Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The signs are mounting that Donald Trump is preparing a serious effort to steal the midterm elections outright. A key tell came during his rambling speech about our election infrastructure a few days ago, in which he raged at news organizations for not carrying him live. In doing this, Trump accidentally revealed that he fully expects the media to help him sow distrust in our elections. That’s an essential precursor to his rigging plot. And remarkably enough, even Fox News balked at participating in this, another sign of how deranged his scheming has become.Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos is arguing that the right way to think about this is to face forward. If we’re going to avert the worst, we need to prepare for it right now. So we’re getting into all of it. Ryan, good to have you back on.Ryan Enos: Yeah, thanks. I’m glad to be here.Sargent: So let’s look forward. In his speech, Trump made wildly deranged claims about intelligence documents supposedly showing that our elections are deeply vulnerable. He also insisted that China had compromised our election data, and said the deep state is covering it all up. Numerous media outlets fact-checked and debunked all of it. But that aside, Ryan, what do you think Trump is signaling about his future intentions here?Enos: We can’t overstate how dangerous this is. Democracy doesn’t work if people don’t have faith in the legitimacy of elections, because things can go wrong. And all signs are that Republicans are going to lose at least the House in the upcoming election, and maybe the Senate. And obviously Trump wants to avoid that. So it looks like he’s trying to sow doubt in these elections, either to take actions as the president, to use the government to try to undo the result of the elections in which he loses, or to encourage his supporters to undo them through violence, like he tried to do in 2020.Sargent: And we’re going to get into the specifics of all that in a second, but let’s first listen to a couple things. Here’s Trump during the speech, raging at news organizations for refusing to carry him live.Donald Trump (voiceover): There’s no third world country that has elections like we have—in a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about. Because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country—and that’s true, you can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.Sargent: And here’s Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin echoing Trump’s anger at a news conference the next day.Markwayne Mullin (voiceover): The major networks not willing to carry the President of the United States’s address to the nation on election security. How shameful is that? What are they trying to cover up?Sargent: So the fact that Markwayne Mullin felt obliged to keep pushing this nonsense shows Trump continued to rage over it, because that’s the only reason these guys ever say anything. It’s to minister to the audience of one. But Ryan, I think something’s getting lost about this. Trump isn’t merely angry because the networks refused to give him attention. He’s angry because he needs the media to broadcast his lies about our election system precisely in order to help him spread distrust in the outcome, right?Enos: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think there’s two ways to look at his anger at the media. On the one hand, it shows the media is doing the right thing. They figured out what Trump’s up to. They know he’s going to lie. And they’re, in many ways, taking a stand for democracy. They’re saying, we are not going to broadcast the thing that everybody knows is a lie, and the media has learned not to broadcast Trump’s lies. That’s the independence of the media, a bedrock of our democracy.But on the other hand, what we’re seeing is just how dangerous it is when a president goes full authoritarian like this. Because it’s not just about him up there ranting on television. He can use the federal government to coerce media firms like these—like CBS and NBC and everybody else—into doing his bidding, because they could very well be punished. The fact that we have the secretary of DHS up there pushing this—what does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with compelling media organizations to carry the president’s lies? It just shows you all the levers that the president can pull in order to get his authoritarian agenda going. And it’s really, really dangerous.Sargent: I want to underscore your point by reminding everybody that in the clip we played, Donald Trump actually said that these news organizations should lose their licenses for failing to carry his speech live. And Markwayne Mullin accused them of refusing to share vital, essential information with the American people. It’s more convoluted than Donald Trump says—it’s the subsidiaries and the affiliates that have the licenses. But the basic point stands here, that now these news organizations may hesitate the next time Trump says, “I’m going to be giving some remarks on the corruption of our election system.” They may say to themselves, he threatened us last time, we don’t want to have the headache of protecting our licenses, and so we’re going to carry it this time. And then Trump’s plot of using the news organizations to spread distrust in our elections could work. What do you think of all that?Enos: Yeah, one hundred percent. That’s exactly correct. And it’s important to emphasize just how unprecedented this is, right? I mean, this is a clearly authoritarian move, and there’s never been a president in American history that’s done this—has said, if you don’t broadcast what I want, I’m going to essentially put you out of business. And that’s the reason we have things like an independent licensing commission—at least we did until Trump came along and the Supreme Court sided with his unilateral authority to take away its independence.But even if you take away all those grander things about democracy, this is just essentially schoolyard extortion, right? Like, it’d be really bad if you didn’t do what I want. Maybe you’ll have an accident next time you’re walking home, or something like that. Everybody knows what he’s implying in that case. It’s very clear. And so yeah, ultimately these media firms, they care about their bottom line. And if they’re worried about losing the broadcast license—which it seems to be now that there’s some evidence Trump could at least try to exercise that authority—then they might comply with what he does next.Now, it could go to the courts, and hopefully the courts would ultimately side with these organizations, because the First Amendment protections are very powerful. But they don’t want that headache. And this is why so many organizations in civil society that know they could ultimately prevail in the courts would take the easy way out, essentially. And that’s the problem, how we end up in these situations.Sargent: Donald Trump is essentially saying, look, the next time I give remarks that are designed to sow distrust in our elections, you damn well better carry it, otherwise the full weight of the federal government is going to bear down on you.Enos: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look, it’s really worth emphasizing this thing about the DHS, right? The DHS was supposedly set up essentially to protect Americans against terrorism. And of course, critics at the time pointed out that this was something that could end up having overreach, but it never really realized that until Trump took it over and turned it into essentially his private secret police force, right? And so here you have an agency where it’s threatening news organizations, it’s threatening the independence of elections—if you listen to more of what was said in that news conference about how they’re going to examine the voter rolls and things like that. And people have this real fear, which is probably still low probability, but there’s a real fear that you’re going to have things like ICE agents and these other sort of shock troops of Donald Trump showing up at polling places trying to intimidate people from casting their ballots.And once you get DHS involved in things they have no place in—like the administration of elections—that becomes a real, real concern and a real threat to our democracy.Sargent: Just to underscore what you were getting at there—during the press conference at which Markwayne Mullin sided with Trump’s theory against the news organizations, he also made a whole bunch of outlandish claims about what DHS is going to require from state officials in terms of election administration, even going so far as to say that if they don’t protect our elections, they may face prosecution. I just want to make one more point about what you’re saying there, which is that it gets even more vile when you consider how Markwayne Mullin talked about this. He had the goddamn gall to say with a straight face that he’s essentially trying to protect the national security of the United States by pressuring news organizations to carry this stuff. He accused the news organizations of selling out the country and its national security by refusing to share vital information with them. It’s exactly backwards. What they did do was actually, in a way, a patriotic gesture—refusing to participate in this Trump-Markwayne Mullin effort to gaslight the country.Enos: Yeah, and look, you’re exactly right. And it fits a really disturbing pattern. Because this is sort of the refuge of bullshit that every authoritarian turns to, right? You’ve heard these same things in Turkey, you heard them in Russia, you heard them in Hungary. Authoritarian leaders, they always claim it’s about national security, right? Somebody is threatening our national security, in this sort of convoluted logic. And that’s hard for people to argue against, because they don’t want to be on the wrong side of endangering our citizens, right? But look, if we’re willing to turn over the legitimacy of our elections because somebody waves this flag of threats to national security, if the media is not willing to do its job, then that’s how we lose our democracy. And that’s what’s being attempted here. It’s something that we really have to be aware of, and we have to—to use this word again—we have to call this bullshit when we see it. And that’s clearly what’s going on.Sargent: One hundred percent. Now, here’s where this takes a weirdly, darkly comic turn. Even Fox News hesitated to validate all this. Fox stated explicitly, right after the speech or during it, that it wasn’t in a position to evaluate some of Trump’s most incendiary claims. And according to both Aaron Rupar and Media Matters, who monitor Fox pretty relentlessly, Fox declined to carry Markwayne Mullin’s presser rehashing Trump’s claims. And it gets even better. CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that many at Fox just didn’t want to hear Trump talk about the 2020 election anymore, and thought it was bad politics for the GOP. And of course, some at Fox thought, oh my God, we better be careful here, because they had a major settlement against them to the tune of, I guess, $700 million, in a lawsuit brought by Dominion over their false election claims. Ryan, what do you make of that?Enos: Well, there are two things I’d say about this. First is, I know sometimes things like civil lawsuits get a bad rap—people going around suing each other. But we actually see the purpose of these in a well-functioning country, right? Because Fox very clearly said things after the 2020 election that were defamatory toward some of these election administrators. And they were punished for it through the civil suits. And they want to avoid that. That’s our court system working.Now, the other thing I would say about it is this fact that Fox thought it was just bad politics. And you see a lot of Republican politicians saying this too. There’s a lot of signs that members of Congress want Trump to move on. And they all know what he’s saying is not true, but they unfortunately feel obligated—they can’t cross him on this issue, right? And what that signals is that the American people aren’t buying this, right? Trump thinks that the American people are a lot dumber than they actually are, which is sort of one of the tragedies of his whole administration, is how stupid he actually thinks the American people are. But the American people aren’t buying this. You can see this in the polls. Like, only about half of Republicans actually say they believe this, right? And I’m not sure even that half actually believes what they’re saying they believe.So people really aren’t buying this, but Trump keeps trying to sell it. And what’s unfortunate about that, though, is what it signals is that Trump very well could want to move beyond politics in order to try to make this happen. He can’t convince Americans that the other party is crooked. And so that’s when we start worrying that, in order to satisfy these delusions that he’s having, he’s going to do things like—which was reported he considered in 2020—like have the National Guard seize ballot boxes, or have, as I suggested and other people suggested, ICE officers show up at the polling stations, purportedly to try to stop illegal voting or something like that. And so at that point you’re interfering with an election that you can’t win legitimately, and in which the American people have rejected you, in order to impose your will essentially on the country. And at that point, we’re not living in a democracy.Sargent: Right. Well, let’s talk about the specifics of the threat. There’s a lot of chatter about how Trump might use his security services like DHS to maybe seize ballot boxes and try to interrupt the count of votes. And the way they would do that is focus it in states where control of the House and Senate will be decided. And that, I think, is why seeing Markwayne Mullin talking this way is so alarming. And we should focus on the context as well. The FBI has already seized ballot boxes in Georgia. Trump himself has already said he wants Republicans and the federal government to take over elections.Now, there’s also the talk about ICE showing up at polling places. I don’t take that as seriously. It’d be hard for them to cover all the polling places that they would need to—although it’s possible they could maybe stage showdowns in select places to create atmospheres of crisis and terror in certain precincts or whatever. But is seizure of ballot boxes something you take seriously? And if so, what can be done about it right now? How do we prepare?Enos: Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have to take everything seriously. And it could be that these things are all low-probability events—and in many ways, I believe they are. But the fact that we’re talking about them seriously, and the fact that these are direct threats to our democracy, means that we have to take them seriously. We take low-probability events like airplane crashes seriously because they’re so catastrophic, right? And they can actually happen.And so we also have to consider what we know Trump wants. And he signaled this very clearly in 2020, when he tried to overthrow an election in which he had legitimately lost. There is no doubt that that’s what he did—the historical record is clear. And we know that essentially what stopped him was members of his own administration, to their credit, people like Mike Pence and Bill Barr, who eventually said, “We’re not going to go on with this. We aren’t going to do his bidding.”And then members of Congress, that actually ended up in his own party, that didn’t side with him as well, right? But a lot of those people are gone. There’s none of those people in his administration anymore. They’re all loyalists. They’re all people that essentially are there because they will do whatever Donald Trump wants. And so there’s none of those roadblocks in the way.Because of that, if Trump decides he wants to order people to do extraordinary things, like seize ballot boxes or something like that, it’s hard to imagine that people are going to say no. You know, we’ve already seen, for example, something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago—we have essentially a masked secret police going around terrorizing American citizens, terrorizing Democratic cities on the flimsiest of pretexts. It’s simply political terror, right? And that’s operating in the United States right now. So there’s obviously people that are willing to do those types of things. And if he told people—I don’t know if everybody would do it, but there are certainly people that, if he told them, “Go seize these ballots, these ballots are illegal, you go seize them,” they would go do that.And so we can imagine that happening. It’s not hard to know who they’d target. They would target Democratic cities that were in, for example, contested Senate races, where they knew they would take out a bunch of Democratic ballots. And the math on it is not hard to figure out. Now, the advantage we have against such things is the constitutional system—it means that we have this big, dispersed electoral system. And this is part of what you’re alluding to with ICE. The numbers in many ways just don’t add up, right? Fortunately, this is where having a small federal government becomes fortunate in a really big country—there’s not enough people to go steal every ballot box in every dispersed election. You could come up with ways it could happen if you federalize a National Guard and things like that, but then things like that are slow-moving. So it’s hard logistically to make happen.But I think we have to treat it as reality, and one way we guard against that right now, is exactly what we’re doing—we’re talking about it. And we have to make people like governors in these states aware that this is a real reality and let them plan for it, right? We need to put them on the record to say, “If somebody illegally tries to interfere with an election in your state, what will you do?”And in 2020, to their credit, a lot of governors, even in red states—I’m thinking about Georgia, for example—stood firm, because they believed in democracy more than they believed in Donald Trump’s lies. And so we need to have people go on the record now that they believe in democracy and they believe in the local administration of elections, which has been a cornerstone of the way elections have been administered in the United States for its entire history. And in many ways, we see the wisdom of that now. And we have to ensure that that process will have integrity moving forward.Sargent: Right. You could see the media putting pressure on Republicans in places like Ohio and Texas, which have critical Senate races that’ll decide Senate control, pressuring Republicans to say whether they will stand up against any effort to seize ballot boxes.Enos: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s very well said. Because nobody should agree to that. And you would hope somebody’d be very willing to say right now that we are going to stand up to that, right? And we need elected officials, whether Democrats or Republicans, to be going on the record right now to say, we are going to protect the integrity of our elections. We believe in the integrity of our elections. That’s how we all got here, right? They are elected under that system that Donald Trump is attacking, and we’re going to protect it moving forward, because that is our constitutional duty.Sargent: Well, Ryan, speaking of that—do we need to hear Democrats, maybe all the governors, all the senators, all the House members, and all the secretaries of state stand up in unison, maybe even hold a joint press conference and say, “This is an emergency”? Do we need to hear them say, “Republicans, now you must say where you stand on all this”? Do we need to hear them say, “The president just signaled an effort to steal the midterms, and we are in an urgent situation right now”? Do we need to hear that?Enos: Yeah, I think we do. Look, I think they all need to stand up. One thing we understand very clearly from decades of political science research is that people take signals from these politicians to understand what is going on, right? And if they’re only hearing one side, if they’re only hearing the lies from Donald Trump—first of all, some people might not realize those aren’t true, which is a little shocking to us, but if you hear a lie often enough, it kind of seeps into your consciousness. But moreover, not everybody’s going to realize what a threat to democracy this is. And how much people need to stand up against it.Because frankly, if Donald Trump tries anything like this—if he tries to steal the election through taking ballot boxes, through interfering with voters casting their ballots, if he tries to do anything—then people frankly need to take to the streets, right? I mean, this is our democracy under threat. And in November, if that happens, then people need to be prepared to stand up against it, using the power of citizens, but also the power of our elected officials. And so that starts with awareness. People need to be aware that this is a threat, and start standing up for democracy now, not later, after something has happened.Sargent: Well, I think the upshot here is that we all have a lot of work to do to get ready for what might be coming. Ryan Enos, thank you so much for all that. It was really bracing stuff.Enos: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.