothing left. The case before the court is one of these cuts that imperils all Americans. Now he's talking about these voter files. So are is he saying that there have been some cuts and chipping away in the states that have turned them over? Yes. But I like his analogy because we just prevented a big chip from coming off in California. So, you know, I like that analogy because I do think of voting rights as this chip by chip. And so, look, we've lost some of these voter roles have been turned over, but 40 million Californians were protected by this judge. And that's a big chip that did not break off. So, yes, I worry about the red states. Yes, we are fighting everywhere we possibly can, but we're not going to win everywhere. But if we can win enough of these big blocks of voters and prevent the uh Donald Trump from getting those, we are not going to have perfect elections, but the elections will be fair enough and free enough. I hope and I work every day towards that Democrats will retake control of the House and Senate in 2026. And then we will have to take about rebuilding our democracy.
>> And and I want to repeat something that you just said, which is that you are working every day toward this. And that's absolutely true. There is no bigger fighter on the left in the pro-democracy ecosystem than Mark and his team. Uh that's not just in the media space where they're um speaking with hundreds of thousands of people per day on democracy docket, but also in the courts where they're waging roughly 80 court cases right now in every state across the country. So a small step that we can all take to support their invaluable work again in the courts and in the media is to subscribe to Democracy Docket. I'm going to put that link right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. If you're not yet signed up, please go ahead and sign up. I'm Brian Taylor Cohen.
>> I'm Mark Elias.
>> This is Democracy Watch.