This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 18 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
On Monday, dozens of people turned up in Austin, Texas, to cheer on Democrats as they returned to the state amid a huge national fight over redistricting.
Texas has been at the center of an extraordinary demand by Donald Trump that Republican-controlled states, like Texas, draw new congressional maps and effectively guarantee GOP control of Congress for years to come.
It’s not just Texas. Vice President JD Vance flew to Indiana earlier this month to put pressure on the Republican governor there to alter that state’s maps for the Republicans. Politico reported that the White House has been in talks with Republicans in Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida to change their congressional maps as well.
That’s one way Trump’s trying to rig the midterms — by demanding changes to congressional district maps to make it structurally impossible for Democrats to control Congress again.
Here’s a second way: Trump also appears to be trying to establish a pretext for nullifying or delaying the midterm elections everywhere, demanding a new census and claiming the old one shouldn’t count.
The census is how we get congressional districts. If Trump can nullify the existing census by, for example, blaming the counting of immigrants or some other factor, he can lay the groundwork to claim that all the existing congressional districts in the country are somehow wrong and can’t be used — and therefore, we can’t have congressional elections using the districts we now have. That’s two.
Now, it seems Trump has a new idea, one that he got from a man he once mused could become his “best friend”: Vladimir Putin.
On Friday, Trump held a summit in Alaska with the Russian president. Immediately after that summit, Trump said Putin gave him some advice on how to conduct elections in the U.S.
Trump said Putin agrees with him that people should not be allowed to vote by mail. And so on Monday, Trump announced that he will sign an executive order barring Americans from voting by mail and potentially by machine, as well.
Now, I would caution you again — as always — to watch what he actually does here and not just what he says he is going to do. But if Trump is taking tactical advice from Putin about how to hold something that looks like an election but is not actually an election, that doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy.
Historian and journalist Garrett Graff summed up what is at stake: “This is step one in how we lose free and fair elections. It’s not that Trump will ‘cancel’ the midterms. It’s just everyone has to vote in person, and urban downtowns will be filled with ICE checkpoints and intimidating National Guard troops to ‘double check’ that only citizens vote.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
