The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 18, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Thursday, Donald Trump erupted with fury at Fox News over its election coverage. This wasn’t an ordinary eruption. What caught our eye is that Trump explicitly slammed Fox for making a Kamala Harris presidency more likely. At the same time, CNN just reported that among Trump allies, plans for a stolen election should Trump lose are in full swing. So we got to thinking, what sort of chaos could erupt if the voting is close and Fox and other right-wing media start amplifying Trump’s inevitable lies about fraud in the election? How bad could all this get? Today, we’re talking to Matthew Seligman, an election law expert at Stanford and author of the book, How to Steal a Presidential Election. He’s going to walk us through the potential nightmare scenarios that lie ahead and what we can do about them. Great to have you back on, Matt.
Matthew Seligman: Good to be here.
Sargent: On Truth Social, Trump raged about the fact that some guests on Fox News offer an alternative perspective to MAGA. Then Trump ranted that “this is so bad for winning the most important election in the history of our country” and added that “if Harris loses, it will be despite Fox, not because of it.” Matt, I find this really disturbing because it’s the first time I’m aware of, at least, that Trump has explicitly attacked Fox as an impediment to him winning the election. What do you fear Fox could do here in the run-up to the election? Not in the aftermath, but in the run-up?
Seligman: Well, it’s already started to lay the groundwork for a Big Lie 2.0. The Big Lie in 2020 was pretty much after the fact—it was that there was massive fraud in the election, that there were all sorts of vaguely unspecified illegalities, that there were felons that voted maybe, and then the conspiracy theories got more bizarre from there. What we have already seen in this election cycle is a concerted effort across the media—the conservative media ecosystem, and indeed in court cases that are being brought already—that allege a very specific version of a Big Lie: that noncitizens are voting in massive numbers in a way that can turn the results of the election.
This is a final synthesis of the Trumpian lies that we’ve heard in some form or another since 2016. The first thing he said as a presidential candidate was anti-immigrant rhetoric. From October of 2016, he already was saying that he wouldn’t accept the results of the election in 2016 if he lost. So in a way, this is the culmination of these two strands of Trumpian worldview that are finally coming together in this explosive and toxic mixture that could set the stage for election chaos to come.
Sargent: It’s remarkable that they’ve already started with a very concerted and specific set of lies, as you say. Let’s switch to CNN for a second. They did something novel and they calculated the total number of election deniers and people who previously served as fake electors for Trump, who have now been chosen as presidential electors for Trump this time. The total is 30 in the battleground states. More than a third of the electors are either election deniers or previous fake electors. Matt, can you walk us through what this means, and what specifically you anticipate in the way of fake elector schemes this time around?
Seligman: This is a really chilling first step in the process of challenging the lawful and legitimate results of the election if Trump loses. In order to reverse the results of the election in the later stages—not just ordinary election litigation, which happens after every election; there are recounts, there are court cases, etc., and that gets resolved in the ordinary course over the course of November and maybe early December; what we saw in 2020 was that Trump wasn’t satisfied with the conclusion of that process, and so he tried to push things further all the way to January 6—the paperwork that needs to be done to set the stage for that later subversion is the electoral certificates from the Trump electors.
What we see here is: There’s a plan. The plan is to make sure that there are people in place who will do the bidding of Donald Trump to cast those fake votes in the electoral college on December 17 this year. That will lay the foundation for everything that will then lead up to January 6 and potentially even beyond.
Sargent: What do they do specifically?
Seligman: In the first instance, what it looks like is what we saw in 2020 where there are court cases. They’re resolved, the........