TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. This week, voters across the country went to the polls for a handful of special and local elections. And the outcome is that Democrats won big and small races in what was seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But while people were looking at governors' races in New Jersey and Virginia and the mayoral race in New York, it was that ballot initiative in California that may have the biggest preview of what's to come leading up to the 2026 midterm elections. Proposition 50 allows California Democrats to redraw congressional maps to potentially win five more seats. The measure passed by a huge margin, after which Governor Gavin Newsom made it clear what he feels should happen next.
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GAVIN NEWSOM: My call tonight, in the spirit of Whitman, who talked about the powerful play goes on - we all must contribute a verse. And so we need the state of Virginia. We need the state of Maryland. We need our friends in New York and Illinois and Colorado. We need to see other states with their remarkable leaders that have been doing remarkable things meet this moment head on as well to recognize what we're up against in 2026. And let me make this crystal clear. We can de facto end Donald Trump's presidency as we know it. The minute Speaker Jeffries gets sworn in as speaker of the House of Representatives, it is all on the line, a bright line in 2026.
MOSLEY: Even when the ballot is small, the stakes can still feel large, and they're often a preview of what's to come. The health and future of American elections, particularly next year's midterms, are at the center of journalist David Graham's latest reporting for The Atlantic. In his piece titled "Donald Trump's Plan To Subvert The Midterms Is Already Underway," Graham explores how the groundwork is already being laid for the conflict in the 2026 midterms, from new voting restrictions and legal challenges to the ways political leaders are reshaping the systems that govern elections themselves. His reporting draws on conversations with election officials and legal experts and those on the front lines of administering the vote. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Atlantic Daily newsletter. He's also the author of "The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America And The World." David Graham, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
DAVID GRAHAM: Thank you for having me.
MOSLEY: First off, your reaction to this week's victories for the Democrats.
GRAHAM: I think what's notable here is not just that Democrats won, but the margins by which they won. You know, we saw, for example, in New Jersey, a governor's race that many people thought might be close, but it was something like 13 points. So I think it is a sign of rejection of a lot of Trump's priorities by voters who either were a little bit blase about the 2024 election or maybe even willing to vote for Trump then. And one thing that I think Trump has really done is made voters more engaged and made them pay closer attention. I think that was something that was a factor in this week's election. People are turning out at a high level. You know, New York City mayoral turnout was very high. It's a very political moment.
MOSLEY: Well, President Trump has said on Truth Social as the results came in that the losses were because he wasn't on the ballot. Your reporting suggests the big question isn't can Democrats win, but whether they'll be allowed to win in 2026. As we look towards the midterms, what should Americans understand about the difference between Tuesday's results and what you're warning could happen in the midterms?
GRAHAM: I think there's several things that are important. The first one is simply scale. These elections are an important bellwether for 2026 and they offer us some early indications, but they're not what will determine control of the House. And so we're going to see much more focus from the White House on what it can do to tip the scales in favor of Republican candidates. The stakes are much higher for Trump, who doesn't want to see his agenda stymied by a Democratic House and is also nervous about the prospect of a possible third impeachment. So I think the stakes will be higher and the opportunities for bad actors to interfere will be many more.
MOSLEY: You know, what happened with California Prop 50 was in response to what happened in Texas, where Texas Governor Greg Abbott did the exact same thing - called a special session to redraw maps to grab five GOP seats. What are we seeing in GOP-led states? Is this also something that is being pushed for to redraw those maps?
GRAHAM: Yeah. So it's not just Texas. We've also seen new maps in Missouri. We saw a new map in North Carolina. We saw a new map in Ohio, which makes two currently Democratic districts much more red. And there's an ongoing battle in Indiana, and I think this is such an interesting case, where the White House has been pressuring Indiana Republicans to redraw their maps. And there's real resistance on the state level from legislators who don't want to do this. And so you see them in real time trying to resist pressure from the White House. I think who wins that will be a useful sign for just how effectively the White House can pressure people. But it does feel like an arms race where both sides are trying to squeeze as many districts as they can and, I think, you know, on the Democratic side, where Democrats feel like they're forced to take up methods that they have in the past rejected. So Trump makes everyone behave a little bit more like him.
MOSLEY: And we're just talking about a handful of seats. So there's a lot at stake for both sides.
GRAHAM: Yeah. I mean, it's going to be, by all accounts, a very close election. If Trump didn't think it was a close election, he would not be pressuring Texas to squeeze a few seats here or North Carolina to squeeze a seat there. If the margin of victory is - I don't know - maybe 10 seats, experts told me they think it's pretty hard to steal that kind of election. But if it's only three or five seats, it's much easier to have shenanigans that cast doubt on things and try to flip the result and to defy voters' will.
MOSLEY: This week, anecdotally, we've seen reporting of lines wrapped around the corner for this special election. People seemed to come out to vote. We were also forewarned that the Justice Department would be sending election monitors to a handful of polling places in California and New Jersey, and there was reporting that some folks saw those monitors. Have you heard word of what happened with those monitors? And also, can you kind of talk about why particularly having monitors come to this type of election cycle is so unusual?
GRAHAM: Yeah. DOJ has election monitors, and they do keep an eye on some races. But what's different here is the kind of races they're choosing and what the Justice Department seems to focus on. Historically, the Justice Department has been very concerned about voter suppression, and it's been looking at places where that has historically been an issue. What we see in these cases this year is the Justice Department going to places that are important elections for Democrats, so, for example, the New Jersey governor's race, which was expected to be fairly close, or to California, where there is this important referendum on redistricting, and putting monitors there. So there's a concern about intimidation where there's no real threat of, you know, problems with elections.
And also, I think experts see this as a little bit of a dry run for 2026 where the Justice Department starts sending out monitors now to get people accustomed to the idea. Then they send out more monitors potentially next year, and there's where you start to worry about intimidation or pressure on local officials or on voters as well, who may not want to deal with inconvenience or may feel that there's some sort of threat to them.
MOSLEY: Your piece actually starts off with this made-up but very specific scenario set a year from now on Election Day in Maricopa County in Arizona. In this made-up scenario, you say CE agents are at polling places. Marines have seized voting machines, and the invocation of martial law has happened. How realistic is this scenario, and why did you choose particularly Maricopa County as a place for it?
GRAHAM: I looked at Maricopa because it's a perfect spot for a lot of these questions. There aren't that many competitive districts in the House at this point because so many states have already gerrymandered. But in - around Maricopa County, there are two districts that are expected to be very competitive in next year's elections. And it's also a purple state where you can imagine a lot of focus from both parties. And it's a state where you have both Republican and Democratic officials who will be influential in that race and where Trump has tried to interfere in the past.
I don't know how realistic it is, but I think everything that I lay out in this scenario is something that experts told me could happen and something that they want to be prepared for. And this is maybe the worst-case scenario where you have, for example, the presence of Marines coming in, where you have the FBI getting involved, or you have voting machines getting seized. But these are all things that Trump or his allies have talked about or considered and things that match with kind of actions that have taken place so far.
MOSLEY: Talk to us about the realities for election officials all the way down to poll workers. I mean, they've had a hard time the last few elections. You tell stories about them getting death threats, having to get restraining orders.
GRAHAM: Yeah. It's amazing the way American elections work. And in some ways, it's amazing they work so well, that they depend on a patchwork of local officials with different laws in every state, different rules in different counties. They require volunteers. They require people who are poorly paid and who have become real targets for harassment, particularly in the last few years. A couple things have happened as a result of that harassment. We've seen an exodus of experienced election officials, people who simply don't want to have those jobs. They go and they do something else. We've seen threats against them. That means they have to worry more about security and spend less time on the sort of basic administration of elections that they want to do. We've seen pressure campaigns against these people.
So, you know, on one level, we saw President Trump in 2020 calling, for example, the Georgia secretary of state and asking him to find almost 12,000 votes. But we also had people in Trump's orbit calling local officials and trying to pressure them to change things. We saw the kind of public harassment of people like the local officials in Maricopa County. And that makes it very hard for election officials to do their job. It, you know, detracts from what they're doing. They're also facing funding cuts, including cuts for security - cybersecurity and physical security - from the federal government. So really, in every way, the work of these election officials has gotten a lot harder.
MOSLEY: You actually spoke with a former Maricopa County recorder, and they told you that standing up to Trump was incredibly lonely and that very few people will have your back, especially if you're Republican. That particular recorder, Stephen Richer, he lost his primary to a MAGA candidate. What does that tell us about the incentive structure for Republicans who might want to defend election integrity?
GRAHAM: I think this shows why Republicans either would be reluctant to stand up for Trump or simply might not run for these kinds of offices. Stephen Richer is an interesting character because he is forthrightly conservative. His politics are conservative, but he's also somebody who cares a lot about elections and about truth. And when Trump was claiming that the Maricopa County elections in 2020 were tainted by fraud, he stood up along with several other elected Republicans in the area and said, no, these elections were fair. And for that, he became a target of extensive harassment, you know, by individuals, by - he was attacked in conservative media. And then he lost this campaign.
So that's both, you know, a warning that you shouldn't get out over your skis if you're one of these Republicans and you won't be supported by other Republicans. But also, people like that are not going to run for the offices that oversee local elections if they know that they can't win and that they'll become targets.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is David Graham, staff writer at The Atlantic. Our interview was recorded yesterday morning. And after our discussion, California Republicans filed a lawsuit challenging the redistricting maps voters approved as unconstitutional. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today we're talking to journalist David Graham, whose recent reporting for The Atlantic looks at how efforts to reshape election systems and narratives are already influencing the political landscape ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Thinking about Trump's power over the media, you - in your Maricopa scenario, where you project what could happen next year during the midterms, you describe how conservative outlets would likely be running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bussed to voting locations. And this part of that scenario is not speculation because we actually saw versions of that in 2020. Trump, though, now has even more control over the information ecosystem. Can you talk a little bit about what's different this time, about how quickly false narratives can spread?
GRAHAM: I think we've seen a major shift in a lot of ways. So one thing that - is that in 2020, Fox News was, for the most part, skeptical of Trump's claims of fraud. And what Fox saw was that when they cast doubt on them, viewers started fleeing to alternative, more Trump-friendly outlets. So I don't think we'll see Fox do that again because they didn't - they don't want to lose their viewers. So that's an important thing. But then you start looking at more traditionally mainstream outlets. There's a danger.
Trump has threatened CBS and Paramount. He's threatened ABC and put a lot of pressure on them, as we've seen. The new owner of CBS is the son of a Trump donor. Trump has indicated he's very happy with the ownership of CBS, but he's also said that he - you know, he's sued them before and he would sue them again, and that it means they're going to be nicer to him. He said this just on "60 Minutes" a few days ago. So he clearly believes that he can bully the press, and I think there are signs that he's been successful in doing that.
And then finally, you look at other media. So in 2020, for example, Twitter and Facebook were really active in knocking down misinformation and disinformation about voter fraud. We've seen them pull back on any of that sort of misinfo, disinfo regulation effort since then, in part because of pressure from Trump and his aides. So we can't expect those outlets to be doing anything to help voters get clarity. And we also see TikTok, which may be sold to people friendly to the president as well and is a major source of information. So, you know, the whole ecosystem of information seems to have shifted pretty drastically since that 2020 election.
MOSLEY: We know that President Trump has asserted power over elections through executive orders, demanding proof of citizenship to vote, which is already required, insisting that only ballots received by Election Day be counted regardless of state law. Federal judges have blocked these orders. One judge even said that the Constitution doesn't grant the president any specific powers over elections. But you write in your piece that that may not matter. Can you break that down?
GRAHAM: Right. Federal election law is a little bit confusing. But Congress has some power over elections, setting election laws. But the president simply doesn't have a role in it. And that's something that it's not in the Constitution, it's not in the law, and courts have recognized that for a long time. Trump has tried to respond to that by simply asserting power. So for example, we've seen him issue an executive order where he does things like mandate that states don't count any ballots postmarked but received after Election Day because he says there's only one Election Day. He's asked the Election Assistance Commission to decertify voting machines because of kind of spurious claims that they might be insecure.
So in the absence of real legal authority, he's simply saying these things and daring someone to tell him no. And we've seen courts knock some of those things down. But also, you know, local election officials may heed what he's doing. And even if they don't, it creates a concern about fraud. And he's tried for years to make voters doubt the result even before the votes have been counted.
MOSLEY: You've suggested that North Carolina in particular is kind of like the canary in the election coal mine. Can you explain that?
GRAHAM: Sure. I think we can see, with the exception of military deployments, many of the possibilities for how, a playbook for how you might interfere with national elections. So in North Carolina, we have seen, for example, efforts for years to suppress votes by doing things like reducing early voting hours or introducing limited voter ID. We have seen years of gerrymandering by both parties to try to ensure that, you know, elections are slanted, most recently by Republicans who are in power. We've seen a partisan takeover of the state board of elections, replacing a sort of professional election administrator with a Republican lawyer.
And all of these things affect the rules ahead of time. Then you get to Election Day, where you have potential vote suppression. You have claims of fraud. So in an election in 2016, we saw lawsuits that were really kind of a harbinger of Trump's claims in 2020, saying there was fraud in major Democratic jurisdictions without providing a lot of evidence of that. And then in 2024, we saw a state Supreme Court race in which the Democratic incumbent won a narrow but solid victory and her Republican opponent attempted to get thousands of votes thrown out.
Everyone agreed that the voters had followed rules but believed that their registrations were invalid because of officials' errors, wanted these votes thrown out and almost was successful in the state court system, getting fellow Republican judges to rule for him. And it was only stopped when a federal court ruled against him, and that was when the Democrat was finally able to be sworn in. So you can see this effort from well before the election, right up to Election Day and then even after the election to do anything you can to win the seats at all costs.
MOSLEY: You know, what's so interesting as well is that, at the same time, the governor in North Carolina is a Democrat. So how much power does he have with state elections?
GRAHAM: This is a great question because they have stripped a lot of his power. Until this year, the state board of elections was under the control of the governor. They moved that power from the governor to the state auditor, who is a newly elected Republican official. Also, in North Carolina, election maps, redistricting is entirely under control of the legislature, and the governor has no role. So that's also allowed them to go around the governor. The result is we have maps where even though this state is, North Carolina is fairly closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans hold near supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, and they have a huge advantage in the U.S. House delegation as well.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Graham from The Atlantic. And we're talking about his reporting on election systems and political power ahead of the 2026 midterms and what those efforts reveal about the current state of American democracy. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I'm talking with David Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who covers politics and national affairs. His recent piece, Donald Trump's Plan To Subvert The Midterms Is Already Underway, undermines how political leaders and institutions are shaping, and in some cases straining the foundations of American democracy as we move toward the 2026 midterms. I want to delve into your reports about the deployment of the military. We've seen the acceleration as you said, that many experts didn't expect until 2028, Can you delve a little bit deeper into how that acceleration happened?
GRAHAM: It's happened in a bunch of ways, and it's been interesting to see the ways in which Trump has justified deploying military. In Los Angeles, initially, it was to support ICE operations. Then in Washington, D.C., the claim was that out of control crime required the use of the National Guard - even though crime was at the time and continues to drop in D.C. More recently, we've seen as Trump threatens or, in fact, does deploy federal law enforcement and also the National Guard in other cities, the focus has shifted back towards immigration.
So on the one hand, that achieves a goal for him, but it also gets Americans used to the idea of armed troops in the streets as something that is not a totally foreign scenario, not totally unheard of. And that's important going into the elections. If you try to deploy lots of the military in, say, late October 2026, it's going to raise a lot of fuss and a lot of attention. But if people are already accustomed to that, it won't be something new. And I think that's a concern that a lot of the election experts I talked to had.
There is specifically a federal law that bans sending armed men in the language to any election of facilities unless there is an actual active rebellion. But there are ways to get around that. If you already have troops in the street or if you already have a strong presence of, say, ICE agents in the streets, you're not sending them to polling areas. You're not specifically interfering with the election, but you may have some of the same effect - and I think that effect is also worth parsing a little bit.
On the one hand, there was a question of intimidation. People may just not want to come to the polls if there are, you know, heavily-armed people in the streets. The answer you get from people on the MAGA right is, well, if you're a citizen, you have nothing to fear. And I think as we've seen many arrests of citizens by ICE and including detention of citizens, that doesn't really hold water anymore. But the other problem is inconvenience. If you have heavy vehicles on the streets and checkpoints and, you know, lots of soldiers or guardsmen, it makes it hard to get to election places. And that inconvenience can keep people from voting.
Especially in a midterm where people are not as motivated or as energized as they are in a presidential election. So all of these little bits on the margin can start chipping away at how many people are willing or able to cast their votes.
MOSLEY: You write about this striking irony. So Trump talks constantly about election security, but he's gutted the agency that actually protects it. He cut a third of CISA's workforce, the people who help local officials defend against hackers. The administration has also slashed millions in funding, and then he appointed this woman, Heather Honey, to oversee election integrity. Remind us who she is and what this tells us about what she's been given as her directives.
GRAHAM: Heather Honey is one of these figures who rose to prominence in the aftermath of the 2020 election as a sort of self-styled election analyst - and she was involved in efforts in some states to raise questions about whether there had been fraud. As we know, there was no evidence of fraud. All the legal cases that concerned the 2020 election were defeated. But Honey now has been appointed to this new position at DHS that concerns election integrity, and we don't know exactly what her powers might be or how she might use them - in part because this position is new and because the administration has not told us a lot about it.
But I think if you put it alongside those other efforts to reduce the security in other ways, the worry is that she'll use that perch to either pressure local officials to do things that - where there's security or that are against the law, or else simply that she will cast doubt on the elections and create concerns among the electorate about whether elections have been fair.
MOSLEY: Let's talk about the power of the courts for a moment. You've pointed out that most election-related cases are actually decided in lower courts where Trump and his allies haven't had much success historically. But if election-related cases are appealed and make their way to the Supreme Court - which has shown a willingness to defer to executive authority at times - what kind of timeline could we be looking at as we think about the midterm elections? Could cases tied to the 2026 midterms realistically be resolved before votes are cast or counted?
GRAHAM: This is a really good question, and it depends a little bit on the kinds of cases we see. On the one hand, the Supreme Court has been taking a lot of steps on the shadow docket. On the other hand, the courts tend to be reluctant to interfere with elections too close to the election. You know, they've held historically that you don't want to change the rules of the election within the last, you know, weeks, months - and so they tend to be fairly restrained about that. So there's a question not only of things that might come to the court before the election, but also things that might come to the court after the election - emergency appeals, issues about stopping voting or you know, a scenario like the Bush v. Gore case in 2000.
One thing that experts did tell me, though, is Bush v. Gore, although it is a very controversial and very high profile, is a little bit unusual. Usually these cases don't make it to the Supreme Court. And usually when they do, on election issues as compared to some of these other things, court watchers see the court being a little bit more restrained and hesitant to rock the boat.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Graham from The Atlantic, and we're talking about his reporting on election systems and political power ahead of the 2026 midterms - and what those efforts reveal about the current state of American democracy. We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking to David Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of "The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America." His latest article, "Donald Trump's Plan To Subvert The Midterms Is Already Underway," examines the vulnerabilities in America's election system and how political leaders are already preparing to test them.
I want to play a clip from a speech President Trump gave at a conservative Turning Point Action summit in the summer of 2024 where he talks about voting. Let's listen.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It'll be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote.
MOSLEY: So that was President Trump at a conservative Turning Point Action summit in the summer of 2024. His people later said that he was referring to fixing the problems with voting. But I could also see where it sounds like he could also be saying there won't be a need to be any more elections. How have scholars that you've spoken to interpreted this?
GRAHAM: They see it as a dangerous statement. Trump has a habit of sort of pushing the envelope in these statements and then writing it back as either a joke or saying he didn't mean that. What I heard time and again was people saying, you know, we believe there will be elections in 2026. Everything moving forward indicates that. There's preparation. Trump wouldn't be pushing states to gerrymander if he didn't think there were going to be elections, so we're not going to see canceled elections. But the question is whether they are really free and fair. And when he says things like that, it doesn't sound like he's preparing for free and fair elections, especially when you take that next to the actions he's taking to undermine the security of the system in other ways and to cast doubt on it.
MOSLEY: Is there a scenario where he could declare a national emergency around the 2026 elections if the turnout isn't what he expected or wants?
GRAHAM: What's, I think, scary about emergency powers for the president is that they're fairly broad and a lot of them are unexplored. So we've seen people around Trump suggesting that declarations of emergency would be really useful. And what's unclear is whether courts would allow that, how fast courts could react to stop them. You know, could courts react before, for example, voting machines were seized, which would raise questions about chain of custody and whether tallies could be trusted, or would they be slower to get to it? And what would he do with that kind of emergency power? Would it be seizing machines? Would it be sending troops into the street? So the broad leeway presidents have and the lack of clarity around how courts would react make that a scenario that a lot of experts are concerned about.
MOSLEY: Can you talk also about some of the other things that are happening, maybe not at the federal level, not with the administration, but with other folks who are supporters of Trump's agenda? There was this story that came out recently of a former GOP election official buying Dominion Voting Systems, saying that he'll push for paper ballots. There are other actors who are also working in ways to shift and change the way we actually vote.
GRAHAM: I think this question of the purchase of Dominion is really interesting. And it has definitely raised some alarm bells from people. You know, election officials who I trust have been treating that one, I would say, with some caution. This is somebody who worked in election administration for a long time. And they're waiting to see whether the new company will actually make big changes or if this is mostly sort of a rhetorical shift designed to appeal to the right. But there are a lot of concerns at the local level and in other places about what might happen. We saw election officials in 2020 who have now been forced from office who stood up to Trump, including many Republicans. And we've seen election deniers running for and being elected to local offices. So they now have control over voting in some places.
We have seen Republicans take control of state election authorities in places like North Carolina. We saw in Colorado an odd situation where a Republican consultant contacted county officials in several counties and asked them to provide access to their voting machines to the federal government. And he claimed he was working with the White House. Now, that would be against state law. All of them told him no. And the White House said that he was not designated to do this. But it's a strange situation. And anything that would provide that kind of third-party access would raise questions about the integrity of the system and whether we could trust the votes.
MOSLEY: You know, one of the things that has been talked about is President Trump seeking a third term. What have the folks that you have talked to, who are making projections or fearful of making projections, said about this particular concern?
GRAHAM: This is a little bit like Trump trying to interfere with state election administration, where it's very clear what the law says. There is not a way for a president to run for a third term. It's also very clear that the Constitution is intended to bar, you know, these weird maneuvers that have been discussed, for example, where Trump would run as a vice presidential candidate, and then whoever was at the top of the ticket would resign and let him take over. So the authority isn't there. But Trump has also tried in many cases to overstep his authority, to do things that he doesn't have the power to do. And he's been stopped by the courts or, you know, the courts have allowed things to go forward on a temporary basis.
So they're not worried that there's some legal maneuver that would work. What they're worried is that he might do it and there might be no one who was able or willing to stop him from running for a third term. And this gets very technical, but there are questions of how, for example, you would disqualify a Trump third term given prior litigations about the 14th Amendment and whether Trump could be disqualified before the 2024 race. It quickly gets very weedy even though the Constitution is so clear.
MOSLEY: Why are people saying that the 14th Amendment should have barred President Trump from running in 2024?
GRAHAM: There were a lot of people who argued that because the 14th Amendment barred insurrectionists, which was a post-Civil War way to disqualify former Confederates from office, they said that Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election qualified him as an insurrectionist. And as a result, he should not be allowed on ballots. And we saw efforts in some states to remove him from the ballot. And those went to the Supreme Court, which ruled basically that states don't have a lot of authority to do that on their own unless the federal government - in particular, Congress - has already deemed somebody to have been involved in an insurrection. So the question is then, would Congress say that Trump couldn't run for a third term? And if they didn't, is there any enforcement mechanism?
MOSLEY: Let's talk a little bit about Congress because, again, the legal experts you talk to refuse to make predictions about the presidential race in particular in 2028. But if Democrats do manage to retake the House or the Senate in 2026, despite all of the interference that you describe, what happens next? Does Trump accept those results? What does the period between November 2026 and January 2027 look like?
GRAHAM: It's interesting to see what's going on now in Congress, where there has been a Democrat elected in the special election in Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, who has not yet been seated in the House, simply because Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to seat her. So one concern is, if there is an election that is not certified in time and the majority is Republican, could they elect Speaker Mike Johnson and then refuse to later seat Democrats who have been elected? It's a little bit of a complicated scenario, but that's a possibility.
The other question is what Trump might try to do to consolidate power ahead of the seating of, you know, a new House sort of in that lame-duck period. Where might he try to push congressional Republicans to give him new powers or do things that they wouldn't block? And then after a new House is sworn in, if it's a Democratic majority, the question is how he will interact with them. For example, would he comply with subpoenas? Will he comply with oversight requests? During his first term, he was really eager to kind of stonewall Democrats in the House. But he's gone further on many things than he did in his first term. And so I'm curious to see what that might look like, how he might be more aggressive in refusing to cooperate with a new Democratic majority.
MOSLEY: How does money play into this? We see billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, you know, help Trump's goals. We also saw a lot of that in the mayor's race in New York with endorsements as well.
GRAHAM: Money in American politics is so central. And even though voters have consistently indicated a preference for stronger rules, they're not there. We have seen billionaires flocking to Trump in particular, and although Democrats have billionaire backers of their own, one concern is whether the system will remain equitable and also whether Democrats are able to rely on their sort of small-dollar donations. When you have something like ActBlue under investigation, it's a real threat to the Democratic fundraising machine.
And so you already have a system that is shot through with money. You have fewer restrictions on it. You have bodies like the Federal Election Commission basically hamstrung by partisanship and by lack of appointments. And so campaign finance is a little bit of a wild west right now, and it creates more opportunities for the federal government to put thumbs on scales.
MOSLEY: You know, because President Trump has been so unpredictable, he's broken so many norms, it requires a lot of speculation to predict the future. How do you reality check the threats to elections with facts, what you write about in your articles?
GRAHAM: It's a challenging thing. And, you know, there have been plenty of occasions where I have talked to experts and they've said, this is not possible. And then something happens anyway because Trump simply, you know, goes around the law or defies the law or the Supreme Court issues something unexpected. I just try to ground this really closely in understanding both what the law is and how Trump might try to get around it and to pay close attention to the things that he and the people around him are saying.
I also think that, you know, the recent past gives us some good indications. For example, we saw Trump calling local officials in 2020 and trying to get them to help him. He didn't face serious consequences for that. That gives us a good reason to expect he would try to do something like that again. We can guess that he might try to deploy troops on the streets because he's already doing that now. Often these things are foretold well ahead of time.
MOSLEY: David Graham, thank you so much for this conversation.
GRAHAM: Thank you.
MOSLEY: David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Our interview was recorded yesterday morning. Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Patti Smith's new memoir, "Bread Of Angels." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF PATTI SMITH SONG, "WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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