The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 6 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.
The White House can’t get its story straight on President Trump’s threats to rig the midterms. Earlier this week, Trump explicitly called on Republicans to “nationalize” the elections—a direct threat. After this blew up, Karoline Leavitt rushed out to reassure people about Trump’s intentions.
But then Trump wrecked Leavitt’s spin by confirming that, yes, he does want Republicans to “take over” the elections. Meanwhile, in the background, Steve Bannon is saying, in effect, that ICE will, in fact, be doing voter intimidation in the midterms.
And after that, Leavitt went out and snapped at a reporter in anger for asking a reasonable question about whether ICE will be at polling places or not. In short, they’re all over the place. So how seriously should we take these threats, and what should we make of them? We’re checking in with election law expert Rick Hasen, who’s been warning that the threat is very serious indeed. Rick, nice to have you on.
Rick Hasen: Good to be with you.
Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said earlier this week. Here it is, quote: “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” close quote. Rick, what does “nationalize the voting” actually mean? What does Trump mean by it? And why should we worry about it?
Hasen: So, we don’t know exactly what Trump means by “nationalize the vote.” It’s possible for the United States to have a system where we run our elections the same in every state—at least Congress would have some powers to do that in Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution.
I don’t take Trump’s statements about nationalizing the vote seriously as an actual proposal, but I do take it very seriously as an indication that he’s thinking about how to mess with the midterm elections. Because I think he’s very afraid that Democrats are going to take control of one or both houses of Congress and make the last two years of his term very unpleasant.
Sargent: Well, he certainly has a lot to worry about there. Let’s listen to how Karoline Leavitt tried to spin it when asked what Trump meant by all this.
Reporter (voiceover): What does President Trump mean when he says Republicans ought to naturalize voting? What does that look like in practice?
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): What the president was referring to is the Save Act which is a huge common sense piece of legislation that Republicans have supported, that President Trump is committed to signing into law. It provides very common sense measures for voting in our country, such as voter ID.
Sargent: Rick, I don’t think Trump was referring to the SAVE Act when he called for “nationalizing” the elections. He said Congress—meaning Republicans—should take over the administration of elections in states that he falsely claims have voter fraud in them. And so, to your point about how it’s not an actual proposal, it’s sort of more of an amorphous threat. He did mean it as an amorphous threat, right? And Karoline Leavitt’s spin is bullshit, isn’t it?
Hasen: Yeah, sure. They can’t get their story straight—just like they can’t get their story straight about why Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is, you know, at the Fulton raid where they’re seizing actual ballots. I mean, there’s a lot of reason to be worried about what this administration is going to do, even if there’s not going to be some plan to have the federal government actually take over elections.
What I’ve heard Trump say more than once is that he believes that states are the “agents of the federal government.” They’re like administering it for the federal government. And in fact, that’s not how our constitutional design is. Our constitutional design gives states the power to run even federal elections unless Congress affirmatively overrides. And you may remember back in the summer, Trump issued an executive order about voting. Well, parts of that executive order have been challenged in court, and we’ve had more than one court say the president has no role to play in the conduct of federal elections. So there are things that he might try to do; there are illegal things he might try to do. But actually nationalizing elections? That’s not going to happen by November.
Sargent: Right. And to your point about how Trump has said that the states are the “agent of the federal government”—Trump actually said that after Leavitt had spun that way. Trump wrecked her spin, in essence. Here’s what he said to reporters. And note that when he says “the people behind me,” he’s talking about Republicans in Congress.
Reporters (voiceovers): What exactly did you mean when you said that you should nationalize elections and which 15 states are you talking about?
Donald Trump (voiceover): I want to see elections be honest and if a state can’t run an election I think the people behind me should do something about it because you know if you think about it a state is an agent for the federal government in elections I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that horrible corruption on elections and the federal government should not allow that.
Sargent: So, Rick, there it is again. He’s saying that state election administration should be taken over by Republicans in Congress, and he named specific locales that happen to be heavily Democratic.
Again, even if all this is bullshit and crazy and not going to happen in one way or another, it’s disgusting for him to single out specific Democratic areas. He’s saying explicitly that places that don’t vote for him should have their election administration taken over. Can you talk about what you think he could actually do to sort of make good on the general threat of trying to rupture the elections in some sense with the federal government?
Hasen: Yeah, but let me first talk about Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, which were the places that he singled out. These are places not only that are Democratic—he didn’t say Madison, Wisconsin. He said places with a large Black and large Latino population.
So let me talk about the things I’m actually worried about. [I’m] not worried about “nationalizing” elections. I’m not worried about Trump running for a third term in 2028. I am not worried about ICE all over the polling places. The person who said that—Steve Bannon—he’s the one who’s famous for saying, “Let’s flood the zone with shit,” and that the media is the enemy. I mean, this is just kind of a lot of disinformation.
Here are the things I am worried about. Number one: threatening to put ICE in the streets and, generally, to have federal observers. And what do these threats mean? Even if they don’t materialize, they deter people from voting. They make it a— “I don’t want to deal with that hassle.” They’re demobilizing. And they kind of put Democrats in a catch-22, because they want to call it out—but the more they call it out, the more they bring attention to it. So that’s a tough spot.
The thing I’m most worried about is after the voting is over. After the voting is over, the votes have to be tabulated. There’s going to be a lot of mail-in ballots; [they are] going to have to be processed, especially in places like California or Arizona, where they get a lot of mail-in ballots. It takes a long time to get through them. There’s going to be a period where you might see that the results show that, so far, [a] Republican [is] in the lead for [a] congressional race, and it switches to a Democrat as more votes are counted.
We heard Mike Johnson this week claim that that is evidence of fraud. I—that just shows he doesn’t understand how elections are actually tabulated. Here’s where Trump could maybe have the most impact. He doesn’t need to send thousands of troops into the streets. He could maybe get a search warrant—like he did in Fulton County last week—and go in and try and seize ballot boxes. I mean, once those ballots are out of the control of election officials, we’ve lost the chain of custody. We can’t be confident that the election results would be accurate.
He could try to pressure election administrators to throw out categories of ballots, or try and get state legislatures to do that. I mean, there’s all kinds of things he could do. You know, if it looks like Republicans actually are close to controlling the House, there might be a battle in the House itself over who can be seated and what the rules are going to be for determining contested elections.
Sargent: Well, I want to come back to those actual threats in a second. First, I want to read the Steve Bannon quote you’re talking about. Bannon is very influential in the White House. This week, he said the following, quote: “We’re going to have ICE around the polls come November,” close quote. To your point, when Bannon says something like that, the point isn’t that they’re actually going to send ICE to the polling places in November. It’s that by saying that they’re going to, they’re going to try to deter voters who might be frightened of ICE from turning out. That’s what Bannon’s doing there, right?
Hasen: Yeah, and this is an old Republican playbook. I remember back in 2004—this was the Kerry-George W. Bush race. The Republicans were threatening to send 35,000 challengers to polling places in Ohio, and Democrats were trying to block them—all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice John Paul Stevens said, “Everyone should behave,” but, “I’m not issuing an injunction to stop this.”
And then no one showed up. The whole thing was a big bluff. But all of the talk about this, really, is demobilizing. You know, it doesn’t take much to convince people not to vote. There’s no penalty in this country for not voting. And especially in a race that’s not a presidential race—as let’s talk about it—and so, really, for those more casual, less committed, newer voters: why go through the hassle?
Sargent: Yeah. And now that we’re seeing ICE shoot people in the streets, they’re taking on this really outsized, you know, threatening image—rightly so—in the minds of a whole lot of Americans, including disengaged ones. And so when they hear “ICE at polling places,” it could have a dissuading effect, even if it’s not going to actually happen. I want to play audio of Karoline Leavitt talking about Bannon’s threat. Listen to this.
Reporter (voiceover): Steve Bannon recently said, quote, “we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” Is that something that the president is considering?
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): That’s not something I’ve ever heard the president consider, no.
Reporter (voiceover): You can guarantee to the American public that ICE will not be around polling locations or voting locations in November?
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November. I that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of locations. It’s a disingenuous question.
Sargent: Rick, this is pure bullshit from Leavitt. The reporter asked if ICE—meaning the agency—will be at polling places. Leavitt says this is “disingenuous” because she can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling place.
That’s just such a garbage way to respond, but what I want to try to bear down on here is that it’s not unreasonable in a general sense for people to be looking—and reporters to be looking—at the sum total of what Trump is saying and what people like Bannon are saying, and worry that they actually want to use federal power in whatever way they can to disrupt the elections. That threat is live, and she’s trying to tell us that that’s not a reasonable thing to fear.
Hasen: Right. It’s not a denial-denial, right? What I would have liked her to say is, “Of course, we’re not going to be sending federal agents to deter voting. We’re going to make sure that voting is free and fair, like it always is in the United States.”
Sargent: Well, you can’t say that if you work for Donald Trump, though, can you?
Hasen: Right. So, you know, that’s also part of what’s going on here. Some of this is performative for Donald Trump. In fact, my kind of optimistic read on the raid of the Fulton County election offices is that it was just a show—so Donald Trump thinks that people are doing something. The pessimistic story would be [that it’s] a dress rehearsal for 2026.
Sargent: Well, another good example of that is the arrest of Don Lemon, the former CNN reporter who was just arrested for reporting on an ICE protest in a church. That was clearly all about pleasing the audience of one.
Hasen: Right. I mean, when you have somebody who has, I would say, an obsession about these things, you get people surrounding him or kowtowing—they’re just trying to do whatever they can to please him.
So, another example of this is what we saw with the Fulton County raid where Tulsi Gabbard, who’s the Director of National Intelligence, was present at the raid. They’ve been giving different explanations for why this would be. It’s very odd for someone who is supposed to be looking at foreign intelligence to be involved in some kind of domestic law enforcement operation.
But in some ways, it makes sense. Gabbard has a record of being a conspiracy theorist like Trump. Also, Gabbard is kind of a non-interventionist. Maybe when Trump was sending people into Venezuela or talking about bombing Iran, he sent her off on a voter fraud goose chase. And again, I’m trying to come up with some optimistic ways of understanding this, rather than: “Are we going to be using our national intelligence services to try to interfere with the conduct of elections in 2026?”
Sargent: Well, look, I don’t want to joke about this, but just for a second—they’re trying to give Tulsi Gabbard something to do. Let’s face it. I mean, if you’re actually serious about stealing an election and pulling off a really complicated operation, you don’t send Tulsi Gabbard in. You know what I mean?
Hasen: Absolutely. I do think that she has not been proven to be a serious person. And so this is not a very serious task that she is being given by Trump.
Sargent: Well, to return to something you said earlier, there is a very serious dimension to all this. The comic relief around Tulsi Gabbard aside, tell us a little bit more about this potential scenario in which federal law enforcement seizes ballot boxes after the voting. What would happen? What would be the legal recourse? How would it all unfold?
Hasen: So, you may remember back in 2020, when Trump lost the election to Joe Biden, he was president at the time. And news stories leaked out that he was considering seizing the ballot boxes. And I bring this up only because recently Trump commented—I think this was last month—he said that he “regretted” not seizing the ballot boxes.
So this, to me, seems like a live operational thing that could happen more than, you know, thousands of ICE agents in the streets of Detroit.
Sargent: What would it look like? What would actually happen? Can you walk us through the details?
Hasen: Imagine that the 2026 midterm elections are close and, in places where there’s a swing district, we don’t know if a Democrat or Republican won a House seat. Trump says there’s fraud, and tries to get a search warrant to seize the ballots that have not been fully tabulated yet—to announce the winner and so that the federal government can “take over” elections, to come back to where we started this conversation, and actually count the ballots, he could say.
That would require getting a federal court to issue a search warrant. There would have to be probable cause of a criminal violation. It seems very hard to show that given what we know about how elections run—but I’m not sure how Trump was able to have his FBI agents get the search warrant in this Fulton County case. But if they can come in—once they take the ballots, once they’d be out of the hands of election officials, out of that chain of custody—we can’t be confident in the outcome of the election in that area.
So it’s going to be very, very messy. So what can be done about it? I think states and local governments need to be prepared for this. I would suggest trying to get injunctions against the federal government to keep them away. I would suggest that lawyers for voting rights groups and Democrats be prepared to go to court. I mean, it may take people in the streets protecting the offices where ballots are being tabulated. To make the Brooks Brothers riot—from the 2000 disputed election where some people were trying to storm an office where they were recounting ballots in Bush v. Gore—that would look very tame compared to what, you know, we might see in 2026.
Sargent: Well, those warnings strike me as really, really important. And if you think about it, that really could be what Trump means when he throws around words like “nationalized” to describe our elections.
Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Rick Hasen’s blog—it’s at electionlawblog.org. He’s one of the best out there at analyzing all this stuff. Rick, really good to have you on, man. Thanks.
Hasen: Well, hopefully we can talk about something more cheerful next time.