Trump’s Election Crackdown Has a Problem: Voters Are Fighting Back

0:00Hey, everybody, it's Tim Oof in the Bullwark. I was on Deadline White House with the Cold Wall S. Alex Wagner and Mark Elias. We covered a wide variety of things. There was laughing and tears and anger. We touched all of the emotional touchdowns. But at the beginning, we talk about the midterm convention that Trump is putting on. That I've like not been talking about that much because it's so stupid. And I'll deal with it when it happens. But I don't think it's going to do anything to help them. It might actually harm them. We get some analysis on that. We talk a little bit. I should have mentioned Joe Partico and my colleague, who are great newsletters earlier this week, about all the ridiculous excuses for publicans are making for now. Why don't we go to that? So we go sign up for that at the Bullwark.com press pass. Then we talk more about the Pierre Bell tragedy, which, you know, I get mad or mad or about as we chat. And usually we do these videos. We usually just show my comments from cable. But I do want to play a little bit of Alex Wagner's comment. I get really locked in on the unfairness.

1:04And, you know, I just, unfairness is something that really grates at me. And so I start to like want to describe the process and all the ways in which it's unfair and all the way that it's bullshit. But like, that is a little bit myopic in a situation like this. And there is a bigger picture, a bigger mission of foot. So I do want to play Alex's thoughts about that. So stick around. And then we end with with Mark Lasson, the threats to the elections and the ways that we can combat that. One thing I didn't get a chance to mention, we'll put it in the show notes here. Our friends at Protect Democracy, or Amanda Carpenter, who I have on works, everybody in bass and runs it over there. They have a whole website with resources, how you can protect democracy, if you're concerned about the midterms, which you should be. So that's what we got for you. Subscribe to the feed. All right, please. Subscribe to the feed. We're moving up towards 2 million. I appreciate all you guys. Stick around for Alex, Nicole, Mark, and me.

2:04Trump's trade war with Canada is still raging. Reciprocal tariffs are expected to go into fact next week. And by the way, who cares, the American people care. And they get it. According to the latest Reuters Ipsas poll, just 14% of Americans support renaming like Ontario, like America. What's more, just 33% of Republicans are into it. Again, perhaps if Trump supporters were also being fed substance, real stuff, solutions, something more filling, they'd be more willing to go along with the stupid human tricks. But Trump right now appears allergic to anything more substantive than can fit in a true social post. Take data center construction, for example. It's a complicated issue. And it cuts across party lines in neighborhoods and communities all across the country. Many Americans, including lots and lots of Trump's most loyal supporters, currently feel uncertain or angry about them. And yet, not only does Trump lack policies designed

3:05to help Americans, including people who support him, he lacks any apparent interest in empathizing with people's fears or trying to explain his position. Just this week, he hissed on social media that communities that reject data centers would end up, quote, backwards and poor. Now, Republican lawmakers who might have a hard time passing that message on to their deeply concerned constituents are expected to drop everything, less than nine weeks ahead of a very difficult midterm, and flocked to Dallas to attend Donald Trump's so-called midterm convention. And on that particular fiasco political is reporting this, quote, a survey of more than 70 Republican candidates and members revealed that most either do not plan to attend or are still weighing whether to go, dozens more declined to share their plans. The 45 Republicans cited a variety of reasons for skipping the first midterm convention, put on by a major party in more than four decades. Some cited prior obligations like fundraisers

4:06or events in their districts that were planned before the convention was scheduled in June. Others had personal conflicts, like weddings and family events, still others raised qualms about the five-figure minimum fees that party officials want attending lawmakers to pony up. In other words, GOP lawmakers starving for something popular or anything substantive, many policy items or solutions are staring down at that now grimy bowl of gummy candy. Happy sugar high. It's where we begin the hour with two of our most favorite friends, political analysts and host of the Borg daily podcast, Tim Miller is back. Also with us, my dear friend and colleague, senior political analyst, host of the Runaway Country podcast, author of the sub-stack, How the Hell, Alex Wagner's here. Tim Miller, I took your advice. I went on a family vacation, a real one. So anyone that's mad at me, I've wanted to say for the last two weeks, text Tim Miller, but I'm happy to be back. You can blame me and reviewers can blame me. And you look great, you look refreshed.

5:07Don't you feel refreshed? I wouldn't choose that word two weeks home with my toddler with lots of things refreshing, wasn't one of them. But yes, no, it was so good. All that concentrated family time was perfect. And to come back and see that we're doing all the same things, I have like renewed wonder at what we're going to look like when they're studying the history of this time. I said this to Jim Himes in the last hour. Like when people study the history of this time, they're really gonna want to understand why no one did anything, right, like Walt Trump destroyed the military. Well, he gutted the intelligence community. Well, he turned DOJ into a personal defense law firm for himself and a political police force to pursue his enemies. And the thing with the midterms that's amazing to me is that even sort of self-survival, doesn't seem to be waking any of these guys up. Their lame excuses should be like, no, I'm not going because Trump is more unpopular than I am and I'm trying to keep it that way. I mean, what is happening to him?

6:12Yeah, look, I'm doing this on the fly. So forgive me if this is not that apt of a metaphor, but I'm just listening to you talk about the history part of this. Like, you know, a lot of like decades later when you looked back at the Nazis, there was this like the banality of evil was this thing that came up, right? That was like, oh, you thought there must have been like some really massively powerful evil force and just turned out that a lot of the evil that happened was just like people kind of going about their lives, following orders, right? And I do feel like there's a little bit of that now, but there's also just this like the fragility of our system, right? It just felt like it was much stronger than it was and that there would be much stronger counter currents to like this clownish collapse that is happening around us. And I think this is obviously, you know, you could talk to a million examples of that and we do every week and we keep coming back to the Republican Party because it's just the most shocking. You know, and there are just two examples from today. You're talking about the midterms, you know, convention. Everybody's like still going on board with Trump.

7:13They, you know, some of them are going, they got to wash their hair or whatever, they're making excuses. Oh, they had a brunch date, they can't reschedule, but like, others are going, Mike Lawler's going. It's like, well, you don't, and there's nobody that's meaningfully trying to distance. The only person that I've seen this week on their Republican side, meaningfully trying to distance from this running catastrophe is Tom Tilles, who's retiring and he said today, he thinks that P. Dexeth should resign in this very long statement, but it's like, you could have stopped P. Dexeth. You know, I told you just how, how, how lagged there was just no countercurrent, there's no backbone and all was so fragile, it all collapsed so easily. To P. Dexeth was a 50-50 vote. Any Republican that voted for him could have been the deciding vote to prevent him from being Secretary of War. It's not like this was a close call. You know, it's not like it was John Kelly or somebody who could see the argument on both sides. And he was a weekend talk show co-host with a history of a drinking problem where his colleagues that he got drunk on morning weekend television.

8:13You're gonna put him in charge of the biggest military in the world as it was a crazy nomination. And Tom Tilles gave it the A.O.K., and now he's like offering a limp tweet, saying that, well, he should resign. It's like you missed your chance on that, buddy. So I just, that is kind of the story, just kind of like the weakness of the pushback in the face of this collapse around us. Yeah, I mean, this is important, I think for us to freeze frame on, Tim, because we've described the motive as one of political fear, right? Why do they go along with Charlottesville, good people on both sides? Why do they go along with Axis Hollywood, Grab Women in the U.K., because when you're famous, they let you or whatever, whatever he said all those years ago. So the explanation sort of baked in to political pendetry is they went along with him because their base loved him so much. Well, the base doesn't love him that much anymore. And now going along with him could cost him their seats. And so I feel like we've sort of failed to update the feed.

9:14We failed to update the story. Now going along with someone who, Trump's own voters think, is stealing from them and all the grip and reaching his sons. You don't really have any experience as defense contractors, but suddenly you have a whole bunch of defense contracts. Raising the price of everything from gas to groceries, waging a war on Iran that I don't think half of his base is enthusiastic about. Lying about the condition of sailors on board aircraft carriers saying, quote, they're not there long enough when family members say they've been there so long they're under distress and under supplied. I mean, this isn't stuff that owning the lives. This is stuff that is own base despises. Why are they still on the sinking ship? Yeah. I want to get to the lie, but I do just want to kind of affirm that this is just not in our bubble that people can see this political reality. I literally just finished an interview. It'll be up on the bulwark YouTube later tonight with a poster, a mega poster named Rich Barris

10:16who predicted Trump to win the electoral college in 16 and 24. And got both exactly right. And he told me that he assesses because the mega base has been so betrayed. I'm characterizing now. These aren't our quotes, but that the mega base is so unhappy and not gonna turn out and maybe who knows? Some people voted for Trump and definitely some people voted for Trump who are gonna be voting for Democrats because they're so unhappy with all the things you just laid out. He thinks that the seats in Nebraska and Montana and Kansas, the Senate seats are potentially in play. He thinks that the Michigan and Georgia Senate seats are off the bulldozer, like the Democrats are definitely gonna win them. And this is like I predicted Trump to win in 16 and 24. It was a mission against interest and I don't know, we talked about a half hour and it could have been a segment of this show. Maybe you should have lots of our audience. He sounded indistinguishable from what you just laid out. He was just a little less happy about it. And so like they see it, like at least some of them see it.

11:18I mean, he's in their bubble, right? Like they see his posts and like they know that that's what he's saying. So then what the question is why are more people distancing? And the best answer I can come to is just like lack of personal courage. It's hard. It's hard to go against the group. You know, like at first it was political survival but then it's just like, you know what? At the end of the day, I'd rather go down to the ship, still get invited to Mar-a-Lago next year, still have them return my calls for lobbying dollars. I would rather that than take a risky move against Trump, maybe lose anyway and also alienate my cronies. Like that would be my armchair psychological analysis and what's happening. The part of it that my brain just won't accept is that it presumes that this movement is going to ride on. And I think it is so politically toxic that I don't think it's going to be a mega figure that sort carries the torch. I mean, I think if Mark Rubio thinks he's going to ride the popularity of the Venezuela raid to the presidency

12:18with gas at $4 a gallon, I think he's smoking something other than a cigarette. I mean, I think Alex, when you look at how crazy these things are, renaming like Ontario, being indifferent about data. It's also quintessential Trump to have come out against data centers. I mean, that would have been a steep ban in like no brainer, right? Would see Bannerman has said, who cares? These are like, you can take their money and screw them on data centers because the mega voter doesn't want a data center in their backyard. Because political Trump's ability to have any sense of what his own voters want is gone over. This message is brought to you by Hems. Look, we all have weight loss goals, including towards the tail end of the summer. And now it's time to actually achieve them. Weight loss by Hems is designed to support you every step of the way. With Rogovie at Hems, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight when combined with diet and exercise. It helps you regulate your appetite, eat less, and keep weight off. And Rogovie is the first ever GLP-1 pill for weight loss.

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14:20in Springfield, Ohio parked on the shoulder of Interstate 70 and that he walked into Westbound traffic and was struck by a tractor trailer. He was pronounced dead at that scene. His family tells the Washington Post it was a suicide. He was just 20 years old. His name is Pierre de Moss Bell. He had the whole world ahead of him. He was a gifted student. He was a soccer player. He was a cadet in the Marine Corps, Jr. ROTC. According to his dad, he was a college student who dreamed of studying medicine. With the Washington Post reports that quote, like an estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants, Bell had recently lost temporary protected status, which is given to people fleeing nations that are experiencing disaster. And federal immigration agents had placed an electronic monitoring device on Bell's ankle. His dad tells the Washington Post that he felt like he was quote being treated like an animal. July Bell posted on social media quote, I came to this country to pursue my education. I did not come here to commit a crime or heard anyone.

15:22Yet now I'm walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience. The Department of Homeland Security said this in a statement quote, we will not speculate about unverified claims regarding illegal aliens. The circumstances of his death remain under investigation by Ohio State Highway Patrol. Here's what Ohio Governor Mike DeWine a Republican said. This is a horrible, tragic and cold, but the New York, the Avery Green, is out of the battle of what he could do in his time and what he could contribute to his time. I think it's also important for us as a people to think about do we want this being done just to mask deportation in our name? And whether that's, do we really support that?

16:22I don't think that's the most Americans so good. Tim Miller, a little bit more about Bell. These are the outfits that he posted himself in on the first day of classes at Wright State on August 24th. Yeah. There he is on his 34th, first day of school. I want to tell our viewers a little bit more about him. He was a varsity soccer player for Springfield City School District. He graduated in May. In his Instagram bio, he wrote that he was studying physiology and neuroscience in preparation for medical school. Wanted to be a doctor. And this is who, in our name is Americans, all three of us, was targeted, started with quote, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, end quote from Donald Trump, and ended on a highway. But the patient never got an ankle bracelet. Your thoughts, Tim?

17:24It's so horrifying. A couple of different things. There is the hand up back to Hannah Rant and the Vanality of Evil here. The ankle bracelet that was put on, I'm not enough people have seen that picture, but it's massive. It's not like a tiny little eye watch. It's like a very, it's a big square block that we shackled to his leg. And so when he says, I couldn't play soccer, I was being bullied on the soccer field, but it's like he literally couldn't play soccer with this thing. So he's unable to do that. When he says that he volunteered to be in the junior ROTC, he volunteered to serve the country. And he couldn't do that because he couldn't get the uniform pants on. Because the bracelet shackled was so big. So, you know, this is a kid and you talk about like everything he did, and you just lay it out and you show his picture. I think the other thing that it shouldn't matter, but it's worth saying is that like, he didn't, he wasn't a legal immigrant.

18:25He didn't swim across the Rio Grande to get into this country. He never did anything wrong. Like he came under the Biden administration under the temporary protected status for Haitians because what was happening with Haiti, this is something we've done since the beginning of the country, people fleeing horrible situations can come here. It's the shining city on the hill. He did so through a legal process. Didn't jump anybody in line. God here came, went to school, learned English. Like did all the things that you hear the mega anti-immigration people say they want. Right? I heated up everything. So he does everything correctly. And still, like we're humiliating him and shackling with his ankle brace. But again, for no reason, even if you're gonna deport him, there's no reason for an ankle brace to let on him. He's followed every rule. He just sent him a letter in the mail and said, hey, you gotta be out of here by September 15th. He probably would have been out of there. Maybe you could have a lawyer in a field and then October 15th. Or like, that's how this was handled forever. There's no need for violence. There's no need for this kind of dehumanization. So the only other thing I do want to just say to Mike DeWine,

19:25it is nice to hear a governor say that. But if you go back to his quote, the one thing that struck me there was he's like, I just want us to take this moment to kind of think about whether we want nasty deportations. And I think for the governor of Ohio, like you're called for a little bit more than thinking right now. And it's a nice thing to say, I guess, but like these federal thugs are in your state, menacing people that are residents of your state, that are tax paying residents of your state, you could do more. Your attorney general could sue the administration. You could have a more direct confrontation with Trump. We've seen other state governors do this. And so, you know, I wasn't really that compelled by Mike DeWine's call for thinking. I wasn't either. And I guess the only thing that I thought was interesting about it is he is the ultimate politician. And even as someone that politically sort of centered to know that the politics on this are a big fat loser.

20:26Because people have thought about this. They had a chance to do that after Renanical Good was shot and killed in her car. After saying I'm not mad at you, dude, and after Alex Prety was shot, point blank, protecting somebody. And what they decided was that immigration is more popular now than it's been in, I think, like 40 years in the last New York Times poll about how people feel about immigration in general. How did it record highs? So people were not offended by this young man being this country to pursue his dreams of studying medicine, Alex. They were not. But I think, I mean, I have so many feelings about this Nicole. First off, Tim, I know you said like, he didn't need an ankle monitor. The ankle monitor and the humiliation and the dehumanization is exactly the point here. Making a young kid who's been playing by the rules,

21:27feel like a criminal is exactly the point because this is all nominally about immigration. But really, the destruction of black and brown lives is essential to the project of white supremacy and white nationalism. And that's what's going on here. And there is a reason that they take people to detention centers and give them dirty water and inadequate medical care and not enough food. It is to make them feel like they have, there is no hope for them. There's a reason that they separate parents after they've dropped their children off at the school bus stop so that their kids return home to no one in the house. It's to rip those parents hearts into and keep them apart from their children, maybe forever. I mean, there's a reason they are doing all of this. And it is not just to get people out of the country and get them to self-deport. It's not just to put Cuban refugees from Florida in countries in Africa to make them disoriented. It's to destroy their lives. And that's exactly what's happened here. And I know that Mark Wayne Mullin and Stephen Miller would never own this. But that's an essential part of the broader project,

22:27which is to bleach the country. And like, no one's going to come out and say, well, that's the intended effect is to have a young promising man walk out into traffic and kill himself. But they absolutely, that's part of the calculation is to make it so insufferable to be here that this country doesn't have people like that in it anymore. And I would say, I spoke to a Haitian nurse who has been here since she was five years old with a child that was born here in America who got the same deportation notice to ask these people to return to Haiti is unfathomable. They have no relation to the country. It is more dangerous than it ever has been. And honestly, shame on all of us for not being in the streets the same way that we were for Alex Prede and Renee Nicole Good, just because this isn't caught on camera and this involves black people. I mean, it is really, it is a national stain on our conscience. How do we keep it in the spotlight, Alex? I mean, you're doing the right thing by putting it on national television because too often this is just a headline like a Burmese man who freezes to death outside of a Tim Hortons

23:28because he was wrongfully stopped by eyes. I mean, we let these people die and we don't talk about it. And this is the collateral damage of this policy. And it is not a policy. It's really actually a project. Can we keep talking about it here, the three of us? Yes. Okay. Are you guys just taking a round? I do want to say this because of what we've been talking about it's a flooding and if you're watching you know someone who's experiencing any sort of mental health crisis that is help available, you can call our texts 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. Rebecca, Mark, Tim and Alex, Tim, Nick Corson, the New York Times dropped this story this afternoon. I'll read some of it to you. Trump administration begins blitz to find elusive voter fraud ahead of midterms. Quote, hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been assigned to an intensive week's long hunt for non-citizens among the nation's registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud

24:29according to documents and training videos reviewed by the New York Times. Agents are scouring voter roles managed by the states and are using personally identifiable information about individual voters such as their dates of birth and partial social security numbers to look them up on those roles according to the documents. The extraordinary operation reveals the extent to which the Trump administration is searching for evidence of fraud ahead of the November elections. The government is privately calling the effort the unlawful voter initiative and is pulling agents from their normal duties, which includes investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism. So I guess a couple of questions Bill Barr called this hunt quote bullshit. And then this Trump 2.0 group, when I think Kristi Nome was in charge of DHS, went out looking for the same thing that Bill Barr called bullshit and they found no examples of this. So now this is another unit that's supposed to be protecting the country from, let me get this right, human trafficking and terrorism, looking for something that Bill Barr couldn't find

25:30and Kristi Nome couldn't find? Make that make sense. Yeah, God willing, there's no real threats to the country over the next few months. I mean, it's crazy, everything has been, and someone should have lucky. Yeah, everyone's knocking on wood right now. It's not just this, by the way, and a ton of people have been rerouted from DHS and have, yeah, positions to do. We can random immigration checks and doing perimeter on home depot raids and other nonsense. So it's happening across the board. Like, do your question from before the break? I do think there are a couple of different, like, there are different roles for dealing with these threats right now. And I think that obviously what Mark is doing is so important and like fighting this out in the courts and getting ahead of it and playing whack-a-mole. Somebody's got to deal it. I'm glad it's Mark and not me. But the other part of this role is I do think that, that if they fail in their efforts to like really rig the system, right, like if they only are able to achieve things on the margins, I like, there's an example in Texas,

26:31Talleriko is pointing out today about how, and like one of the biggest counties, there are only three places to vote, and there just isn't as much access in this blue county to voting, and so should, if there are only situations like that, I do think there can be backlash to this if it is loud enough, and there is evidence about that in the data and in the political science that sometimes voter suppression efforts fail because it draws attention, particularly in these off-year elections. And I think that is key for people in the communications business. And like I said, I saw Talleriko pushing on this today, and I think that's gonna be important for the Democrats going ahead to the fall.