As the midterm elections loom, analysts Joel McCleary and Mark Medish warn about the panoply of tools the Trump administration is putting in place to potentially control the outcome.
Midterm elections in the United States are scheduled for November 3. Concerns that the elections might be canceled, coerced or subverted at any stage of the process are becoming increasingly valid as the Trump administration takes steps to possibly disenfranchise voters or otherwise control the outcome to prevent a Democratic Party majority in Congress.
Chris Hedges invited two political analysts with deep histories in Washington, Joel McCleary and Mark Medish, to this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to speak about a series of articles they published in The Spectator, titled “Dancing in the Dark,” in which they describe the wide range of tools available to the current administration to maintain power. Medish warns, “What we see is that he’s put in place a whole array of worrying mechanisms to interfere with the process and, at a minimum, to claim afterwards that the election was flawed, so the results are not valid.”
McCleary and Medish describe the Trump administration strategy as one of keeping all options open. These include preventing people from voting, intimidating voters, and even targeted challenges aimed at particular races to prevent certain members of Congress from being seated. They caution that the administration learned many lessons from their mistakes in the 2020 election, and are better prepared this time to control the narrative and to act quickly to intervene in races. As McCleary explains, “This time I think they’re preparing the public for the case that they will have to make, and the election deniers, who are now in key positions, will be part of that communication strategy.”
Another concern is the amount of executive power that Donald Trump possesses. There are old tools such as The Insurrection Act or Article II of the US Constitution that could be invoked and other new ones such as the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which targets anyone deemed to be anti-Christian, anti-capitalist or anti-fascist. Their warnings are a call to action, as Hedges concludes, “We’re saying that it is this serious. And I think if Trump manages to essentially shut down these elections, there’s no exit.”
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Transcript
Chris Hedges:
The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope, should the elections be rigged or stolen, is probably nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, I expect we are doomed. There will be no exit.
If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They’ve already seized ballots from previous administrations. The US Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data. Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republicans. Federal ID and citizenship document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.
Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress, will be deployed to or near polling stations, which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, or charged with belonging to Antifa will be intimidated and blocked from voting.
The Republican majority in the House, regardless of the vote, will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the electoral college, and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seated by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices. Trump, who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost, ruminates openly about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
When Vladimir Zelensky, whose presidential term ended in May 2024, informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying during the war you can’t have elections. So, let me just say three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. Oh, that’s good.”
Trump told the New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators, which allow election boards to post results on election night. Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.
Joining me to discuss the mechanisms the Trump administration is cementing into place to invalidate or rig the midterm elections is Joel McCleary and Mark Medish, who wrote a series on the Trump efforts to fix the upcoming elections in The Spectator titled, “Dancing in the Dark.” Let’s begin with you, Mark. I thought the series was very illuminating and very well done and important reading, because you just laid out all the tools that the Trump administration is employing or plans potentially plans to employ to make sure the Democrats are denied a victory. And I’ll let you begin with some of that, Mark.
Mark Medish:
Thank you very much, Chris. Great to be with you. I think the adverb you just used, potentially, is very important because while it’s true that these mechanisms have been put in place and some of them have been tested, we don’t know how far this will go. And that’s really key to the picture here that the Trump strategy is one of optionality, of keeping options open, of putting a question mark on the election process, the holding of the election, the counting of the votes, the certification of the results. He’s keeping his options open. I would say he has sort of an ambivalent attitude towards elections. He would love to win them free and fair, but he’s quite aware that he might not be able to do that. In fact, the polls for the midterms look pretty bad for his team. And so, what we see is that he’s put in place a whole array of worrying mechanisms to interfere with the process and, at a minimum, to claim afterwards that the election was flawed, so the results are not valid.
So, he’s trying to lay the predicate for that at a minimum. But it could go much further. And I think you spelled out some of the scenarios. And again, I would emphasize ‘potential’. We’re talking about risks. Joel and I really approach this as risk analysts. We used to analyze foreign countries this way in terms of political risk. And I think the tragedy for America is we now have to turn that lens inward. And where America used to be able to take for granted that we knew how to hold elections, and we do know how to hold elections, suddenly that’s being called into question by the people at the very top of our government, led by Mr. Trump himself. So, it’s an atmosphere of uncertainty and chaos and confusion. That is the foundation that’s being laid.
Chris Hedges:
I think it’s almost certain that at the very least, if he loses, he will declare fraud. And then the question is how far is he willing to go? I’ll go to Joel in a minute, but Mark perhaps you can just begin to lay out for you and Joel some of your most important concerns about interference, whether it’s purging the voting rolls. I mean you talk in your article about the ability to in essence declare martial law, but let’s just begin to tick through some of those mechanisms that may be employed by the Trump administration.
Mark Medish:
Well, we’ve seen the attempts to curtail the mail-in vote. And courts were divided on this, but finally basically the Supreme Court shut that effort down now, but the damage was done because it sort of laid this foundation to claim that there’s something wrong with mail-in ballots. And the ultimate test will be how those ballots are canvassed at the election and after the election. Will they be in fact counted by clerks or not?
We’ve seen attempts to seize voter rolls. We’ve seen the FBI investigating the Georgia election apparatus to try to seize the ballots from the 2020 election because they’re still disputing that. And so those things are all underway.
Could it escalate to the presence of police forces, even military forces around polling places, which is something not permitted under US law because it can intimidate voters, obviously? Could that be coming? I think yes. That would be a really bad thing. Could it go further if there is unrest over, heaven forbid, yet another ICE shooting somewhere. And that that unrest close to the election is used as a pretext to say that a proper election cannot be held in the context of civil disobedience.
That’s the pathway to the nightmare scenarios that you were indicating that could culminate with invoking the Insurrection Act, which we’ve heard of before around Lafayette Square. That’s a delegated power that the president has. Obviously, it’s a statutory power delegated by Congress, Insurrection Act. Even more extreme would be declaration of an emergency using Article II powers, the inherent sort of national security powers of the president.
And here I would say the darkest scenario would be some kind of melding of an international crisis with a claim that we just can’t hold an election because of a war somewhere. And the fact that this president, who campaigned against forever wars, is now so casual about starting them, should raise alarms because anyone who can talk casually about annihilating any other country, he mentioned that in reference to Iran in a tweet. Well, if he’s willing to do that, annihilate a civilization, what might he be willing to do in an election process? I think that’s where the big fears are.
But, and here’s the but, Trump is also known to ‘taco’, to bail out at the last minute. And so that’s also a possibility here we have to keep in mind. His leadership style is one of rope-a-dope. Always keep folks guessing, and he’ll keep the options open and decide how far he goes at the at the eleventh hour, basically.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk a little bit about the deployment of federal forces, which you and Mark raise in your article, the ability of the Trump administration to unilaterally, in essence, through emergency powers, declare martial law in times of what is in the eyes of the administration determined to be a domestic crisis. There have been news reports that people around Trump are already encouraging him to consider declaring martial law. So, talk about that ability that Trump has.
Joel McCleary:
So, let me step back for a second. I think one of the great fears I have is that people think that the November election is the war, as I was saying earlier, and it’s not. You have a series we have an election, we have January third, and then we might have 26 months of an administration. And so, this is more like a chess game where you have a leader who has amassed more powers than any other president since maybe Roosevelt during the war, and he has many chessboard pieces on the chessboard, and that’s the optionality that Mark is talking about. And most people don’t realize how extreme those options are.
Now, the whole question of whether you can deploy troops is a complicated one. And it’s enhanced by the fact that they have declared that under NSPM-7, which is a document that most people don’t discuss and should, because of the operational plan that’s been laid out, and which was discussed with the 90 generals and admirals a few days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Since we’re looking at ‘terrorist events’, it implies once you declare someone’s a terrorist, you then unleash all these powers that have emerged since 9-11 by Democrats and Republicans. So, you can use NORTHCOM, and it’s been discussed, if it’s so-called a ‘terrorist action,’ that opens up a lot of possibilities. Ideally the military doesn’t want to do that. It becomes extremely complicated. And as it almost did when Black Lives Matter was protesting out in front of the White House, it’s an option that the troops themselves probably don’t want to do. It wasn’t just Millie that was nervous about that. I think there were advisors who felt that the 82nd Airborne was not the racially defined 82nd Airborne than it was in let’s say in 1968, which we all lived through. So, the loyalty of the troops can become an issue. And also, in massive civil disorder, you have to rely on fear, but you don’t really have the manpower that would be needed. So, in my view, it’s a last resort.
I don’t know if Mark agrees with me on that, but he’s just got too many other tools that he can use. And some of them people don’t look at. For example, the executive order on foreign involvement seems namby-pamby to a certain extent, because if you can prove foreign involvement, all you can do is impose tariffs or penalties of sorts. But the purpose of that is that the determination of whether there’s been foreign involvement happens a month after the election. And it happens over at DNI. And then a month after that, it gets approved or disapproved by the Attorney General. So, you have this space between the election and January 3rd, where so many important events occur where intervention is actually more effective than an outwardly suppression of voters.
So, I think they’re quite clever. I think they’re well organized, and I think they have many of the tools that we lay out in in “Dancing in the Dark.” They have them and they’re ready to use them. But as Mark was saying, they don’t want to use them unless they have to because I think they’re also aware of the cost of doing that. They lived through January 6th and I think if they can get through the whole process easier than that, I think that they would like to do that. Would you agree with that, Mark?
Mark Medish:
Yeah, and I think Joel raises a really important point about the calendar that we need to think of the election as not just November 3rd, not just that sacred Tuesday for the midterms. It’s the whole run up, which includes absentee voting, mail in voting, includes day of, it includes the counting afterwards, and then the whole process to get to certification, but also to work out any controversies and contests, because elections can get contested. Someone can raise a flag saying something went wrong. And that all has to get adjudicated. And it’s one thing if that’s done in good faith. Our point is it really looks like this crew would act in bad faith and try to manipulate the process to put a cloud over the election if that’s the only way they could prevent the certification of a Democratic victory on January third, an installation of a Democratic majority, let’s say in the House, which looks like where the polling is headed.
But again, Joel and I are not political forecasters. And it’s important to approach this election with two screens. There is a real horse race. Traditional American horse races are going on right now. And the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are duking it out. I hope that the Democrats are able to do well. But there’s this other screen, which is unconventional methods that could be used to disrupt the process and finalization of the election results. And so, you got to be looking at two screens, which is unnatural for Americans. The strength of our country was we were able to take for granted the operating system. We were able to trust that the system works and that all the actors are basically operating in good faith. We can no longer do that. And that’s a tragedy for the country because it saps our energy, that energy that has to be devoted to being on your guard, vigilant, worried, that saps away energy from productive activities that the country could work on social problems, could work on economic growth, et cetera. Instead, we’re going to have to kind of look inward and be worried, because we’re not confident that the election process is going to go smoothly.
Joel McCleary:
That’s a great metaphor, the screens. What I’m afraid of, because the networks might go and say, “This is a change election and the Democrats have won,” and then people are going to turn one of the screens off. And it’s in that lack of light that their strategy really, in that case, would begin to unfold.
Mark Medish:
Exactly. And that’s such an important point again, because you know, we don’t have a parliamentary system. We have midterms that could lead to a change of majority in either or both houses, but that doesn’t bring the government down. That’s not an end to the Trump presidency. So, I think the Trump White House will still be evaluating their options depending on those results. And again, he might taco and say, “Well, yeah, okay, they got majorities. I think it was invalid. They cheated. There were irregularities.” It’s the ‘they stole the election.’ We’ve heard this mantra before. And then he won’t but, will he comply with subpoenas from committees? Will he be constrained or chastened by the defeat? I don’t think so. And that’s where Joel’s point is that it’s this election and then two more years of this presidency afterwards. The game doesn’t end on November 3rd, on January 3rd. It’s a longer game here.
Joel McCleary:
And the Omar FBI thing is a warning of what’s coming. That’s not the end of it. And all these databases that have been put together under NSPM-7, and they’ve threatened to arrest Kelly and people on all kinds of charges and they have not been very successful organizationally. But now with the task force of NSPM-7, they are much better organized, and the targets could become the elected officials themselves. So, we’re just starting.
Mark Medish:
And let’s clarify NSPM-7, National Security Presidential Memorandum Seven, which was issued, I guess what, Joel, September of last year?
Joel W McCleary:
Yeah, it was right after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Mark Medish:
But this is the one that identifies the threat of Antifa, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-American activity, possibility of fifth columns operating in America, anti-terrorism. The strategy is to create the impression that we are threatened by enemies within, that the political debates are not regular debates, these are terrorist activities. That’s extremely dangerous because it suggests a preparation to investigate political adversaries and prosecute them, possibly.
Chris Hedges:
Can you talk about Hegseth’s announcement that he is going to use military resources to prevent foreign intervention in the elections and the significance of that? Why don’t you address that, Mark?
Mark Medish:
Well, again, this is the MO. They make a kind of assertion by implication that there’s this threat. There could be foreign meddling in the election. What form could that take? Maybe hacking, somehow interfering in the electoral infrastructure. And what he, I guess, is saying is this may necessitate a military response, that the military may have to take action to protect the election infrastructure. That’s quite worrying, right? We just haven’t had that concern in the past. Why should we have it now? What is he really talking about? I mean, there are a lot of challenges and flaws in our country. The holding of elections has not been one of them. It really hasn’t.
And again, Trump won the 2024 election. He won the 2016 election. But what? So, then he’s saying the ones he loses are the troubled ones. Those are the ones where there are fifth columns and four interventions, but the ones he wins are okay. No. I mean, we actually know how to hold elections. But I guess the Secretary of Defense (War) is saying that the situation is so grave that we may need a military intervention into the domestic election process. That’s really scary.
Joel McCleary:
We should not ignore statements that have been made about Georgia. Remember, he has made a statement that actually the two sitting senators are not legitimate and shouldn’t be sitting. They’ve had 200 FBI agents down there combing through everything. So, those are not idle statements. And so, the whole of government effort has already been targeted on this executive order and it is a very big piece on the chessboard that could be played.
Chris Hedges:
Joel, I want to ask you about disenfranchising voters. The League of Women Voters has warned, this is a quote or rough quote, that millions of voters could be disenfranchised. Where are we? Have they managed to disenfranchise? Are they in the process of disenfranchising? Where does that stand?
Joel McCleary:
Well, I had a little bit of a discussion with a major pollster on that today. If we have a massive, we meaning if the Democrats have a massive victory, these things don’t matter. But if we’re into a Kennedy-Nixon kind of election where a few votes really count, then these matter. I’ve been very worried that a lot of our polling is built on past election results. But are we factoring in that there have been all kinds of new restrictions put on student voters in a place like New Hampshire where you have a huge percentage of the vote that is student? In North Carolina? Traditionally the big universities, and they voted, if you were in UNC, you went to a polling place there. And in many states, you could use your identity card that you were a resident of that university. Well, a lot of that’s been changed in many different places. That is not factored into the polling data.
Now, maybe people will turn out and overwhelm that, but the fact is we don’t know. We actually don’t know whether the polling is accurate and whether they have factored in the disenfranchisement of the voter. And in “Dancing in the Dark,” that’s the first thing that we address is the question of, we call it the shrinking of the electorate. We just don’t know how to statistically measure it. It’s a factor.
Chris Hedges:
So, I want to ask both of you about the appointment of election deniers into positions within states that monitor and oversee elections – how many there are, how extensive it is, and how worrying it is. I’ll begin with you, Joel, and then have Mark respond.
Joel McCleary:
Well, there are amazing groups out there and large groups and successful groups that are looking at all these points. The organization that Mark and I formed with Gephardt and Wirth has really done a great job at looking at conventional threats and that’s part of that. And I think we’ve got a pretty good hold on what’s happening locally and that mechanism. But what do you do when an election denier is in charge of the effort and they start saying that, “Well, we think that there are too many questions here,” or that they won’t even certify their own voters out of that district or precinct or area?
And one of the problems that Trump had last time was that he didn’t jump into the game of discrediting the election fast enough. He was actually stunned. I think he thought he was going to win, and he was stunned about the results of the election. Whereas this time, Mark can speak to this, this time I think they’re preparing the public for the case that they will have to make, and the election deniers, who are now in key positions, will be part of that communication strategy.
Mark Medish:
I think that’s exactly right. If you go back to November of 2020, it really appeared that Trump believed he was going to win on election night. Late into the night, he still believed he was going to win. And when his own people finally delivered the news that it was going to be a narrow loss, he froze basically, actually for several days. And that allowed all the votes to get canvassed, counted, certified, and the major networks, including Fox, all projected Biden or confirmed Biden as the winner. They learned a lesson from that, that they need to pre-position the sabotage and subversion of the election process much more thoroughly to be ready to pull the trigger quickly.
And Chris, what you mentioned, trying to get election deniers in place at the hyper local level, that’s been part of the strategy. That’s what has worried us that across the board there’s a pre-positioning of mechanisms and avenues to undermine the election or call into question its validity. That’s what we’re seeing.
Joel McCleary:
And why is this important? On January 3rd, this becomes important because you don’t have to declare that all elections in all states have gone afoul. There are certain districts where you would like to raise questions. So, if you can raise substantial questions, meaning the state itself, let’s say the state of Tennessee or the state of North Carolina, if their election board and their election deniers say, “We have a question here and we’ve advised the governor not to certify the candidate for that election,” it puts the Congress in a very difficult situation. Congress could go ahead and certify somebody that’s not certified by the state, but then you could claim foul there too. So, this is really, it’s an area that a lot of people are working on and there are a lot of strategies and a lot of court strategies, but it’s a very big vulnerability.
Mark Medish:
And so the key point there that Joel has implied is that the houses of Congress have the ultimate authority in seating the winners of the election. So, it’s not up to courts or something else. It’s actually the houses of Congress that seat their fellow members. And that is a quirk of our system. And when people are operating in good faith, not a problem. But if they’re willing to mess with the process, could be a problem. And what do I mean by that? Messing with the process would mean putting clouds over ballots in particular districts. Say, “They’re eating the dogs and the cats,” or the equivalent of that. “There’s something wrong here.” “They’re fraudulent voters,” or “the Chinese hacked something in Fulton County” or wherever it is, and use that as a pretext for a claim that the election cannot be finalized. And that way you could potentially manipulate the majority that is seated on January 3rd in the House, let’s say.
Now let me note one wrinkle in this that’s a challenge. Ballots are unified. So, in places where you have a Senate race and district races, those are unified. So, if you’re going to contest those ballots, you’re throwing out not only the House votes, but the Senate votes in that particular case. And it varies, obviously, by locality, because not all states have senators that are up at the same time. So, it would require a bit of navigation if you want to target particular districts and ballots and not have a collateral impact on the Senate.
Joel McCleary:
They got so close on January 6th. And January 6th was post-election. January 3rd is not as big a hill to climb as January 6th was, in my view. And they lost the power struggle on January 6th because they weren’t prepared. These are the days that were lost where they weren’t planning, and also because they had Pence and also because Attorney General Barr, who understood these laws better than anybody, had been head of the OLC and understood emergency powers and all that. He went in after the report from the DNI, and when Justice was supposed to report on whether there was foreign involvement or a problem, he wouldn’t play and he resigned. He was one of the heroes actually of January 6th, believe it or not. But they learn from those mistakes, and if they want to, and this is the optionality we’re talking about, if they’re going to play that card, they are much more prepared and it’s easier, I think, in the congressional strategy than it would be the January 6th strategy, but that’s an intuition, not a factual answer.
Chris Hedges:
Do we have any sense of how many election deniers have been seated throughout these districts? Are we talking about hundreds? Do we have any idea?
Joel McCleary:
I don’t have that number, but there are organizations that know exactly and that have listed them. It’s not insignificant. Do you, Mark, know the answer?
Chris Hedges:
It’s not insignificant.
Mark Medish:
No, I don’t know the numbers, but it’s pretty clear it’s been a broad-based grassroots campaign. I mean they’ve gone hyperlocal. It’s like the campaign that was waged on school boards. A very, very locally targeted trying…
Joel McCleary:
And it’s not how many, it’s in which districts. Remember, this is all targeting.
Chris Hedges:
Right.
Joel McCleary:
You don’t need to do the whole country. We’re talking probably on the congressional one, you’re talking 10 seats, 15 seats maximum. It all depends upon the margin. But to knock out 10, 15 seats, is there going to be that kind of margin? And there are other ways to knock other folks out. So, this is the chess game. You want to do it so that you don’t create riots and problems. And everybody who’s listening to this should understand that the greatest tool that they will have is if there is violence in the street, because that will give them permission to really use NSPM-7. Everybody must stay non-violent.
Mark Medish:
That’s the gateway to the darkest scenarios.
Chris Hedges:
Do we have any sense within the Trump White House who’s coordinating all of this? Either of you.
Joel McCleary:
A sense, I don’t want to get into…
Mark Medish:
Yeah, a sense. I mean I yeah.
Chris Hedges:
Not Trump, obviously, but if there is a mastermind, do you have any sense of who it is?
Joel McCleary:
Well first of the Republicans have always been way ahead of the Democrats in terms of targeting, in terms of understanding the fundamentals of the vote. And they’ve had more money. They have better models, I think. People will question that. So, you have an infrastructure, and it’s the usual suspects and they’re smart and they’re good and they know what they’re doing. Some of them are in government. If you look at the list of people that met with General Flynn, both the government and non-government people, that would be a pretty good place to start and they’re unified. There are not any dissenters this time. And I think it’s not being directed maybe minutely by Trump, but I think Trump has a much better understanding of the whole game than people realize. I think he has a minute understanding of it.
Chris Hedges:
I mean, one would assume that it’s the whole Project 2025 core who are openly antagonistic to the open society.
Mark Medish:
I think that’s a safe assumption.
Joel McCleary:
Yeah, and Homeland Security has been purged of anybody that might, the Miles Taylors of the world are long gone. And then of course the FBI understands, and you have in the Department of Justice all the civil rights monitors that used to get involved in elections to make sure that they weren’t being stolen and people were denied their rights, that’s changed and you have a very different group, but it’s again an intelligent group and it has the data and they have a plan. Again, going back to the chess analogy, if they need to play those pieces, they know how to do it. How can you do it with the least amount of damage?
Chris Hedges:
Let me just close. I’ll start with you, Mark. I want to talk about the Democratic Party. Is the Democratic Party in your assessment aware of the precarious moment we are in and are they essentially creating mechanisms to protect the vote should these kinds of tactics be used to invalidate the vote?
Mark Medish:
Yeah, I think the leadership of the party is quite aware, both the national level and state and local levels, and there is a heightened vigilance. I mean, I think there were lessons learned after January 6th and subsequently, but there are also a lot of NGOs involved, and I think that’s really important. Civil society in America is vigilant and active.
I think the challenge for the Democratic Party is that going back to my two screens, this isn’t what they’re professional about. They do the horse race thing, sometimes well, sometimes not very well. But most of the people in the apparatus, the apparatchiks of the Democratic Party, this is not what they are focused on. This is not what they’re expert at. They try to win horse races. But this other screen that we described, the one with the unconventional threats, the out-of-the-box risks, is sort of not in their flywheel, as it were. And that’s a challenge. It can be frustrating trying to brief them and Joel and I were part of teams trying to brief not only the Democrats, but on a nonpartisan basis, all along the way for the past five or six years. And a lot of people would listen to it and say, “Well, you know, what are you really? Are you out to lunch? I’ve got to go win this election.” And we launched Keep Our Republic before January 6th. We were a small group that basically war gamed scenarios that ultimately looked like January 6th. So again, we’re in the risk modeling business and that’s not really what the Democratic Party is about. They’re not risk modelers.
Joel McCleary:
1960 changed everything. And when Nixon left after he went and met with Kennedy, this is the mythology, they said, “Okay, you did what you did in Chicago. You did what you did in Texas,” but from the 1960 election…
Chris Hedges:
Let me just interrupt that. What they did in Chicago and what they did in Texas and even what the Kennedys did through the mob was essentially steal the vote.
Joel McCleary:
Well, that’s what they thought probably.
Chris Hedges:
Well, I mean Mayor Daley was pretty aggressive.
Joel McCleary:
Yeah, and so after that, every time they got into power, U.S. attorneys were instructed to go disrupt the Democratic machinery. And it’s been decades and decades of work to go after local politicians and that mechanism. And so, the Republicans have been very aware of that and they’re sensitized to it, and so they’re built to address that, just as the Democrats, to a certain extent, started this whole issue of certification in the House when we denied the saving of a congressman from Indiana. And that’s when Cheney went to the floor afterwards and said, “Okay, this is before Florida. If that’s a game that we’re in, then we’re going to get ready.”
Mark Medish:
That was in the mid-1980s, right? But it set up 2000 and the Bush v. Gore situation, which is another important reference point. That was an accidental situation that then became seen as a strategic opportunity. So, the hanging chads and all that.
But what that kindled in the imagination was if you can mess with an election at state and local levels and create enough uncertainty and doubt, and then if you can have a cooperative Supreme Court backing you up at the end, you’ve got some tools at your disposal to manipulate election outcomes.
Chris Hedges:
Well, that’s what Bush got appointed by judicial fiat president, in essence. They stopped counting in Florida.
Mark Medish:
Correct. The Supreme Court stopped the counting. Correct.
Joel McCleary:
And they were ready for it. They were prepared.
And that’s as a party I think we’re getting more prepared. I mean I think there are a lot of people that are getting more prepared, but we also don’t have, the party doesn’t have, the resources that they have right now. So, it’s going to take a generation to get ready for the kinds of threats that are ahead.
Mark Medish:
And I’ll say I feel nonpartisan. I feel orphaned by the parties. I mean, I would happily vote for centrist Republicans who are committed to the traditional American operating system. But I think that’s what’s at risk right now is we’re seeing movement style politics, populist, cynical, committed to holding on to power at almost any cost, that is putting in peril the American political system and culture that was built up over generations by accretion.
Joel McCleary:
Keep our Republic, it’s probably 50 percent Republican judges, former governors, and this is a cross-party movement. And that’s what I hope reemerges after this election is that we can really build on that in both parties.
Chris Hedges:
Well, let us all take the example of the Indians who have, after Modi invalidated 130 million, purged 130 million people from the voter rolls, they took to the streets. Let’s hope we don’t go there. I don’t think any of us are predicting we’re going to go there, but we’re saying that it is this serious. And I think if Trump manages to essentially shut down these elections, there’s no exit.
So, it’s that grave. Thanks Joel. Thanks Mark. It’s a really smart article. It’s in The Spectator, “Dancing in the Dark.” It’s a series, but it’s really worth reading. You did your research. And I want to thank Milena and Max who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.
Host
Chris Hedges
Executive Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Margaret Flowers
Transcript:
Margaret Flowers
Crew:
Milena Soci