Trump Begins to Run 2020 Playbook in California and Alaska

Chaos is the Goal

As David Kurtz has been chronicling for TPM in his daily newsletter, the Trump administration has started to undertake what much of America long expected: it is trying to intervene in the midterms to help Republicans retain control of Congress.

The Department of Justice sued Alaska on Friday, demanding that the state delay certification until an investigation can “determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan” — a Republican on the ballot with the same name as the incumbent GOP senator — “were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.” Trump said he asked the DOJ to initiate the suit. Experts see the case as weak.

In California, the DOJ demanded that Los Angeles — and then every other county in the state — segregate ballots from a list of names it provided, claiming those people were noncitizens likely to cast ballots.

The lists appear to have considerable problems, as have previous administration effort to identify noncitizen voters. One county’s list had only two alleged noncitizen voters, and the county clerk told the New York Times it appears neither had ever voted. Another county clerk told the Times that she had been sent the wrong list, with names only of people from a different county.

On Sunday, federal appeals court judges appeared skeptical of the Los Angeles effort, suggesting both that it was premature for the court to order the county to do as the DOJ wished, and that, even if the court had jurisdiction, the DOJ did not have a case on the merits.

This campaign has clear echoes of 2020 and early 2021, when the administration and allied lawyers went to court dozens of times seeking to throw out votes from various swing states. They used arguments that ranged from complaints about new, COVID-era election administration procedures to hare-brained conspiracy theories. Over and over, they lost.

But the legal campaign and the headlines it generated — along with a steady flow of ever-more out there conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric from the administration — created the appearance that, well, something must be off. Otherwise, how did all of these cases wind up in court? What’s everyone talking about? Regular Americans don’t have time to get to the bottom of it. The hubbub inspires doubt and creates chaos, which, for Trump, opens doors.

As TPM has chronicled through close examination of Trump allies’ texts and legal memos from the period immediately after the 2020 election — many of which we published for the first time — this strategy was part of a carefully calculated campaign.

As January 6 approached, the goal was no longer for victory in lower-level federal courts, but for a kind of deus ex machina — for either Congress to throw out the votes from certain states and seat Trump’s alternate slate of electors, or for the Supreme Court to step in and somehow invalidate the election without getting too deep into the specifics. Trump’s lawyers planned for a congressional stalemate over the results of the election to begin, but not end, on January 6. All of the lawsuits ahead of Jan. 6, regardless of outcome, would “force serious review in Congress of election fraud in various states,” one Trump lawyer wrote in December 2020, imagining an election that was still unresolved by January 20, 2021 — Inauguration Day.

The lawsuits initiated last week lay the groundwork to run this campaign again, this time with the full force of the federal government behind it. Even if the DOJ loses repeatedly in court — as looks likely, at least with these first two efforts — the appearance of still-unresolved questions tees up the argument that its premature to seat any new Democratic majority.

This is not to say this plan is likely to succeed. But its worth being clear-eyed about the road we’re heading down.

A Defeat for the Right in Brazil Inevitably Leads To Election Denial

• Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection Sunday with 51.76% of the vote. Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president who attempted a Jan. 6-like autocoup, recieved 48.24%.
• Immediately, Bolsonaro said he would not accept defeat. A Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice extended voting hours after bad weather and, Lula alleged, meddling by local officials prevented some voters from being able to reach the polls. Both candidates requested the extended hours, but Bolsonaro’s team later described it as a “judicial coup.” “It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the ​circumstances under which things unfolded,” Bolsonaro told journalists, saying he would seek to get the election annulled.
• The fact that Lula won by 4 million votes means Bolsonaro is unlikely to succeed.
• The U.S. State Department pushed hard for Bolsonaro to return to power, Reuters reports. In the months before ‌election campaigning began, two top State Department officials “instructed US diplomats in Brazil that it was US policy to restore ‌former President Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s leader – even though he had been disqualified from office for plotting a coup in 2022, when he lost the presidential election to Lula,” Reuters reports.

Tabs

• The right-wing strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic — often compared to Hungary’s now-ousted leader Viktor Orbán — has conceded defeat in a parliamentary election that followed years of student-led protests against his reign.
• Speaking of Orbán, here’s the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board writing that the Trump administration wants him for UN Secretary General.
• “Companies with ties to President Donald Trump and his family are staffing up with lawyers and lobbyists, as Democrats threaten sweeping probes if they flip either chamber of Congress in the midterm elections,” Bloomberg Businessweek reports. That includes prediction market companies and crypto firms.

Woman of the Hour

It’s Kristi Noem, who, on October 16, put out what appears to be a fake press release, on fake letterhead to make it appear as if she was still involved in the Trump administration. “The Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas role was always a six-month appointment,” it read. “Secretary Noem remains at the State Department as a Senior Advisor.” State Department sources told Politico and CBS the press release was not real, nor was the letterhead it was published on.