During his prime-time speech dissembling endlessly about our elections, Donald Trump raged at news organizations for refusing to carry him live. Then his Homeland Security secretary also smeared the media, a sign Trump’s fury continues to deepen. We think this means Trump fully expects news organizations to help him amplify his lies about our elections to sow distrust in them. As we discuss in this episode, his speech revealed that he’s plainly mulling an effort to rig the midterms, and sowing that distrust is key to it. A funny thing, though: Fox News explicitly declined to endorse his claims and refrained from carrying his DHS secretary. And according to Fox sources, insiders were dismayed to hear Trump obsessing over our elections, thought it was bad politics for the GOP, and even worried it was bad for business given post-2020 litigation against Fox. We talked to Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos, who explains how Trump is telegraphing an authoritarian plot to corrupt the elections, why the assaults on the media are central to that, and how Democrats and the American people must respond. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
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Trump’s Plot to Rig Midterms Gets So Unhinged That Even Fox Is Rattled
As Trump’s threats to corrupt the midterms grow more vile, a political scientist explains why his visible derangement shouldn’t distract us from the severe threat this moment poses.
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