Offline with Jon Favreau - Offline’s Anti-Anxiety Election Special

Episode Date: November 3, 2024

The 2024 election is almost upon us, and if you’re not anxious…please give us some of whatever you’re taking. Barton Gellman, Senior Advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice, joins Offline to talk about how election officials are safeguarding your vote. This spring, Gellman co-lead a series of table top exercises involving current and former politicians, military officers, and analysts. Together, they played out worst-case scenarios under a second Trump presidency to better understand the true threat he poses to democracy—and brainstorm how conscientious objectors, state governments, and even protesting priests could slow him down. But first! Max and Jon talk about whether newspapers should endorse presidents, Jeff Bezos’s cringey letter, and the many ways they’re quelling their own election anxiety. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Election officials around the country have hardened their systems, have reinforced defenses, have increased auditing. There are backup plans and backups of the backups for the things that usually go wrong in elections. The big question to me was, if Donald Trump disputes the election result and tries to overturn it, which I'm quite certain he will if he loses, can the system withstand that? Can the system hold? And I believe it can't. I believe that he will try if he loses to overturn the results and he will fail. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher.

And you just heard from today's guest, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Barton Gellman. If you know who Barton Gellman is, even the name might make you a little anxious. He wrote a piece right before the 2020 election that basically predicted Trump's attempted coup. If you don't know who Barton Gellman is, you're probably anxious anyway, because the 2024 election is almost here. And if you're not anxious, please give us some of whatever you're taking. Just mail it right to us. I will take triple. In the meantime, we thought we'd do an offline election anxiety special. So we're going to talk through some news and then chat about all the ways we might be able to temper our anxiety heading into election day and potentially beyond. We've got to get through it.

Then you'll hear my interview with Barton, who's now a senior advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he's been focused on building safeguards to protect democracy and fighting attempts to steal the 2024 election. We talked about why he thinks that this time our votes will be safe, but maybe not America if Trump wins. Yeah, there's some real good news, bad news out of this one. Real good news, bad news. You win some, you lose some with Barton Gellman. It was a great conversation that should make you feel at least a little bit better about the next few weeks. At least knowing... TBD on beyond. There are so many things you could potentially worry about or be stressed about. And I am, in fact, stressed about all of them. But hearing from him and

knowing which ones to really focus on and worry about and which ones we actually have advanced a lot in the last four years is something it feels like you can do agency best you can do that's right uh but first speaking of democracy dying in darkness uh we got to talk about the decision of jeff bezos to turn out the lights on a presidential endorsement from the editorial board of the Washington Post, which he owns. The Post reported that its editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Vice President Harris, but the Amazon founder spiked it at the last minute. In an op-ed he published this week, somehow he got it placed in the Post. I don't know who he called. Bezos argued that newspaper endorsements create a perception of bias in the media and that not endorsing is a step towards rebuilding the public's trust. Uh, the Post's non-endorsement was notably the third of the week with the LA Times editorial board blocked from running their endorsement of Harris by its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shong, and USA Today announcing it would not make an endorsement either.

Since the decisions were made, multiple members of the Post and the LA Times editorial boards have resigned, and Semaphore's Max Tanney has reported that the Post has lost at least 250,000 subscribers. That is a lot of subscribers. And the Post confirmed that number, so it is

real. It's 10% of their subscriber base. It's huge. It takes years. And they were struggling anyway. They were getting a slight uptick in subscribers after a couple years of loss, but yes, they lost $77 million last year. So you used to work at one of these big old-timey newspapers. I did, I did.

As a former newspaper man. A newsman. A newsman. Here with my fedora and my press badge. Yeah, that's right. Can you put this in context for us? How big of a deal is it that the Post and the Times aren't endorsing? I mean, the one thing that I will hand to Jeff Bezos is he is correct,

is that presidential endorsements from a major newspaper are kind of an anachronism. It's a weird tradition that we go through that doesn't really make any difference. I don't believe that it is why public trust in the media has collapsed, given that that is a very recent development and newspaper endorsements have been around for decades. But as Bezos knows well, it's not the what, it's the why. And it's the fact that it's just very hard to escape the context here that, first of all, he knew about this endorsement weeks or months ago. And he only made this decision at the last minute to pull it, and that he has billions of dollars of business before the federal government. We know that when Trump was president, that he threatened many times to use the power of the White House

to punish Bezos' business and retaliation for Washington Post coverage, did the same thing to Time Warner over CNN coverage. We know that one of Bezos' businesses, Blue Origin, their executives met with Trump on the day that Bezos pulled the endorsement over federal contracts worth $9 billion. And we also know, thanks to reporting in The Washington Post, that Trump personally threatened executives at Amazon and said, you better give me a big campaign donation because otherwise it's going to be tough for you when I'm president, openly extorting them. Same thing with the owner of the L.A. Times. He's spent four years, we know from people at the L.A. Times, that he has been interfering in the paper's coverage to steer coverage in ways that are favorable towards his business interests. So it is just impossible to escape the very strong appearance here that this is about preemptively caving to Trump to avoid him using the power of the White House to punish Bezos' businesses for Washington Post coverage. So Bezos says, not true, Max. None of that's true.

So let's just, I just want to, I do think it's worth going through Bezos' argument here, which, so in his op-ed, right, or his piece, whatever it is, he says, you know, as soon as I learned, I had no idea about the Blue Origin meeting. As soon as I learned I had no idea about the Blue Origin meeting as soon as I learned about it I sighed and I was like oh my god

this is going to create the perception now people are going to be mad blah blah blah and he's like I should have I didn't want to do this endorsement for a while

and it should have happened should have been announced earlier and that was a miscommunication that was my bad blah blah blah and I think he said something like look you can

you can look at my ownership of the Washington Post in two ways which is either that my wealth insulates me from any kind of pressure from the government or something like that, or that, like, you know, I'm just, my values are for sale kind of stuff. Right. Or they'll just, like, change on a whim. And he's like, what I'm saying is that I just, this is what I strongly believe about newspaper endorsements, blah, blah, blah. What do you make of all that do you buy his his like i do wonder if he was really worried about trump uh as as president sort of making life harder for amazon um wouldn't you do more than just pull an endorsement? I mean, this is...

Because the one thing that is true is they've pulled no punches since he's been the owner on the reporting. The coverage has been excellent, has been very strong on Trump. It's been really, really good investigative reporting. I mean, this is the thing. As Bezos kind of implicitly acknowledged in his own op-ed that merely doing this creates the appearance of preemptively caving to Trump and avoiding a presidential endorsement to try to avoid pissing him off too much so that Amazon won't get punished. So even if Bezos is telling the truth about his motivation, and it is true that throughout the Trump presidency, he stood strong and no matter

the threats that Trump lobbed his way, he never interfered in post news coverage. That is true. It's also true of Time Warner, which is, you know, meaningfully commendable because he does stand to lose billions of dollars to that. He knows that Trump is going to read this and has read this because Trump fucking brought it up at a rally, is going to read this as them caving and as a green light. And Timothy Snyder, who's a scholar of authoritarianism, has this great expression, anticipatory obedience, that people cave to authoritarians in advance to avoid pissing them off. And that is what gives them most of their power, is that it's not having to forcibly

take them. It's people ceding it. He knows that he's creating that appearance. I also just think, Pfeiffer said this, Dan Pfeiffer said this, but he's like, the organizations that are always the worst at trying to figure out media

relations and media coverage are media companies. Because the idea that Jeff Bezos could not see how this was going to land, and the potential consequences, not just for him and his paper and his reporters, but like you said, and how Trump would see it as well, is preposterous. And again, let's just take him at his word that everything he says in his piece is right. It's possible. It is such a fundamental misunderstanding of what has created distrust in media institutions.

And it is the kind of understanding that rests with a certain set of elites, you know, in tech and finance and some media, right? Which is very much like, well, know if if but we're getting criticized by both sides we must be doing this something right kind of thing and it's the it's the liberal bias and we get to like go out into the country and talk with the rural folks to really understand you know it was like there was a lot of this after trump won in 2016 there was but it's like the reason that there is distrust in the media a big a big driver as we have talked about many times in the show is the fucking internet yes absolutely the fact that there's like like people don't know who to trust right because there's a lot of media sources um that aren't real journalism that just

sort of like confirms people's priors and biases right and um there's also been a sustained attack on journalism and the media from political elites and from Trump and his movement over the last 10 years. And you can debate how Republicans did this pre-Trump, Fox News, all this kind of stuff. But it has been nothing like what we've experienced over the last decade where Trump calls the media the enemy of the people. That does more to erode trust in media than a fucking endorsement from a paper. I know. Like, I actually, if all newspapers tomorrow announced we're not doing any more endorsements at all, I don't think it would matter that much. I wouldn't actually care that much.

The down ballot endorsements, I find help. Oh, they're useful. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I'll be looking for the LA Times on the judges. The high level, who endorsed who for president? No, it doesn't matter. Can I tell you the part of the Bezos op-ed that pissed me off the most and that made me think that he might not, he might really not understand the value of media in a democracy. So he had this very patronizing line where he compared the media to voting machines.

And he said, we must be accurate and we must be believed to be accurate. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility and therefore decline in impact. But a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. What? I mean, no one, maybe in history, has done more with a single decision to blow up the credibility of his own reporters who are working really hard. Also, you just lost 250,000 subscribers. Right. Do you think that has helped your

starting to build up the who? Do you think now you think a bunch of Trump supporters or people or like or straight shooters, independents who are the few of them that are still out there. You think they're going to subscribe to the post now because of your brave decision not to endorse?

It's just so stupid to turn around and to scold and to blame the reporters who are doing the actual work and whose reputations you just damaged and whose fucking livelihoods you just put at risk with this stupid, venal, short sighted little ploy. It makes me absolutely crazy. But at the same time, and I know we're going to talk about the cancellations, what can readers do? You know, he lost $77 million on The Washington Post last year. That's more than I gave to support an independent press and an independent media. And if Trump becomes president, he does stand to lose billions of dollars if he continues to, I hate to use the word allow because it makes it sound like he's doing something great by doing it. But if he continues to just not interfere in Washington Post news coverage, that could cost him billions of

dollars personally. That's a big ask. That's the price tag for having an independent press nowadays. You know what? I don't think he cares that much about losing money. I hope he cares about his reputation because something has got to swing in. And look, this is because I think your natural inclination, understandably, when a billionaire does something like this is be like, oh, it's all about money. Sure.

It doesn't have to be about money to still be unfortunate or nefarious or whatever you may want to call it. These people have such egos. And again, you've got to understand the circles they hang out in. i know some of the people that know right it's just like yeah it is a circle of people and what what do they do they're like you know they're having all the most annoying fucking conversations about politics that you can

imagine right this is like you wonder why like the tech world is like a little more open to trump and wall street and the and poly market the predictions market i think he's gonna because they're all like fucking bored and they all feel put upon like the society is mad at them and this kind of shit and what really is needed is just it's bullshit it's bullshit and so it's like it's still just as damaging as if they were doing it for the money it's true understanding the mindset that leads to this, I think, is useful. Is important, especially if we want to try to navigate this going forward and what are the right pressures to apply. What do you make of the cancellations?

Because I don't love it. And, again, I don't want to sit here scolding people at all. But I certainly would not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post. I love the Washington Post. I think the reporters are some of the best in the world. And we count on the Washington Post for this show. Absolutely. And for all of our shows here.

And I see no reason why I would want to punish the reporters. And I know that the people canceling aren't intending to punish the reporters. Sure. But that is the effect, unfortunately, because that's the world that we live in. Right. So but I don't know. What do you think?

I agree with you. And we should talk about where that impulse comes from, because I think this is symptomatic of a deeper change in our relationship to our media over the last 10 years. But, you know, the Post already had buyouts last year. Bezos has made clear that he is. And, you know, again, I get it, he is not willing to burn infinite amounts of money to continue, you know, the Washington Post to be the second largest print news operation in the country. Deeper losses are going to come as a

result of these layoffs. It's something like 10, 20% of their revenue. It's a huge amount. If he's not going to foot the bill for that, which it doesn't seem he's going to be, the result is going to be reporter layoffs, which means less high quality reporting, which means less accountability for another Trump administration, less monitoring of election threats of the far right of Trump corruption. if we want to make this a game of who can most threaten Bezos's bottom line and threaten his wallet, we are going to lose every time if Trump becomes president because he can revoke two contracts worth $9 billion. Washington Post doesn't make $9 billion. If we make it a money game, we lose. And again, I just think, what are you, so you cancel your subscription to the Washington Post. What do you think the outcome is going to be? Right. Right?

Like what, I just, I mean, this is, this is something we all have to think about, honestly, whether Kamala Harris wins or loses, right? It's true. Just like, when you sort of resist Trumpism, what is the way that you're most likely to have the biggest impact? Yes.

And I do not, I think that the 250,000, that's a lot of subscriptions that are canceled. The impact that will have is on the bottom line, on potential layoffs of the Washington Post and journalists.

It's not going to, you're not going to get an endorsement from Kamala Harris from that. You're not going to change Jeff Bezos' mind on that. Yeah. Again,

he has not yet interfered with any of the reporting whatsoever. In fact, the Washington Post is reporting on Bezos, not in a positive light. There's a lot of stories that are not very positive right now. It's actually great reporting. It's great reporting about this. They're doing some of the best reporting about their own boss. I know the idea that we're going to take their

paychecks away is, it doesn't make sense to me. It's not getting, again, it's like you can do it if you want. It's not getting you anything from that. So where I think this is, this impulse is coming from, I think this is a larger story that like I have been thinking about a lot over the last 10 years, because our relationship to the news media really changed when Trump was elected in 2016. We were all scared. Everybody was kind of desperate for someone who was going to be in a position to protect us from him and from his authoritarianism. And I think for a lot of us, that answer was the media. And that was partly because Trump positioned the press as his enemy and the thing that was going to stand in the way of what he wanted to do. And it was also because, you know, frankly, brands like the Post and the Times marketed themselves as the resistance. You know, democracy dies in darkness. That is about subscribe to us and we are going to stand up to Trumpism, stand up to Trump, defend your values, defend democracy.

And the value proposition changed for subscribers. After that, it was not as much or just exclusively about I'm going to subscribe to The Washington Post because they have great articles that I want to read. It's this is my civic duty because The Washington Post plays an important role in our democracy. Now, I do think there's truth to that, but it created some tension because reporting the news and being a bulwark against Trumpism, there's a lot of overlap between those two things, but they're not the same thing. And they're always going to be in tension. And this was constantly popping up at The Times and I know at The Post, too, where it's the readers kind of expect you to be on their side, on their side, the vanguard against Trump and against Trumpism. And, you know, listen, I believe that that is important, obviously, but that's never quite the same thing.

And it is how you get to this moment where hundreds of thousands of people say, I subscribe to the Washington Post to defend us against Trumpism and to stand up for my values. And by pulling this editorial, they failed to do that. So they're no longer doing what they promised me they're going to do. And I'm going to cancel my subscription. I mean, did you see Carolyn Kitchener, the Pulitzer winning abortion reporter? She had this devastating tweet thread about her mom called her to say that she was canceling her post subscription. She's read every one of her stories. And she said, I'm not going to read your stories anymore because I can't pay for the Washington Post. And I see how in context the last 10 years, I have been worried about this since we fucking started branding ourselves the resistance.

I always worried it was going to blow up. And I feel like we are getting to that point. And I think we've got to think about reframing our relationship to our media brands. Yeah, I do, too. And it's just look, it's in look, we are somewhat insulated from that here just because... We play a different role. Right, we play a different role.

But also, it's one reason why, like, I love when all of you listeners, like, you know, send in comments, complaints, criticism. Do it. I look at it in the Discord for the friends of the pod, right? And I just, I don't, I want to always resist changing our coverage and analysis based on the audience.

And that's not because I don't respect the audience. I very much do and sometimes give me things to think about and change my mind, which is wonderful. But like once you start going down the road where you're just giving the listeners or the readers or whatever everything they want, like, it's just, it never ends. Yeah. You know? And also, it's just impossible to give them what they want because everyone wants different shit. You know what I'm saying? Right.

Not everyone's the same. Right. And so everyone might agree on one coverage decision or piece of analysis, but they're not going to, everyone's not going to agree on everything. Right. And, like, this is the whole fucking value of everyone's not going to agree on everything. Right. And like, this is the whole fucking value of like pluralism in a democracy. Right. Like if,

and this is what's so hard about resisting authoritarianism, right. That it's like, if we want to resist authoritarianism and be a pluralistic democracy, we have to be comfortable like disagreeing with each other and reading things that make us mad and decisions that other civic institutions and democratic institutions make that make us mad and not sort of just sort of like disconnect completely. I mean, the thing I would always tell to people when I was at the Times and people would get, because we dealt with smaller versions of this constantly where it's,

they would run a bullshit Brett Stevens climate denial op-ed and people would be like, this is a betrayal of the values that I thought the Times was to stand for and I'm canceling. And I would always tell people because you would see all these people log on and say, how could you, you know, the Washington Post is defending us from democracy. That's essential. You've got to stand up for that. And I would always tell people, look, don't subscribe to us because it's like your civic duty or anything. We're a private company. We're selling or anything. We're a private company. We're selling you product. We're selling you service. I think that if you log on to the website, you will see that we're delivering you articles that are worth your seven bucks a month. And if

you feel the same way, then give us your seven bucks. And if you don't, then unsubscribe. And you know what? I logged on to the Washington Post after all this happened. And there were great articles on there. It made me feel very, very comfortable giving them my $2 a month. It's also a very cheap subscription. Yeah. Giving them my money because it's, and not doing this complicated calculation of, do I think the Washington Post is playing the proper role in our democracy? Although they are an important part of it, which is also makes this very complicated, but just, am I giving, getting the service that I'm paying for?

Yeah. We should also say, by the way, I know thehington post has uh there's ads on cricket pods from the washington post are they really i didn't realize that there's been one on there's a couple on offline there's some on psa i just thought about that we've talked about that when this happened because i was like oh god we're gonna get you for that but i was like we should we should know well i will just say our decision was first of all no we're not going to change our mind on that because we actually believe this, whether or not they were advertising. And long before they were advertising, I would have said the same thing. And I believe the same thing about The New York Times and anyone else that, you know, that we actually appreciate their journalism. Well, I found out live on this recording, so you know that I'm – but I was already fucking in the tank for these newspapers anyway.

I know. I know. Okay. Let's talk about the most important issue on everyone's minds. Our feelings. We're hope we've got a lot of them. You may have noticed in this last segment, we've got some feelings. We're recording this on Wednesday,

October 30th. Election day is Tuesday. By almost any measure, the race is tied as just about every fucking pollster is telling us now because they're all fucking they're all profiles encourage

all these pollsters the final polls are all like tie tie tie tie tie

oh okay random sampling they all got ties but you know what I can't blame them because I check them well also I check them all 30 times

I know I know no I feel I'm not gonna I'm not gonna discredit any of the pollsters. We're not going after the Nates today. If you're like us, you're doom scrolling, doom texting. Oh, absolutely. Searching the internet for any shred of evidence that will provide you some sense of certainty that it'll all be okay.

Even for the worse. But alas, no such sense of certainty exists. It is unknowable. I was definitely checking my phone last night between, I believe it was 3 and 5 a.m. For what? Just anything. Oh, just anything? Just anything it had to provide me.

And you know what? It wasn't good. Nothing? No. Yeah. It turns out at 3 a.m. the Siena pole did not magically untie, which i was surprised the the word the new bad thing is uh the the john ralston updates his blog about nevada in the early vote nevada like later in the evening because it's west coast time and so it's like i one of the nights i caught it right before bed and then i

was i was like nope no more not checking that not checking that at night anymore which brings me to my question um first of all how are you feeling is the question. For people who don't know if this is your first campaign, people, the last few weeks of an election, especially if you're like involved in a campaign,

all you do is you walk up to people, talk to people who are involved in the campaign and you go, how you feeling? How you feeling? How you feeling?

How's it feeling out there? How's it feeling on the ground? Are you feeling good? It's so funny. It's the same language as if somebody is pregnant. How are you feeling? How are you feeling? So how are you feeling good it's so funny it's the same language as if somebody is pregnant how are you feeling how are you feeling so how are you feeling bad i'm feeling

fucking bad you're feeling bad it's look it's scary it's frustrating it's very hard to wrap your mind around the idea that it could really be a coin toss which means that in my mind it's 70 30 odds and it's just a matter of any given moment, if it's 70-30 Trump or Kamala, is a realization this morning. I've been all week, like everybody else, I've been feeling groggy. I've been feeling nauseous. I've been having headaches. And I'm thinking, oh, it's because I'm doom scrolling all the time on my phone.

I'm up, you know, 3 a.m. every night. And you actually have COVID. I don't think so. I'm looking around. I do not think that I have COVID. It's like waiting where this is going. It's not COVID symptom. I looked down.

I was making coffee. I realized I've been drinking decaf all week. Oh, God. That's terrible. So I switched to caffeinated this morning. And after a week on decaf, I feel like I'm sitting on a fucking car battery. So I just feel worse in 17 different ways. I'm doing great. I will be dead by the time you hear this.

How are you feeling? I was going to say, can I say something surprising? Say it. I'm feeling pretty calm. Come on. Yeah. No. So I realize this is unexpected for me.

It is. It is. And I don't want to confuse unexpected for me. It is. It is. And I don't want to confuse calm for confidence. I really believe that it's a tie. Sure. Not just because I think smart people working on the campaign, super PACs, all the people I talk to, polls that are even better than the public polls,

everything seems to be coming up really close. Maybe not exactly tied as the public polls, everything seems to be coming up really close. Maybe not exactly tied as the public polls, but like, you know, really close. But it's not that. So it's like, I could easily see us winning. I could easily see us not winning. But I really, I've just, I've got myself to a place over the, at least maybe the last week or two, where I really started trying to take my own advice

and be like, look, getting anxious about this is not going to change the outcome. It's not productive. Superstitions are stupid. Right. And the idea that, well, if I'm optimistic, then maybe that'll help. Or if I'm too optimistic, then it'll be bad.

And if I'm pessimistic, then it'll be... I'm like, that's all bullshit. It doesn't do anything. That's not real. And I can either make myself super anxious and upset in the lead up to the election, or I can decide to enjoy the time I have where I'm not working and not try to constantly either inundate myself with information that's not helping, or if I am going to inundate myself with information because I have an obsessive compulsive checking behavior, I'm not going to let it really get to me. So I'll look at the polls, good polls, bad polls, and I just won't really let them get

to me. And the other thing I've been thinking of is win or lose. Unfortunately, MAGA is not going away by mag i don't necessarily mean trump but like this what has happened to the republican party what has happened to politics in this country right we are not going to snap out of it if kamala harris wins even if she even if the weirdest thing happens and she wins by a landslide and by the way i think if trump wins in a landslide that's also weird um so we're gonna have to keep fighting this battle no matter what so it's not like 100 of everything rides on this

one election and it's like we can either constantly worry about the future and how scary it could be or we can like wake up every day and be like okay sun is out things are fine right i'm gonna go do this and then if something bad happens we react to something bad and then we figure it out i it's it's believe me this is not easy i don't it's not perfect there are times when i can like maybe descend into the darkness a little bit but it's been it's been helpful it is why i am really glad that we are having this conversation about how to get ourselves emotionally and psychologically through not just this week or however long this election takes, but through if, you know, God forbid, Trump wins the next four years or however many years it is. Because we have learned a lot in the last eight years about what is useful and what is not useful. And also, if this is to your point, there's going to be some degree of this around for a long time, maybe the rest of our lives.

It's important that we still know how to lead our lives. You only get one. And it's important to play your part, as I know everyone listening to this show will, in getting the country through whatever the next X number of years brings. But it's also important to get yourself through it because you only get one of these.

And every day or every year that you waste spiraling more than you need to, checking polls for the 18th time a day, you don't get that back. Yeah. It's funny because on Tuesday's Pod Save America, towards the end, Tommy and I had like what I thought, what he thought, too, was like a pretty friendly debate, disagreement over like the final strategy, like more Trump, fascism, more economic, whatever. I'm not going to relitigate it here. But I, as I just said earlier in this, in this episode, I sometimes check the discord and I was like, Oh, I wonder how people will take this, you know? And a lot of people were like, Oh, the guy seems so stressed and I can't wait for this election to be over. And they sounded so like, and I'm like, it's funny. I can understand why it came off like that. But afterwards, Tommy and I were not bickering and we were like totally fine. We were like, oh, that was good to have disagreement once in a while. And I was, I was really trying to have the conversation as an

intellectual argument because it's a bit, it's a, like I was struggling with it myself. And I think it's good to like talk with people about it, But I can see why everyone's so on edge that every piece of analysis or are they doing this or that right can really get to you. Yeah. Which is why I want to talk about like strategies to like help with this. Yes. One thing that has helped me is, and this is very offline, but I have found over the last couple of weeks, the times where I am alone on a screen and getting information that way, or even texting and messaging friends that way, I feel like I can feel my system getting amped up more. Yes. getting amped up more. And the times when I am, you know, I've done like canvas kickoffs, either on Zoom

or we, you know, on Sunday, we went to three different stops in Southern California to do canvas kickoffs and like took the, you know, Emily and Charlie came with us and it was like, I just, it was so fun.

Like the election didn't become less close. No one in any of those canvas kickoffs was like, oh, we're actually going to win. We feel great. Our polls are great. That didn't happen. But just the experience of being with people, talking with people, and talking about how you're anxious with people and talking about how you really feel about this, it really does help. Especially if it's in person.

Yeah. The advice that I give people when they ask me, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Is draw a hard line for yourself between, and you kind of referenced this, between what is actually productive and what is not productive. Every morning, what I've been doing for myself,

I try to make a plan for one or two things that I can do if it's signing up for canvassing, whatever, that are going to be productive. And then I kind of give myself a set amount of time where I'm going to have half an hour to read the news or an hour to read the news, and I'm going to listen to these two podcasts. And then I tell myself, that's it.

That's the line. Because I know if I just let myself do whatever, it's just going to be flailing. It's going to be doom scrolling. And then I try to be really thoughtful about what those one or two things are, because if they're with people, like you said, or they're just things that I know will make some kind of a difference, that feeling of having agency over what's happening will make you, I mean, first of all, it matters. And second of all, it will make you feel so much better. And then even though it's hard to do, I try to be really ruthless myself. Things on the other side of that line, once I've kind of checked the things off my list, making sure that I am doing things that feel good for me, that are emotionally healthy for me, that I really take time. Even though it feels weird to give yourself permission to goof off this week it feels weird to give yourself permission to like like we had a party over the weekend and in the first

half hour I was like this it's like we're on the fucking deck of the Titanic what are we doing this is so stupid but an hour in of course like we all felt great everybody felt great I've been like actually like watching more movies than I do usually going out more with friends because you have to take time and force yourself to do the stuff like this

that is healthy for you and you have to do it because otherwise you're not going to be useful on the stuff that is actually productive and that's important because it's not it's not giving up you don't don't beat yourself up over having the good time. Right. Because like, hey, we could, no, you need to have, you need to be like emotionally ready to then get back into the fight here. Right. In order to take that time. And everyone needs it. You're not a fucking superhero.

We always say like, go canvas and phone bank and all this kind of stuff. And yes, it is because it's useful. But if you take that as, oh, they want me to do something useful and not worry, it's not just useful for the cause of winning. It really is useful for yourself. Absolutely. Our friend, she's a writer in L.A. She was texting me and Emily and saying she did phone banking. And she's like, I talked to this mom who

wasn't going to vote. She said, I don't know if I can bring myself to vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. And she's like, and then we talked about

our kids for like 30 minutes. And then, and she's like, at one point, we were both crying. And then afterwards, she said that she's voting for Kamala Harris.

And I swear, phone banking, she goes, I swear, phone banking is like Molly. That's amazing. Yeah, whatever Molly's like which i believe the listeners are sending us for our request i can say this because emily did post this post the text conversation without her name on instagram um but it was yeah it but i get the feeling of connecting with someone about the election.

And not everyone's going to have a conversation where you flip a voter just letting you know. But I'm telling you the conversations are going to be better. Connecting with people makes a big difference. Are you thinking about posts if the worst happens? It's fucking all I'm thinking about. So I have been thinking a lot about what it was like to go through the experience in 2016 of him winning and what we've learned, how to try to make it less terrible this time around. And I really think that as terrible as it is to preemptively imagine the idea of him winning, have a plan for that day and have a plan for that week. Even if it's just something vague in your mind for,

I'm going to call my parents and then go for a walk. Because if you know what to do with yourself, even if it's not anything political, although it is very good day to get engaged, it will just be easier to get through that day. Because what, I don't know what your experience of 2016 was like, but I know me and everybody I knew, we just felt like we were adrift. Yeah. And it just totally unmoored. And that led to a lot of really productive grassroots energy. There was so much organizing that came out of that, but there was also so much kind of flailing. And just people felt like they had to take absolutely everything on themselves

because they didn't know where else to turn. And it felt like I have to keep up with every single development that's happening. And that led to a lot of burnout. And I would really urge you to keep in mind that if he wins again, yeah, it's going to be hard and it's going to be really scary, but we're not starting from zero this time. The same way that we were eight years ago, the states have learned a lot of lesson. Organizers have learned a lot of lessons. State AGs have learned a lot of lesson. And I know it feels frivolous to talk about fucking self-care in case of the return of far-right authoritarianism. But, you know, number one, this is a marathon, not a sprint. It's going to be a long, however many years it is, and you're not going to get through it unless

you can take care of yourself and get through each day and week and you don't want to burn yourself out. But number two, yes, you will have a role to play in everything that will happen in getting our country and our democracy through this the other side with as little damage as possible. And you do have a power to have a little bit of influence in that. But one place where you have a lot of influence is the people around you and the people in your life and it's a small thing but getting your friends and family member through another trump term is meaningful it's important and you're not going to be able to get them through it if you're doom scrolling all the time if you're spinning out over every trump development so i would i would give the same advice that I did about getting through this week, which is just try to make a plan for here are the things you can do. Stay involved, stay active, give yourself that sense of agency, but know what the limits are

for that. And know that on the other side of that, you have to still live your life for yourself and for the people around you. It's very well said. And the only thing I would add is, again, a very offline thing but throw your phone in the river yes if you can but also but what we're saying for this we do don't don't go looking for the worst information yes or the scariest information right which is what your brain wants it is it is of course if he wins it is very possible things get quite bad and i'm not trying to predict anything. But if you have that mindset constantly, there's going to be so many people who are like, oh, God, this is it.

He's ending the – this is happening, this is happening. And it's like just you don't need to go searching for all the scariest shit to keep revving yourself up. And so before you search forward, before you read the news, think like, be intentional about what you're looking for in the news. What am I really want to get out of what I'm looking at today

about, you know, a new Trump presidency, right? And like, what am I going to do with the information? How am I going to respond to it?

Where am I going to fight? Where's it going to have the most impact? But don't just go like, oh, someone tweeted this and this. Right,

right. Every new thing, if you spin out, right, that's not useful. it's not a useful way to spend your time and i saw so i mean i did it all the time in his first term me too every day yeah being deliberate is hard the thing i will say about your screen time and your screen is going to be so fucking bad for you is that i'm not going to try to tell you either you the listeners or especially me to delete twitter off of your phone. That's a big ask. That's really hard. I think that's something that we learned from when we did that offline challenge where we took all those screen time breaks or really tried to break ourselves up with our screen is that the kind of screen time limits deleting apps in itself is not actually that useful. What is really useful is identifying healthy activities that will fill whatever psychological or emotional need you're reaching

for your phone to fill. If it's anxiety, you know, getting out and exercising. If it's a sense of despair or hopelessness, it's spending time with people that you care about. Filling in those activities will make it much easier to put down your phone and make it much easier to get through the day and the week so you can do whatever you have to do. Here's one thing you can do before that happens to avoid that outcome. Again, we're talking about being intentional. It is not too late.

And controlling what you can control, right? Last call. This is Vote Save America's last call. It's great. Vote Save America is asking everyone to reach out to three friends in swing states. Go through your contacts,

see who's in a swing state, reach out to them. If you don't have three friends in swing states, maybe someone in your contacts also has someone in a swing state that they can talk to. Call people who call people.

Yep, call people who call people. Ask them if they're planning to vote. They can go to votesaveamerica.com slash vote to make a plan. Or you can persuade them if they're Trump curious or third party curious or maybe not going to vote at all. And if everyone in swings, if everyone does that, everyone finds three friends in a swing state and gets them to vote like Kamala Harris wins. Man, you want to talk about finding a sense of agency?

That'll do it. The vote is going to be so fucking close. The incredible opportunity. Okay, so the most likely electoral outcome is 270 electoral votes with the three upper Midwest swing states and Nebraska too, right? I mean, according to the 538 model, that is the modal outcome. It's 270 out of all of their potential models. Wait, you don't think that that's going to happen? Oh, no.

Again, this is my, like, I genuinely have no idea what's the most likely. Like, I think it could be, I don't know. Of course. Yeah. Well, it's just to say that in the models, the outcome that occurs most frequently is that she wins with 270 with those three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska second. Nebraska second, the Republicans in that state tried to get rid of that electoral district so that we would, the Democrats would not be able to get those electoral college votes. They were stymied in that by two Nebraska state lawmakers who won their seats with 250 votes each. That might make the difference. 250 votes. You could call five. Yep. You're one person. You can really make a difference. That's it. I say this at every canvas kickoff, like the upside of an extremely close, polarized, divided electorate that makes you anxious all the time is that everything you do actually matters. And so you can have an impact that actually changes the whole race. It changes the course of history. Yep. Yep. So no pressure.

So last call, go reach out to three friends. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. We're also going to have a lot of coverage here at Crooked because this is it. This is our Super Bowl here. What a day will be fresh in your feeds with Jane Koston breaking down what you need to know in 20 minutes.

Pod Save America will release new episodes with in-depth analysis of the latest news every morning until the race is called. And in the case the Trump campaign's feeling a little loose with their legal challenges, Crooked's go-to legal experts from strict scrutiny will stop by on shows across the network to unpack breaking news

plus drop bonus episodes on their feeds for those who want more. You can find all this on your favorite podcast platform and YouTube. When we come back, my conversation with Barton Gellman about the fight to protect the 2024 election. Barton Gellman, welcome to Offline. My pleasure. So you wrote a piece in The Atlantic just before Election Day 2020 that really scared the shit out of people. The title was The Election That Could Break America. If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Turns out you were onto something. Since then, you joined the Brennan Center for Justice to work on the specific challenge of

safeguarding our elections from the kind of thing Trump tried to pull off in 2020. And I wanted to have you on because Trump and his followers are clearly laying the groundwork to subvert this election if he loses or potentially subvert democracy itself if he wins both scenarios that you and others have gamed out. So maybe let's start with the election itself. You wrote a piece this month in time titled Your Vote is Safe, which I took as quite reassuring coming from you. Why should people feel more confident that their vote is safe this time around? Because election officials around the country have hardened their systems, have reinforced defenses, have increased auditing. We have got like 98% of people will be voting with human verifiable paper records. There are backup plans and backups of the backups for the things

that usually go wrong in elections. And the big question to me was, if Donald Trump disputes the election result and tries to overturn it, which I'm quite certain he will if he loses, can the system withstand that? Can the system hold? And I believe it can. I believe that he will try if he loses to overturn the results and he will fail. So I'd love to unpack that a little bit because there's obviously a lot of different entry points in the system where he could try to challenge the results. So you talked about sort of the voting machines at the local level, like the actual machinery of the vote counting has been protected a bit more since even 2020. Does a lot of your reassurance come from the fact that this time Donald Trump is not in power?

That is actually for sure a big piece of it. I mean, look, last time there were people trying to persuade him to send troops to seize voting machines. If you're not president, you can't entertain ideas like that. Last time, his appointee, the guy he wanted to make the acting attorney general, drafted a letter to the Georgia legislature after he lost the state in which the Justice Department was going to tell the Georgia Republican legislature that it had evidence of wrongdoing that could have changed the election results and encouraged them to send an alternative slate of electors, that is to say fake electors, to pretend to be the electors and cast the state's electoral ballots

for Trump. That would have been the Justice Department doing that. He doesn't have control of the Justice Department anymore. And that matters a lot. He does, however, have a lot of help from the national and state Republican parties. Last time, it was kind of outlandish that he wanted to reverse election results. A lot of people had never thought about that seriously, and a lot of people pooh-poohed my article in 2020 when I talked about how you would try to do that. But now it's become a comfortable and accepted thing

in the Republican Party, and there are lots of well-resourced party leaders and lawyers who are getting ready to try to help them do exactly that. One thing that I've wondered about is what if these Republican-controlled state legislatures or the courts somehow delay sending the electors to Congress past the safe harbor deadline in the hope that they could then, if no candidate gets 270 electoral votes, they throw it to the House. And of course, if the election goes to the House,

Trump wins because Republicans control more state delegations. So how much are you concerned about the fact that there may be a delay in sending the slate of electors to Congress? A delay is actually, I think, one of the greatest risks that still remain right now. The Congress, in a bipartisan move a couple of years ago, reformed the Electoral Count Act, and they turned what was then a kind of optional deadline of December 11th for safe harbor into a kind of a hard deadline by which governors have to specify who the electors of the state are going to be. And it's left two governors. That, by the way, is good news because in the battleground states, five of the seven are Democrats and the two Republicans are not election deniers. But meanwhile, what Trump and his allies have done in a number of states is to try to mount attacks on the certification of the election, the certification of the ballots, so that they're in a position, if Harris wins a state, to try to get the people who do the certifying to say,

no, no, we won't certify. And that is a losing battle in courts. So in Georgia, the state courts have stated unequivocally that election officials for each county must certify within seven days of election day. They have stated that no election official may refuse to certify for any reason. In Arizona, the two Cochise County election board members who refused to certify an election two years ago have now been indicted for that. In Pennsylvania, judges have also put the kibosh on refusing to certify. So I think it's going to be a losing argument for these guys. But it is clearly part of their strategy that they're teeing up that they would use the certification process to stop electors from being appointed in time to vote in the Electoral College on December 17th.

So that is one risk. The other risk I've heard is, so say the Republicans keep the House, Mike Johnson is speaker, and he decides that the, you know, Electoral Count Act, the Electoral Count Reform Act isn't constitutional and just decides to ignore it and says that there's irregularities in the voting and there's a, there's, you there's a set of electors from the Republican state legislature in one state and a Democratic governor in the same state competing slates of electors. And then Johnson does some, tries to pull some funny business in the House. Is that a risk that you're concerned about? Well, keep in mind that it is not the Speaker of the House, if Johnson remains Speaker of the House, it is not the Speaker of the House who

presides over the joint session of Congress that counts the electoral votes and certifies them. It is the President of the Senate who is the Vice President of the United States who is also one of the candidates in this election race. So there's no question that Kamala Harris will actually have to gavel at that joint session of Congress. So there's and act to the contrary of the statutory law. He might mount an attack on it in court, and God, who knows what comes of that with the current Supreme Court. Yeah. There is apparently a legal issue about whether one Congress can commit a future Congress to doing a certain thing that the future Congress must obey, for example. But I don't give a lot of credence to this new January 6th shenanigans scenario. I think that whoever wins the most popular votes in any given state is going to get that state's

electoral votes. And Congress will count the electoral votes. And the person who wins the election will be sworn in as the next president. So it seems like there is some outside risk with litigation delays and safe harbor deadlines. And you never know with this Supreme Court what they might do. But generally, the process of certification as it gets to Congress seems secure. We actually first thought about talking to you for this after the news broke that someone set fire to two ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington, which was a scenario right out of an exercise the government did to prepare for the 2020 election, which also then became a storyline on succession. How much are you concerned about sort of threats like this or even the threats of violence and

intimidation in and around the election? Look, I'm quite sure that bad stuff is going to happen. And if Trump loses, he's going to pull out all the stops to try to reverse the result. And during the election, there will be efforts to intimidate voters. There might be, you know, AI-powered, you know, disinformation telling people their election polling site has blown up or the election has canceled or who knows what. I mean, ballot boxes burning, you know, a lot of things may happen that sound really bad. But what I think your listeners need to remember is that they're not cataclysmic. They're not apocalyptic. Let's take the case that there were ballots burned in Portland and in Vancouver, Washington, just across the border.

One of them, three ballots were lost. One of them, there were 200 that seemed to have been burned. On the other hand, election officials know exactly when they received their last shipment of ballots from that Dropbox. They are able to tell all voters who voted by Dropbox, if you voted after this time of day on this date, please send your ballot in again. If they have two of them, they'll only count one. And if one of them has been burned, then sending in a new one will fix that. The number of votes that are going to actually be lost is probably trivial. And, you know, a lot of things that sound really terrible when you first hear them are fixable. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned disinformation and, you know, this is something we talk a lot about here, sort of the impact of the weaponization of information and the impact it has on public trust and opinion.

You know, I just saw today that a QAnon account posted a viral video that supposedly showed illegal ballot harvesting in Pennsylvania. Turns out it was just a postal worker delivering ballots to the elections office. Have you talked to officials, local, state, whoever, about some of the more effective ways to sort of fight the information war? They're fighting the information war. What are your thoughts on that? Well, you know, they're just speaking on repeat their reassurances about how everything works. You know, let's take Georgia. I talked to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of 2020 election fame. As your listeners will remember, he's the one Trump called up and said, he's got to find me 11,780 votes to reverse the results in the 2020 Georgia election. He told me that in 2020, the count was very secure and very accurate,

and they did two recounts and a hand count. But because there was criticism of the Dominion voting machines, he has now hired another contractor, another technology company, that will do a second count, a second tabulation of all the votes in Georgia. So one will be done by Dominion, but then Dominion won't check its own work. Somebody else will check its work. This is an example of the ways that these folks are trying to reassure voters that their votes will count, their votes will be counted accurately, and the election will be secure. Still, they have to contend with a lot of intimidation, a lot of threats, some actual attempts to assault them. You know, I talked to the guy who's running elections in Durham County, North Carolina, and, you know, he's arranged that all of his poll workers are

going to get little badges with an activation button, where if something bad is happening, they can just push the button on their lapel and call 911. It is a sad place to be in this country where election workers are facing this kind of threat, but they're also standing up to it. It's scary they have to do that. Let's turn to the less pleasant outcome, which is that Trump just wins the election. He's made a lot of threats and promises about ruling like a dictator, prosecuting political opponents, deploying the military against protesters, rounding up

immigrants. You helped lead a series of tabletop exercises for the Brennan Center this spring, where a group of people basically role played what could happen if Trump actually carried through on these threats. Before we get to how it went, can you sort of set the scene for us in terms of who was there, what roles they were playing and how the simulation was supposed to work? Sure, absolutely. And I have to give a disclaimer because I work for a tax exempt organization. We did this exercise on a completely nonpartisan basis. We had Republicans and Democrats. We had 175 people playing over the course of five games. We had former governors, former two and three and four star flag officers, a

senator, a couple of former members of the House, former state attorneys general, former cabinet officials. Again, from every recent administration, including Trump's, we had a number of former Trump officials. Everyone in the room was pro-democracy with a small d, but their political affiliations were all over the map. And we deliberately did not try to test in these games any policies that fall within the normal range of political debate. It was all about how do you restrain someone who is trying to abuse executive authority to do illegal things, things that are contrary to the rule of law or to our constitutional structure

or break sort of fundamental governing norms of a democracy. And so it was, what can you do if the president sends troops to crush a political demonstration that is protesting his election or his policies? That, like every other scenario we tested, came directly from things that Trump has promised to do, or said he he would do or tried to do the first time he held office. What we were looking for is, can you delay or deflect or diminish the damage of these authoritarian acts by using the instruments of government or civil society. And I should have mentioned we had people there representing grassroots activists, faith leaders, the business community, unions,

NGOs like the Brennan Center, litigators, and so on. So we were basically looking at a whole-of-society response. And so the way it was set up, I think you guys had like a red team and a blue team, and you had the president. And then how did it work? The president would say, like, I'm sending in troops to X state. And then you'd have someone playing the governor of that state? Or how did the gameplay actually go? Yeah, well, that's pretty close. What we did was in two of the

exercises, we did not constrain the president at all. We called them, you know, the everything everywhere all at once games. And we let the red president, who was a stand in for Trump and Trump's agenda, do as many things as he cared to do along as many policy fronts as he wanted so he could prosecute his political enemies and send troops and do mass expulsions and replace civil servants with political appointees using schedule f and so on first of all every president has to focus the scarce resources of his own time and staff priorities. So in real life, it would be very hard to do a lot of those things all at once. But I will say it had the effect of overwhelming the blue team. The blue team had trouble kind of keeping up with all the things the red president was doing all the time. And by the way, we had red and blue,

and those are like traditional designations in tabletop exercises. That's not the kind of red and blue of Republican and Democrat. It's sort of, you know, the home team and the away team. And our games were played under the Chatham House rule, which means that we can't attribute things that were said or done to specific individuals unless they gave their permission. under the Chatham House rule, which means that we can't attribute things that were said or done to specific individuals unless they gave their permission. But a number of our players did give permission. So I can tell you that Christy Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of

New Jersey, played a blue governor in this exercise. And when the president said, I am federalizing the National Guard in your state, and I am ordering through my chain of command that these federal troops go break up those demonstrations, because I'm calling them insurrections and riots. And I'm invoking my power under the Insurrection Act, Governor Whitman tried to prevent that by ordering her National Guard onto active state duty. And she actually commanded the Adjutant General in her state, who is in charge of the State Guard, not to obey any federal order. So that would be a fairly extraordinary thing.

It's never happened, I don't think, in American history. And I think in real life it would not go well for the Adjutant General if he did refuse to obey a presidential order when the president activated the guard. But what this brought up for us in our kind of after action review was that we don't think governors and state attorneys general necessarily have a fine grain understanding of the boundaries of their authority vis-a-vis the federal government in cases where they believe the federal authorities are being abused. So, you know, what is the limit of the governor's ability or a mayor's ability to constrain what federal troops or federal law enforcement officials do in their jurisdictions? super easy questions and we would certainly recommend that every pro

democracy governor and state attorney general and police chief pay some attention to those questions in the coming days do you think a lot of governors have since you guys did this tabletop exercise I assume you probably have been in contact with a lot of state and local officials. Yeah, we've put out word and we've given briefings to state officials in a bunch of states, and they are actively considering these questions. I just thought it was fascinating. We had two governors in our exercises, and they actually didn't know whether they could countermand a presidential order or whether they could do anything to slow down the activation of their state guard into federal status. And I just find it fascinating that you can hold an office like that and not really know what the exact boundaries of the authority were because there have been so few cases in American history in which there was a conflict. So which guardrails did the red president have the most difficulty getting

around and which were sort of the easiest to just plow through? Well, we did not come up with, you know, one weird trick to stop a tyrant. In general, the blue team was frustrated by its inability to sort of throw its body in front of the train and stop the president if the president's determined to do something. But there were a number of things that can slow him down. For example, when he wanted to send in troops, I wrote about this in the Washington Post after the fact, he tried to give the order to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who's not actually technically in the chain of command, but so that was clarified.

He ordered his defense secretary to send in the troops, break up the demonstrations, which he called riots, and said, don't be gentle about it. You know, feel free to use all the force you want. And the chairman immediately, as his chief military advisor, started pushing back and saying, you know, you need to give that order in a form that is not, you know, obviously illegal on its face. And if you tell us to break up a political demonstration,

which is an exercise of First Amendment rights, and to use force on American citizens, despite the constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act, and so forth, you know, we need to clarify here, and we need to let you know what the consequences are. At one point, the president in our exercise said he just wanted to activate and federalize the National Guard in all 50 states. He just wanted all of it under his control. And in that case, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Northern Command, who was in fact a former four-star, a retired four-star general, said to him, you know, you are about to take away more than half of our worldwide contingency force for military emergencies elsewhere in the world. And that would be very unwise, sir. And, you know, it went back and forth on rules of engagement. Military is very much aware that it falls under

civilian control and must obey lawful orders from the commander in chief. But under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, an officer is also obliged to disobey an unlawful order. There's a high bar for that. You don't want to go around disobeying orders, and how do you know it's unlawful? But the judge advocate general, who was one of our role players, was opining on the legality of presidential orders to use force on civilians. And in general, this process forced the president to narrow down and soften his orders. So, you know, it's famously the case that Trump asked Mark Esper and General Milley in reference to demonstrators outside the White House, why can't you just shoot them, shoot them in the legs or something? And in that case, from Esper's account, they just ignored that. In this case, the military chain of command pushed back and said,

that would be illegal, sir, and got him to not give that order. They got him to change his order and sort of reverse his order to federalize all 50 states of National Guard when he realized, you know, what a kind of calamity he was setting in motion. But in the end, they did not stop him from sending troops into the cities. And the troops did break up the demonstrations. And so you could slow things down,

you could make them less worse, but you can't necessarily stop it altogether. The Blue Congress tried to defund, prevent the use of any funds, any federal funds for this exercise. And the Red Attorney General figured out a way to reprogram funds that were in a piggy bank for FEMA in case of emergencies to pay for it. We weren't honestly sure in the exercise whether that would work or not. But, you know, all the things that people tried were interesting and they probably had some impact. For example, the faith leaders sent in a lot of clergy to the demonstrations and they stood in clerical garb between the demonstrators and the troops as if to kind of dare them to use force on

a bunch of priests and monks and rabbis. And maybe in part, in consequence of that, the encounters with the troops were not violent and there was not a lot of bloodshed. So maybe public opinion still matters here. I actually think public opinion does matter. I think Donald Trump cares a lot about his polls and he cares about public opinion. And if there think Donald Trump cares a lot about his polls and he cares about

public opinion. And, you know, if there's a clash on the streets, you know, there are basically two possible storylines. One is that this is a bunch of crazy mobs, rioters burning things down and that the president is imposing law and order and a lot of citizens would approve of it if it were cast to them that way. And the other is that he's, you know, sending armed people to crush civilian demonstrators in an exercise of their First Amendment rights. And so it's going to depend a lot. I think if there are big demonstrations, they're going to have to be disciplined and peaceful. And we're going to have to be disciplined and peaceful. And we're going to have to push that message.

So it seems like, at least in the exercise, the president can fairly easily steamroll Congress. The military maybe can slow him down, but ultimately he found a way to send them into the cities anyway. I want to talk about the courts because in a lot of the scenarios, the blue team relied on a strategy of litigation to stop the red president. And it seems like that is challenging for a number of reasons. One, just the delay. Two, potentially the makeup of the Supreme Court. And three, the possibility, and I interviewed Liz

Cheney about this on Pod Save America, and she said her worry is that Donald Trump in a second term just wouldn't abide a court order. Yeah. It seems like the courts are not really the answer here either. Well, I don't discount the importance of courts. In Trump's first term, courts did constrain his actions a number of times. And although he did a lot to change the makeup of the federal judiciary, not all the judges are alien canon. I mean, there are a number of Trump-appointed judges who have ruled against him in civil and criminal and in issues of presidential powers. So the courts may constrain him. The increasing partisanship of the Supreme Court is not a good sign. But the worst thing is, what if he simply, flagrantly refuses to obey a court order?

And that's a constitutional crisis because it's two coordinate branches of the government. And I just think there again, public opinion is going to be a very important thing. I mean, are we a country that's going to sit back and watch the president defy the rule of law openly, just be openly a lawbreaker? I hope not. And I think not. So what else can we do to sort of Trump-proof our democracy aside from winning the election? I know one safeguard you recommend is pre-commitments. What are pre-commitments and where are the areas that they would best be applied? The idea of pre-commitment is that you get together with pro-democracy people. people, let's say they're in the corporate world or they're in a union or they're in,

you know, any number of places that have an influence on our society and say, can we agree here among ourselves that if a president tries to, let's say, declare martial law, that you're going to speak out against that. And they say, oh yeah, sure, everybody's against martial law. We would speak out against that. Now, if you pre-commit, it can be possible to remind you of that pre-commitment, if and when the bad thing actually happens, and to make people feel that they won't be acting alone if they step up and object to dictatorial behavior. If you say, you know, I've got, you know, this company and this company and this company over here who are going to step out with you, you have a better chance of getting people to overcome the natural human instinct to keep your head down and not pick a fight with the president.

All right. So it seems like the best hope here is still an engaged, disciplined, attentive civil society here that can continue to organize, shape public opinion, and try to resist that way. And obviously, the best thing is to win the election. That's the part I'm not in a place where I could comment on. Of course, of course, I understand. Barton Gellman, thank you so much for joining Offline and letting us know both what's at stake and what we can do to preserve democracy. So appreciate it. Thanks for having me. One last thing to hopefully inspire

you to go call some friends and do some volunteering in these last couple of days. Some of our VSA volunteers are sharing what it's like phone banking and canvassing in these last days. Very inspirational, very informative. We'll leave you with a little bit of what they had to say. Hi, I'm David. I'm 40. And I've been volunteering from New York City into the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada. My name is Sarah. I'm 35. And I've been knocking doors in New York and New Jersey in two of the closest house races in the country. My name is Kat. I'm the daughter of a public school teacher and a labor union negotiator working in St. Paul, Minnesota. I've been volunteering with Boat Save America and the DCCC calling for tight

congressional races all over the country and door knocking across the river with the Wisconsin Democrats. I couldn't forgive myself if I didn't do everything I could to ensure that Kamala Harris and Democrats up and down the ticket were elected. Even here in the deepest blue of the Northeast, there are critical races to turn out for and boy, could we use the help. In my own circle of influence in my neighborhood, it seems like could we use the help. In my own circle of influence in my neighborhood, it seems like everyone is essentially the same. But when I called all over the country, truly, there are a lot of people who have not made up their mind. And what that means is that we have the power to actually change them for the better. Don't worry if you've never done it before. You

talk to people all the time. You talk to your friends and family and the barista who makes your coffee and the librarian who checks out your books. There were a ton of things that surprised me about the process of phone banking. And the first thing is that people actually pick up their phones. Truly, in this day and age, people answer. The thing that resonates most with the voters I talk to is when I stop and I say, this is why I'm showing up. This is why I'm making calls to strangers. This is why I'm knocking on your door. It is the best way to channel and ease my election anxiety. This is my first time phone banking and having that direct contact with voters. And I've been doing it by repeating the mantra, being scared is not a good enough reason not to do something. So I'd encourage everybody out there listening to conquer their fears,

impress themselves, and with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illick-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin, and Adrian Hill for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva,

who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Thank you.