Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to sabotage at least one election.
Chapter 2: How are Trump allies planning to militarize elections?
He can't cancel elections. So the new idea is very, very dark. In addition to nationalizing them, which we talked about yesterday, the new idea is to militarize them. Voting with people standing there with guns. I'll tell you what the play is and where else we've seen it in history. Trump also getting hit with a brutal legal one-two punch.
Republicans may have thought that dragging the Clintons into the Epstein hearings sounded like fun, sounded like a win.
Chapter 3: What legal pressures is Trump currently facing?
but they have now opened the door to Trump, his kids and other allies to be subpoenaed. And then we have to talk a little bit about the Epstein files themselves. A democratic lawmaker drops a shocking claim involving Trump and children. We're going to walk through what is alleged and what is proven and what is possible. And then a complete and total meltdown when a nasty woman
calls Trump out on live TV. He doesn't like real journalists and he doesn't like women who aren't intimidated by him. So if you've got a female journalist who's not intimidated by him, it is a recipe for a meltdown.
Chapter 4: What allegations are made against Trump in the Epstein files?
All of that and more today. Plus on the bonus show, what I've been up to here in Portugal, very relevant to the political situation in the United States. How do men holding guns while you vote sound to you? If it sounds like 20th century authoritarianism, it's because that's exactly what it is. Now, one of the reasons that Donald Trump is so dangerous is that he learns from failure.
He doesn't just lose and move on. He loses and then he thinks about what stopped him and then he tries to figure out a workaround.
Chapter 5: How did Trump respond to questions about Epstein?
And that is exactly what we are seeing right now with Donald Trump in the 2026 elections. You control Trump's destiny. I do. We all do collectively as voters and potential voters in the upcoming midterm elections. Trump, like most authoritarians don't want, doesn't want other people determining his fate. And Trump has now figured out he can't cancel the elections. We talked about that yesterday.
It's not how the system works.
Chapter 6: What does Trump mean by nationalizing elections?
Elections in the United States are run by states, not by the president. There is no legal switch. There's no kill switch in the oval office that lets him say no more voting and we're done here. Trump knows that. And so instead of canceling elections yesterday, we talked about Donald Trump's idea of national nationalizing the elections. But there's another idea. It's arguably darker.
Chapter 7: How does Karoline Leavitt defend Trump’s controversial statements?
It's arguably more dystopian. And it is to militarize elections to make them so intimidating and chaotic and coercive that the outcome can be influenced without technically ending democracy on paper, much like ice is effectively limiting the first and second amendments. Even though you go and you look up the bill of rights, it's still there in the same way.
You can have an election, you can have democracy on paper, except if people are intimidating into potentially not even voting then you don't really have a full free and fair election.
It's funny because Trump has now spent a decade saying we don't have free and fair elections, mostly catalyzed by his own losses in 2016 to killery who would start four wars, which of course never would have happened in the popular vote.
Chapter 8: What evidence does Mike Johnson provide for election fraud claims?
in 2020 in the popular and electoral vote to Joe Biden in 2024. He's been saying, I am really the winner of California nonsense. And so what we see now is talk of militarizing the polling places. Steve Bannon, one of Trump's kind of closest ideological allies and one of his primary propagandists went on TV and said in future elections they are looking at having ICE agents at polling places.
Men with guns while people vote. And his words were that they could never again allow an election to be stolen. And of course, no election was stolen. Here's Stephen Bannon, sort of propagandist in chief.
You're damn right, we're gonna have ICE surround the polls come November. We're not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.
ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. It is not an election monitoring body. It has no role in voting. Putting armed federal agents at polling places would not be about security. It would not be something ICE agents are qualified to do. It is only about fear and making people afraid and intimidating people.
Depending on who you are, fear works differently for me or if you are a white native born voter in a right wing area or you know, I'm a white presenting naturalized citizen from Argentina. We might not really be intimidated by the presence of those ice agents. If you are a visibly minority voter, someone with mixed status family members, the message is obvious.
you might show up and have a real problem even if you are legally allowed to vote. And that is exactly the point because Trump's problem isn't that he lacks supporters. His problem in the midterms is going to be turnout in high participation midterms. the incumbent party in the White House tends to lose. Trump is deeply unpopular.
And so the strategy, if you can call it that, is to instead of persuade voters that you're offering them something that will be good for them, just discourage them from showing up. This is also, by the way, an explanation as to why the rhetoric keeps escalating, because Donald Trump and his allies constantly say elections are under siege and there's fraud everywhere.
And we need extraordinary measures in order to keep our elections safe. That is language used to justify extraordinary force. And this is where the constitutional danger really kicks in.
Trump can't tell states to cancel elections, but he can try to federalize the environment around them and to then use that federalization to militarize the elections, deploy federal agents to preserve integrity and all of this nonsense.
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