Chapter 1: What recent actions by President Trump have sparked outrage?
Late last week, something rare happened.
There's growing outrage to a video that President Trump posted last night. A video that included a racist clip of the Obamas depicted as monkeys. This is totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize. Praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House. The president should remove it. Those are Republicans. That never happens.
But the video wasn't just racist. It was filled with conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And not a peep from Republicans on that. Trump's 2020 obsession isn't a thing of the past. It's driving new investigations and shaping how the White House approaches the midterm elections later this year. That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
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I'm Ested Herndon. Josh Dossi covers Trump for The Wall Street Journal. I asked him how Trump is keeping the dream of 2020 alive in his current White House.
Well, I think more than anything, he's put Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, in charge of this. He's basically tasked her with trying to prove that he won the election in 2020. So she's reviewing ballots across the country.
The federal government has seized the voting ballots of thousands of people in a raid of the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. The president remains focused on the 2020 election more than five years ago, the election he lost to Joe Biden. Georgia says they had multiple recounts.
They have nothing to hide. She's, you know, been in contact with FBI officials. The other day after that raid in Georgia, The New York Times reported that she put Trump on the phone directly with the FBI officials who did the raid. And so you have sort of a whole-of-government approach. He also brought in
A lawyer named Kurt Olson, in the 2020 election, Trump hired Olson to try and push his claims of fraud across the country, and they were not successful. But earlier, well, last year now, we're in 2026, and last year, he hired Olson as a special government employee to come into the White House, work directly for White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and try and prove election fraud.
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Chapter 2: How is Trump's fixation on the 2020 election influencing current politics?
Many of these allegations of fraud already been investigated. I remember when Trump was out of office in the Biden years, this being a focus of so much litigation and just so much conservative activism in general. President Trump and his campaign have filed a number of lawsuits against key battleground states. President Trump suffering yet another stinging legal setback tonight.
A federal appeals court tossing out his election challenge in Pennsylvania. What are they possibly hoping to find that hasn't already been found or scrubbed and nothing was found?
Well, they've certainly counted the ballots over and over and over in Fulton County. And, you know, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and others have certified the election, have studied it time and time again. I'm a passionate conservative.
And as I've said before, I'm a proud Trump supporter. Working as an engineer throughout my life, I live by the motto that numbers don't lie. As Secretary of State, I believe that the numbers that we have presented today are correct.
They say, you know, that Trump lost in 2020 and there was no wide-scale fraud. He hired his own consultants in 2020, his own lawyers, his own consulting firms, his own researchers. They couldn't find evidence for it. So I guess the real answer to your question is that I don't know what we're looking for in Georgia. I mean, it's sort of too early to say what the...
We haven't seen the unsealed, you know, affidavit. We haven't seen any sort of court papers that show how they were able to get a court approved search to go into an area like that, a voting area. But, you know, everything else seemingly has been looked at many, many times since the 2020 election.
In this Fulton County episode, you said that Tulsi Gabbard arranged a call between the FBI officials on the ground and President Trump as the investigation was unfolding. Now, obviously, that seems unusual at the minimum. Is this anything other than an effort of intimidation, like it kind of sounds like? Like, what was actually the purpose of said call?
Well, one of the things we've seen time and time again, as I said, in this administration are cabinet officials saying, including maybe most notably Tulsi Gabbard, who leads DNI, trying to get in the president's good graces, trying to carry out what the president wants, trying to keep him happy.
And what we saw here, I mean, first of all, it's really unusual for the director of national intelligence to be on the scene as the FBI searches a court, you know, a court-ordered or a court-approved search. I don't know that we've ever seen D&I, the director, standing over in a hat and watching and sort of, you know, supervising or overseeing or whatever she was doing there.
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Chapter 3: What role does Tulsi Gabbard play in Trump's ongoing election claims?
I needed it for my own ego. I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though.
You know, 2020 losing, I think, was a big stain on his ego and his legacy. And he did not want to be viewed as a president who ever lost, right? I mean, for Trump, there's a relentlessness there. I mean, you see him now, you know, going back again, like the things that happened in 2016 and 2017. and trying to, you know, get history rewritten. I mean, look what he did on Jan. 6.
I mean, in the aftermath of Jan. 6, I think Republicans and Democrats alike viewed it as a dark day for the country and saw what really happened and how bad things were. And look how he's changed history over maybe not history, but changed how many people see it over the years since then. He's sort of rewritten his own narrative. 2020 election is the same thing.
He's never given up on the idea that he could convince people that he won, and he's still working at it. I mean, Trump is always bending a narrative, always selling the idea of him as a winner, him as all-powerful, him as a person who does not lose, frankly, and that's what he's doing here.
What do we think about the other folks in government when it comes to things like his election denial and consistent conspiracy on this front? Is everyone else on board? Are they willing to be on board just to maintain his favor? Or is there a limit? I mean, I guess I'm asking, is there a Mike Pence of the second term that might say, hey, we may be going too far here? Do you see one?
No, I certainly don't. But you know it better than I do.
Look, there are people in the White House who certainly think it's not the best use of his time, right? And they certainly do not love—I think there are elements in folks who work in the White House who do not love spending part of their time on this.
But is there anyone who's willing to go into the Oval Office, sit down with him and say, we're wasting our time on 2020, you lost, let's move on, you won in 2024? I don't think that's happened, no.
Mm-hmm. There has been a lot of evidence, even the data and the amount of kind of election deniers, not Dame Trump, who have lost their races, that this does not play well with voters. That although maybe the most ardent parts of the base agree with Donald Trump, there's not necessarily been a winning issue for them.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's calls to nationalize elections?
You have people wearing their passports around their necks when they go to the grocery store out of fear of being detained. A lot of people are kind of scared right now. There might be an air of intimidation that could play into 2026. Is there concern about that? And do we know if that's an explicit strategy from the White House?
When you talk to nonpartisan election experts, folks that are former election administrators, that is what they bring up, what you just mentioned, that he doesn't actually have to do all this stuff. to make an impact. He can just threaten it or bring it up because it is scary.
And people might ask themselves, yeah, is it really worth it to go vote for a senator, some senator that I think is a bum or some member of Congress that I might not even remember? What have they done for me lately? Am I going to go risk getting detained? For them to vote for them? Screw that. I could imagine people that is going through people's minds.
Are there other ways that you think Trump could influence or interfere with the midterms that we haven't covered yet?
So a big piece of this, the Justice Department has sued more than a dozen states, many states, for access to their voter rolls.
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Virginia for not sending over its voter registration data. The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Illinois. The department wants access to the state's official unedited voter registration. Yesterday, Wisconsin joined the growing list of states being sued by the United States.
Private data belonging to American citizens that the state's are in charge of. The feds think that they have the power to do it, which is why they've gone to court and filed these lawsuits. But so far, they've been losing. There have been at least two cases, one in California, one in Oregon, where federal judges have rejected those attempts by the DOJ to get that data.
And the states, the Democratic officials say, hell no, we are not giving you this data. It's protected by federal law and state law. I'm just not going to hand that over to them.
Go jump in the Gulf of Maine.
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