Will Trump rig the midterms?

Hi, I'm Nick co-host of the best one yet. You optimize your workouts, your portfolios, and that rando start-up idea that hit you in the middle of the shower. But if you're not hydrated, you're already playing catch-up. So, we keep a stash of liquid IV in our studio. One stick mixed into 16 ounces of water is clinically demonstrated to hydrate faster than water alone with three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink, plus eight vitamins and nutrients. Whether you're traveling, exercising, or podcasting the best business news ever, liquid IV makes it easy to stay hydrated wherever life takes you. So shop now at liquid iv.com. Liquid IV hydration. That goes wherever life takes you. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Matthew. I'm in for Jamie today. And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness. If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included. We have to understand that if we don't take this to the maximum now with a sense of urgency and in doing this, seize the institutions, if we don't do that now, we're going to lose this chance forever because you're never going to have another Trump. That's Trump Acolyte and advisor Steve Bannon talking about the midterm elections. Here he is again. We're going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And here's Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. If we lost the midterms, heaven forbid. If we lost the majority in the House, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect. Donald Trump has made repeated reference to just how important these midterms are likely to be. And on this, many of his political enemies might actually be inclined to agree. though for different reasons. Now, nine months out, there's increased fear that Donald Trump may be working to subvert the vote. Election officials and administrators are pointing to specific pieces of evidence. In just the last few weeks, the FBI has raided an election facility in Georgia, seizing records related to the 2020 election, which Trump continues to maintain, against all evidence, was stolen. Attorney General Pam Bondi offered a quid pro quo to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, suggesting that chaos in Minneapolis could be ended if the governor gave the Department of Justice access to his state's voter rolls. And Donald Trump has said during interviews that the White House should, quote, take over voting in at least 15 places. In Colorado, election officials are working on contingency plans in the event of presidential interference. And just last week, the FBI subpoenaed voting records in Arizona. In the last year, Donald Trump has placed election conspiracists in senior positions. He's worked to decertify voting machines and mail-in voting. He's threatened election-related prosecutions. And those in his orbit have even called for a military presence at every polling station across the country.

He was Democrat U.S. Senator Mark Warner. I never thought I'd have to ever say this. But I am seriously concerned about the security and integrity of our elections in 2026. And if we have a corrupted election, I'm not sure how our country ever comes back. And back to Trump. Clear as ever. You got to win the midterms. Because if we don't win the midterms, I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me. So with that as our backdrop, today we're going to examine the past, present, and potential future of Trump-related election interference and ask whether or not the American election system has the capacity to keep a president that has already attempted to subvert an election from doing it again. David A. Graham is a staff writer with The Atlantic, and he's done a lot of reporting on the state of American elections. He's our guest today. Hi, David. Hello. So Trump won re-election in 2024 without conceding defeat in 2020. And really since the first day of his second term in office, he and his senior staff, as a piece in the Atlantic has described it, quote, launched tandem efforts to rectify the imagined injustice of a rigged vote. How powerful a force would you say that that imagined injustice is? I think it animates much of sort of the way Trump has interacted. with all politics. And I would say even going back further. And he continues to claim that he was cheated out of the 2016 election popular vote. Despite winning the election, Trump is reviving unfounded allegations of voter fraud, a sign he's unwilling to drop his pension for conspiracy theories now that he's the president-elect. So he's been claiming fraud now for a decade. And this idea that something was taken from him in 2020 has been an important justification for... really many of the actions he's taken, whether it's sort of going after political opponents or attempting to seize control of the election process. 2020, by the way, that election was totally rigged, but these are the, that's okay. It's a war that should have never started, and it wouldn't have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren't rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out people will soon be prosecuted for what they did. and also for bringing together his coalition in this shared sense of persecution. Donald Trump lost by 7 million votes and 306 electoral votes in 2020. And, I mean, kind of really immediately started to call the legitimacy of that result into question. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal.

After his loss, Trump filed dozens of failed lawsuits and tried to recruit local and state officials to help him reverse outcomes. I think probably most notably, you know, asking Georgia's Secretary of State. So look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have. Because we won the state. His aides actually drafted executive orders to seize voting machines. And Trump himself was later indicted twice for efforts tied to trying to overturn that election. When you look back on that event now, how do you begin to make sense of it? It's very hard. I mean, it's an amazing thing to have experienced. And it was one thing to watch it in real time and sort of see what Trump and his aides were doing. And given what we now know about the efforts, they were taking in private. It was really an elaborate, if not very well thought out, legal effort to try to subvert the election. So it's amazing that it happened. It's amazing that we live through all of that. And then the other thing that is incredible is after all of that, Trump faced no serious consequences. He escaped any legal jeopardy. And in fact, he won re-election fairly and squarely after trying to subvert a vote. So it's a very singular thing. And I think really still boggles my mind. I mean, also, you know, we're kind of talking about Trump's allegations of election fraud here, which have been obviously disproven through the courts. But I'm not sure that lay people necessarily have the best sense of what some of these conspiracies and canards that he's relied on actually are. Can you kind of walk me through some of the conspiracies that you've heard Trump and those in his orbit rely on when talking about 2020? There are a whole bunch. And one of the hallmarks of their strategy, I think, is to raise a lot of allegations. with varying levels of evidence for them or persuasiveness and sort of see what sticks with people. So we have seen claims, for example, that there were election workers in places like Georgia who were adding votes, that there were, you know, boxes of ballots that were delivered later. We heard claims that voting machines had changed the tally. That was particularly tied to one county in Michigan. where there was a glitch in reporting the results that then was seized on. We heard allegations in Arizona that there were Chinese ballots being mailed in. We had claims that Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, who was at the time dead, had somehow conspired to. hack voting machines and change them. I think a lot of this comes down to what Rudy Giuliani, who was working, as Trump's lawyer, said in the aftermath of 2020 election, which is we have lots of theories, but not a lot of evidence. And that remains the case. There are just all of these different ideas. And it also comes in a, I'd say, in an environment where people, particularly on the right, have been claiming for years that there are supporters being bust in from other states to contested elections or the Democrats are bringing illegal immigrants to vote. There's a whole range of ideas floating out there. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's kind of worth noting that the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative organization in the U.S., ran a study recently, which found, I believe, 77 cases of illegal immigrants voting in American elections over the last five years. But kind of given all of these theories that you've just, you know, run us through here.

And the fact that so many of these theories have been disproven, you know, I mean, through the courts, through the press, but they still seem to retain a lot of purchase in the public. Why do you think that is? I think one big thing is the voting system is kind of complicated and difficult to understand. There are a bunch of fail safes built into the way it works. But it is opaque. Most people, you know, they go to the polls and they cast their ballot and they don't think another thing about it. And they don't take the time to understand how the process works. And as a result, I think there has been not a lot of effort necessarily by officials to educate people on the process. And that lends itself to that kind of ignorance, not in a negative sense, just the people not knowing lends itself to conspiracy theories. The other thing is you've got a media establishment that is happy to amplify these on the right. And I think about, you know, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Fox News, which had been very closely aligned with Trump. kind of turned against him and said, you know, these theories are not real. There's no evidence for this. And what we saw is the audience from Fox started going to alternative channels that were willing to repeat the conspiracy theories. Fox saw their audience dropping and changed course. So you've got a kind of bubble that reinforces these ideas for people who support Trump and are maybe more willing to believe them.

I want to dig into this notion that since his first day of his second term in office, Trump has been working to mitigate the possibility of another election loss. You know, in the last year, he's replaced all kinds of local officials with loyalists and election conspiracists. This includes people in pre-senior jobs like the director of election security and integrity and the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. Trump has also launched a number of investigations into high-profile political rivals. And it was also reported that he has discussed the fact election-related prosecutions could be coming. I mean, you know, like... Let's just kind of sit in that for a moment. You know, when there are full-blown election conspiracists working as senior officials in the American government, you know, when the president is talking about election-related prosecutions, what do you even begin to do about that? You know, I think the first thing is to take a little bit of heart. One... Quirk of the American election system is how decentralized it is. So the president can make a lot of noise and he can put people in these positions that sound very influential, you know, director of election integrity. But the actual federal role in elections is fairly small, especially for the president. So what he's looking to do is sees power to exert control he doesn't really have and see if people will go along with it. But I think that, you know, that's an important thing to remember is that he just doesn't have a lot of role here. But I think it is really important to push back on these ideas and to be on guard for attempts to subvert the system, much like the ones we saw in 2020. But this time it seems like he's much better organized and prepared. In an executive order last year, Trump asserted that mail-in ballots, which arrive after election day, would not legally be counted even if they were postmarked on time. In that same order, Trump also moved to decertify every voting machine in the United States and then recertify only those which meant a very specific list of requirements. It should be said that both moves were denied by the courts, but what do you think he was trying to pass both of those orders into law in the first place? I think Trump is trying to do two things. One of them is potentially to affect the election itself. One thing we have seen consistently for years in the U.S. as something called the blue shift, where initially results tend to look more Republican friendly, and then as more ballots come in, they move more towards Democrats. Partly just because cities are heavily Democratic and there's a lot of people and they take longer to vote. But there's an idea, particularly spread by Trump, that it's mail-in ballots that are doing this. And some mail-in ballots... are allowed to come in in some states after election day if they're postmarked. So he's pushing back on that. And he's been suggesting, you know, the mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, which is another idea that doesn't have a lot of evidence for it. So in some ways, he wants to affect the way the election goes. But I also think he's laying the groundwork for claims that the election was fraudulent after the fact. So he issues these orders and states continue to accept.

ballots after election day or they use, you know, these voting machines that they've been using for a long time that he's tried to decertify. He can say, look, we tried to tell you. We tried to do something about this. And nobody listened. And now the election has been stolen from us yet again. So I think a lot of is sort of preparing a talking point for later. Yeah. I mean, the president has also expressed the desire to nationalize elections. The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting and at least. Many 15 places. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that are horrible corruption on elections. And the federal government should not allow that. The federal government should get involved. What does that mean? And does it stand up to constitutional scrutiny? It's a little hard to know what he means by that. And he will often speak in these kind of vague terms. You know, Congress could pass laws that exerted greater control over the way elections work. They certainly have that power. The president doesn't have the power to do that, but Congress has. And we've seen Congress do that in certain circumstances. You know, after the 2000 election, they passed a law that was meant to clarify and specify the way some of the way the process works. There's an important law passed in the 1990s that said people could register to vote when they applied for a driver's license, for example. But they don't control elections directly. And partly that's because the federal government simply doesn't have any kind of apparatus for that. I mean, there's no department that has the expertise to run all of the tiny elections on a county level that we have across the country. There's also political resistance. For a long time, mostly conservatives have argued that the federal government shouldn't be in the business of running elections, that it's dangerous to have that kind of power centralized. And you've heard people on the left saying that a national election system would be better. In the last couple years, in Trump's time, that is flipped. I now see progressives saying that the decentralized nature of the system is a real strength. And I hear Trump saying that we should have a single national system.

That refresh you've been putting off until the right deal came along? It's here. Wayfair's Black Friday and July sale is happening now so you can finally get the style you've been waiting for for less. Get up to 80% off area rugs and up to 60% off outdoor and bedroom furniture. Shop Wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style, budget, and space. Plus, free shipping. Black Friday and July ends July 27th. Shop today at Wayfair.com. Every style, every home. The news can be hard to keep up with, but sometimes I want to spend a bit more time with a story that's made headlines. That's why I produce CBC's Understood podcast. We've covered the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the scandals surrounding Canada's very own porn hub, the controversial leader of India. Each season of Understood is a short, four-episode immersive experience with a host who knows the story best. Follow so you never miss a season. I guess this now brings us to our present moment here. And I think a good place to start is the recent FBI raid on an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia. Can you walk me through exactly what happened there? Yeah. So. Trump has been talking about Fulton County, Georgia, since the election and claiming that there was some sort of fraud. He filed lawsuits there to no avail. There's been no evidence to back that up. So we recently saw this raid, and it was really surprising for a few reasons. First of all, the search warrant is premised on debunked information. So it's not really a valid claim for why they needed to raid a voting facility and to try to obtain a lot of this material from the 2020 election. Often magistrates will sign off on that sort of thing. They, you know, they tend to take the evidence as given to them at face value. But in this case, it was not good evidence. It was filed by a U.S. attorney in another state. So a federal attorney, a federal prosecutor, but who was assigned to do this even though he is not local, which raises some eyebrows. The director of national intelligence was present there, even though she has no role in domestic election security. She called the president and the president talked with FBI agents who were involved, which is a really surprising involvement of the president and what's supposed to be a law enforcement operation. It's not political. And the pushback has come, not just from Democratic election officials, but from Republican election officials. You know, local election officials, I think, take their jobs really seriously. They do make mistakes from time to time. Occasionally you have people who are prosecuted from, you know, whatever misdeeds. But these people are really devoted public servants. And when they see the federal government reaching in and doing this sort of thing, look over their shoulder, it shakes them a little bit. So basically, they just showed up. They just showed up. They just showed up. To pick up a warrant to pick up the 20-20 ballot. In the video, employees appear to be confused as the FBI served the warrant at the office near Atlanta. So, look, you want to take that on your office with the ballots. Have that.

So they can go play make people airplanes where I like here. All right. That's pretty much it. So they just popped up. What's happening now is that their warrant is wrong. It had the wrong. It's not in elections, possession. It's in clerks. And we've heard pushback and real concern coming from election officials across the political spectrum about how this might affect the ability to conduct elections. I mean, I know you mentioned there the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, who was the director of national intelligence. And I know that there was a lot of attention paid to her presence at this operation. I mean, ultimately, like... Why do you think that she was there? Like, why would the Director of National Intelligence be present for this kind of operation? It's hard to find a good reason for it. It is the case that Tulsi Gabbard has been a proponent of claims of voter fraud in 2020. So it's in line with her sort of political interest. It's also coming at a time when Tulsi Gabbard seems to have been a little bit on the political outs with Trump. You know, she is an opponent of a lot of foreign intervention and she is in a case where she's sort of at odds with Trump in Venezuela or in Iran. And I think there's an impression, fair or not, that this is a way for her to get back in Trump's good graces by emphasizing some of her agreement with him. But I can't see any legitimate reason for her to be there.

Let's now talk about the midterms. So conservative operatives have hinted at the potential use of emergency powers like the Insurrection Act come election day. And the fact that something like that would give the president, you know, more broad authority. Trump has also said that he would accept the results of an upcoming election. I will if the elections are honest. Look, I want. In the quote, we shouldn't even have an election. Earlier this month, former Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, kind of added to these fears by saying... And I would say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust is reliable and that when it gets to election day that we've been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have, knowing that people can trust it. When you hear stuff like that, said in such plain language, What's your reaction? I think it's very worrying. You can, you know, you can look at Kristi Noem's comments and you could interpret them in a charitable way as meaning, you know, the right people voting means people who are legitimate voters. But when you say the right, the right leaders like that or you hear these talk, I don't think there's any way to interpret it as a positive thing. You know, this is a president who has complained about democracy and administration that has fought back against the election administration for a long time. And they may not have the capacity to do much in this case or they may not have the will, but they certainly don't have a lot of respect for the process. And I think that's concerning. In a lot of the, you know, kind of reporting and writing and commentary about the midterms, there's been a lot of focus on the possibility of a militarized presence at voting stations across the country. President Trump has to nationalize the election. You've got to put not just, I think, ICE. You've got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You've got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs. People are actually registered to vote. And people that are nine state citizens vote in this election. election, full stop. Or even seized voting machines, you know, and I know that Donald Trump has already said that he regrets not having seized voting machines in 2020. You know, you've been reporting on elections and democratic freedom for, you know, a long time now. Is there any part of you preparing for a kind of, you know, worst case scenario here? And I wonder if so, what that scenario would look like. Yeah, you know, when I started reporting more on this cycle on what might happen, I viewed the possibility of military intervention as a kind of thing that was a sort of outside chance and not something I really needed to worry about. And then I started calling experts who have talked to in the past who have tended to downplay fears, who have tended to be very sober and careful and not exaggerate. they would repeatedly say, yeah, that's possible. We should be prepared for that. And so I'd say that that made me a lot more worried about the possibility. You know, it's legally complicated. There are laws that are intended to avoid direct interference. The government can't send armed men, as the law says, to polling places unless there's an active insurrection.

So there's, you know, and there are state laws around these things that should constrict the way you do it. But people worry that there might be some sort of interference anyway. And that could be, you know, we already have seen the National Guard in the streets of some cities and cities are overwhelmingly Democratic. We've seen Trump talk about the Insurrection Act. We've seen obviously major. presence from people like ICE or the or CBP in states. And those are the sorts of things that can be used to intimidate voters or to inconvenience voters or to, you know, cause problems with elections even if people aren't directly interfering at the voting places. So there's that. And then you also have people like Steve Bannon, you know, close advisor of Trump in the past and still somebody with influence in his, you know, in his circuit saying. that Trump should send ICE directly to the polls. They should absolutely do it and they should avoid some sort of theft. So, you know, this is something that local election officials are taking seriously and, you know, sort of election advocates are taking seriously is something they need to be prepared for as a possibility in November. When you say people are preparing for a militarized presence at the polls, what does that kind of preparation look like? A lot of it is understanding what the law says about where people can be. It is making sure people know that they have the right to vote. People are, you know, local election officials are getting in touch with their city and county police departments to ensure that things stay calm, to ensure that people have, you know, the right cordons around things. I think a lot of it is just they want to make sure that people are aware and they can try to mitigate that. So if, for example, if the military is blocking access to polls or making it hard to get to the polls, make sure people know about that. Make sure that they vote ahead of time. They use things like mail-in voting. So it's more about mitigation than anything else. As we've seen in Minnesota, it's very hard for a local law enforcement agency to resist the kind of military might of the federal government. They simply can't, you know, get into a shooting match with them.

So I'd like to maybe take a little bit of a step back here and kind of, you know, take a more historical lens on this conversation a little bit. Voter suppression and disenfranchisement generally are like a central constellation in the American political story. This is something that both parties are implicated in, although to varying degrees. Voter suppression, for example, has had a... a really long and violent American history, which includes lynching and, you know, all kinds of racist political violence and intimidation. There's also a history of literacy tests and poll taxes and gerrymandering. How central would you say, though, that voter suppression has been to the history of elections in the United States? And what do you think are some of the key lessons to be learned from that history? I think you can make an argument that voter suppression is more the rule than the exception throughout American history. You know, election advocates will say there's no such thing as a perfectly free and fair election. And the goal is to get you as close to that as possible. I think there are ways in which we've been taking steps back as a system in the U.S. The voting rights act of 1965 is a really important piece of law that helped to push back on various voter suppression efforts, whether that was voter IDs at the polls or certain kinds of redistricting and gerrymandering. But the Supreme Court has been picking away at that and weakening it to a great degree. And so you see more states being able to do these things. We've also seen a growth of partisan gerrymandering. driven by, you know, really specific mapmaking and computer programs that give a capacity that didn't exist in the past. So it's an old school technique that is being adopted to the modern moment. And we've seen the Supreme Court say that it has no role in policing partisan gerrymandering. So that's something that is growing a great deal. The big things in this moment, I think, are... Voter ID laws, which you see in many states across the country, and which are fairly popular. I think a lot of people believe that it makes sense to have voter ID laws. The question is really how they're implemented. And then gerrymandering, and that's something we've seen in many states. We're witnessing a partisan tit for tat going on where, you know, Trump pushed a bunch of Republican states to redraw their maps in ways that were more favorable. The Supreme Court tonight and what appears to be a six to three ruling along ideological lines now allowing Texas to use a new congressional district map drawn to favor Republicans. New maps could help Republicans gain up to five more seats in the House in the midterms next year. We've seen Democratic states then respond by doing that. The Supreme Court is allowing the state to use a new congressional map for this year's midterms. The Trump administration and California Republicans had sued Governor Gavin Newsom claiming the newly drawn map favored Hispanic voters. In the case of California, they had to go to voters to overrule a body that voters had instituted to prevent this kind of partisan gerrymandering.

So it does feel like a little bit of a race to the bottom between both parties right now. You've written about a phenomenon called competitive authoritarianism in the context of these upcoming midterms. Can you kind of walk me through what competitive authoritarianism is and kind of is in this context and why it's a particularly relevant framework to understand Donald Trump in this moment? I found it really helpful to thinking about a lot of the things that Trump does. We have this idea historically of what a dictator or a strong man is. And it's a really straightforwardly repressive environment. You ban opposition parties. You get rid of elections. You have a single media establishment that's run by the state. And we can think of lots of examples of these around the world in the 20th century. This is an idea that comes from the sort of end of the Cold War. And originally was designed by political scientists to talk about countries in, for example, in the former Soviet Union. Now I think we're seeing it more in places like the U.S. And the idea is you don't adopt those really heavy-handed tactics. You don't ban opposition parties. You just make it a lot harder for them to win elections. And I think a lot of the things we're talking about Trump trying to do fit under that rubric. You don't. get rid of elections altogether because that gets a lot of backlash, both domestically and overseas. You just make the elections harder. You don't ban the media altogether, but you sort of pressure the independent media and you try to put friendly operators in place who can give you more favorable coverage. So that's an example. We've seen that in Viktor Orban's Hungary. And I think you can look at the way Trump is attacking media outlets, threatening them, but also... working to install political allies as the owners of those outlets in U.S., whether it's CBS or CNN, fits into the same thing. And so there you're just sort of shifting the playing field and putting a thumb on the scales. so that you may not win every election, but you will win many elections, and the opposition party will just really struggle to compete. You know, we've spent a lot of time in this conversation talking about Donald Trump and the Republican Party, the particular and unique risk posed by one party in the United States. In which case, I think the, you know, the natural question to ask here is probably whether or not you think the Democratic Party is up for the fight here. You know, I read one person in the Atlantic that, you know, the magazine that you work for who said, quote, Republicans are over here being straight up mercenaries. Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance. They are not built for when the fascists come. What do you make of that argument? The Democratic Party has certainly seemed on the back foot for much of the Trump administration. And, you know, what the leaders will say is we're in a difficult position. We just don't have a lot of power because we don't control the Senate or the House or the White House or the Supreme Court. And it is true that that is a... That's not a strong position to be in. But they do seem to have been taken by surprise by some of the things that Trump has done and the Republicans have done. And I think that, you know, that is a, that's the worry that activists have. I think there is a real effort to be prepared for the midterms. And Democrats also feel that they have the edge in the midterms. And, you know, you mentioned earlier, Trump saying there shouldn't be midterms because the president's party always does poorly. He understands that. They understand that. So they're looking forward to this as the chance to put.

put some pressure on Trump to win the election and to regain some power. So I think they understand the existential stakes. But, you know, it's very hard to resist the kinds of things Trump is doing. What he's doing is using government power in ways that have traditionally been either illegal or have been, you know, viewed as inappropriate. And using that power against your opponents to make it hard for the opponents to have power, that's an effective tool. And they need to come up with new ways to push back on it, I think. Just as the last question here, you know, we've done all kinds of episodes on this program about the way democracy has historically produced authoritarianism and fascism, how it has through history helped to facilitate its own destruction in many cases. Do you think that American democracy, you know, the system as it currently exists? has the capacity to withstand and resists the kinds of challenges that we've been outlining in this conversation? I think it's too early to tell. We have seen some real signs of strength from the system. You know, the 2020 election was a test, and in many ways, the system passed it well. Trump lost the election and left office. What came after that was more worrying the lack of accountability. We have seen now Trump managing to sort of work around Congress, sideline a lot of the safeguards on him, but also losing a lot of cases in court. I think that 2026 midterms are going to be a really important moment to see just how strong the system is. If the system is able to hold this election in a fair way and whether Republicans or Democrats win. Those people take power without major strife, without violence, widespread issues. That will be a good test for whether the system is working. But even if it works in 26, 2028 was going to be another important and probably even more important test. So I think what's scary is there's no chance really to take the foot off the accelerator here. People have to keep paying attention to this and working at it and defending institutions. And it's very hard to sustain that kind of effort over a long period. David, thanks so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. That's all for today. I'm Matthew Amha. Thanks so much for listening.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.