Chapter 1: What was David Frum's reaction to the racist AI video involving Obama?
Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Stephen Richer, formerly recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, the chief election official in the city of Phoenix in the swing state of Arizona.
And we'll be discussing election integrity and the threats to election integrity, the conspiracy theories and lies that are told about elections past, and that present a threat to the integrity of free and fair elections in 2026.
My book this week is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I choose because this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of that book, of that famous book, in February 1776.
There were six volumes altogether, the last published in 1788, but February 1776 begins, announces the arrival of this tremendous achievement of historical research and English literary triumph. Before turning to either the dialogue,
or the book, I want to begin with some thoughts about a very upsetting thing that happened over the past few days, and that is the posting on the social media account of the President of the United States of a scurrilous, racist, insulting, and stupid video about the past President of the United States, President Barack Obama, and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama.
I'm sure many of you have seen the video or images of it. You know what I'm talking about. You've heard the many stories that the Trump White House has told, many contradictory stories about how this came to be. I'm not interested in decoding which of those stories is closest to the truth or furthest from a lie.
And I'm not interested in adding my voice, one more condemnation to this offensive and stupid act. The whole country has reverberated with condemnation, which is right and just. And I'll say, I agree.
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Chapter 2: How did Stephen Richer navigate the challenges of election integrity in Arizona?
What more can be said? But there is a deeper thing going on here that does deserve some comment. You know, race, of course, is the fundamental thing. chasm, a fundamental wound in American society. And moving toward a more just racial constitution of the United States has been the work, oh, well, it's been a work that is never, you cannot date when it begins and you cannot date when it ends.
It goes on and continues to this day. But the society is changing and a new racial constitution has been coming into being. Right now, about 93 million Americans are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. That's almost a third of the country.
It's a different country than it was when the Civil Rights Act was passed or when the affirmative actions programs of the 1970s began to be devised. In the half century since those affirmative action programs have come to be devised, the racial fabric of America has been reinvented in many ways.
And one of the questions that we're all left in the 2020s is whether these programs of racial restitution continue to make sense in a country that is so different from the country that existed when these programs were put into place. Now, it has fallen to the Trump administration. It has fallen in the Trump administration's time to respond to these changes.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in important decisions that it is more and more skeptical of programs of racial preference to correct for past racial injustice.
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Chapter 3: What pressures did Stephen face regarding Trump's election denial claims?
In 2023, a pair of cases ruled that preferential treatment of undergraduates seeking admission to colleges is probably almost always illegal.
And the Trump administration, in one of its more normal actions, something that you would expect from a more normal kind of government, has followed up or responded to the lead of the Supreme Court by issuing executive orders, rolling back preferential treatment in many areas of employment and hiring. And many American companies have responded by changing their approach to equal opportunity.
They are ending the practice of trying to ameliorate past injustice by having preferences in the present and moving toward an approach that treats all applicants more equally than they have been treated in the recent past. I must say, I regard this as progress. I think this is the right way to go.
I think it's the only way to go in a country where, as I say, 93 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants to whom America's tortured racial history was something that happened before their families arrived on these shores.
And they don't understand why their life chances should be abridged or artificially boosted because of something that happened in a past that was not their own familial personal past. It's not sustainable in such a country to treat people from certain backgrounds more favorably and people from other backgrounds less favorably. It's not sustainable.
And it will only inflame feelings that are already touchy enough. But the administration that has the job of bringing us to a more perfect union, of restoring more equal treatment
of finding some way forward from the preferential programs of the past, it is absolutely indispensable that such an administration show itself in every respect to be animated by ideals of equal treatment, racial fairness, justice for all. When the president is acting like some kind of internet troll, some kind of Klansman with access to a AI machine,
He discredits everything that his administration is doing that looks like something that another administration might also do.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Trump administration's actions in Georgia for the 2026 elections?
He ratifies every allegation of every critic of that administration, of every critic of the Supreme Court, of every critic of anyone who has ever held up for equal treatment under law by saying, you know what? The president is obviously motivated by racial animus. He's overseeing this.
These acts of racial profiling by a paramilitary force that is masked and poorly trained and poorly led and that is sending people into, that is apprehending people because they don't like the way their accent sounds, they don't like the look of their face, and sending them to prisons where they're held without due process for weeks and months, that is sending children under the age of 10 to similar kinds of camps.
In every way that this administration tries to prove that it is indeed motivated by the worst, ugliest, most primitive kinds of prejudice. And then it asks Americans to trust it as it dismantles outdated correctives to the prejudices of the past. This isn't sustainable either. If you are going to attain equal justice, you have to do it by treating people equally. I believe that.
I think the Supreme Court, its decisions on these matters have been broadly correct. I think it's going in the right direction. And I think that the critiques of past diversity programs, maybe they were not as powerful at the beginning as they are at the end, but by the 2020s, they remain very powerful.
And there are 93 million people to whom all of this has to seem oppressive, unfair, and none of their concern. But if we're going to get from here to there, we can't be poisoned by the kind of
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Chapter 5: How does Edward Gibbon's work relate to modern political discourse?
Talk that comes off the president's social media page and comes from the lips of the people around him The people lead the government must be seen to be just for anyone to believe in the justice of what they do And this is one case of so many where even the parts of the trump administration's agenda that Some people might like that even I might like are disqualified and discredited by the trump administration's own actions and by the president's own personality it's
So tragic. It's so unnecessary. It's so ugly. It's so stupid. It's so shameful. It just makes you wince and say, why does it have to be like this? Why can't it be better? Why can't we be having a politics that is productive? Why can't we be talking about things that matter? Why do we have to have people who act like children and adolescents at their worst?
We're discussing the things that matter most or should matter most to us all. And now my dialogue with Stephen Richard. But first, a quick break. Stephen Richer was elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona in November of 2020 and served in that role from the 1st of January 21 to the end of December 2024.
Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from Gibbon's analysis of the Roman Empire?
Maricopa, of course, is the county around the city of Phoenix, the biggest city in what has become a crucial swing state. And the recorder is the most important election official in that county.
Richer, a Republican, held firm against President Trump's conspiracy theories and wild allegations against the election of 2020 and then faced another round of such allegations in 2022 and another round again in 2024 when Kerry Lake was on the ballot, first for Arizona governor and then for the United States senator from Arizona. Richer now writes, teaches, and practices law.
He's a native of the state of Utah, a graduate of Tulane and the University of Chicago, from which he holds both his law degree and also an MA. I got to know Stephen as a regular contributor to my From Forum website in the 2010s.
He's a man of steadfast courage, and it's a pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show at a time when the Trump administration is mounting a renewed attack on the independence and integrity of the American voting system. Stephen, welcome to The David Frum Show.
Thank you very much. Thanks for all you taught me previously, and it's good to be back. My wife keeps saying, when do you think these invitations are going to dry up? And then President Trump does something related to elections, and I get another round of interviews and invitations. So it's good for business.
So long as he's crazy, you'll be employed. Or you'll be busy anyway, because you have a new life away from all of this madness.
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Chapter 7: How are current election integrity issues impacting the political landscape?
But let's start with your first exposure to the madness. So you take office on the 1st of January of 2021. minutes before the attack on Congress in the throes of all of these denunciations of the integrity of the vote, especially in your state. What was that like in 2021?
It was surreal because so many people were asking things about the 2020 election, and I was just getting into this office. I was still figuring out basically how to dial out of the office, who works in different spots in the office. COVID is going on. It's an office of 160 people. I'm just trying to get to know everyone's faces. And meanwhile, we have January 6th that happens.
And then we have protesters outside of our facility. We have some of my erstwhile allies saying that my office had participated in stealing the 2020 election. And then by my second week, I had been subpoenaed from the Arizona Senate for all the, uh, all of the materials relating to the 2020 election. And that began the whole endeavor known as the Cyber Ninjas Forensic Audit.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the SAVE Act and other Republican election proposals?
And boy, we spent a whole year going over 2020 and it was a lot.
Because you were a Republican and always have been a Republican, people in the president's camp were looking to you to agree with their story, however farcical it was, and you didn't.
That's right. I think that, well, I was very patient with it. And a lot of the people who were coming to me with these allegations were people who I considered friends. They were supporters. And so they were people who I presumed to have good faith questions about election administration. And I thought that if I dug in,
And if I researched them and if I got them answers and I did it in a way that was polite and if I did it in a way that was factual, that this would just be a scientific process and we would have questions and we would have answers and we would move on. But it took me a while, but maybe a year into the process, I realized that was not going to be the case.
Yeah, I'll say here, as someone who's known you for a while and then watched you or observed you in your public presence, in these public interactions, you're a very non-fiery personality. You are very patient and low-key. And you agree to take seriously a lot of things that people will say. I had a vision. It came to me in a dream. The ballots are hidden in a vault underneath a lake.
And you would say, okay, can you give me the GPS location of the vault and the lake? And you never lost your cool. But the allegations just got wilder and wilder, didn't they?
They did. And more than that, they seemed adverse. They seemed stubborn to... getting any answers. And eventually I just realized you don't want answers from me. You don't want me to investigate. You just want me to affirm what you want to believe to be true. And that was very saddening to me because I come from a world in which the epistemological process is highly valued, in which
Man is a rational creature and things can be scientifically discovered. And so why did I try to be nice? I tried to be nice because I don't think anyone has ever persuaded somebody else by telling them that they're an idiot, even though it might be satisfying to say.
And I tried to be nice just so that when I look back on my actions throughout this whole affair, I can hopefully, you know, at least feel good that I wasn't too terribly mean to people. I've had a few moments where I've slipped, but I think I've done pretty well.
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