Bulwark Takes - Last Time He Had a Mob. Now He Has Congress.

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Donald Trump isn’t just attacking voter ID opponents—he’s laying the groundwork to reject the midterms if Republicans lose.Will Saletan traces the throughline from 2020 to now: the claim that Democrats can only win by cheating, the endless escalation from voter ID to reopening old elections, and the growing chorus inside the GOP repeating the same message.

Hey, it's Will Salatin from the bulwark. Serious topic, we got to talk about the Republican plan to de-legitimize this year's elections. So here's where we are. Donald Trump and Republicans are claiming that Democrats support voter fraud because they're refusing to go along with the Save America Act. Here's Trump talking about it in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. It's very simple. All voters must.

to show voter ID. So that is the centerpiece of the act, voter ID. But what Trump didn't mention is the House already passed a version of the bill last year, which would require an ID to register

to vote. So they already passed that. The new version says, even though you already presented an ID to register, and they have your information in the system, you have to bring an ID again on Election Day. And the trick is, if Democrats go along with that, Republicans are going to keep going. They'll keep adding

hassles and demands until Democrats say, no, no, no, that's too much. And the point of this whole exercise is to get Democrats to say no to something. So Republicans can say, see, the Democrats just want to cheat. What I want to show you today is where all of this is going. The goal is, Trump and the Republicans want you to believe not just that Democrats cheat, but that cheating is the only way Democrats can win elections. And if they can get you to believe that, or if they can get the public to believe that, then when Democrats do win this year's elections, Trump and the Republicans can claim that they don't have to accept the results because Democrats cheated. Now, I know that may sound alarmist, so let me take you through it. Here's what Trump said in his state of the union about the Democrats. Why would anybody not one voter ID?

One reason, because they want to cheat. There's only one reason. They want to cheat. They have cheated and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. So that last line is the key. Democrats, according to Trump, are so unpopular on the issues that the only way they can win is to cheat. which means any election won by the Democrats is by definition stolen. Now, you might ask, come on, does Trump really mean that?

Would he actually follow through and try to block Democrats from taking office? And the answer, of course, is yeah, he already did. Here's what Trump said, two months before the 2020 election. And the ballot sending, what do you see with at these unsolicited ballots? What do you see the mess that they want? They want it to be a mess. It's the only way they're going to win. It's the only way they can win is to cheat, in my opinion.

So Trump was laying the groundwork to claim that if Democrats won, they must have cheated. And he used his own crowds, the big crowds that showed up at his rallies, to prove that voters loved him. So if he lost, it had to be cheating. These ballots, the ones we're talking about, whether it's Pennsylvania, because we're going to win in Pennsylvania. You've got to watch, but you have a governor who's in charge of ballots. They're going to try and steal the election. Look at this crowd. The only way they can win, Pennsylvania, frankly, is to cheat on the ballots.

That's the way I looked at. You heard what he said. Look at this crowd. Never mind all the people who didn't go to the rally because they hated Trump. Those people, they don't exist, right? All these people, the people in my rally, they love me. I can't lose. So when Trump actually lost Pennsylvania in the election, he said, no, no, no, that's fraud.

Here's what he said on January 6th when he had another rally. And this time, he told the crowd to march on the Capitol. So Pennsylvania was defrauded. But I said, something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. Can't have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell.

And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. Again, you heard him. He said, it can't have happened. I can't have lost. It has to be fraud. And he sent those people to the Capitol and they tried to overthrow the election. So this is deadly serious. There's a straight line from saying Democrats can only win by cheating to overthrowing the election. And then Trump said it again when he ran for president in 2024. Here he is. in Michigan on the night before the 2024 election talking about the Democrats. Very high taxes. Their campaigning are the fact that they're going to raise everybody's taxes. And you have men playing in women's sports. You have to cheat. Who else going to approve that stuff? Who's going to approve open borders with criminals pouring into our country by the millions? No, they have to cheat. They have to cheat. And they do. And they do it very well, actually. The message was Democrats are so far left, they can't possibly win on the issues.

It has to be cheating. And in fact, after the election, Trump did claim that Democrats cheated. But because he won, he didn't need to overthrow the results. So now we're approaching another election, the midterms. And Trump is claiming, again, that because he's surrounded by crowds who love and adore him, Any election, his party loses, must be rigged. Here's what he said at the White House in October. The best thing you can do is have honest elections because the elections are totally rigged in so many of these places.

You know, you take a look at the people they're all loving you. They can't breathe. They love so much every one of them. You don't see one negative. Then all of a sudden you lose the election by 20 points. The elections are so rigged and we prove that in 2020. Again, you can see the bubble he lives in. He says the people around him love him.

They love him so much. They can't breathe. You don't see one negative, he says. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you lose the election. How can that be? It has to be fraud, right? And then last month at a meeting of House Republicans, Trump said Democrats were so clearly out of touch. They were so totally incapable of winning a fair election that Republicans

shouldn't even have to run against them. For four years, we had the worst president, did the worst job, they had the worst policy, we have to even run against these people. Now, I won't say cancel the election, they should cancel the election because the fake news will say, he wants the elections cancel,

he's a dictator, the election. And they'll fight it like crazy because they cheat. That's the only way they can win. Oh, no. Trump's not saying he'll cancel the election. No, no, no. He's just saying there's no point in having

an election since everybody knows there's only one party that can win without cheating. But the thing is, Democrats have been winning elections. They just won the election in Virginia in November. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, is the new governor of Virginia. And Trump can't believe it, right? He can't understand how she won. In fact, he says it has to be cheating. She came into Virginia, raised everything to a point like taxes that nobody ever even heard of before. And I don't understand. How do people get elected with this kind of philosophy? You know, I give tax cuts and they give tax increases.

I don't know how they get elected. They get elected because they cheat. You want to know the truth. If they didn't cheat, if they didn't cheat, they'd have no chance. They have horrible policy. Transgender for everyone. And then just this week on Monday, Trump basically said he also doesn't believe the polls that show most people don't like the way he's treating immigrants and protesters. He said he has a silent majority that apparently doesn't show up in the polls because the polls are fake.

And also this silent majority somehow gets hidden or erased by election fraud. It just amazes me that there's not more support out there. It's just, we actually have a silent support. I think it's silent. I think it's a, well, that's how I won. I got probably 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated in this election, too. It was just too big to rig. Too big to Rick. But they cheated like hell. So all of that brings us to this voter ID bill. Trump's message is, Democrats, are opposing this bill because it would take away cheating, and they can't win without cheating. They don't want voter ID because they want to cheat in elections. Because they cheat. And the fact is they could never get elected if they ever changed.

They know it. If you had voter ID, if you had proof of citizenship, they could never win an election. And they know that. And they're fighting to the hill. So all of this is about reinforcing his plan for the midterms. if Democrats win, Trump will say the election was stolen. So why shouldn't Democrats just go along with the extra voter ID?

Well, the problem is Trump already has another level he can go to. If Democrats say yes to the extra voter ID, Trump will say they're still trying to cheat because they're opposing his new thing, which is reinvestigating the 2020 election. Here's what he said last week after the FBI, prompted by Trump, raided a ballot warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Voter ID. The Democrats don't want to give us voter ID because they want to cheat. By the way, did you see they raided the Fulton County place, storage house.

And now they have the ballots. And the Democrats are fighting like. hell, and I think it goes before a judge tomorrow, to not let anybody see the ballots. Why don't they want them to see the ballots after all these years? You know why they don't want? Because they cheated, that's why. You get the picture. There's no end to this game. The game is to find something to accuse Democrats of cheating. And the point of the game is to justify rejecting the election results in November. Now, you might say, okay, maybe Trump would do that. But he didn't get away with overturning the election in 2020, and he won't get away with it this time either, because

Republicans won't go along with it. Well, let me introduce you to the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. He already is totally on board with Trump's campaign to reinvestigate the election in Georgia. Here's Johnson three weeks ago on Meet the Press. I find it comical that one of the senators from Georgia is talking about schemes in elections. Remember, Georgia was example A of that in the 2020 election. There were two statewide recounts in Georgia, Mr. Speaker. They sent mail-out ballots to everyone. Everyone knows all of the problems that occurred in Georgia. And the president is keeping a proper focus on it.

This investigation is to ensure that all the questions about the elections in Fulton County are investigated properly. That's all bullshit, by the way. The whole thing about fraud in Georgia was totally debunked years ago. But Johnson is trying to bring it back to help Trump spread his lies about fraud. In fact, Johnson is pushing his own lies

about the 2024 election in California. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle. And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away. until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day

were our candidates ahead on any of those counts. It just looks on its face to be fraudulent. That was Johnson on February 3rd. And then four days later, he repeated Trump's overarching lie that the only way Democrats can win is fraud. Their policies are so unpopular. They are refuted and repudiated at the ballot box is over and over. And so they feel like they've got to a lot.

allow, they've got to cheat. Frankly, that's it. They've got to allow illegals to participate in election so that they can continue to win. So Trump has Johnson in the House, and he's getting support in the Senate for the same big lie. Here is Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri, a Republican, right after the state of the Union talking about the Democrats. And I think you have this convergence of illegal immigration that they support. Also this, you know, they don't believe people should have to, you know, prove who they are when they vote. There's no coincidence that those two things are tied together for them because they have to cheat at this point. There you go.

Democrats have lost the American people. They can't win legitimately. So they have to cheat. And that message that the only way Democrats can win is by cheating is coming from Trump, the Speaker of the House, and Republicans in the Senate. What do you think all those people are going to do? these people who control the government, under a president who already tried to overthrow the one election he lost. What do you think they're going to do when Democrats win in November? See you next time.