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This is your host, Nat Town. You're listening to An American Power Extra, a bonus episode with one of our experts designed to go deeper into the energy, military, and geopolitical stories driving the news. Take it away, Chad.
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Donald Trump keeps claiming that the elections he loses are rigged and that he is deeply concerned about election security. But his actions tell a very different story. If you look at what previous administrations actually did to protect American elections, then compare that with what Trump is doing now and what he has already done. His claim completely falls apart. After Russia interfered in this 2016 election, the Obama administration began treating attacks on our elections as a national security threat. It publicly attributed the operation to Russia, imposed sanctions, expelled Russian intelligence officers, released technical information to help defend American networks and designated election systems as critical infrastructure that needs to be protected. These designations meant that state and local election officials could receive federal cybersecurity assistance, thus protecting voter registration databases, election websites, voting systems, and ballot counting infrastructure. Now, during Trump's first administration in 2017 and 2018, two major election security organizations were established or significantly expanded. One was the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, and the other was the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also known as CISA. The bill creating CISA passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House by voice vote. It had such overwhelming bipartisan support that had President Trump chosen to veto it. Congress almost certainly had the votes to override that veto. Trump ultimately signed the legislation into law. The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force was created by Director Christopher Wray. On top of this, Congress provided election security grants that helped federal officials, state election administrators, local governments, and private voting system companies to coordinate against cyber attacks and foreign interference. The Biden administration expanded and institutionalized many of these systems, allowing SISTA to provide state and local election officials with vulnerability scanning, ransomware preparation, cybersecurity assessments, emergency exercises, and incident response assistance. The Justice Department under Biden created a task force to investigate threats against election workers, and the intelligence community established a central hub for trafficking foreign influence operations targeting American elections. Additional federal grants under the Biden administration helped states replace vulnerable equipment, create paper records, conduct post election audits, and improved both physical and cybersecurity measures. Biden also signed the Bipartisan Electoral Count Reform act, closing many of the legal loopholes exposed after the 2020 election and making it clear that the vice president cannot simply reject electoral votes because the president does not like the outcome. I listed a massive amount of things there that the Obama administration, the Biden administration, and even the first Trump administration did to secure our Elections. For all intents and purposes, by the end of the Biden administration, the United States had some of the strongest election security protections it had ever had. Despite all of this, and despite his repeated claims that he wants to secure elections, Donald Trump is now dismantling many of the very institutions designed to protect them. He is not just rolling back policies from the Obama and Biden administrations. He is dismantling election security institutions that were built across three administrations, Obama, his own first administration, and Biden's administration. That makes his hypocrisy even more striking. Some of the systems his administration is now tearing down were created or strengthened while he was president the first time around. Now, to be clear, unlike what Trump is trying to do, the Obama and Biden administration policies did not fit federalize elections or give Washington control over how states conducted them. The Constitution explicitly gives the primary responsibility for administering elections to the states. Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution states, quote, the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Elections Clause broadly, recognizing that states may provide what it called a, quote, unquote, complete code for congressional elections, including voter registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud, counting votes, duties of election officials, and certification of election returns. The President has no constitutional authority to unilaterally dictate how states administer elections, and yet Trump is trying to fundamentally change that system across the country. But something changed when we entered Trump's second term here. He got more serious. His administration froze CISA's election security work. His administration removed specialized personnel who worked directly with state and local election officials. It cut federal support for information sharing organizations that warned states about cyber attacks and helped them respond when those attacks occurred. It dismantled the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force. He weakened the intelligence office responsible for coordinating information about foreign election interference. The Trump administration gutted Justice Department teams responsible for voting rights enforcement, election crimes, and politically sensitive public corruption cases. He also removed the bipartisan leadership of the Election Assistance Commission, which is the independent federal body responsible for voting system standards, testing laboratories, and certification policies. All of that happened in roughly the span of the last 18 months. Trump claims he wants election security while dismantling the people, the offices, and the systems that actually secure our elections. But why would he do this? Well, because election security is not really his objective. Election security is his Trojan horse. It is the language Trump uses to justify voter restrictions, expand federal influence over elections and spread doubt about any outcome that threatens his power. Real election security means protecting the entire chain of voting, from the systems to the people, all the way down to the voters themselves. It means defending election workers. It means detecting foreign interference using our intelligence apparatus. It means maintaining paper records and conducting legitimate audits. It means supporting state and local election officials. But most importantly, it means accepting verified election results even when your side loses. Trump consistently undermines those things while claiming he is somehow their greatest defender. And we need to understand where this may be going before we arrive at election day in 2026 and 2028, because the best way to counter attacks on our election system is through the free flow of accurate information. As Jake Sullivan and John Finer said in a recent podcast, the Long Game, they said it is actually similar to the intelligence strategy we used before Russia invaded Ukraine. Rather than keeping the intelligence secret and trying to deal with it on our own, the United States shared that intelligence with our NATO allies and Ukraine and signaled to the world that we knew what Russia was preparing to do. So when the invasion happened, the world was already prepared to respond. We should take the same approach here. We should not wait until after an election when the country is drowning in accusations, lawsuits, conspiracy theories and fabricated evidence. You warn the people now. You tell them what to watch for. You explain the playbook before it is ever used. People need to understand ahead of time that Trump appears to be setting conditions to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterm elections and quite possibly the 2028 presidential election. So how is he doing this? Well, as I said, he dismantled institutions responsible for protecting elections. He removed cybersecurity experts. He has broken information sharing networks. He has weakened independent oversight bodies. He has replaced career officials and election lawyers with political loyalists like Bill Pulte, who has no business being anywhere near our intelligence apparatus. Despite now serving as Acting Director of National Intelligence. As I said before, he is a political loyalist to Donald Trump. That is why he has this job. The current Secretary of Homeland Security is Mark Wayne Mullen, whose only meaningful national security experience before taking that position was serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Before entering politics, he owned a plumbing business and operated a ranch. He's never served in the military. He has no background in intelligence. He has no background in federal law enforcement. His security credentials are largely legislative oversight experience, not operational experience. But he is a Trump loyalist, and now he oversees the department that includes cisa. Trump is also pressuring state election administrators and demanding access to voter registrations and voter records, as well as voting equipment Then what he's going to do is he's going to spend months giving speeches and posting on social media about how insecure the elections supposedly are. So he's going to tell people that foreign countries are interfering. He's going to tell them that voting machines cannot be trusted. He's going to tell them that mailed in ballots are being sent in by random Chinese people and not to be trusted, even though he himself has mailed in his ballot. He's going to tell everyone the voter rolls are filled with illegal voters. And then he is going to repeat those claims over and over again without providing any credible evidence. It is a Russian tactic. Keep repeating the lie until people begin accepting it as the truth. His approach accomplishes two things. First, if Republicans lose the House and potentially even the Senate during the midterms, Trump can point back to everything he has said and claim. See? I warned you. The election was rigged. There's no possible way Democrats could have won legitimately. Second, it convinces people that participating is pointless. Even if you dislike Trump, you will look at the corruption in the election system and believe that they aren't secure, that these are all rigged anyways in one way or another. Why even vote? So people stay home. That is exactly how a country, an administration, a regime delegitimizes elections. And you don't even have to prove an election was stolen. You simply spend months conditioning your supporters and those that are fence sitters to believe that the only legitimate outcome is the one in which your side wins. Then, when your side loses, you simply declare that this election could not possibly have been legitimate. Trump has already begun centering those unsupported claims when it came to Chinese interference when it comes to illegal voting, even though previous studies, court cases, and US Intelligence assessments found there was no evidence for any of that. But now, for Trump, China is the perfect political boogeyman. He can blame Beijing without confronting the far more politically inconvenient reality that Russia conducted a systematic influence operation in 2016 intended to benefit his candidacy. That Russian interference that I spoke about earlier, it really happened. It was extensive. It was designed to influence American voters, and it was meant to help Trump get elected. But that's not the foreign influence story Trump wants people talking about. Of course not. Instead, he creates an entirely different narrative centered around China. He essentially replaces Russia with China and replaces his own influence operations and supporters with that of the Democrats in order to discredit future Democratic victories. That is straight out of Vladimir Putin's playbook. But when the midterms inevitably go bad, For Trump, the danger is not that Trump has some magical button that allows him to decertify elections. That is not how our system works. Elections are administered by the states. They are certified by the states. Courts hear specific legal disputes, and each chamber of Congress ultimately judges contested elections involving its own members. The real danger, though, is, is that Trump could create chaos throughout the entire process. He could pressure state officials. He could order investigations through the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security. He could demand voter information. He could encourage lawsuits that cost states millions of dollars. He could support litigation attempting to stop vote counting, reject ballots, or delay certification. We may even see Republican candidates refuse to concede at Trump's direction. After all, Trump himself never conceded the 2020 election. In the end, Trump could argue that federal intervention is necessary because states supposedly failed to secure their own elections. Eventually, all of this could end up before the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump. Now, that does not guarantee the court would rule the way he wants, and we've already seen the instances where that is the case, where they have ruled against his interests. But it does mean we should take the possibility of a coordinated legal and political strategy seriously, instead of simply assuming every institution will automatically hold. Thankfully, state and local officials are already preparing for confrontations like these. The nature of our election system is such that it is highly distributed and highly decentralized. That makes it extremely difficult to influence or challenge every election across the country. That being said, from a political standpoint, he really only has to challenge a handful of swing states. But how are the states preparing if they know what's going on? Well, election administrators in those states have reportedly begun discussing how to respond to federal subpoenas, demands for voting equipment, or even the presence of federal agents around polling locations. If you start seeing ICE agents deployed around polling places, that is not remotely within ICE's normal mission. Nonetheless, governors, secretaries of state, county clerks, judges, election workers, and state legislators all have responsibilities within the system. Some are Democrats, some are Republicans, and many local election positions are rightfully nonpartisan. Defending elections cannot become purely a Democratic issue. The fact that so many Republicans are ignoring these concerns simply because Trump is distracting them with these shiny Chinese jiggling keys hanging over their heads is extraordinarily problematic. Republicans who genuinely believe in a constitutional government should oppose efforts to politicize election security, intimidate election officials, or overturn legitimate election results. Instead, we're watching Republican after Republican appear before Congress unable to simply admit that Donald Trump lost in 2020 because they're terrified of a Trump tweet or a truth social post ruining their political careers. This is bigger than that. This is about preserving a system in which either party can win and both parties are required to accept a lawful loss. In recent decades, Democratic presidential candidates have ultimately accepted certified election outcomes after exhausting the available legal process. There's only so much an ordinary citizen can do before an election, but that does not mean we are powerless. Pay attention to what is happening in your state. Know who your secretary of state is. Know who your county election officials are. Reach out to them. Demand that they maintain free and fair elections while rejecting federal encroachment on responsibilities that the Constitution primarily assigns to the states. Follow local reporting on elections, not just national political commentary. Support election workers. Volunteer as a poll worker or an observer through legitimate local programs. If things begin going sideways, demand paper records, professional audits, and transparent procedures. Or just whip out your phone and start filming it. And when elected officials make claims about fraud or foreign interference, demand evidence. Write them. Call them. Show up at their press conferences. Don't accept speeches. Don't accept tweets. Demand actual evidence. The Mueller investigation, for example, resulted in numerous criminal convictions and documented extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election. If officials are making similarly serious claims about election interference today, they should be expected to provide similarly credible evidence. Then keep talking about it. Public attention matters. This needs to remain part of the public conversation so that we can recognize and counter attempts to undermine confidence in our elections. Donald Trump says our elections are dangerously insecure while systematically weakening many of the institutions that were created to help them. Stays secure. He's not repairing the guardrails, despite what people like Jesse Waters claim. He is removing the guardrails and then warning everyone that the road is dangerous while insisting that he is the only one that can safely drive us through it. But if we wait until after the election to realize that he has successfully compromised public confidence in the process, it will already be too late. The public needs to recognize this playbook now, before the election, before the allegations begin, before the lawsuits are filed, before millions of Americans are told that any election Donald Trump doesn't like must have been stolen.