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3570 - Nationalize the Defense Industry; GOP's War on Voting Rights w/ Julia Gledhill & Ari Berman - The Majority Report with Sam Seder | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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3570 - Nationalize the Defense Industry; GOP's War on Voting Rights w/ Julia Gledhill & Ari Berman

The Majority Report with Sam Seder

Thu Aug 28 2025

It's an Emmajority Thursday on the Majority Report. On today's Show: After another school shooting the right-wing media plays defense for the gun lobby. Kristi Noem wants us to know that the shooter was a transgender woma Co-Host of the , Julia...

Summary

The Majority Report with Sam Seder – Episode 3570 Summary

Date: August 28, 2025
Host: Emma Vigeland (filling in for Sam Seder), with Sam Seder and guest hosts
Guests:

Julia Gledhill (National Security Reform Program, Stimson Center; co-host, Undiplomatic podcast)
Ari Berman (National Voting Rights Correspondent, Mother Jones)

Episode Overview

This episode centers on two interlinked themes: reforming the U.S. defense industry—including the radical proposition of its nationalization—and the ongoing Republican attacks on voting rights and democratic mechanisms. Through detailed interviews with Julia Gledhill and Ari Berman, the show unpacks both the hidden inner workings of defense sector profiteering and the systematic assaults on election fairness, with both conversations situated in the rapidly shifting political context of Trump’s second term.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mass Shooting in Minneapolis – Political Response and Right-wing Deflection

The episode opens with coverage of another tragic mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, resulting in child casualties and sparking renewed debate on gun policy.
Emma Vigeland highlights broad patterns in mass shootings:

“This is a policy choice… the numbers on mass shooting demographics: of the 172 individuals who engaged in public mass shootings… 97.7% were male… Trans individuals are not overrepresented in mass shootings as perpetrators at all.” (17:00)
Detailed exploration of the right-wing media’s strategy to scapegoat marginalized groups (notably trans people) for America's gun violence, despite clear data to the contrary.
Notable quote:

“Other countries have trans people. They don’t have kids being slaughtered in schools. It’s because we allow people to buy this. This person had an AR-15. It shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t care about permits. Fuck you.” (10:36, Matt)
Broader critique of political inertia despite clear polling in favor of gun reform.

2. Nationalizing the Defense Industry – Interview with Julia Gledhill

Segment starts: 24:27

The Setup

The Trump administration’s moves to, in effect, transfer public funds to private defense contractors via stock “equity” purchases, described as “crony capitalism.”
Howard Lutnick (quoted via CNBC) states:

“Lockheed Martin makes 96% of their revenue from the US government. They are basically an arm of the US government…” (26:29)

Gledhill Interview Highlights

Why Nationalize the Defense Industry?

“The arms industry is so deeply ingrained in our government and corrupts our decision-making process around national security policy. And frankly, I think that we need fundamental institutional reform to throw a wrench in the war machine.” (27:51, Julia Gledhill)
Comparing Nationalization Models
- References partial nationalization in European countries like France, where government representation on boards and better oversight helps align defense policy with the public interest.
- The U.S. spends over $1 trillion annually on defense, much of it unaccountable, driven as much by lobbying and private profit as strategic needs.
Shareholder Profits & Waste

“Ultimately they are private companies with private interests. If they can’t exist without the government, then I think that this deserves serious conversation about how we reorient that relationship.” (31:33, Gledhill)
Intellectual Property and Right to Repair
- Contractors maintain monopolies on maintenance and repair, leading to ballooning costs (e.g., the F-35 program).
- They’re not required to provide substantiating cost data to the government, enabling rampant price gouging.
“They have really successfully lobbied Congress to essentially gut contracting law and regulations so that they can sort of make up prices on military contracts...” (36:10, Gledhill)
Partial vs. Full Nationalization
- Partial: government stake/representation, more transparency, oversight.
- Full: buy out (compensate) shareholders, government assumes control. Not considered likely but worth public debate, especially in crisis.
- Historical precedent: U.S. government intervention in WWII; temporary nationalization of banks during crises.
“If the government is the stabilizer here, even in a partial nationalization situation, then you have undercut the profit motive to a large degree...” (42:10, Emma)
Ethics and Foreign Policy Impact

“Imagine…if arms contractors were not lobbying Congress to the extent that they are, if they weren’t giving tens of millions of dollars… It could totally change the way that we talk about national security, particularly in Washington, D.C.” (42:19, Gledhill)

3. The Republican War on Voting Rights – Interview with Ari Berman

Segment starts: 44:36

Historical Background

Since Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court has stripped crucial protections from the Voting Rights Act, eliminating pre-clearance for states with histories of discrimination.

“That…was really the most important part of the Voting Rights Act because it stopped abuses before they even occurred…” (47:10, Berman)
Post-2013: rapid resurgence of discriminatory voting policies in multiple states.

Present Attacks on Voting Rights

Section 2’s Fate
- Now the focus is on gutting Section 2 of the VRA, which allows private parties to bring voting rights lawsuits.
- Only 15 successful Section 2 VRA lawsuits (of 182 since 1982) were brought solely by the DOJ; most were brought by private actors (51:20).
Judicial Activism and Racial Gerrymandering

“This is the idea that Section 2 shouldn’t be used to strike down racial gerrymandering. That is also an insane, totally ahistorical idea. Clarence Thomas has basically been arguing this for 30 years. And now it seems like there’s a majority on the court for this idea.” (56:48)
- Supreme Court plans to revisit whether majority-minority districts violate the “colorblind Constitution,” a legal maneuver critics say directly undermines the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments’ intent.
Conservative Justifications and Real-World Impact

“They’ve been turned on its head… The interpretation that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth who were meant to prohibit racism, not the consideration of race, now are said to prohibit the consideration of race. That…would basically kill the Voting Rights Act.” (58:39)
Gerrymandering Arms Race
- Trump administration’s direct pressure on Republican states to redistrict mid-decade, seeking up to 12 extra GOP House seats. Unprecedented presidential intervention.
“A president telling a state, you need to redistrict, you need to gerrymander mid decade to give me more seats… this is absolutely insane to see.” (69:28, Berman)
Voter Roll Purges and DOJ Actions
- DOJ requesting voter roll data from blue states to fuel a new wave of voter purges, echoing past efforts to falsely allege mass voter fraud.
Broader Shift Toward Authoritarianism
- Berman warns of the “flood the zone” tactic: increase the volume and speed of anti-democratic changes so opposition cannot keep up.
“His push for authoritarianism is gaining speed every single day and has been remarkably effective and has been quicker and more aggressive and more successful than I think even many of his critics… expected.” (80:35)
- Glaring lack of institutional resistance; higher education, corporations, and even law firms “caving” to the new status quo.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Right's Deflection After School Shootings:
“They are professional scapegoat hunters, pointing at scapegoats at every single turn. And, you know, we gotta stop being stupid enough to fall for it.” (19:10, Matt)
On Pentagon Waste and Cronyism:
“Our national security budget is well over a trillion dollars. It is completely unmoored from any cohesive or realistic strategy to guide our foreign policy.” (32:48, Julia Gledhill)
On the VRA’s Historical Importance:
“The Voting Rights Act was a law that basically made America a multiracial democracy. And without it… some of the things that we thought we would never see again, those kind of things will start coming back.” (66:39, Ari Berman)
On Trump 2.0’s Ruthlessness:
“They have accomplished, in my estimation, a lot in just eight months. I mean, very bad things. And again, it’s been destructive and that’s a lot easier to do. But they have started to figure out how to work around the courts…” (78:32, Sam)

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:18-07:00: Minneapolis mass shooting & right-wing response
24:27-43:21: Julia Gledhill on defense industry nationalization
44:36-86:25: Sam Seder interviews Ari Berman on voting rights (detailed historical and current analysis)
86:25-end: Show panel fun and lighter discussion (skip for core political content)

Episode Tone & Style

Forthright, irreverent, occasionally expletive-laden analysis
In-depth interviews with strong focus on policy detail and democratic principles
Clear outrage at current political developments, tempered by moments of dark humor and camaraderie among the hosts

Conclusion

This episode is a must-listen for anyone wanting an accessible, strongly-argued account of how America’s twin crises—a captured defense economy and a sabotaged democracy—intersect under the current political regime. Both interviews serve as a call to action for more radical, structural solutions—be it nationalizing war profiteers or fighting for the very foundations of voting rights. The mood is urgent but never defeatist, consistently foregrounding data, real-world impact, and the imperative of public accountability.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

You are listening to a free version.

B (0:02)

Of the Majority Report. Support this show@jointhemajorityreport.com and get an extra hour of content daily.

A (0:18)

It is Thursday, August 28, 2025. My name is Emma Vigeland in for Sam Cedar and this is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Julia Gledhill will be with us to talk about her piece arguing for nationalizing the defense industry. And later in the show, Ari Berman joins Sam for an interview that was recorded in the past, but you'll get to hear it through the magic of.

C (1:02)

Time travel and is also about an article from the future.

A (1:06)

Yes. Wow, that's. My head is spinning. That will be after my interview with Julia. Great conversation. Also on the program, In Minneapolis, a shooting at a Catholic school leaves at least two children dead and 17 injured as Republicans scramble to find a way to blame anything but guns. RFK Jr severely limits who is eligible for the COVID vaccine, narrowing it to people older than 65 or with proof of an underlying condition. And not so coincidentally, yesterday the CDC director was fired less than a month after being sworn in. In Chicago, Pritzker and Johnson's offices are closely coordinating to shield the city from Trump's deployment of the National Guard. Israel has a problem. Many IDF reservists are not showing up for duty, complicating Netanyahu's plan to call up 60,000 to invade Gaza City. In the North, Tony Blair is taking meetings with Trump to help craft post war plans for Gaza, you know, democratically, without the input of Palestinians. A new Quinnipiac poll finds that half of all voters in the US think Israel is committing genocide, including 77% of Democrats and 51% of independents. And that same poll finds that 56% of registered voters disapprove of Trump deploying the National Guard to D.C. including an overwhelming majority of independents. Maybe taking this on is good politics instead of hiding from it.

C (3:01)

I don't know what something like 14 Democrats and one Republican call it a genocide.

A (3:12)

The administration is testing a pilot program in six states, hiring private AI companies to screen Medicare patients to determine coverage for certain care like spinal surgeries. Alligator Alcatraz will be vacated even as they appeal the court order demanding they shut it down. That's some good news. Trump gives an army contract to build a concentration camp in Texas to a shady LLC with no experience running a correctional facility or a functioning website. It could be worth up to $1.2 billion. And lastly, over 600 workers of the United Auto Workers union at GE's aerospace facility in. I did not write this down correctly. We'll look it up in just a second. But they're going on strike. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome to the show, everybody. It is an M. Majority Report Thursday. Just want to make sure I have the correct location of that GE aerospace facility in the Evandale, Ohio plant and the Erlinger, Kentucky distribution facility. So 600 workers at those two facilities, they didn't reach a contract agreement. So all solidarity to the GE workers in Kentucky and Ohio. And hello to Matt, hello to Brian. We have a great show for you today. We'll start off with, you know, the biggest story really in the country yesterday was this horrific shooting yesterday morning at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It happened as the students were attending mass in the morning. The shooter reportedly shot through the stained glass and killed an 8 year old and a 10 year old in the pews and injured at least 17 other people. Here is a young boy who survived this horrific traumatizing ordeal recounting the events.

A (7:00)

That's just, it's. It's really the innocence of it. The fact that any student in this country has to go through that kind of thing. It is a choice, It's a policy choice. There's been analyses done and this is not news to anyone in this audience. But just for posterity's sake, we'll get to the demographic piece in a second because we know how the Republicans are running with this. But there was an analysis done by the Violence Project, which is really the most frequently cited database academically for these mass shootings. Their qualifications for a mass shooting mean four or more killed, excluding the shooter. So, you know, this wouldn't even qualify. But this data is, I think from 1966 to 2016. I believe it was over a 50 year period. But they analyzed that over the past 50 years. 20% of the 167 mass shootings in that period occurred in the last five years of the study period. More than half occurred after 2000, 33% occurred after 2010. So just think about that. 33% occurred in a fraction of that 50 year period. The study. Yeah. Oh, actually it was from 1966 to 2019, but that's still just 10 years where 33% of those shootings occur. And in 19, or in 2004, Congress let the federal assault weapons ban expire. It was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004 under the Bush administration. Republicans let that happen and you see how the death toll has risen since that period. From 2010 to 2019, the end of the study period, the average was 51 deaths per year with these mass shooting events versus eight lives in the 1970s. And that's a result of magazine capacity, assault weapons, these weapons of war being on our streets. The shooter was clearly deeply disturbed, as you would have to be to commit this kind of horrific act. The shooter had anti Jewish, anti Latino, anti black slurs written on the magazine and weapons that the shooter used. The shooter had a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol and died of a self inflicted gunshot wound on the scene. This study also shows that suicidal ideation is one of the best predictors of this kind of act. And this shooter appeared to meet that criteria as well. What it seems, what seems to be the case is that the shooter may have been trans. We don't know this for sure, but the. And the data is still coming out. But that has not stopped Republicans from of course, running with this in a defensive manner. As you were saying before the show, Matt, they need to run cover for their amosexual cohort of support.

E (36:10)

Yeah, absolutely. You know, so contractors price gouge the government in a number of ways. They have really successfully lobbied Congress to essentially gut contracting law and regulations so that they can sort of make up prices on military contracts. And by that I mean, they're not required to give the government what's called certified cost and pricing data to substantiate prices on contracts that, you know, potentially no other company can fulfill for the government. So it's sort of a separate issue. There's the price gouging issue, wherein contractors have bent lawmakers to their will to better bilk the government, essentially. And then there's the issue of intellectual property, of right to repair. Right. And so the problem with that is that. Take, for example, the F35, the most expensive weapon program in United States history. Part of the reason that program is so expensive and so fraught with complications is not only because the design is overly complex, but also because it requires this software program called the Joint Simulation Environment to test it. And basically, the software for that program is never going to be complete, seemingly. And so you have a contractor that is sort of kicking the can down the road with programs like this one and really, really kicking up prices on the F35. And, you know, the DOD finds itself in a place where it sort of gets waist deep in the mud and, you know, falls into this cost fallacy. And so there are a number of ways that military contractors are able to maximize not just profits, but other financial returns as well. The defense industry far outperforms other commercial industries in terms of, you know, returns to their shareholders, for example, also in return on equity, on capital investment and things like that, because they are subsidized. And yet they're able to privatize the rewards of public investment and maintain IP to repair military equipment or to develop the technologies needed to maintain a program or run a program.

F (48:51)

Yeah, exactly. I mean, Roberts, his whole argument was basically, he said, you know, things have changed in the south, that the south was dramatically different. The country had changed a lot since 1965, but the voting Rights act kept treating the country like it was still 1965, which I think both missed. The fact that a. A lot of the progress made since 1965 was because of the Voting Rights act, because states tried to discriminate and the Voting Rights act blocked them from doing so. But also that the Voting Rights act had been reauthorized four times by Congress in 1975 and 1982 and in 1970 and in 2006. So the Congress looked four different times and decided we should reauthorize this. It's still necessary, including in 2006, when the vote was 390 to 33 in the House and 90 to 0 in the Senate. Things you don't even see ever these days. Now, you can't even name a post office with that kind of vote now. So, I mean, there was such an overwhelming bipartisan support for this among the public. And in terms of the Congress and the Supreme Court just pushed all that aside because they had this vision of the country that they wanted to free these states from federal oversight. And then, of course, what happened is you had things like the Texas voter ID law, where you could vote with a gun permit but not a student ID immediately go into effect. And states like Texas and Alabama and Mississippi and North Carolina all reverted to doing the kinds of discriminatory things they had previously blocked from doing. So that, that then. So basically, they take one part of the Voting Rights act, the preclearance part, out. There's another part of the Voting Rights act section. It. It takes effect after, meaning that instead of blocking discrimination before it occurs, you can only challenge things after the fact. But Section 5 of the Voting Rights act of pre clearance part only applies to part of the country. Section two is nationwide. So that's the really important part of it. And you can still use section 2 to challenge discriminatory voting laws, to challenge discriminatory election maps, redistricting laws, that kind of thing. Then they start going after section two. They weaken it in 2021. They make it easier to be able to pass discriminatory voting laws. Now they're talking about going after it in a few really important ways. One way is what you talked about, not allowing private plaintiffs to file lawsuits under Section 2. That would basically destroy Section 2, because pretty much every voting rights lawsuit is filed by private groups, people like the ACLU or the NAACP. And if they.

F (53:42)

Well, it's the most like, wooden sense of textualism, where you say it doesn't explicitly say in the Voting Rights act that private groups can file these lawsuits. Therefore, we. We find that it's not inherent in the authority of the Voting Rights act, which is insane, because from the very minute the Voting Rights act was passed, private groups were filing these lawsuits. Yeah, the federal government was also filing a lot of lawsuits because they were interested at that point in time in enforcing the Voting Rights Act. But from the very beginning, you had groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. I mean, I know a lot of the lawyers back then who were. They worked hand in hand with the Justice Department to file these lawsuits. And then the years later, when the Justice Department moved on to other things, it was these private groups that filed the bulk of the lawsuits. What happened was you would have places. You would have people in places that were being discriminated against. So let's say they want to destroy the only black city council district in a town in Alabama. Those kind of things happened all the time. Those people would approach the ACLU or the NAACP or the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and those. Those groups would bring lawsuits. And that's how it works. So no one even considered the idea that private groups couldn't do this. I mean, it's just one of those things that came totally out of left field, or in this case, right field. And basically they found some judges to put it into law. And I mean, that's what's happening all over the place with so many different things where these crazy decisions happen. And these judges who would have otherwise never been on the bench. Right. Who are even more extreme than the likes of John Roberts or Bret Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett. They're sort of auditioning for the next Trump Supreme Court appointment, and they have these wild decisions, and that's how they get recognized. And so then what happens is even if the Supreme Court decides not to do this, then you say, oh, they finally did the reasonable thing. But all that does is restore a status quo that no one ever thought about challenging before. You know, Trump came on the scene in the first place.

F (60:56)

Yeah, and it wasn't even that. I mean, it wasn't even anything close to proportionality. But the idea was it wasn't necessarily that there, but in places like Alabama, in places like Louisiana, what was happening is there was six or seven congressional districts, and African Americans were 30% or more of the population, but they were only getting one of the districts. And essentially you were packing all of the black voters into one district so that you could dilute their influence in the rest of the state, meaning that the vast majority of districts would not just only be controlled by white people, but white Republicans that were hostile to the views of most black voters in those states. And so what civil rights groups and others showed was that you could create these cohesive districts where blacks were a majority of the population, and they were concentrated in such a way that they could have another district. And this started in Alabama. I mean, there's a long history of the court ruling this. But the thing that was surprising was in 2022, the Supreme Court said that Alabama should create a second majority Black district, which was surprising because the Supreme Court has been so hostile to voting rights. And it was authored by John Roberts, who has been very hostile to voting rights. And it was joined by Brett Kavanaugh, who's also been very hostile to voting rights. Kavanaugh, though, in that opinion in Alabama, said maybe there should be a limit on how long you can create these kind of districts, which, again, was kind of shocking because nowhere in the Voting Rights act does it say there should be a limit. Like the. The other part of the Voting Rights act that we talked about earlier, the pre clearance part that did have to be reauthorized by Congress. So you could theoretically argue there should be a limit on that at some point in time. But this other part, Section 2, was meant to be permanent. So this idea that there was a limit on it, that was really something only Clarence Thomas had argued. And then suddenly Kavanaugh floats this idea. In the Alabama case, it seems like Louisiana is very similar to Alabama, has a cohesive population, has a majority black population, should draw majority black congressional district. In fact, Louisiana legislature, which is Republican, already did that. So it seems like this is pretty much settled. And then the court, instead of deciding this case, says, no, we want to look at it again. And we don't just want to look at this instance. We want to look if these districts are protected in the first place. And if they were to do this, it would basically not just kill what was left to the Voting Rights act, it would basically kill the protections that remain against gerrymandering. Because remember, the Supreme Court has already said you can't challenge partisan gerrymandering in federal courts. That if a place like Texas says, yeah, we're rigging the maps, but we're rigging them because Trump wants to do it. And by the way, there's nothing illegal about that. If you can. If they can show that they didn't actually discriminate while doing it, which, by the way, is going to be hard. But if they can show that, the Supreme Court says, okay, we're okay with that, but you could still bring claims under the Voting Rights Act. But if they were to do this, if they were to basically say you can't challenge partisan gerrymandering and you also can't challenge racial Gerrymandering. Well, then you basically can't challenge gerrymandering at all.

F (69:28)

Yeah, I mean, I like to think that I was a little bit ahead of the curve with this whole Trump rigging the election idea because as I was writing it, things are really started blowing up on that front and there's gonna have to be a lot of updates when it finally goes online. But I think the mid decade gerrymandering we're seeing, it's just the most concrete way, but not the, the only way Trump is trying to rig the midterms. And we should say, Sam, that mid decade redistricting in and of itself is extremely unusual. Generally speaking, restricting happens at the beginning of the decade after the census and that's it. And yes, gerrymandering happens, but it still usually happens at the beginning of the decade. The idea that a state would just redraw its districts mid decade and then the fact that it would come from the White House, that is totally unprecedented. A president telling a state, you need to redistrict, you need to gerrymander mid decade to give me more seats. And it's not just happening in one place. Cuz, yeah, Texas did this before under Tom Delay in 2003. We remember this, right, that was a mid decade redistricting that came from Washington, but this is coming from the President. And it's coming not just in Texas, but now they're saying they want a dozen seats because Trump doesn't want to have to deal with a Democratic Congress, especially a Democratic House. Meaning that they're not just pushing Texas, but they're pushing Florida and Indiana and Missouri. I mean, this is absolutely insane to see. And it's basically the quasi legal version of stop the steal. But instead of trying to overturn the election after the fact, they're just trying to rig the election ahead of the fact, ahead of time. So Democrats just don't have enough places that they can pick up seats to flip the House. Now Democrats are gonna respond and we'll see what happens. But I basically think if there's a gerrymandering arms race, Republicans are gonna win because they control more states. They're just more ruthless in general, but they control more states, even if every state was as ruthless as California. And they said, well, if Texas is gonna pick up five seats, we're gonna fight back with five seats. Like that can only happen in so many Democratic states because Democrats both have moved to ban gerrymandering. In ways that Republicans haven't. But also there's fewer states under Democratic control than there are states under Republican control. So Republicans are going to win this fight. And then, of course, there's all sorts of other things the president is doing, from passing a national voter suppression bill. They're trying to still get through the courts and in other states to killing protections against election security, to going after their political opponents, to taking over the courts and not just as a US Supreme Court, but lower courts. I mean, there's so many different parts of this strategy that gerrymandering, just the most concrete, discreet way it's playing out right now.

F (75:06)

Exactly. I mean, people get removed from the voting rolls all the time. If they've died, if they've moved, if there's good, solid data on it. The problem with the kind of voter purges that, that the Trump administration wants to do is they want to do it based on bad data, and they're sloppy as they can, as softly as they can. And they're running it through databases that are not designed for this purpose. So they're taking Homeland Security databases that are not meant to be used for voting purposes. They're taking these databases, they're running people through it. And the problem with these databases is they're not accurate. They don't often say whether someone has naturalized. So this happened in Texas, for example. Texas claimed all these people a few years back were illegally on the voting rolls and needed to be purged. And then when people took a closer look at it, turned out it was full of naturalized citizens who at one point in time had told the state they were non citizens. They were, most of them were legal non citizens, but they had then become, in the process, they'd become naturalized citizens. But the Texas data didn't have that. So being able to say, being able to go on Fox News, being able to go on X, being able to push this lie that non citizens are voting has a lot of benefits for the Trump administration. It allows them to push for states to remove people from the voter rolls, and it also allows them to further this crackdown on immigration. And they clearly want to make this a central issue in the midterms, this idea that Democrats are defending people who are here illegally in all sorts of different ways, and Republicans are trying to remove them. Now, I think Trump's general handling of immigration has become a lot more popular than it was at the beginning of his presidency. But I still think they feel like, they want to make this. Remember in 2018, there was a caravan of people that were coming. They want to do this, and they want to do this on as many fronts as they can. And this is part of the larger strategy here, the larger nativist strategy they have. And so that's one of the things the Justice Department is doing. And I think that what we're going to see as the midterms get closer is that the Justice Department is basically going to be the weaponization arm of the Trump administration. It already has become that, that, But I think it's going to be that with regards to elections, that so many of the things they want to do vis a vis elections to interfere in the midterms, they're going to do through the Justice Department. Even the gerrymandering in Texas was kicked off by a Justice Department letter which, which is sort of gone under the radar a little bit. But Texas Republicans weren't going to call this special session, and I think Trump convinced them to do so, but they needed some sort of pretext to do it. And the pretext that they came up with was the Justice Department sent this letter, letter saying that four districts that were all represented by black or Hispanic Democrats violated the Voting Rights act, making the kind of argument against the Voting Rights act that we were talking about earlier. Now, it was a laughable letter, but then it was cited as by the governor of Texas as the reason to call this special session. Now, of course, lots of Republicans have come out and said subsequently, we're doing this to help Trump. Trump has himself said we're entitled to five seats. So that letter has been totally discredited. But that is nonetheless the legal pretext they use to kick this whole gerrymandering spree off. And so I would imagine you're going to see that kind of election interference on steroids by the Justice Department as we get closer to the midterms.

F (80:35)

Well, I think that two things can be true, which is whatever Trump wanted to do is falling apart. And I think the pace that we thought it would, meaning he is becoming more personally unpopular, his policies are unpopular, his handling of every major issue is underwater. That is not that surprising. But on the flip side, his push for authoritarianism is gaining speed every single day and has been remarkably effective and has been quicker and more aggressive and more successful than I think even many of his critics, including myself maybe expected that. We went into thinking, oh man, like Trump too is going to be bad. And like, it's even worse than I think a lot of us thought it would be. And I think because it's been such a flood the zone strategy that even if the Supreme Court, let's say they, I still think they agree. Let's say they, they agree with 9 out of 10 things or 8 of the 10 things that Trump does, which I think is probably about the ratio. If you looked at it, they, even if they lose on two or three things, they're winning on so many things that it's hard to keep track of. And I think that's kind of like where we're at with elections right now. Is that like, yeah, they might lose in court here, they might fail to do this, but, but they're succeeding on so many fronts and they're opening. I started this article, right, And I started in the summer and I looked, there's a section on gerrymandering and like I said, it's be updated online, but in the magazine there's A section on gerrymandering and we said, Ohio's gonna redistrict. And the White House is putting pressure on Texas. Right? That's where things were at in June of 2026. Well, now it's August and about half a dozen Republican controlled states are being told explicitly by the White House, you need to read redistrict. So like, in the span of two months, we went to like one or two states that were considering this, to more than half a dozen. And that's just how it is for everything, it seems. And it's just, it's really difficult to try to figure out how to counteract things when you feel like you've won one battle and then a million other fronts emerge. And that's that, that's my worry here, is that everyone says, oh, wait until the elections, right, wait until November. And it's like, well, what if, well.