The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 18, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Thursday, Donald Trump erupted with fury at Fox News over its election coverage. This wasn’t an ordinary eruption. What caught our eye is that Trump explicitly slammed Fox for making a Kamala Harris presidency more likely. At the same time, CNN just reported that among Trump allies, plans for a stolen election should Trump lose are in full swing. So we got to thinking, what sort of chaos could erupt if the voting is close and Fox and other right-wing media start amplifying Trump’s inevitable lies about fraud in the election? How bad could all this get? Today, we’re talking to Matthew Seligman, an election law expert at Stanford and author of the book How to Steal a Presidential Election. He’s going to walk us through the potential nightmare scenarios that lie ahead and what we can do about them. Great to have you back on, Matt.
Matthew Seligman: Good to be here.
Sargent: On Truth Social, Trump raged about the fact that some guests on Fox News offer an alternative perspective to MAGA. Then Trump ranted that “this is so bad for winning the most important election in the history of our country” and added that “if Harris loses, it will be despite Fox, not because of it.” Matt, I find this really disturbing because it’s the first time I’m aware of, at least, that Trump has explicitly attacked Fox as an impediment to him winning the election. What do you fear Fox could do here in the run-up to the election? Not in the aftermath, but in the run-up?
Seligman: Well, it’s already started to lay the groundwork for a Big Lie 2.0. The Big Lie in 2020 was pretty much after the fact—it was that there was massive fraud in the election, that there were all sorts of vaguely unspecified illegalities, that there were felons that voted maybe, and then the conspiracy theories got more bizarre from there. What we have already seen in this election cycle is a concerted effort across the media—the conservative media ecosystem, and indeed in court cases that are being brought already—that allege a very specific version of a Big Lie: that noncitizens are voting in massive numbers in a way that can turn the results of the election.
This is a final synthesis of the Trumpian lies that we’ve heard in some form or another since 2016. The first thing he said as a presidential candidate was anti-immigrant rhetoric. From October of 2016, he already was saying that he wouldn’t accept the results of the election in 2016 if he lost. So in a way, this is the culmination of these two strands of Trumpian worldview that are finally coming together in this explosive and toxic mixture that could set the stage for election chaos to come.
Sargent: It’s remarkable that they’ve already started with a very concerted and specific set of lies, as you say. Let’s switch to CNN for a second. They did something novel and they calculated the total number of election deniers and people who previously served as fake electors for Trump who have now been chosen as presidential electors for Trump this time. The total is 30 in the battleground states. More than a third of the electors are either election deniers or previous fake electors. Matt, can you walk us through what this means, and what specifically you anticipate in the way of fake elector schemes this time around?
Seligman: This is a really chilling first step in the process of challenging the lawful and legitimate results of the election if Trump loses. In order to reverse the results of the election in the later stages—not just ordinary election litigation, which happens after every election; there are recounts, there are court cases, etc., and that gets resolved in the ordinary course over the course of November and maybe early December; what we saw in 2020 was that Trump wasn’t satisfied with the conclusion of that process, and so he tried to push things further all the way to January 6—the paperwork that needs to be done to set the stage for that later subversion is the electoral certificates from the Trump electors.
What we see here is: There’s a plan. The plan is to make sure that there are people in place who will do the bidding of Donald Trump to cast those fake votes in the electoral college on December 17 this year. That will lay the foundation for everything that will then lead up to January 6 and potentially even beyond.
Sargent: What do they do specifically?
Seligman: In the first instance, what it looks like is what we saw in 2020 where there are court cases. They’re resolved, the governor certifies the lawful electors for the state, but we still have this sideshow where the Trump electors say they’re meeting too, they’re casting their votes too because there’s a continuing dispute about the election, they’ll say, or that the results were fraudulent. They will claim from there, and Trump will claim from there, that there are dueling slates of electors and then Congress has to sort out which ones count, and we’ll see what chaos can be brought then.
Sargent: Let’s put all this together. In 2020, Fox News lost a ton of viewers for calling Arizona accurately for Joe Biden on Election Night. They’re not going to make that mistake again. Trump has signaled, in that rage tweet today and elsewhere, that he fully expects Fox to do whatever it takes to deny Kamala Harris the presidency or he’ll blame them for it. That’s not something Fox can take lightly. And Trump has already said no election is legitimate if he loses. What do you envision happening here if Fox really starts amplifying Trump’s lies about voter fraud? That combined with the fake electors going out there and saying, We’re the real electors, how bad does all of that chaos get?
Seligman: It could get very bad. It could in fact get worse than 2020. The ingredients are here already. The pretext—the conspiracy theory about the illegitimacy of the results of the election—is much more powerful at this time because the seeds are being planted earlier on. We’ve been hearing about these allegations of noncitizen voting, which to be clear are complete conspiracy theories. We’ve been hearing about that for months, and the Fox News audience has been hearing about it for months. So when Donald Trump claims after the election that his loss was illegitimate because of noncitizen voting, people will be primed to believe that. Then they will demand of other Republicans in Congress, in governor’s nations and elsewhere, that they have to do something. The fake electors will vote on December 17. Then the Fox News audience, the Donald Trump’s base, will demand that Republicans in Congress do something about this. Now what happens there is the real question. We saw in 2020 the attempt. The question in 2024 is: Will that attempt succeed?
Sargent: Let’s talk about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s role here. Reform of the Electoral Count Act now requires Congress to count the slates of electors certified by governors, makes it harder to get away with a fake elector scheme. But in a scenario where Republicans hold the House and Trump loses the presidential election, the speaker could do various forms of interference, couldn’t he? What could he try to do specifically?
Seligman: You’re right that the Electoral Count Reform Act, which you’ve written about extensively and so have I over the years, makes a lot of improvements. It’s not perfect, and I don’t want to suggest that it is, but it makes a lot of improvements. If Congress follows the Electoral Count Reform Act, then we should be OK, as long as something earlier in the process hasn’t gone haywire. It makes it very difficult to reject electoral votes. Even if Republicans take both the Senate and the House—over 90 senators voted to reject the objections in Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2020—even if the Republicans have 52 votes in the Senate, I don’t think that the Senate is going to do something crazy. Indeed, there were 17 Republicans who voted for the Electoral Count Reform Act. If Congress follows the Electoral Count Reform Act, then we should be OK, again, as long as there isn’t a catastrophic problem earlier in the process.
The question then is: Will Congress follow the Electoral Count Reform Act? Mike Johnson could wake up on January 6 and say, Well, we’re not going to follow the Electoral Count Reform Act because it’s forcing us to count these noncitizen fraud-infected electoral votes, and I’m not going to stand by that egregious assault on our constitutional republic, or something like that. He and the House majority standing behind him, which is substantially more MAGA than it was even in 2020, can stand up and say, We’re not following the law. Then the question is: Who enforces it?
Sargent: Matt, what happens if the House just doesn’t count the legitimate electors from one or more states, swing states, and the Senate does? What happens then?
Seligman: If we follow the Electoral Count Reform Act, here’s what happens. The presiding officer, who happens to be Vice President Kamala Harris, is required by the law to open the certificates—and only the certificates that have been certified by the governor are subject to federal court review earlier in December. So Kamala Harris, the presiding officer, just like Mike Pence before her, will open only the legitimate electoral certificates. There can be objections, just like there were in 2020.
Now, the threshold for triggering debate on the objections has gone up to 20 percent of both houses, but let’s say that the Republicans have enough support both in the House and the Senate to vote to debate those objections. We move forward then. The Electoral Count Reform Act makes an important change in that it says that no matter what, these electoral votes can be rejected only if both the House and the Senate vote to reject them. As I mentioned earlier, I think it’s pretty unlikely that the Senate is going to go completely rogue even if Republicans have a thin majority. In that case, if Congress follows the Electoral Account Reform Act, then we have essentially what we had in 2020, which wasn’t great, but at the end of the day, the objections were defeated and Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20.
Sargent: What can Mike Johnson do to scuttle the count if he decides to? Let’s keep in mind, he’s going to be under heavy, heavy pressure from Fox News to do just that.
Seligman: And not just Fox News. He has to win the speaker fight. As we saw, there are MAGA conservative Republicans like Matt Gaetz who are waiting in the wings with knives out for Mike Johnson. The price he might have to pay, in order to remain speaker, is to do whatever it takes. At that point, the only thing he can do is stand up and say, We’re not going to follow the Electoral Count Reform Act because it would force us to count these illegitimate votes and we’re not going to stand for that, we the House alone is rejecting those electoral votes and we say Donald Trump is president.
Sargent: Then what, Matt?
Seligman: Then we have a situation that is unprecedented in American history, at least since 1877, which is the now-famous dispute of presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, where the House said one candidate won, the Senate said the other candidate won, and there was no agreed upon legal framework to resolve the dispute between the two. What happens then? Well, we’ll have to hope at that point that the Supreme Court steps in, but I’m not sure that it would. Then we are in a crash course from January 6 for another 14 days until January 20.
Sargent: We should remind people here that there’s a perfectly reasonable chance that this election is closer than the 2020 election was.
Seligman: That’s right. And that’s important. The reason is because we saw an unprecedented assault on the legitimate outcome of the election in 2020, but it didn’t actually come that close to succeeding. There was no governor that tried to certify the wrong electors. There was no state legislature around the country that tried to send in their own electors, even though that would have been unconstitutional. In Congress, it didn’t particularly come close to having an objection sustained, because as we mentioned, 93 senators voted to reject the objections from Pennsylvania and Arizona. The part of what made that seemingly OK outcome as easy as it was—as hard as it was, but nonetheless as easy as it was—is because it wasn’t close; Republicans, Trump would have to reverse the results in seven states, the closest of which was 10,000, the largest margin was approaching 100,000. It just wasn’t close enough to make it easy enough to push across the goal line.
Now, if this election comes down to one state and there’s a dispute about a couple thousand ballots that could change the result, the Supreme Court itself might not refrain from intervening in the way that it did in 2020. Even if it does, at that point, the argument, the pretext that MAGA Republicans could have to engage in these unconstitutional unlawful maneuvers, is that much stronger because there’s that much closer to the goal.
Sargent: When you look at what Trump did today, erupting at Fox News the way he did, you got to really start to worry very deeply about what he’s going to expect and pressure Fox News and the whole right-wing media, as you pointed out earlier, to do in a situation like this. They could have a dual role. One is to keep up the drumbeat of confusion about what happened with those several thousand ballots in a very tight election in one of the states that could decide it all. [Two is] they’ll mount immense pressure on Republicans in Congress, especially in the context of a speaker fight or a potential challenge to Johnson, to actually do the wrong thing here. Does that seem like an unreasonable fear?
Seligman: No, we’re already seeing it started. In the context here, just last night, as we’re speaking now, Kamala Harris did an interview with Bret Baier, who is among the more sober of the Fox political anchors. Nonetheless, he was parroting Trump’s talking points, his conspiracy theories, selectively editing clips that he showed her, and indeed showing her a campaign ad and asking her to respond to it. This is not a situation where it was reasonably fair and balanced. This was a situation where Bret Baier was going out of his way to be as pro-Trump as possible. And still, today, Trump thanks Fox News for its observance by attacking it even more intensely than he had before.
Sargent: It’s worth pointing out that Trump viciously attacked Bret Baier in the lead-up to the Harris interview precisely in order to make it clear that Bret Baier had damn well better make it a MAGA talking points festival and nothing more. Bret Baier did what he was told.
Seligmna: Donald Trump learned the lesson well, which is that if you bully Fox News, they’ll fold. What we can expect going forward is that Fox News will respond to Trump’s bullying in exactly the way that it shouldn’t, which is it will not stand up to the bully, it will fall before it. What we’ll see is an increasing drumbeat of the preemptive delegitimization of the election results.
Sargent: That’s exactly right. What can be done right now, Matt? Is there anything that we can be doing?
Seligman: I think there is. One is to be aware of what’s coming. I think of this play in three acts. The first act is that the election system is fundamentally sound. There are not noncitizen voting. There are not errors in electronic voting machines. The people who vote are eligible voters, and the votes that are counted are their actual ballots. The first act of this play is that people should have confidence in the election system itself.
The second act of the play is that there will be an unprecedented assault on the legitimate results of the election. What we saw in 2020 was just the beginning. Why? Think about the stakes for Donald Trump. In 2020, the stakes were, Well, he wanted to stay in the White House and fly around in the big fancy plane. But if he didn’t, he would go back to Mar-a-Lago, play golf for the rest of his life, and be surrounded by sycophants. Now, the stakes for the election are—let’s not forget that he has two pending federal criminal cases against him, both of which are very strong; they’ve been delayed, but they will not be deterred unless Donald Trump returns to the White House to drop the charges against himself—not the big fancy plane versus playing golf. The stakes now are staying in the White House to drop the charges against himself or to spend the rest of his life in prison and probably die there. Whatever his motive was in 2020, it’s infinitely greater now. So we should anticipate, steel ourselves, prepare ourselves for the unprecedented assault on the legitimate results of the election to come.
The third act, and I want to leave on this, which is, yes, there will be this unprecedented assault, yes, there are real dangers—nonetheless, we’re ultimately going to be able to defeat those risks. Because the legal system has been strengthened in certain important ways through the Electoral Counter Reform Act, and states have passed—or at least some states have passed—some laws to strengthen their system. We have seen before that at least some Republicans are willing to stand up to Donald Trump and say, No, we’re not going to cast aside our constitutional democracy for this narcissistic dictator wannabe. We do have some reasons to be hopeful. And there have been people who have been preparing for this for a very long time. Now, Trump and his lawyers have as well, but there are people who have been in the trenches fighting these battles in order to make sure that we can ultimately win the war in November, December, and January.
What can everybody else do? Something you said before is really important, which is that this election looks closer than 2020. Part of what made it easy for Brian Kemp as governor of Georgia not to interfere with the results was that it wasn’t particularly close in Georgia. Even if it had been, that wouldn’t have changed the results of the electoral college if he had reversed Georgia. What can people do? They can vote. Because the more people vote—the more people who vote for Kamala Harris—it increases the margin of victory. Hopefully that’ll put it outside of what I think of as the margin of manipulation. The margin of victory really matters here, because it can put us outside of the margin of manipulation.
Sargent: I don’t know if anyone could possibly say it better than that. Folks, keep that in mind. The margin of manipulation. Get out to the polls to put this outside the margin of manipulation. Matt Seligman, it’s always great to talk to you.
Seligman: Great to talk to you, too, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.