No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - DOJ makes DREADED announcement ahead of midterms

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

The DOJ makes an announcement previewing their strategy to interfere in midterms. Brian interviews Dan Pfeiffer about Trump's waning influence in the party.Subscribe to Message Box: https://www.messageboxnews.com/Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Department of Justice makes an announcement previewing their strategy to interfere in midterms. And I interview former Obama Communications Director and co-hosts of POTSafe America, Dan Pfeiffer. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So the question I get more than any other is about what the White House is going to do to interfere in midterms. And we just got a preview of exactly that. The Assistant Attorney General, Hermit Dillon, sat down for an interview on Bloomberg's balance of power. And she said, quote, we began our election security work almost as soon as I was sworn. in last April. This is an ongoing duty and obligation. The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights

Division has sent monitors to election hotspots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems, and we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary. We're going to do it to the tune of approximately 1,000 election monitors in the November election, and this is just something that the DOJ does. Now, let's be clear. This is a voter suppression tactic, period. Here's why. Think about who actually gets deployed. It's not going to be bureaucratic. There's not a thousand bureaucrats sitting around. It's probably going to be the federal agents from the one agency that has more money than most militaries on the planet, which is ICE. So you've got a rogue agency answerable to one man that doesn't show their faces, doesn't wear insignia,

whose entire reputation is that they are not afraid to shoot or kill Americans with impunity, who will likely be at the very polling places that Americans are expected to show up at in person in November, which might shed light on why people like Caroline Levin. outright refused to rule it out when asked. Steve Bannon recently said, quote, we're going to have ICE around the polls come November. Is that something that the president is considering? That's not something I've ever heard the president consider.

No. To the American public that ICE will not be around polling locations or voting locations in November? I can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November. I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ice outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question. But the fact that they feel they have to do this is just as big a story.

Like clearly the Trump administration and the broader GOP have just given up on trying to win on the merits. So they feel like their only choice at this point is to just rig the rules of the game. Just look at the environment that they're operating in. You've got 10 Trump endorsed candidates who've already lost their own primaries this cycle. the president's approval ratings are underwater on virtually every issue that matters to voters. The economy, health care, foreign policy, costs are higher across the board. Healthcare is less available. Food assistance is less available.

Inflation's up. The Epstein files are being suppressed. The war that Trump swore he'd avoid is going on nine months now. And frankly, there's no way to hide any of that. There's no ad buy that erases inflation or the Iran war or, you know, a carrier full of sailors who've been stuck at sea for 250 days. When a party knows it can't win a fair fight over its record, it's got two options. It can try and change its record or it can just change the fight.

This administration has made very clear which one it's choosing. And look, the Republicans will try and sell this move as election integrity, as they've been doing for years, that a thousand federal agents need to be posted up at polling places because something is wrong with how Americans vote. But the obvious question in response to that is something is wrong based on what? where is the evidence of any widespread fraud that justifies a thousand person federal deployment? Doesn't exist. It's never existed. Study after study, audit after audit, court case after court case, including the ones that this very administration brought in front of judges who Trump himself appointed have failed to turn up

anything remotely close to the scale of fraud that would warrant this kind of response. The absence of evidence isn't some gap in the story. It is the story. So if this isn't about fraud that exists, what's it about? It's about creating the appearance that fraud might be lurking because they need some thin pretense, some flimsy justification to justify federal agents standing inside polling places in, you know, specific communities that this administration has already landed on, has already decided to distrust, probably black majority or young majority or Democrat majority districts in swing states. Surprise, surprise.

That's not election security. That is the machinery, the basis of suppression. Because the most effective way to suppress a vote isn't always physically stopping somebody from casting a ballot. Sometimes it's just making people afraid enough or uncertain enough or to feel watched enough that turn out in the quote-unquote wrong precincts just quietly drops on its own.

Even Harmeet Dillon, when she was pressed, couldn't produce the evidence that she was implying existed. She claims that states that have cooperated with DOJ's voter role efforts, supposedly show, and this is a quote, hundreds of thousands of dead people and, quote, tens of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls. But she didn't name a single state, didn't cite a single source, and even admitted in the same interview that the DOJ needs to do, quote, further verification before it can say whether anyone actually voted illegally. So the justification for a thousand agent deployment is by the administration's own admission,

completely unverified. That's not. responding to a documented crisis, it is manufacturing the impression of a crisis. And consider, too, if there was mass fraud, you know what we'd see? Prosecutions. And you know what we haven't seen? Prosecutions. That is as big a tell as you could possibly find, especially at the hands of a DOJ that will stop at nothing to prosecute anyone regardless of how much evidence or lack thereof there is. In fact, DOJ has had every opportunity to make its case in an actual courtroom, under actual scrutiny, and it's failed spectacularly. I've spoken with Mark Elias at length about the fact that there are

23 separate district court cases where DOJ sued states demanding their unredacted voter rolls, you know, complete with social security numbers, drivers' license data, all of that, and DOJ has lost all 23. The Sixth Circuit rejected them too. And just this past Friday, the full appeals court, en banc, wouldn't even rehear it. 23 losses in front of judges appointed by presidents of both parties is about as close as the legal system gets to saying definitively that there is nothing there. And the department's response, by the way, wasn't just to accept it. It was to start talking to the Supreme Court instead. Because again, when you can't win on the merits, you just find hacks whose hackery you can

appeal to. So follow the actual sequence of events here because it tells you everything. DOJ went looking for evidence of massive voter fraud. It lost 23 times trying to get the data it claimed would prove it. It still hasn't produced a single verified case at the scale it's describing, and now, instead of the case for fraud, we get a thousand federal monitors at polling places anyway, announced with the same unverified claims that already failed in court, aimed at election hotspots that the department won't even name. When you can't win the legal argument and you can't win the political argument, you just change the rules of the game to benefit you. And that is the entire strategy in one sentence. If this White House can't win elections on the

merits, you know, on the economy, on the Iran war, on a president openly telling grieving military families that their kids haven't sacrificed enough yet, the fallback is just to make voting itself feel like it's being surveilled. Not because there's real fraud, because the administration needs voters, especially in those communities that it doesn't like, to just hesitate, to wonder if showing up is worth of scrutiny. You don't need to rig a single ballot to suppress the vote. You just need enough people to believe that something is wrong, something is dangerous, and to make an example out of those people. So my advice to everybody, do not give them what they want. There will be midterm elections and they will be free and fair. We have God knows how many attorneys, prosecutors

working to make sure that that's the case. And the Trump administration will not succeed at suppressing the vote no matter who they deploy. This tactic is a sign of weakness and are precursors to the fact that even the White House is preparing to lose come November. Next up is my interview with Dan Pfeiffer. No Lie is brought to you by SimplySafe. So obviously security is important for everybody, but when you've got a home, pets, kids, a family, it becomes exponentially more important.

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Don't forget, there's no safe like SimpliSafe. It looks like there's something of the end of an era as far as Trump's grip on the party is concerned. I'm joined now by Dan Pfeiffer, former communications director for Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Save America. Dan, you had posted in the aftermath of Cory Mills losing his primary in Florida. And I'm going to put this right up on the screen. Three more Trump endorsed GOP candidates lost their primaries last night. Trump's endorsement used to be a guaranteed win, no more. This is more evidence that Trump's grip on his base in American

politics is loosening. So I want you to talk about that post that you made and Trump's waning influence in his own party. Sure. Like, I will stipulate that the over overwhelming majority of people that Trump endorses wins, but also the overwhelming majority of his endorsements are in completely safe seats. Right. It used to be an absolute guarantee that in the most high profile of races, a Trump endorsement would be akin to victory. We have seen in several cases in recent weeks, including three times last night, where

Republicans endorsed by Trump have lost. And what I think is interesting about it is like, if you are a Republican who, cross the party like a Thomas Massey or a Bill Cassidy like Trump can still win those primaries but when Republicans are choosing between two different Republicans

who haven't like committed some sort of mortal sin against the party Trump's endorsement is it isn't a guarantee anymore like we've seen it and I think you can do it's just if part of this I can get into data if you want but part of this is also just vibes you can just feel

it Trump's a less dominant force in the attention economy what he says people react to less. It carries less way. People are less scared of them. And I think it's showing up in primaries too. Do you think that this is evidence of his waning influence? Or is this like an affirmative rebuke against Trump?

I think it's waning influence because these are not, these are primaries between two mostly equally conservative Republican candidates. And if people think there is a better candidate that Trump does not like, they'll vote for that candidate. So it's more like his death grip on the party is loosening. Yeah. And so what are the implications then moving forward? Like how are you thinking about his influence, especially as it relates to who he decides to declare as his heir apparent in 2028? You know, I think the people, Republican primary voters, will take Trump's endorsement into consideration, but it may not be decisive in a primary. What will matter is whether he deploy,

his hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds or puts his thumb on the scale with the actual institutional Republican Party in terms of how delegates are counted or what the primary schedule is to help that person. But if people are just walking in, they may, you know, Trump's endorsement is one piece of data. It's not the only piece of data. In terms of like what he's doing, I guess I guess the broader question is like he still, as you said, has overwhelming support among his base. He's done virtually the opposite of everything that he promised on the campaign trail. And so to what extent does it matter? To what extent is his continued refusal to abide by his campaign promises? The increased cost, you know, continuing to stay

bogged down in this foreign war in the Middle East, his refusal to release the Epstein files, is that will there come a point where the base is so inelastic because these are people who stuck with him through everything, that he can, you know, basically commit any sin and it just won't matter. Well, I think what happens over time is not that the base abandons Trump is the base becomes smaller, is that more and more Republicans identify, stop identifying as macro-republicans. Yeah. Because, you know, I think in the way a lot of political analysts think about it, they think a Maga-Republican is someone who is, you know, anti-immigration, anti-trade. The MAGA Republican really just means you like Trump.

And so you're seeing, you know, so Trump's always going to have high approval among MAGA Republicans. That's not the most important question. The important question is how many Republicans to identify as MAGA Republicans? And that's the number we should sort of watch. The other thing that I've been paying a lot of attention to it, and you do see, is that Trump's strong approval among Republicans has been dropping steadily since he was sworn in. And so you have people who still say they like and they still approve of them. But strong approval is a proxy for enthusiasm. them in elections, it's a proxy for how much they care about them. And so, yeah, of course,

if, you know, like in Republican politics, approving of Trump is a, it's part of your personal identity. But do you strongly approve of them or are you just kind of approve of them? And the number of Republicans who just kind of approve of them is going way out. So in terms of kind of the end of an era, I'm going to put another post on the screen of something else that you said from the other side of the aisle. And this is in the aftermath of Alexander Vindman, who had boatloads of money losing to a DSA-backed candidate in Florida for the Senate race. So that post says, Alex Vindman losing despite raking in a metric shit ton of money

based on being a resistance hero, does feel like the end of a certain era. And I know there's probably a degree to which that was tongue-in-cheek, especially given the fact that that was the caveat, it was caveated by or qualified as being the resistance hero era. But do you feel like we are coming up upon a moment because there's such a glut of money

in this ecosystem that having boatloads of money, having metric shit tons of money, isn't a guarantee of victory in maybe the same way it used to be? Yeah, so my tweet was referring to two things here. The first is, and it's kind of related to your first set of questions about Trump's death grip on the Republican Party, it also feels like he's losing a bit of his death grip

on the Democratic Party. Like there was a time in which the thing that mattered most was, for a Democrat, was, does this Democrat stand up to Trump? And in this election cycle alone, we have seen Dan Goldman, who was the counsel for the Democrats during their first impeachment trial of Trump, and then rode the fame from that job into Congress, lose a primary. We saw George Conway, a very famous Trump apostate who was basically lived on MS now over the years. Yeah. Only get 6% of the vote in a primary in the upper west side of Manhattan. And then you have Alex Vindman, who was the, you know, he was a very, he's a very, very brave person who stood up and testified against him.

Trump and that impeachment, and that he lost. And so I do think that this is the worst. I kind of think Democrats can see the light at the end of the Trump tunnel here. And so fighting Trump is necessary to succeed in democratic politics, but it's insufficient on its own. But the second point is we are seeing at a number of races where the candidate who is spending significant less money, notably Angie Nixon here in Florida and Abdul al-Said in Michigan, win despite that. And there are a couple of things going on here. One, there are ways, if you were very, very talented to get your message out much cheaper. You can do it organically. You can go viral. You can have a real social presence. You can be someone who is always communicating in every platform.

Abdul was excellent at that in his case. But also, the bulk of money is spent on linear television ads. And linear television ads now reach a vastly diminishing. group of people. They still matter, and I think one of the reasons why Francesca Hong lost is because she ran no ads down the stretch. But it's not, the victory does not go to the person who can raise the most money anymore. And there are ways in which I think this is going to matter in the 2028 primary where candidates who are understanding the attention economy who are clever about getting their name ID up and their message out, will be able to succeed without raising the most money. No lie is brought to you by Quince. So August is the perfect time to hit reset before the

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shop for everything that I like. not just clothing. Quince has become my go-to for everything from hotel quality bedding and bath essentials to premium cookware and travel must-haves. Upgrade your every day. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash BTC. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-C.com slash B-T-C. So in the event where Trump has this, what, $400, $450 million just sitting there as his war chest and and this is you know compared to a DNC that has an anemic i mean they have like negative funding i think they're in the whole three million dollars yeah like i understand why trump is

sitting on that because he wants to be able to deploy it when it's going to be most effective for him but will will he like could we be in a situation where he's held onto it so long and we've entered an attention economy where simply being able to perform well organically and authentically is going to be enough that you don't even need these boatloads of money. And he will have kind of like held onto it too long because now we've entered an era where you can pretty much do it for free if you're good enough. If you've got the RIS that AOC has, that Abdul has, and so on.

I think that he has sat on it much longer than he should have because investing the money in the campaigns earlier has exponential benefits. If you wait to the end, all you're doing is buying television ads to the most expensive rate possible. If you buy your ads earlier, they're cheaper. But if you invest in technology, organizing, staffing, those sorts of things

we'll use for the bulk of the campaign. And so he has not been, I don't think he's been particularly strategic about this. That money is going to matter. Like, it definitely will matter and it will be a help to Republicans, particularly in more Republican states, or in some of the stretch districts

where Democrats could cash Republicans sleeping, you know, like a Trump plus 12, Trump plus 13 district. they'll now have money to be everywhere, but it's still, once again, does not matter as much as it used to before. And I would be much more worried if Trump started the year with $500 million,

and only had $200 million to his account now because it meant he was deploying it strategically throughout the course of the year. Instead, he's basically keeping it in an account that doesn't really gain interest for a year and a half now. Okay, so like a couple things on that. First of all, that is basically the theory of the case with Ben Wickler and Wisdoms.

Like they had a long-term strategy to continue building up the party so it wasn't just throwing money at ads that go in one year and out the other in October or November of an election year. This is what it looks like when you organize year round. And that's what turned Wisconsin into the state that had often been a thorn in the side of Democrats into a pretty reliably bluish state when it came to a lot of these statewide elections, state Supreme Court elections. A lot of those went our way. And that's because we had somebody like Ben Wickler running that show. Another point is like, you know, I can't remember how many years ago it was,

but there was an election cycle where Stephanie Valencia basically watched, and she noted this, and that's why she, that was one of your colleagues in the Obama White House, but watched as in some South Florida district, Democrats poured millions and millions and millions of dollars into ads that, again, went in one ear out the other that ran for eight weeks. And meanwhile, Republicans bought a radio station for $350,000. So pocket change compared to what the Democrats were spending. And now they have infrastructure that they can rely on all year long to basically proselytize people who are listening.

And all the Democrats had to show for it was like, again, making a bunch of TV stations rich, filthy rich in the lead up to an election. And then the last part is like, you know, in large part, like the importance of the work that you and the guys that Crooked do is like creating. that infrastructure so that it's not just throwing money at ads that are not going to impact people. Like, we are in a different kind of economy where people are building up their worldviews based on their trusted voices that they listen to 365 days out of the year. People aren't just tuning in to you like in November to figure out what to do. They're in large part reading message box all year round. They're listening to POTSafe America all year round. And that's how you have to operate in this ecosystem. And yeah, to your point, like,

Just throwing money at these ads is not going to be it in 2026 or beyond. Yeah, that's exactly right. Like there's one thing that I could wave a wand and do would be to convince the donors who have been giving the super PACs millions of dollars a year for decades now just to run the TV ads to invest in something that has more lasting value, which is, it's so ironic because all the people who have these millions of dollars to give, got it for making really smart investments and things that have long-term value. If they could bring that mentality to politics, we'd be in a better spot.

Last topic I want to touch on, and this is something that's kind of consumed the new cycle in the last few days. And that was John Ossoff's pretty banal remark about Natalie Harp, his, I don't know, body woman, I guess you would call her, where, you know, Ossoff said that basically that Trump was more interested, not in helping regular people bringing costs down, but instead on, you know, golfing, building his ballroom and traveling with Natalie on a jet that we apparently needed for national security implications that he wouldn't even ride on when shit hit the fan. And so I'm just curious what your take was. I saw a post from David Axelrod saying that while he is a big fan of John Ossoff that he missed the mark. Meanwhile, other people are saying, you know, this is what it looks like when Democrats actually exercise this idea. that, you know, we are done with the era of when, when they go low, we go high. And so what do you think about the effectiveness of the, the John Ossoff comment? Look, I've never gone very far in my life

disagreeing with David Axelrod, but I will do it here. Like, I think a couple things. One, Osloff understood what he was doing, which is he was trying to find a way to both strike a chord with people who were trying to pay who were paying attention and get a reaction for the White House and in doing this was very smart. Everyone in the White House is reacting as if John Osloff was alleging that Trump and Natalie Hart were having an affair. That's not what he was doing. I don't think Democrats think that Trump is physically is, Trump at his advanced age and

poor health is in the having an affair part of his life and that she's not his girlfriend. She's his nursemaid. And I think that's why they reacted the way they did. Yeah. But it's like there is a lot to learn from Osloff because he has found a way to go viral without doing things that sacrifice his electability in a very purple state. Right? He's not, and it's authentic to him.

He's not doing, it works for some candidates, but he's not doing TikTok dance. He's not doing any other things. He's finding a way to, it's really impressive to go viral delivering his message in his speech, which almost no one really in democratic politics has done since Barack Obama. And he's pulling it off and he's finding ways to do it. And by adding the word Natalie in there, he has created a four-day new cycle over it. And it's very clever and very well done.

I wonder too. Like, look, I'm not going to ask you to get in the heads of these right-wingers. But is there no shame in the fact that this is an entire party falling over themselves to present themselves as these champions for women, these great defenders of women, when they're talking about somebody, you know, on the Trump end of things who has like $2, credible allegations of sexual assault against him, who was just forced to pay five and then $83 million for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, who is right now in the process of suppressing the Epstein files. I mean, is this, is like, is there

no regard for the other end of the, of the person on this argument that from these people? Yeah, I don't, I don't think that all of a sudden they're going to start carrying about their own hypocrisy. What is happening here is this. is a very uncomfortable subject. There is reporting that the First Lady and others within the White House are uncomfortable with her relationship with Trump, just how close the fact that she slept in a locker room for an entire summer so she could be near him. Yeah. That she wrote in the trunk of a car wants to be near him, that she wrote in these letters. And I imagine, I don't know. I imagine that Trump's fear here is that the First Lady is going to be mad about this. And so there is this performative nature going on from Trump and all the age. down to show Melania that they are pushing back on this. This is as much about domestic tranquility as is domestic politics for Trump. Yeah, I just think, like, this guy every day has a moment where he goes out and tells some female reporter, quiet piggy.

And then you have these, and it's just crickets from, you know, the Scott Jennings of the world. Yeah, but. Yeah, he did it to the reporter who asked the question. Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. Like, like, if that's not, if that's not a perfect encapsulation of the fact that Trump is

not interested in being the virtuous one in this argument. I don't know what is. Yeah, no one's, no one's buying this from Scott Jennings or the White House or Donald Trump or anyone else. On the point of her sleeping in the locker room at Mara Lago for an entire summer, that, that is crazy. And I presume that you did not even half of that when you were vying to be Obama's communications director. No, I often was given a hotel room if I was staying with them. And if I was not supposed to be on the trip, you know what I did? I didn't go. And that in Obama's White House? Yeah. That would have been seen as that sort of behavior would have gotten you kicked out pretty fast.

Yeah. Well, you know what? That's the difference between someone like Obama and a megal maniacal maniacal narcissist like Donald Trump. With that said, Dan, where can people see and hear more from you? They can listen to me on Pod Save America. They can subscribe to my newsletter or the message box on Substack, messagebox. com where I break down what's happening in politics and the midterms. If you like Podsadzee of America, you like Brian Tyler Cohen.

I think you like the message box too. I'm going to put a link to the message box and the link to Pod Save America's YouTube channel in the post description. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to throw it on the show notes. Dan, as always, thanks for the time. Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Thanks again to Dan Pfeiffer. That's it for this episode. Talk to you on Sunday. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen.

Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to bryantaylorcoen.com to learn more.