← Deadline: White House
Deadline: White House
“What we stand to learn from Orban’s defeat”
00:42:45
After nearly 16 years in power, Orban lost his re-election bid, signaling to America’s far-right that the tide might be changing.
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- [00:00]
Mark Elias
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- [00:30]
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- [00:44]
Tim Miller
Hey, what's your pin?
- [00:45]
Nicole
Mm, 2538.
- [00:48]
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- [01:05]
Mark Elias
Of the nearly 200 different countries on the face of the earth, precisely one of them has an elected leader who publicly identifies as a Western style conservative. His name is Viktor Orban. He's the Prime Minister of Hungary.
- [01:17]
Mara Gay
I mean, Hungary is doing things right. They have a leader who is putting the people of that country first.
- [01:23]
Myles Taylor
One of my heroes in the world today, in addition to President Trump, is Viktor Orban.
- [01:30]
Tim Miller
Mr. President, you are on with about
- [01:32]
Myles Taylor
5,000 Hungarian patriots and I think they
- [01:34]
Mark Elias
love you even more than they love Viktor Orban. Well, I can't believe that. I can't believe that because I love Hungary and I love that Victor. I'll tell you, he's a fantastic man.
- [01:49]
Mara Gay
I love that victor. So I'm good. That did him. Hi again Everybody. It's now 5 o' clock in New York. It is difficult to imagine a more urgent question before the far right movement this afternoon, the G rated version of which is this. What the heck just happened in Hungary and elsewhere. We're going to spend the hour evaluating what certainly feels like a paradigm shift in political energy. But the conversation has to start with what you just heard those figures describe. A hand in glove love affair many years in the making between America's far right and a foreign leader. A political kindred spirit, by their telling, now so completely and unceremonious, kicked to the curb by his own people. Because any sober after action report on Viktor Orban's defeat in Hungary's election will contain answers that Republicans Here don't want to grapple with and lessons they don't want to learn. Because, as the Bulwark points out today, quote, orban was in a stronger position in Hungary than Trump is in here. Orban had been in power 16 years, reelected with super majorities in 2014, 18 and 2022. He succeeded in establishing his dominance of the political system in his 16 years in office, rewriting the Constitution, changing electoral rules, and establishing a remarkable degree of control over the courts, the media and the private sector. All of this was in the service of institutionalizing the illiberal democracy he proclaimed as his goal in 2014. Yet Orban lost in a landslide. Years ago, Tucker Carlson called Hungary a place, quote, with a lot of lessons for the rest of us, which today we agree with. It's true this afternoon, but not for the reasons Tucker described. Steve Bannon once called Orban, quote, Trump before Trump. Today, though, there's some doubt that Bannon or any of his allies are learning the right lessons. In today's postmortem. In the New York Times today, quote, Bannon suggested in an interview that Orban's loss should serve as a warning flare to the MAGA movement not to get complacent or lose touch with the issues that motivated its voters to turn out for the president, quote, you have to energize your base and they have to come with a sense of urgency. Bannon said. If you're going to go middle of the road and moderate your policies, you're just not going to have a motivated base and you're just not going to have people turn out. Bannon adds, people should not dismiss this. They should take this and redouble our efforts. That's where we begin the hour with Mifra Olivet, political analyst, host of the Bulwark Podcast. Tim Miller is back. Also joining us, former DHS chief of staff during Donald Trump's first term, Myles Taylor's back and, and voting rights attorney, founder of Democracy Docket. Mark Elias is back as well. Mark Elias, I start with you. Your thoughts?
- [04:30]
Mark Elias
Yeah. So I mean, the thing about what Bannon said that we should all be paying attention to is that there wasn't a turnout problem for Victor Orban, right? I mean, 80% of Hungarians turned out. So when Steve Bannon says that Donald Trump needs to turn out his base and shouldn't moderate like that wasn't the problem that, that, that that Orban faced, Orban faced a very high turnout election, what I'm afraid of is that once they digest this, once they realize that in fact, there is no amount of turnout that will solve the Republican problem in the midterm. They will turn to what is the animating principle of Trumpism, which is election denialism. And in that sense, it's different than Orban. Orban manipulated the election rules. Orban tried to rig democracy against the opponents. But what held the Orban coalition together was essentially nationalism and a move to the east rather than to the West. None of that is what holds Trumpism together. What holds Trumpism together is election denialism. I mean, you can be an interventionalist or an isolationist and still be welcome in the Trump camp. You can be in favor of tariffs or opposed to tariffs and still be welcome in the Trump camp. You can be pro choice or anti or pro life and be welcome in the Trump camp. The only thing you can't be, whether you are appointed federal judge or you are just a local Republican official, the one thing you can't be is not be an election denier. And so that makes Trump, I think, a lot more dangerous as we look forward, than Orban was.
- [06:01]
Mara Gay
But, Mark, that is not. I mean, that is for the power brokers in the movement. That is not a belief held among any independents or even a super majority of Republicans. It's just sort of the core feature of being a MAGA Trump supporter. Right.
- [06:18]
Mark Elias
But it also is the core strategy of the movement. I mean, this is, this is the thing. If there's one thing I have been trying to get people to understand, it is that last August, okay, August, he said that he believes that the states are his agents for counting and tabulating ballots in January. He said that I wish I had. We should have seized the ballots in 2020. He said he wished there wouldn't. There wouldn't have to be midterm elections. He said that Republicans should take over the voting. Now, that has gotten translated to be federalizing elections. But what he actually said was Republicans should take over the voting. I mean, Donald Trump is setting up the midterm elections not to be about becoming more popular. Like, he's doing nothing to become more popular. And he doesn't expect his party to focus on being more popular. He's setting up the midterm elections for him to try to rig the outcome as he did with the. Tried with the redistricting. And if that fails to just escalate and escalate and escalate. And we saw that after the 2020 election where I tried to sound this alarm and people said, mark, you're just being alarmist. And the next Thing you know, it, we, we saw the voter suppression become the efforts after the election to subvert the outcome, to try to, to try to overturn the will of the voters. And finally we had January 6th. So I just think we need to understand that Donald Trump doesn't look at Orban as something to mean that he needs to moderate. He sees the failure of Orban and as a failure of tactics about how you handle elections.
- [07:48]
Mara Gay
So what does that mean? Where are we? I mean, Orban had more years to sort of rig those elections. And I think you're probably right. If Trump is watching this on television, he's saying he didn't rig it well enough. We've still got five months to do that here. How much progress on that project has he made and where can we stymie those efforts?
- [08:09]
Mark Elias
Yeah, so I'm not defeatist. Right? Like, I don't think he's going to get away with it. I mean, my life's work is fighting him in court so that he doesn't get away with it. And, and, you know, and I think calling this out is part of, is not part of being a doomer. It's actually offering a path forward, which is that we need to be aware that what he's going to do, we need to call it out and we need to be prepared for it. And if we are, I think we're going to prepare, we're going to be, we're going to succeed. Where is he on that trail? Well, I mean, you know, we've had, let's see, we've had the seizure of ballots in Fulton County. We've had the, we've had the efforts to get ballots in Maricopa. We've had a sheriff In California seize 650 ballots. We've got the Department of Justice suing 31 states trying to get access to sensitive voter data. We've got the Republican National Committee waging litigation in courtrooms around the country. I mean, you know, we've got the SAVE act, you know, which is on. Remains on the floor of the Senate. So, so he's trying, I mean, his latest thing is this executive order to try to ban, essentially so that he could create a list of who gets the vote and who doesn't. I'm suing him in federal court over that. And we're gonna win that. But, but, like, this is gonna be playing whack a mole on these tactics moving forward. And again, it's not that we're not gonna succeed, but, boy, I think we're gonna see him try A lot harder between now and then.
- [09:21]
Mara Gay
The undeniable defeat though, to bring Tim and Miles in on this is on the vibes. I mean, this is the biggest sort of vibes blowing that you could imagine for Maga. CPAC was so braided politically and we're learning today financially. I mean, the Hungarian taxpayers were funding cpac, parts of cpac. Let me read you this from the New Republic. Hungary's new leader reveals Viktor Orban was paying cpac. Peter Mayer, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban Sunday in a landslide, told reporters Monday that the outbound leader had diverted Hungarian taxpayer funds toward financing the American Republican Conference. He noted his government will be investigating Orban's expenditures and will no longer finance CPAC or other right wing institutions abroad. Quote, I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place. It was a crime. Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view a criminal offense. And this will have to be investigated by the future authorities, including the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of Public Assets. The corruption that reaches into CPACT and Miller from the Hungarian government is a stunning new reveal.
- [10:37]
Tim Miller
It is stunning. And I just want to say at the start, I love being on with Mark for two reasons. Number one, because he's doing the work and because I get to be the optimist for once, because I am feeling good vibes today and it's only when Mark is on that I get to be the optimist on the panel. So I'm going to do it. The vibes are really good in part because of, you know, it's just an unbelievably impressive victory by Peter Mayer, what he overcame and a lot of stuff that we are talking about here in America that Trump is doing. Like Orban had already done it. The new prime minister had never done an interview in national media because Orban had taken over the media completely. So, and obviously we've been warning and talking about what's happening with the Paramount merger and TikTok and maybe CNN next and et cetera. But like it happened already in Hungary, he had to go to towns to campaign. He had to rely on independent media, which there are a lot of brave independent journalists in Hungary that were still working and the Internet. Luckily they hadn't gone all the way to North Korea. But Orban had taken over the media. Orban had tried to rig the elections. In fact, the manner in which he tried to rig the elections backfired so spectacularly that Major now has even more members in the parliament. Than he would have under the old system, because it's kind of essentially, it's a pretty decent parallel to what Trump tried to do with gerrymandering, rigging, making the midterms, and how that had backfired on him, thanks to Gavin Newsom and others, and hopefully the voters come November. So he overcame all of this, which is a massive victory. And I think that the vibes are shifting, and everybody who's in the pro liberal democracy movement should feel like they have. The wind at our city fails a little bit because of it. And then I loved that comment that he gave, that speech he gave. He gets in there. We have a lot of conversations about this, like, what happens in the future. Let's say we defeat Trumpism, Then what? And, you know, I think one of the criticisms looking back in the Biden administration is a lot. There's a lot of effort to just, hey, move forward. Let's unite the country. I understood that impulse, but, you know, the accountability part of it came later. There he was on day one in the press conference saying, no, we need to investigate them. This is corrupt, what they were doing, and we need to go after them now. And so I think that's really encouraging, and that's a model for what this could look like. And then, as you mentioned, the fact that the CPAC thing is so comically corrupt and, and just crazy. I mean, this idea that that Orban was running on this family values nationalist camp, you know, platform, and he's funding an American political conference, one run by a guy with some credible accusations of. Of sexual assault against him outside of his family. And that guy is coming to Hungary and getting a payoff from the Hungarian taxpayer in the name of nationalism and traditional values. And it's comical. And I'm hoping that another benefit of all this is who the heck knows who else they were paying? And that some of the funds for some of the MAGA groups like CPAC that were coming from foreign governments might start to dry up now. So good news across the board.
- [13:47]
Nicole
Yeah.
- [13:47]
Mara Gay
I mean, Miles, I think that one of the hardest parts of the 2.0 Trump story to give appropriate proportionality to is the corruption in plain view. Trump learned in the first term that if he does crimey things in full view, I think maybe he learned this from Rudy, or Rudy learned this from him, I don't know. But things that look illicit, and he tweets it out himself that he won't get in trouble or no one will come for him because he'll say, oh, no, I did that on Twitter, I threatened war crimes on my social media feed can't be a war crime. So it becomes difficult to quantify the corruption. But this is an old story and it's not unique to Hungary, it's not unique to America. It was sort of, it's a feature in any fall of a once seemingly fortified and immovable political force or fortress really. And that is that when it is undergirded by corruption, when it is undergirded by anti democratic policies, when it is held up almost completely, completely reliant on propaganda and lies and the lies are something coming from the leaders saying don't believe your eyes, don't believe your ears, only believe me sometimes it's just the last sneeze that knocks it all over spectacularly.
- [15:08]
Myles Taylor
That's why I'm going to strike a middle ground between Tim's optimism and Mark's cold hearted realism. And I mean that in the most affectionate way, Mark, because we need that realism. Here's the reality. He can do a lot of damage still over the next three years. He can and he is. And what happened in Hungary is not going to stop. I wish it was. I wish they were going to take a lesson from Hungary. They will not. But at the same time, the end, Nicole, it's going to come. And right now we may look a lot like Hungary as for the past few years, the media takeover, the manipulation of the justice system, the endless corruption that like you said, is crimey, it's in your face, the election meddling, all of it. But we are also going to eventually look like Hungary looks right now. Let me tell you how that jubilation you saw in Hungary the past few days in the streets, if you want to know what that is going to look like, we made a video the other week and we put it at the top of defiance.org to show what January 21, 2029 will look like when people are melting the coins with Donald Trump's face on them, when they're taking his name off the Kennedy center, when they're imploding his ballroom. But it's not just that, Nicole. It's also what Tim just said. It is how the Hungarians are announcing now there's going to be consequences, now there's going to be investigations, now they're going to reverse what happened. That will happen here in the United States. But again, the message hasn't been received. I mean, I think while we've been on the air, acting AG Todd Blanche said Americans should be happy that their president is micromanaging the Justice Department happy. So they clearly have not gotten the message.
- [16:53]
Mara Gay
You know, I also feel Mark Elias, like, we spend too much time on them, right? They're going to be what they're going to be. And someone in the last hour said, they're like a teenage boy. As a mother of a teenage boy. They're nothing like a teenage boy. They're like wild animals with instincts and impulses or badly, you know, you walk a dog in the park, they have to pee on every post because other dogs peed there. And so it's just an instinct. They have to put their pee on top of the pee that's there. That is what they do. I worry that the rest of us are so sort of underutilizing our agency. And I, and I wonder is the vibe shift. Why haven't all the law firms that did deals walked before, you know, someone with the phone and ripped them up and said, here's my deal. I no longer work for Boris Epstein or the Trump Commerce Department. Why haven't the universities that done deals said, you know what? It's year two. I'm not, you know, I'm not paying any more of my $30 million pledge to the Trump administration. We're going to work with our student body on whatever we had or that they diagnosed. Why is the capitulation ongoing?
- [17:57]
Mark Elias
Because there hasn't been a vibe ship. I mean, I hate to be the doom sayer here.
- [18:03]
Mara Gay
I feel like you should own your lane.
- [18:07]
Mark Elias
I think that Miles is basically right. I mean, the fact is that those law firms, you know, they woke up on Monday morning and, yeah, maybe the politics of Hungary have changed, but the politics of the United States hasn't. I mean, Donald Trump is still running a grifted operation out of the White House. Donald Trump's FCC chair is still on tv, you know, making threatening noises. You know what Miles just said about the Department of Justice? I mean, Todd Blanche is saying it is literally the president's duty, he said the other day, duty to get involved in directing the prosecution of his political enemies. So the truth is that, you know, I think that it is important that we take our wins where we have them. It is important that we acknowledge that a, that, that, that an ally of Donald Trump and his movement from Hungary lost. And it showed the power of people voting. And that is something we ought to, we ought to celebrate. But then we need to get back to the hard work. I mean, just before we came on the air, you know, my law firm, we want a big case for student voters in Indiana. And like that's the work of every single day that we all need to do in our own way. I mean, it's not all litigation. It's, it's protesting. It's turning out into the streets. It is, it is posting on social media. It's sharing content, you know, with your friends and your families. It's telling the truth. It's doing what you and Tim and Miles do every day. And, but I don't think, though, we can just assume that it's all going to pivot off of an election in Hungary.
- [19:36]
Mara Gay
I like this duel. I'm going to throw down with Tim Miller and have a comeback to you on the other side of a short break. There's much more on this topic because there is, there are tangible proof points today of Donald Trump's losing streak. More and more people are calling him crazy and that's not nothing. We'll talk more, though, about what it means that people now feel free to speak out against him and some of his most loyal supporters are doing so viciously. Also ahead, a major postal workers union representing 200,000 employees is now taking on Donald Trump over the issue. He falsely claims to be corrupt again and again. And that's mail in voting. We'll tell you what that means. There's new reporting on that that we'll share with you later in the hour. Deadline White House continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere.
- [20:24]
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- [21:24]
Simone Sanders Townsend
Simone Sanders Townsend and I have known each other for more than a decade, tussling over politics and policy when she worked in the White House and I reported on it.
- [21:32]
Nicole
And now we're friends and colleagues. And on our podcast, Clock it, we are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics.
- [21:40]
Simone Sanders Townsend
Clock it is where we talk about what we see and hear in the news. So you can start to clock it too.
- [21:46]
Mark Elias
Clock it with Simone and Eugene.
- [21:48]
Podcast Narrator
All episodes available now.
- [21:56]
Mark Elias
So if you were in charge of NATO, if you were, say, Joe Biden, what would your next move be in the war in Ukraine? What would you do?
- [22:03]
Tim Miller
Peace immediately. Call back Trump. That's the only way out.
- [22:09]
Mark Elias
Call back Trump.
- [22:09]
Tim Miller
Call back Trump. Because, you know, you can criticize him for many reasons. I understand all the discussion. But, you know, the best foreign policy of the recent several decades belong to him. He did not initiate any new war
- [22:30]
Mara Gay
except for when he did. Tim, when you've got your bestie basically providing the clip that proves that you are a liar to your own base. And you've got Europe's far right leaders saying, quote, the MAGAs should really stop campaigning internationally because everyone and everything they support loses the elections. That's the far right sort of. That's the new Flemish alliance party leader saying that that's the impact of Donald Trump and his movement in Europe. I think there is a toxicity to Donald Trump personally and J.D. vance personally that makes it hard to land Air Force One and Air Force Two over the next five months. I mean, I understand all the structural things and I think for Mark and Miles, who sort of stared at the, you know, the circuitry of both our elections and our homeland security and national security protections, I don't know that they'll get a good night's sleep until MAGA is sort of purged from governance and politics at every level. But I think in terms of the things that move record numbers of voters that swing an off year election 24 points in Marjorie Taylor Greene's district, these are political phenomenons and we don't have the right words to them. They're not waves, they're not swings, they're not targets. They are movements against this thing that sort of swept in and took everyone by surprise. How do Democrats and how does the pro democracy side capitalize on that?
- [24:02]
Tim Miller
Yeah, yeah, look, there's a rejection of him that is coming from a lot of different quarters within his own coalition. And that's good. And I totally agree with you, by the way. I'm not throwing any parties at my house right now to celebrate the end of maga. And there's just a ton of work ahead. He's going to do a lot of damage ahead and it's critical, as we saw in 2020, not just to defeat him and his movement, but to grind it into dust to overwhelmingly defeat it, to bring as many people as possible and so that it cannot reemerge from the ether again. Right. And I think that is then the strategic question now, how does that. How do you do that? Right? Like, how do you get as many people on board as possible? And he's helping with that. And so you start to take advantage of it. And you mentioned the war. You played the clip there from Orban. I am of the view, you know, none of us have a crystal ball, so we'll see what happens. But I think people who have already, I know that the majority of Americans are against the war have already turned against it, but I think that even that group of people is underestimating the amount of damage that's going to come at home as a result of it. I mean, like every day this blockade goes on, there are new issues that are going to arise with the supply chain, with the delivery of energy both abroad and at home. And I saw just a little news item today about how once again, now beef prices are up and they're gonna be. They're at a record high when people are trying to spend their summers going on road trips, having a barbecue with their friends, and every single thing is more expensive. And the answer is, well, we had to do this war of choice in Iran. And regular people are gonna be like, why? MAGA voters are gonna feel betrayed. People that voted for him because they're unhappy about the economy are gonna be confused and angry about the fact that he made this decision that went against the reason that forum. We're already seeing young people get off the boat. We're already seeing a lot of Hispanic voters get off the train, and it's gonna get a lot worse. There's gonna be a lot of pain, unfortunately, ahead of us. And so I think that it's important to take the opportunity to speak to all those people and to say, and for the Democrats and for others in the pro democracy movement to say clearly that we hear their concerns, we understand them, when we get back in power, we're not gonna make these stupid mistakes. We're not gonna be corrupt. We're not gonna betray them. We're gonna listen to their concerns about their personal financial interests, not what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz. And so I think that this is a huge opportunity to do that and gain credibility with those voters. And it doesn't mean that the political winds couldn't shift back or anything. Nothing is guaranteed in life, but the opportunity is here. And what we saw in Hungary is a bit of a model for how to do it.
- [26:57]
Mara Gay
I also think that what Hungary could teach Americans is about the virtues of patience and of people over power structures. I've done all this hand wringing about what's happening at CBS because I really like 60 Minutes and I really like the Sunday morning show. I interviewed Kara Swisher who was like, who cares? Let Larry Ellison burn it all down, build something better. And I mean, that is sort of this entrepreneurial regrowth spirit that I think the people of Minneapolis embodied and put on display for the world to. I think you see it in some of the successful Democratic campaigns. I think some of you were here when I pointed out that it is now the Democratic Party that has David Jelly, Mayor Mamdani Talarico and AOC in it. I mean, in terms of ideology, it's now the Democratic Party. That's a big tent. And Trump and Vance now have Elise Stefanik and the other people who you can count on one hand defending the Pope, Trump as pope or Jesus or doctor or whatever he's saying it is. And I wonder, Miles, how you sort of deepen your connection to a broad tent of Americans and say the, the country's been in some ways traumatized in the second term by Trump saying, I'm going to use DOJ against my enemies, by Trump saying, I'm going to carry out war crimes with the United States military and annihilate an entire civilization. It's like being in the car with someone you know is drunk, but we're all stuck in the car for another three years. How does that conversation on the pro democracy side happen in a way that's meaningful and that sticks?
- [28:29]
Myles Taylor
You know, I think sometimes we can get accused of being trite when we say things like people power, But I think that's absolutely right. I mean, look, let me give you the bad news. I mean, just sitting here on this panel, the four of us here, you know, Tim and his colleagues have been attacked by this president. Marco Lias has been attacked by this president. I think Mark, he had DOJ sanction you, Nicole. He said he's going to try to get you fired from this network. And he's effectively threatened to throw me in prison or have me put to death. That's the bad news. Here's the good news.
- [29:01]
Mara Gay
We're all still here.
- [29:03]
Myles Taylor
All four of us are still sitting here. None of us decided not to show up today. And in fact, millions of Americans are now doing this. Millions of Americans are standing up and saying, no, I'm not going to let the guy scare me. I'm not going to let him do this. And so, yes, in the short run, it will get scarier. In my experience with Trump, when he gets backed into a corner, he gets more vindictive, not less vindictive. He's going to do more vengeful things than less. But in doing that, he's going to do what he also always does, Nicole. He's going to defeat himself because he's going to give millions more Americans reasons to join that defiance in this country. That's how this is going to play out.
- [29:48]
Mara Gay
That's amazing. Thank you all so much for getting to the bone here. Miles, thank you for starting us off. Tim and Mark, stick around a little bit longer. When we come back, why a postal workers union is now risking what we're talking about, incurring the wrath of Donald Trump over an issue he falsely claims is corrupt. We'll bring you that reporting and a big win for the pro democracy movement to tell you about after a very short break.
- [30:16]
Simone Sanders Townsend
Simone Sanders Townsend and I have known each other for more than a decade, tussling over politics and policy when she worked in the White House and I reported on it.
- [30:24]
Nicole
And now we're friends and colleagues. And on our podcast, Clock it, we are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics.
- [30:32]
Simone Sanders Townsend
Clock it is where we talk about what we see and hear in the news. So you can start to clock it, too.
- [30:38]
Mark Elias
Clock it with Simone and Eugene.
- [30:40]
Podcast Narrator
All episodes available now.
- [30:48]
Mara Gay
There's another example to tell you about in terms of people and groups being willing to push back against Donald Trump and his policies, this time From A major U.S. postal Service union representing 200,000 employees is launching a national TV ad campaign promoting voting by mail. PBS reports to the American Postal Workers Union's advertising campaign will begin airing this week in Ohio, where union army soldiers during the Civil War cast the first mail ballots in 1864. The campaign will then move to other states. The ad ends with the message vote by mail. Keep it, protect it, expand it. And it comes two weeks after Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and subsequently bar postal workers from sending absentee ballots to those who are not on each state's approved list. Also today, a big win for voting rights in Indiana, where a federal court has blocked a state law banning the use of student IDs for voting. The ruling means that students can use their student IDs to vote in upcoming elections while the case works its way through the courts. Joining our conversation, New York Times Opinion writer and political analyst Mara Gaze here. Tim and Mark are still with us. Mark's firm, as Mark mentioned, helped secure that victory in Indiana. I'm going to come to you in a second. I just want to pull Mara into this rather raging debate we're having today about whether not really either or, but how do you see sort of the really epic tension between Trump's efforts to rig the rules ahead of the midterms and the undeniable sort of shift in political energies and fortunes of his allies and the willingness now to speak up against Trump?
- [32:33]
Nicole
Well, I'm. I'm honestly very concerned about it because I think it's increasingly clear that the Republicans, and the president in particular, are not behaving as though they have a midterm election that they are concerned about.
- [32:47]
Mara Gay
Not responsive.
- [32:48]
Nicole
They're not responsive in the same way that in normal times they would be a political party in charge would be to policies that are popular. Think about the war in Iran, not something that voters wanted. Inflation, gas price, all the things that voters hoped he would focus on, mainly affordability, that's actually suffering. And even the way he has carried out the immigration raids is very unpopular, even with voters who may have supported hardline policies. So I actually am very concerned, and I think all of us should be, that one of the only playbooks he has left is to try and interfere again with this election. We know because of January 6th and because of his interference in Georgia and in Michigan that he is willing to do nefarious things to interfere in our election system. And now he's going to be even more desperate. And I think that should alarm us now. At the same time, we do have a strong election system, and fortunately, it's a system that he isn't fully in control of. But we should be really aware of all the pressure he plans to exert because he's becoming increasingly desperate, and that's a dangerous place for us to be as a democracy.
- [33:59]
Mara Gay
Yeah, I mean, and again, enter Mark Elias, who's slugging away legally in courts against all many of these steps and many of these measures take us through the victory today.
- [34:12]
Mark Elias
Yeah, so this was a big win. You know, the state of Indiana passed a law that is very similar to the attitude that Republicans are showing throughout this country country, which is that there have been close elections that have been decided in the past in Indiana at the local level or the congressional level, where student voters make the difference. And there is a lot of student voters in Indiana that use their college IDs in order to prove that they, that they are who they say they are. I mean, after all, the Republican Party keeps saying we need voter id. And here are these students providing voter id. Well, Indiana passed a law that did nothing else other than saying you cannot use college IDs to vote. That was it. Just the entire law was you can't use college IDs to vote, period. And so we sued and today we secured a victory that blocks that law from going into effect during the pendency of the ongoing litigation. But look, this is just one of many of these kinds of lawsuits that are going on. You know, I mentioned that, you know that, that there is that the Republican National Committee and the Department of Justice are active in court. I don't think the audience really understands what I mean. There are right now 158 cases pending in almost every state. And the majority of them are brought by forces that want to make voting harder. Now that's, that is a historic right. Like if you thought about what your typical voting case involved, you know, even five years ago it was a group that was trying to strike down a barrier to voting. Right now you're average voting case is brought by a group that is trying to strike down a vote, a law that makes it easier to vote. And so, you know, we are having as the lawyers having to play sort of double duty. We are both challenging states like Indiana that are passing these restrictive laws. And like I said, it's not the only state that we've sued over these laws. And if Ron DeSantis is listening, we're about to sue you over your similar law banning college IDs. But we're also having to deal with the fact that the Department of Justice and the RNC have virtually unlimited resources and they're challenging rights to vote.
- [36:20]
Mara Gay
Yeah, I mean, Tim, if you needed any more evidence that this is not about fraud, mail in ballots are the most secure among the most secure ballots. I mean, and anyone that's voted by mail knows it's got the signatures and all sorts of measures to make sure that that's the case. I have the number here. Cases of mail voting fraud are very, very rare, accounting for only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast. About 4 cases out of every 10 million mail votes. This has never been about fraud. No one on Earth one thinks it is. But the lie persists over on Earth two.
- [37:07]
Tim Miller
It does. And I think the mail in voting attack is the thing that I think is the most alarming to me, particularly thinking about kind of the post election Period. When, you know, if there are elections that come to recounts, like throwing out the mail in ballots, you know they're going to do a full direct assault on it, similar to what we were talking about earlier. There have been some examples of their attack on mail in voting, backfiring on them because their own voters don't trust the mail anymore. And there are a lot of older MAGA voters who had relied on the mail previously. So I do think that this is important to be vigilant about. One additional thing, something that Mara said about Trump not acting like somebody that cares about the midterms. I think that that's true. I think that there's an ominous way to look at that, which is that he's planning to rig the midterms. And then I think that there's another slightly less ominous way to look at that, which is that Donald Trump doesn't care about anybody besides himself and he wasn't really planning on doing any legislation in 27 and 28. And it doesn't matter one way or another to him, you know, whether or not Sherrod Brown or John Husted is the senator from Ohio. And so it could be. I just want to offer that as a potentially slightly more optimistic look at the same analysis.
- [38:27]
Mara Gay
Right. He doesn't care. And there are also polls that show that a president is often more popular with his own party when the other party controls Congress. So there's certainly ways to self soothe if he ends up in that fate. All right, no one's going anywhere. We need to fit in a short break, but we'll all be right back on the other side.
- [38:50]
Tim Miller
I think that he's telling people what they want to hear. I don't think there's any evidence to support the gas prices are going to come down. The cost of everything has increased over the last few months specifically. And it is very frustrating when I'm struggling to put food on the table. I can't believe he's just being as arrogant as he is and not working on solving the issue. The issue is war. We're not supposed to be in wars. He promised us no new wars. Bottom line, here we are. I'm hoping he changes his tune. Otherwise I may really reconsider.
- [39:21]
Mara Gay
Brand new reporting for the New York Times bolsters what you just heard there from Trump's own voters and shows the depths of frustration Trump's most loyal supporters are feeling in the wake of what they just described, their rising prices and the war with Iran from that reporting, quote, as the war in Iran extends into its seventh week. And a truce feels increasingly shaky. Many Americans express bewilderment about a conflict that came with little warning. A new poll From Pew shows 45% of independent voters who lean Republicans say they disapprove of how Trump is handling the war. That could be a sign of trouble for Trump and Republicans in this year's midterms. We're back with Mara, Tim and Mark. I take your point about it being disconcerting that Trump isn't responsive to polls. He is still responsive to markets. He does seem responsive to outrage inside his own coalition. He came out with this absolute BS story about how he meant to post an AI generated image of himself as a physician, not Jesus, which is personally, in my personal opinion, just as, if not more insane than posting a picture of oneself as Jesus. But the things that do still get under his skin are evidenced by the all nighters he polls posting on social media completely.
- [40:36]
Nicole
And the Epstein situation Epstein files are another example of something that he's clearly afraid of. And so he doesn't want his base to collapse. There's no question about that. At the same time, I think that one of the things we have to consider is just how isolated the president is. And I've been thinking about that in recent days. This isn't a phenomenon only with Donald Trump, only with Republicans or Democrats. Oftentimes when people get into power, when they're in power for a long time, when they have personal wealth, they are completely disconnected from the everyday, ordinary lives of real people and of Americans. And I think that is part of the disconnect. He's also surrounded by donors and by other billionaires. He's thinking about his White House ballroom. And I think the spectacle of that compared with you just saw voters who are trying to put food on the table and are struggling to fill up their cars with gas, that is something that has hit in a visceral way. And I think this is also on the heels of the United States and its role in Gaza as well. And that is something that really angered independence too. So this is something Americans don't want to see. And even whatever their views, how hawkish they are or not, their views on Iran, on Israel, Americans are thinking, there's no money in my pocket to pay for basics, for food, for housing. Why are our tax dollars going to wars we don't want to be in? And that is really what's coming home to roost for him in a way I don't think he anticipated because he's
- [42:17]
Mara Gay
surrounded by rich people. Yeah, I Mean, Tim, I thought this was the case before the war manifested in the way he talks about how hot people tell him the country is. Like, the only people saying that to him are the people he sees in the buffet line at Mar a Lago. Like, those are the only people saying that. And I think this idea of sort of political isolation is where he feels comfortable trotting out his ugly plans for the new ballroom. But it gets me back to people that should be responsive to customers and people making decisions. I mean, the boycott movements, every time you open the paper, there is a new boycott movement. People are starting to feel this, and I sort of align with your rosier sense of it. They are starting to rediscover their agency.
- [43:09]
Tim Miller
Yeah, they are. I think the two things are like, Trump definitely. Trump's always deeply cared about elite opinion and recognition. You know, that was one of the many great frauds of Trump pretending like he cared about regular people. He always, you know, wanted more credit from the elites, even going back to before his time running for office. And I think maybe that's exacerbated now. I don't know if that's, you know, because, you know, death is. Death comes for all of us since, you know, as you get older, you want that recognition even more or whether it's related to him not having normal people around him anymore. It could be a bunch of things, but like that, I think it's increasingly true now. And, yeah, that's right. He wants. He wants the approval of the rich donors and businessmen around him. He wants to improve all the other heads of state. You know, he's got Bibi and MBS in his ear telling him that he can save the whole Middle East. He'll go down in history. You know, people raise statues to him. And I think that obviously he cares about that more than he cares about the guy at the gas pump complaining about the gas pump. And that's a massive political mistake for him and his movement. It was. One of the things we didn't mention about Orban earlier is that the economy in Hungary was awful, which is why it's kind of crazy to have Hungary as a model to begin with. And it's only going to get worse. Like, all this stuff is only going to expand. You think gas prices are high now, wait till August, right?
- [44:21]
Mara Gay
Margay, thank you so much. It's so nice to see you today. Tim and Mark, thank you for spending the hour with me. We're going to sneak in one more break. We'll be right back. My guest on this week's episode of the Best People podcast is the insightful and brutally honest Kara Swisher. She tells me about her latest project, where she explores the longevity craze with a healthy dose of skepticism, but also also the future of American politics. Give it a listen if we walk
- [44:50]
Kara Swisher
away from this Trump thing and say, oh, he was a unique figure and he is a unique political figure, but to say he isn't us is a real mistake. You may not agree with him, you may think he's terrible.
- [45:01]
Mara Gay
I do.
- [45:02]
Kara Swisher
But we can't pretend that he's this thing that's just a phenomena that just happened, because everything about him is inside of all of us. And the question is, which way do
- [45:13]
Mara Gay
you want to go?
- [45:13]
Kara Swisher
And that, to me is the most important thing to take away from it is what are we going to build next? What are we going to do next?
- [45:21]
Mara Gay
It is a must. Listen and the rest of the conversation is available right now. To watch on YouTube, you just scan the QR code on your screen or download the Best People. Wherever you get your podcast, be sure to let me know what you think on Instagram or bluesky. One more break. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for letting us into your homes tonight. We are grateful.
- [45:45]
Podcast Narrator
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