‘Chilling’ MSNBC Host Reacts To Guest’s Warning of Trump ‘Plan’ To ‘Subvert’ Midterms and ‘Suppress the Vote’
MSNBC’s Katy Tur called it “chilling” hearing a guest’s warning about a plan by President Donald Trump that is apparently “already under way” to subvert the upcoming midterm elections.
The Atlantic’s David A. Graham, along with multiple state officials, joined Tur on Tuesday to discuss Graham’s new piece entitled, “Donald Trump’s Plan To Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way.”
Tur read from the report:
To understand the threat to democracy, and how it might be stopped, I spoke with experts on election administration, constitutional law, and law enforcement. Many of them are people I have known to be cautious, sober, and not prone to hyperbole. Yet they used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for “really wild stuff.” They described a system under attack and reaching a breaking point. They enumerated a long list of concerns about next year’s midterms, but they largely declined to make predictions about the 2028 presidential election. The speed of Trump’s assault on the Constitution has made forecasting difficult, but the 2026 contests—both the way they work, and the results—will help determine whether democracy as we know it will survive until then. “If you are not frightened,” Hannah Fried, the executive director of the voter-access group All Voting Is Local, told me, “you are not paying attention.”
“It was a chilling piece you wrote there,” Tur told Graham, “but there was some hope in it.”
Graham said:
One of the things that worried me most in addition to how concerned these generally sober people are, was just the number of ways that somebody who wanted to subvert the election system could do it. There are ways to mess with the rules ahead of the fact, there are ways to suppress votes in the moment, there ways to try to get votes thrown out or to get elections overturned or simply not to seat the winners.
Tur asked for “potential scenarios” Trump could take to subvert the midterms.
“You do talk about things that happened the last time around and how they might happen again and how Donald Trump might be in a better position to have the folks around him act on his impulses. One of them, you know, he wanted to deploy the troops, he wanted to seize voting machines,” Tur said.
Graham noted one person who took part in his report, lawyer and elections activist Cleta Mitchell, argued the president could declare a “national emergency” and “seize control of the voting system.” Graham argued deployed troops can also be used to deter certain precincts from voting.
He said:
The law prevents calling out troops or armed men in general, according to the language, to the polls, federal troops or federal law enforcement. But if you put those people in the streets already, whether that’s the sort of operations we’re seeing in major cities or the ones that we’re seeing threatened in other major cities, you’re gonna have troops already there by the time the election rolls around. And people are gonna be, if not used to it, it’s gonna be something they don’t react to as a sort of frantic escalation. And that might be something that intimidates some voters from staying home from the polls. But it might also be the kind of thing that simply creates hassles. It makes it very hard to get around because they’re roadblocks and there’s heavy equipment and there’re all these things and suddenly getting to the polls and casting your vote is gonna just take too long and you’re not gonna vote. So even these things that aren’t major intimidation can start to suppress the vote.
Watch above via MSNBC.
