What A Day - Will The GOP Come To Trump-a-Palooza?

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

President Donald Trump is going all in on... President Donald Trump. And he's hoping GOP lawmakers will do the same at their midterm convention in Dallas this week. Jane talks to Antonia Hylton, host of the new MSNOW show, "The Assignment," about Trump's strategy for the midterms.Show Notes: Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

So I take Trump at his word when he says that I want to nationalize and federalize, essentially, elections. I think sometimes people try to add sort of explanations and psychoanalyzed Trump around these things. But at least in this arena, I think he means exactly what he says. And that means that instead of the states having autonomy and control over elections, different parts of the federal government, he wants them and his allies who are in them, sort of part of those tentacles to control this system.

It's Tuesday, September 8th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day. More survivors have been pulled from the rubble over the weekend after last month's devastating glacier collapse in Nepal. Here's hoping many more survivors are found. Canada put tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of American goods today in retaliation for Trump's very dumb trade war. And the far-right alternative for Germany Party won a major election in an East German state Sunday, putting a right-wing extremist party closer to running a German state than at any time since World War II. And as you remember, that ended badly. But I want to talk about

Trump and the midterms. Joining me is Antonia Hilton, host of MS Now's The Assignment. Antonia, welcome to what today. Hey, thank you so much for having me. So let's start with voting by mail, which Trump loves to do, but seems to hate to see. Trump has been a attacking mail-in voting for years. But yesterday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow it to enforce new rules on mail-in ballots. Can you tell me what's going on here? Well, what's really going on here is that Trump appears to be trying to change the rules of the game while the game is being played. I mean, like, we're now like two months away from the midterm elections. States like North Carolina are actively already sending ballots out in the mail.

and he is throwing additional chaos into the system. That's according to every expert that I've spoken to that my colleagues have had on air, on MS now. And you know, you point out the fact that he has taken advantage of mail-in-voting himself while constantly casting doubt, sort of positioning it as this thing that has created an opening in our election system

or the fraud that he has not told the truth about, has not substantiated him or really the sort of Trump apparatus and allies around him. And I think one of the interesting things about all this, Jane, is that while it is true that Democrats and people who tend to lean toward the left, maybe more likely, like 30-something percent of them tend to lean on mail-in voting as an option, 24 or so percent of Republicans do. I mean, this has the potential. When you combine what he may be doing here, the chaos he may be throwing on a technical level

into the voting system just weeks ahead of the midterms, with also the enthusiasm gap that we know that his party is dealing with, I'm just not so sure that the math ends up mathing in a way that actually works out for Trump. But it sort of seems to the experts that I talk to, like he understands the headwinds for him are not great. And one of his best options is to essentially disenfranchise

disenfranchised people by making it so that states will have all of this confusion thrown into the system ballots that may not be properly delivered and processed via USPS. USPS sort of intervening as a checkpoint in the voting system, even though voting is something that is supposed to be managed fundamentally by the states. And the hope it appears to be is that by doing so, so close to the midterms, he is able to sort of whittle down these fee margins that could end up being crucial for him and save him from some major losses. I'm just not sure it's going to work, actually, when you look at sort of the larger picture, but that appears to be the play here.

Yeah, and we're going to get into what Trump is thinking here, because I have a lot of questions about that. But it's interesting because I was doing a little bit of reading before we spoke. And the interviews that the New York Times was doing, for example, with voters, it was Republican voters who sounded most discouraged about mail-in voting because they are the ones who hear Trump talking. about how mail-on voting is fraudulent and you can't trust it. And they're basically like, so is there any point in voting? But you mentioned something important, which is that voting

in the midterms is a state responsibility. There are tens of thousands of localities that will be dealing with voting this November. It is not supposed to be under a federal purview. But earlier this year, Trump said that he wants the Republican Party to, quote, nationalize elections. What is that even supposed to mean? So I take Trump at his word when he says that I want to nationalize and federalize essentially elections. I think sometimes people try to add sort of explanations and psychoanalyzed Trump around these things.

But at least in this arena, I think he means exactly what he says. And that means that instead of the states having autonomy and control over elections, different parts of the federal government, he wants them and his allies who are in them, sort of part of those tentacles to control this system. So in the front of USPS, that means your ballot needs to travel through and be approved by USPS and their barcodes are going to run through that process. And if you don't make it past us, you're not even going to be able to make it through. It doesn't matter if you've already been approved by your state. I think it's also connected to the larger project and the sort of looming threat that we hear

from Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen about the potential for there to be federal agents out on the streets trying to arrest people in the midst of the midterm elections, something that is unprecedented, that legal groups have been sort of scrambling to try to prepare for. And there is the sort of technical desire to nationalize elections. But there's also just, I think, the sort of rhetorical and cultural desire to put these threats out there and so confusion in the hopes that people will say, oh my God, I may have mail-in voted for years. And that may be because of where I live and my job or my circumstances or I'm serving overseas, whatever it may be, this may be what I depend on. And now I'm not so sure this is safe. So what am I going to do? Or for you to stop yourself

and say, oh, I come from a mixed status household, right? I am a citizen, but I'm worried about my family. And what does it mean if I'm stopped and I'm interrogated and I'm stalked at the polls? Is it worth it for me to come out this November? I think some of this is about the hope that, again, because the margins in so many of these states, they're going to be so tight that there's just enough people who may stop themselves, self-censor themselves, question themselves. And so there's the hope to win this on an illegal front. That's the work of people like John Sauer in front of the Supreme Court. But then there's also the sort of cultural front, which is that if you undermine just the story of how elections are run, destroy people's faith in our broader system and structure

of governance, you may do just enough to change the game. How are Democrats responding to this at the state level? At the state level, I think there's a whole range of things. So there are these legal groups that have been preparing and coordinating with Democratic organizations and lawmakers for quite a long time on this. You have states that are trying to just move forward as prepared. But I think one of the sort of under-told stories of the Trump era is a the pressure that this puts on individual people who do not have a ton of power,

resources and legal sort of armies around them, like election workers, who are going to be the people who are accused of doing something nefarious, accused of fraud, accused of errors if Trump feels that states don't comply with his sort of broad vision for what these upcoming midterms should look like. And those are the people that I think a lot about, just given the trauma, frankly, that people in places like Atlanta, Georgia and Fulton County, Georgia, and then, say, like Detroit were put through in the last major election cycle. So some of those people will no longer want to be election workers.

And then people who do believe the big lie, they are raising their hands and inserting themselves into the dynamic here. And so what ends up happening to some of these people on the ground level, I think, is a real open question. But people, I think, can take comfort in the fact that. that there will be, there is, there are, there will be legal challenges to all of this. There will be groups out in communities to the extent that they can on a state by state basis to support people who may have nerves about federal agents, for example, being present. But I think some of this sort of depends on what happens in the coming days on a state by state level,

how people can respond and what they're going to do as again, states like North Carolina already sending their ballots out. So you said something earlier that was interesting. because you mentioned that Trump knows about the headwinds he's facing. And I think he kind of does, but also I don't think he knows that he is responsible for those headwinds. You know, we've got, as you've mentioned, just under two months to go into the midterms. And Trump is so unpopular that you have multiple House Republican candidates removing references to Trump from their campaign websites. One of those House representative candidates is in California. The other is in Kentucky. But Trump seems to think that the solution to all of this is more Trump.

What is Trump doing now to get involved in state-level races? Well, one big thing that he's doing is making the midterms. Now, it seems like their final midterm strategy has landed on actually Trump is on the ballot. We're going to lean into that. And guess what? Wednesday and Thursday of this week, September 9th and 10th, we're going to have. Trumpapalooza in Terrant County, which is the Dallas area in Texas. And so it's strange because all of the reporting that my colleagues in the White House unit and on Capitol Hill

have done in recent months points to everyone around Trump being incredibly aware of these headwinds. And Trump has been questioned about it. He's been confronted about all of this. To some extent, some of these polls have broken through, although we know, too, from the reporting that he's sometimes given selective information about the way Americans view him and their reflections on things like the war and gas prices. And so I guess it leaves that sort of open, that element open for debate. Like to what extent does Trump see himself as fault? I'm not sure as being at fault. I'm not sure he's someone who's ever going to sit there and say like, hey, I am accountable for the conditions down ballot Republicans are running in right now. But fundamentally everyone around him is.

Yeah, he seems to have concluded. And there was an interview with him I think over the last couple of weeks in which she was like, oh, people hate Republicans, but they love me, which like, no, no, I don't think that's true. I don't think they love you at all. He has his hardcore fans. I don't know what percent you would call them. People used to say it's like 30-something percent of the country. And I think that number is like being peeled away, peeled and peeled and peeled away. We'll get back to my conversation with Antonia Hilton in just a moment. This episode of What Today is brought to you by our friends at Wildgrain. Wild grain delivers sourdough breads, seasonal pastries, and French butter made by small independent bakeries right to your door.

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Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. You mentioned Trumpapalooza in Dallas. It's a convention where, you know, it's a midterm convention. Democrats did that decades ago, but abandoned it because it was a bad idea. bad idea. The Republicans are trying this now. And a host of Republicans have all said that they suddenly have plants. You know, they've got weddings and campaign events and they just can't make it. So what are you expecting from an event where it seems like a host of Republicans don't want this to

be happening at all? A bunch don't want to come. And Trump is apparently planning to be there and be front and center for both days. I mean, I think you're going to see a lot of Trump. and a ton of Trump sycophants surrounding him, I think you are going to see folks like Ken Paxton, who have no choice. I mean, Ken Paxton's sort of lot, his future, has been cast with Trump. He kind of has no choice, but to double down.

It's been interesting. I was just in Texas the other week, working on a story that is actually going to be part of my premiere episode of my show this coming weekend on the 12. And it's all about what Trump has been doing to Big Ben National Park and the fight over the border wall. And the extent to which Trump's insistence on just this sort of symbolic vision of an end-to-end wall in Texas, despite like what geography and topography and Border Patrol insiders and sort of longtime legacy workers in the sort of

broader immigration space have been trying to tell this administration, he's going full speed ahead on this project. And it's really pissing off moderates and conservatives. And I mean long time, three-time Trump voting conservatives in the state of Texas who just happened to live in that big bend sector. And so what's really interesting as I'm watching Ken Paxton with this is he is in this terrible and unfortunate position for him where he is trying to tell voters, I'm your guy and I'm going to stand up for you and I care about your land. I care about your animals that live near the Rio Grande, and I care about the ranchers who depend on the balance of the environment here.

But I really trust Trump. And he's going to, I don't know that all this is going to be solved before the midterms, but he would never do anything wrong by all of you. Meanwhile, they have images, drone video, satellite imagery of what's already happened to Big Bend Park, where the administration has said there's no wall, but there's already physical evidence. They've been constructing roads. and a ton of preparatory work to aid in the broader wall projects.

They've already sent out hundreds of eminent domain requests to landowners. I mean, people who go back so far in Texas that their families have been in Texas before Texas was Texas. And again, these are people who, I spoke to many of them, like Trump, agree with his broader vision on so many things and feel at this point, like between the Iran War, what's happening to gas and diesel prices, what's happening to ranchers and farmers with beef and what's now happening with the wall, they are just at a complete loss. And they have no one to take that anger out on

except for Ken Paxton. So that's going to be one of the people who I'm watching very closely during Trump of Paloosa, because he kind of has no choice but to be hand in hand with this guy because he's only in the position he's in right now and only even has a shot at becoming senator because of Trump.

At the same time, Trump may be the thing that sinks him. And a lot of political operatives that we've been speaking to in Texas really think that this, that the big, that's a sort of symbol of big bend is like the final nail in the coffin there. Yeah. It's, it's also not good when you spent the 4th of July with your mistress in London as Ken Paxton apparently did. I don't have enough time to talk about all Ken Paxton's problems on this on the shelf. It would be a fun several-hour segment. Something that is that's interesting if you follow conservative politics or you talk to pundits, is that you can see if there's a sense of like, well, if we just wrap up the Iran war today, if we just solve all of our problems today, is it, is today too late for the Republicans,

especially with regard to the House? I mean, we really are very close to the midterms. As you mentioned, North Carolina is already sending out ballots. It seems like not only is this convention a bad idea because Trump isn't popular, but also it's a bad idea because people have already started to make their choices. And it seems a little late for Trump to try and change whatever the message is. That's if he could decide on what the message is besides him. Yeah, that's going to be a major problem. And we already know that even if his staff has prepared what the message is.

he's liable to go off script and perhaps say things that undermine the message. I mean, even the people around him, like Vice President Vance and his sort of presser about the war that is not a war, but is a war the other day, could not really fundamentally stay on a message that if I was still in the middle, I just don't know how metabolizing that, hearing that, would pull me any closer to your side when Vance could not articulate a clear vision for what the administration's plan is to get us out of this mess and to bring prices down and to address the concerns Americans have been asking to. So that's asking them to. And then so that's, that's confusing. I can't follow. But what I can follow is that every day my life is getting

more expensive. Gas is, it has been crazy and it's just been Labor Day weekend and people are feeling the squeeze after trying to do, you know, good things for their families, for their kids at the end of this summer. It's back to school and people have to buy all kinds of equipment, tech, clothing and shoes for their children. There's a headline the other day that now more than a dozen colleges in the United States have a price tag for one, just one year of school that's over $100,000 now. And these are not just like scammy universities that you don't really know anyone who's attending them. I mean, these are places like, Duke and Vassar and Wesleyan, you know, schools that people from all over the country are trying to

eager to send their children to are now becoming more and more privately expensive. And so people are, those are headlines that are very, very easy to understand. And what is not easy to understand is what the Trump administration is fundamentally going to do or is even able to do right now to get us out of the sort of structural and financial mess. that we all feel that we are in. When I ask economic experts, people like Ron and Sana, who I talk to every day, basically, at MS now,

they tell me that even if he were to do everything, everyone's begging him to. Like, we're a hundred, that war is 100% over. We are getting out of the way. Here's our announcement of what our plan is with Iran. We're no longer threatening to go into pickaxe or mountain or Karg Island. we're shutting this show down,

that it would be months and months and months still before life went back to something that resembled normal. So to your question, they've run out of time. I think that's part of the reason why we're actually seeing the GOP lean into some of the culture war stuff that I think they hope will still make people feel like they have something, particularly in Texas. It's very interesting to me that Trumpapalooza is happening there

because of sort of the history of the power of the GOP in Tarrant County but also because Texas is sort of the place where Republicans so often test their culture war messaging. They've really been leaning in to Islamophobia there. We have seen people in Trump's circle like Laura Lumer double down on incredibly racist and divisive rhetoric online day in and day out. And what I consistently take away from that. Oh, I mean, this is not even to mention the images of Haitians that they've been sharing online as they brag about deporting people who came. to this country legally and tried to do everything correct and then had temporary protected status taken away from them. So they're sharing these images of them. They're creating video games and

promoting them online for young men basically to like pretend to be a border patrol agent chasing migrants of color around. When I see all this stuff in concert together, what that tells me is you actually do not have much to offer right now. And you're hoping some of the red meat culture war stuff that has been successful in recent years will work. If it's going to work, it will work in a place like Texas where so much of that begins and gets tested. I'm just not sure, though, that it actually is enough right now, given the pain people are feeling. Antonia, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me.

This is so much fun. That was my conversation with Antonia Hilton, host of MS Now's The Assignment. Before we go, at Crooked, we believe the answer to right-wing authoritarianism is a big, fun, pro-democracy movement. And that's why CrookedCon is back. Join us in D.C. from November 5th through 7th for three days of live shows, panels, candidate forums, and maybe a drink or two. We just posted a ton more info about what to expect from the big event on Saturday, November 7th, and D.C. It's going to be the first time we come together after the midterms and the kickoff of the 2028 debate. Come be a part of the big tent.

Head to crookedcon.com for tickets, lineup announcements, and more. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Corey Lewandowski is too weird for the Middle East and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how according to the Wall Street Journal, the former special government employee and Christy Noam's partner, tried to get work with Qatar and the UAE, but both countries said, no thank you. Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe.

I'm Jane Koston, and someday I hope to find out what Corey Lewandowski was actually supposed to be doing. What Today is the production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Adam Lippurg, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. I'm Nate Silver.

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