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

crown coins winning never sounded so good what would you do if you won big at crown coins casino real people win real prices every single day hi this is michael from georgia i won 40k and finally renovated my home visit crown coins.com sign up in seconds enter code crown and get a free lucky wheel bonus you may win up to 10 000 sweeps coins crown coins.com that's c-r-o-w-n coins.com no purchase needed code valid for new users only void were prohibited by law 18 plus terms and conditions apply hey everybody it's timo from the bulwark i was on deadline white house with nicole wallace alex wagner and mark elias we covered a wide variety of things there was laughing and tears and anger you know we touched all the emotional touchstones but um at the beginning we talk about the uh midterm convention that trump is putting on that i've like not been talking about that much because it's so stupid um and uh you know i'll deal with it when it happens but i don't think it's gonna do anything to help them you actually harm them we get you have some analysis on that uh we talk a little bit um i i should have mentioned joe pertico and my colleague uh their great newsletter earlier this week about all the ridiculous excuses republicans are making for not wanting to go to that so go sign up for that at the bulwark.com press pass then we talk more about the pierre bell tragedy um which you know i get madder and madder about as we chat and and usually we do these videos we usually just show my comments from cable but um i do want to play a little bit of alex wagner's comments as well because i get really locked in on the unfairness and you know i just i really 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 to bigger mission afoot so i do want to play alex's thoughts about that and i'll see you in the next one bye bye about that so stick around and then we end with with mark elias and the threats to the elections and the ways that we can combat that um one thing i didn't get a chance to mention uh we'll put it in the show notes here our friends at protect democracy or amanda carpenter who i have on works my buddy and bass and uh runs it over there uh they have a whole website with resources how you can protect democracy if you're concerned about the midterms um 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 two million i appreciate all you guys uh stick around for alex nicole mark and moi trump's trade war with canada is still raging reciprocal tariffs are expected to go into effect next week and by the way you know who cares the american people care and they get it according to the latest reuters ipsos poll just 14 percent of americans support renaming lake ontario lake america what's more just 33 percent 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 loyal supporters currently feel uncertain or angry about them and yet not only does trump lack policies designed to 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 own communities are now in a position to say that they're not going to be able to protect their own communities they're deeply concerned constituents are expected to drop everything less than nine weeks ahead of a very difficult midterm and flock to dallas to attend donald trump's so-called midterm convention and on that particular fiasco politico 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 candidates who are not going to be able to participate in the midterm convention they also 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 or events in their districts that were planned before the convention was scheduled in june others had personal conflicts like weddings and family events and still others raise 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 and not being able to pay the rent or anything substantive any 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 bulwark 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 wanted to say for the last two weeks text tim miller but i'm happy to be back you can blame me and viewers can blame me and you look great you look refreshed don't you feel refreshed um i wouldn't choose that word two weeks home with my toddler was um lots of things refreshing wasn't one of them but yes no it was so it was so good all that concentrated family time was perfect um 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 going to want to understand why no one did anything right like while trump destroyed the military while he gutted the intelligence community while 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 they're not going to be able to do anything about that they're not going to be able to do anything about it they're not going to do anything about it they're not going to do anything about it they're not going to do anything about it they're not going to do anything about it even 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 what is what is what is happening tim yeah uh 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 that came up right it was like oh you thought there must have been like some really you know massively powerful evil force and it 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 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 like it just it felt like it was much stronger than it was and that there would be much stronger countercurrents to like this clownish collapse that is happening around us and um and i think obviously you know you could talk give a million examples of that and we do every week and it's we keep coming back to the republican party one because it's just the most shocking uh you know and they're just two examples from today you're talking about the midterms you know convention everybody's like still going on board with trump they you know some of them aren't 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 not going like michael aller's going why are you going and there's nobody that's meaningful to them and they're not going to be able to do anything about that so i think it's really important that we try to distance the only person that i've seen this week on the republican side meaning we try to distance from this running catastrophe is tom tillis who's retiring and he said today that he thinks that pete eggstaff should resign in this very long statement but it's like you could have stopped pete eggstaff you know i'm talking just like how how how lack there was just no countercurrent there's no backbone it all was so fragile it all collapsed so easily to pete eggstaff 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 like it was john kelly or somebody or you could see the argument on both sides and he was a weekend talk show co-host with a history of a drinking problem where you know his colleagues said he got drunk on morning weekend television you're going to put him in charge of the biggest military in the world as it was a crazy nomination and tom tillis gave it the a-okay and now he's like offering a limp tweet saying that that uh 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 you know kind of 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 access hollywood grab women in the you know what because when you're famous they let you or whatever whatever he said all those years ago so the the explanation sort of baked into political punditry 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 them their seats and and so i feel like we've we've sort of failed to update the feed we failed to update the story now going along with someone who trump's own voters think is stealing from them and all the grip enriching his sons who don't really have any experience as defense contractors but but suddenly have a whole bunch of defense contracts, raising the price of everything from gas to groceries, waging a war in 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 undersupplied. I mean, this isn't stuff that, you know, owning the libs. This is stuff that his own base despises. Why are they still on the sinking ship? I want to get to the why, but I do just want to, like, kind of affirm that this is just not in our bubble, that people can see this political reality. I, like, literally just finished an interview, it'll be up on the Bulwark YouTube later tonight, with a pollster, a MAGA pollster named Rich Barris, who, like, predicted Trump to win the Electoral College in 16 and 24, and got both exactly right. And he told me that he assessed. Because the MAGA base has been so betrayed, I'm characterizing now, these aren't true quotes, but that the MAGA base is so unhappy and not going to turn out, and, you know, maybe, who knows, some people that voted for Trump, and definitely some people that voted for Trump are going to 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 board, like the Democrats. The Democrats are definitely going to win them. And this is a guy that predicted Trump to win in 2016 and 2024. It was an admission against interest. And, I don't know, we talked for like a half hour, and it could have been a segment of this show. Maybe you should have watched tomorrow. I mean, he sounded indistinguishable from what you just laid out. He was just a little less happy about it, you know? And so, like, they see it. Like, at least some of them see it. I mean, he's in their bubble, right? Like, they see his posts, and they know that that's what he's saying. So then the question is, why aren't more people distancing? And the best answer is. 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 with 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 of 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 MAGA figure that sort of carries the torch. I mean, I think if Marco Rubio thinks he's going to ride the popularity of the Venezuela raid to the presidency with 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 centers. It's also quintessential Trump to have come out against data centers. I mean, that would have been a Steve Bannon, like, no-brainer, right? Steve Bannon would have said, who cares? These, like, you can take their money and screw them on data centers because the MAGA voter doesn't want a data center in their backyard. Like, his political, Trump's ability to have any sense of what his own voters want is gone over. This message is brought to you by HIMSS. 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 HIMSS is designed to support you every step of the way. With Wegovy at HIMSS, 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 Wegovy is the first ever GLP-1 pill for weight loss, so there's no needles needed, and you know I don't like needles. Through HIMSS, everything happens online. 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The Ohio State Highway Patrol tells local media that on Monday, a Haitian immigrant living in Springfield, Ohio, parked on the shoulder of Interstate 70, and that he walked into westbound traffic, 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 DeMoss 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 Junior ROTC. According to his dad, he was a college student who dreamed of studying medicine. But the Washington Post reports that, quote, like an estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants, Bell had recently lost temporary protection, which is given to people fleeing nations that are experiencing disaster. Federal immigration agents have 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. In 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 hurt anyone. Yet now I'm walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my lap. A 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, horrible, tragic, brutal world. I'm not up to it. You knew him. He had great dreams about what he could do in this country and what he could contribute to this country. I think it's also important for us as a people to think about do we want this being done, this mass deportation, in our name? And whether that's, do we really support that? I don't think that's what most Americans support. 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, August 24th, 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 a varsity soccer player and that he was studying physiology and neuroscience in preparation for medical school. He wanted to be a doctor. And this is who, in our name, as Americans, all three of us, was targeted. It started with, quote, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, end quote, from Donald Trump, and ended on a highway with a Haitian immigrant in an ankle bracelet. Your thoughts, Tim? It's so horrifying. A couple of different things. You know, there is the back to Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil here. Like, the ankle bracelet that was put on him, I don't know if people have seen that picture, but it's massive, right? It's not like, you know, a tiny little eyewatch. 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, it's like he literally couldn't play soccer with this thing. You know, so he was unable to do that. When he says that he volunteered to be, he was 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 shackle 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 shouldn't matter, but it's worth saying, is that, like, he didn't, he wasn't an illegal immigrant. He didn't swim across the Rio Grande. He 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. Got here, came, went to school, learned English. Like, did all the things that you hear the MAGA anti-immigration people say they want. Like, he did everything. So he does everything. He does everything correctly. And still, like, we're humiliating him and shackling with his ankle bracelet. Again, for no reason. Even if you're going to deport him, there's no reason to put an ankle bracelet on him. He's followed every rule. If you just sent him a letter in the mail and said, hey, you've got to be out of here by September 15th, he probably would have been out of there. Maybe he would have got a lawyer and appealed. And then October 15th, like, that's how this was handled forever. There's no need for violence. There's no need for this, you know, kind of dehumanization. So the only other thing I do want to just say to Mike DeWine, it is nice to hear it go. say that, but if you go back to his quote, the only thing that struck me there He's like, I just want us to take this moment to kind of think about whether we want mass 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 taxpaying 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. Because people have thought about this. They had a chance to do. They had a chance to do that after Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed in her car. After saying, I'm not mad at you, dude. And after Alex Preddy 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 had record highs. So people were not offended by this young man being in 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 feel like a criminal is exactly the point. Because the destruction. 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, you know, 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. It's to rip those parents' hearts in two 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, you know, 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 Mullen and Stephen Miller would never own this. But that's an essential part of the broader project, which is to bleach the country. And, like. 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, you know, 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 Preddy 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 because he was wrongfully stopped by ICE. 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. All right, you guys are sticking around. I do want to say this because of what we've been talking about. It's upsetting. And if you're watching and you know someone who's experiencing any sort of mental health crisis, there is help available. You can call or text. 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 weeks-long hunt for non-citizens among the nation's registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud. According to. Documents and training videos reviewed by the New York Times, agents are scouring voter rolls 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 rolls, 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 Noem 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 and Kristi Noem 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, as crazy as everything has been in some ways, we've been 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 FBI positions to doing random immigration checks and, you know, doing perimeter on Home Depot raids and other nonsense. So, this is happening across the board. To your question from before the break, I do think there are a couple of. 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 do it. I'm glad it's Mark and not me. But the other part of this role is I do think 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. And, like, there's this example in Texas, Tallarico is pointing out today, about how, in, 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 as there should be. 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. I saw Tallarico pushing on this today, and I think that's going to be important for the Democrats going ahead into the fall. 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