DEMOCRATS MIGHT SHELLAC THE GOP, BUT WE'LL STILL BE IN "THE TRUMP ERA"

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

I keep seeing pundit musing about the end of the Trump era....

I think it’s highly likely that Democrats gain thirty or forty seats in the House next week, and win enough Senate races to control that chamber by four or five votes.

I think Democrats will make big gains in the House. I'm less sanguine about the Senate. Too many of the races Democrats are counting on are still well within the polling margin of error, at a time when there are signs that Democrats are much more willing to respond to pollsters than Republicans are. If I had to guess, I'd say that Democrats will fall short in at least some of the states where the polls say they're leading. My guess is Democrats will get to 51 or 52 seats, though I agree it's quite possible they'll do better.

But the question is: what then? Donald Trump and his base have no commitment to democracy because, among other reasons, they’re not democrats in even the loosest sense. Trump is a straight-up authoritarian, at the head of a mass anti-democratic political movement that at this point has most if not all of the hallmarks of contemporary neo-fascism.

Trump has already engaged in open flagrant sedition, in an attempt to overturn the results of a national election. He did this at a time when the upper reaches of his administration were not nearly as stacked with unhinged zealots and cultists as they are at present. That crime was also committed at a time when the Republican party was not nearly as all-in on supporting him no matter what he might do as it is now....

Why, given all this, do so many people seem so confident that Trump will in any sense whatsoever accept the results of an unambiguous electoral repudiation of his party and his movement? Because there will be nothing he can do about it? But that assumes a very great deal about how far Trump and his supporters throughout the federal government, the military, the courts, the governments of red states, the mobs in the street, etc. are or are not willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation.

I think we'll avoid the worst outcomes, for a couple of reasons.

First, Donald Trump is an authoritarian, but in one sense, he's not a "straight-up" authoritarian. A straight-up authoritarian would study the battlefield -- American democracy -- and identify and set in motion the most effective ways he could neutralize it. A straight-up authoritarian wouldn't spend hours every day on architectural projects, wouldn't be writing 1,318-word social media rants about a streaming-cable political comedian, wouldn't be entrusting his attempted election steal to government lawyers who struggle to obtain indictments. He'd figure out what works and do more of it.

How far are Trump and his supporters willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation? This seems like a scary answer, but on one level it isn't: they're willing to go far as Trump tells them to go. It's still much, much farther than they would be permitted to go if this were a well-functioning democracy, but they don't seem to be getting the go signal for a true authoritarian crackdown. Trump and Pete Hegseth don't appear to have mobilized the military. Mobs of MAGA thugs aren't launching unprovoked pre-election attacks on Democrats all over the country. Trump is appealing the many, many court rulings that have gone against him, but he isn't defying them.

I continue to believe that Trump isn't prepared to stop a Democratic wave election by any means necessary. What he is prepared to do is empower his administration to put together a dog's breakfast of anti-Democratic acts that don't add up to a comprehensive election-stealing plan but make him feel good.

So at a time when Democrats are likely to win a double-digit margin in the House, he's targeted precisely one specific House candidate, Ilhan Omar. She was elected in 2024 by a margin of nearly 50 points, and she'll probably win by an even bigger margin this year. Maybe he'll obtain an indictment against her. Maybe she'll be in a cell when the new Congress is sworn in. But Democrats are still likely to have a large House majority without her.

Trump's other gambit for saving the House seems to be the Justice Department's effort to block voting in California unless the state agrees not to count ballots from approximately 20,000 people the feds claim are illegally registered voters. Democrats are likely to win 47 of the state's 52 House races; if the Trump regime could take all those seats off the board altogether and convene a California-less House in January, Republicans would likely retain their majority. But the courts have rebuffed this effort so far, noting that there's no reason contested voters' ballots can't be challenged between Election Day and the scheduled election certification in December.

(Keep in mind that approximately 20,000 voters -- many of whom will undoubtedly prove to be citizens or non-voters -- spread out over 52 congressional districts average out to approximately 400 per district. It's likely that no House race in California will be decided by a margin that small.)

In the Senate, Republicans might have struck pay dirt with the story of Democratic operative in Alaska recruiting a candidate with the same name as the GOP incumbent. Alaska's Republican governor has ordered an investigation and says the state might not certify a win by Democrat Mary Peltola, even though there's no evidence that she was personally involved, and even though the state Supreme Court okayed the candidacy of the same-named candidate. This one could get tied up in court for months. But the feds' pursuit of Peltola is a strategy to try to win one seat. It's not an overall strategy to steal the Senate.

Yet I think Trump would be satisfied with this. Like millions of other Fox News grandpas, I think he's content -- in a way a true authoritarian wouldn't be -- with the opportunity to turn on the TV and see a lot of ragebait stories hinting that the evil Democrats are getting away with something. A true authoritarian would have a plan to prevent the opposition from winning; Trump seems content to have Attorney General Todd Blanche as his personal content creator. Alaska was rigged! An immigration fraudster won in Minneapolis! There was massive cheating in California! Trump seems as if he'd be satisfied believing that Republicans should have won.

It might get worse than that -- thugs at the polls, mobs in Washington. But it looks as if lawsuits rather than jackboots are Trump's go-to this year. The key person seems to be Blanche, not Pete Hegseth or Markwayne Mullin or Stephen Miller. That's Trump's lifelong happy place: employing lawyers to make trouble for his enemies in court. Unlike a true authoritarian, I don't think he cares if it works, as long as he's certain he's right, and as long as he keeps on fighting.

This is why we can't talk about "the Trump era" ending on Tuesday. We'll still have to endure this exhausting and extremely Trumpian post-election battle. Peltola and Omar might be targets long after the new Congress is sworn in. Trump will still command attention, even if it's in defeat. We'll probably save democracy from him for the most part, but we won't be able to get rid of him that easily.

THE BOMBING WILL RESUME ON ELECTION NIGHT, WON'T IT?

It sure looks as if Democrats will win the Senate as well as the House next week.

A new CNN poll in Michigan finds Abdul El-Sayed (D) leading Mike Rogers (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 42%....

The same poll in Texas finds James Talarico (D) leading Ken Paxton (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 43%....

The same poll in Maine finds Troy Jackson (D) leading Susan Collins (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 45%....

The same poll in Kansas finds Adam Hamilton (D) leading Roger Marshall (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 45%.

This is happening as the U.S. prepares to resume bombing in Iran. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. has told several Gulf Arab countries to be prepared for a short, intense military campaign after the U.S. midterm elections, people briefed on the conversations said....

The U.S. military is sending an additional Patriot system to Israel from Texas to beef up its missile defenses in the country, according to flight-tracking data and two officials with knowledge of the movement. The U.S. has also moved troops off bases in the Middle East where they were vulnerable in preparation for an escalation, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

U.S. forces in the region have been restocking their munitions, and bomber aircraft and jet fighters are preparing for strikes, some of the officials said. An additional aircraft-carrier strike group and Marine expeditionary unit are also poised to join an armada of roughly 20 other warships operating in the Middle East next month, although some ships could rotate out....

President Trump hasn’t decided to go ahead but is leaning toward a large postelection attack that could target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites, people familiar with his thinking said.

I think it's all but inevitable. And when will the attacks resume?

I expect them to start on Election Night.

Trump isn't a 24-hour news cycle guy. He grew up in a world of newspapers and Walter Cronkite. He thinks what's important for public perception on a given day is that day's headline story.

On the day after Election Day, he's planning to declare that positive results for Democrats are a sign that the election was rigged. He'll have Todd Blanche at the Justice Department pursuing legal harassmnent of winning Democrats. He'll have Mike Johnson hitting the fainting couch after a handful of DSA Democrats win. Johnson might echo Florida congressman Randy Fine's assertion that Ilhan Omar should be expelled from the House. If Mary Peltola and Abdul El-Sayed win, there'll be talk that they shouldn't be seated.

But Democratic wins could be so massive that the perception of a massive defeat for the GOP can't be avoided, even by people in the Republican information bubble. And even though I don't expect Trump to do a lot of deep reading next Wednesday, he won't be happy if the big, bold headline in the print The New York Times declares a Democratic rout. He won't be happy if the lede at CNN and even Fox is similar.

So I think he'll drop bombs Tuesday night, to ensure that the election isn't the only top headline on Wednesday. He might not do this if the blue wave is just a ripple. But if cable news anchors are reporting a resounding defeat for Trump, watch the bombs fall.

TRUMP IS USING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AS HIS PERSONAL SPA

Donald Trump hasn't been having particularly good luck in court in recent days. There's this, for instance:

A federal grand jury in D.C. rejected an attempt by the Justice Department to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for the account she gave lawmakers of President Donald Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol....

In a brief court appearance Tuesday afternoon, Neville S. Hedley, who introduced himself as the acting senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui that the grand jury had not concurred on the proposed indictment. Hedley did not specify the defendant, but the people familiar said he was referring to Hutchinson.

And this:

A federal judge on Tuesday expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s effort to force California to set aside some 20,000 mail ballots that the federal government claimed were sent to noncitizens.

After listening to arguments for several hours in a packed Los Angeles courtroom, the judge, David O. Carter of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ... suggested that he was unconvinced by the Justice Department’s argument that urgent action was necessary to halt illegal voting ahead of next week’s election. California counties have until Dec. 3 to certify elections, he noted, giving the government enough time to examine ballots and determine if any were cast illegally.

Also:

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a new charge against a pair of former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress, finding the Justice Department took novel — and improper — steps to announce the allegation.

Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said at a hearing that prosecutors created “their own category of charging” with the new complaint they tried to bring against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, who were initially charged last week with making false statements to Congress about their level of knowledge about an investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop....

Flores and Benavides have been targets of withering criticism from allies of President Donald Trump. Both were involved with election security issues around the 2020 contest, which Trump falsely claims was rigged. After they were arrested last week, Trump said, “I heard they were bad people.”

Trump loses in court on a regular basis. Yet his attorney general, Todd Blanche, just keeps throwing cases against the wall, especially as Election Day approaches.

In recent days Mr. Blanche and his team have announced, unsealed or initiated a succession of headline-grabbing actions certain to placate Mr. Trump’s demand for results, many targeting his longtime adversaries or promoting contested claims of election fraud....

On Monday, a federal judge in Washington unsealed new charges against James B. Comey, the third criminal case brought against the former F.B.I. director Mr. Trump openly reviles.

Also, we've had

intensification of an immigration investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar, a sharp critic of the White House; [and] the indictment of L. Louise Lucas, a Virginia state lawmaker, accused of overseeing a criminal conspiracy to sell marijuana....

All of this is why I disagree with something Jamelle Bouie says about Trump's feelings regarding the law:

Donald Trump is not the first president to break the law. He is not the first president to disregard the law. He is not even the first president to insist that his actions cannot, on some deep ontological level, be illegal. But he may be the first president to abandon the pretense that the law matters at all.

... He thinks he is a law unto himself; that he holds sovereign authority over the entire country; that he can rule by decree and punish those who resist. As one would expect, his administration has been an exercise in breaking the law, exceeding its bounds and violating its spirit.

This is true up to a point -- Trump think he's a law unto himself and can rule by decree -- but it's wrong to say that he think the law doesn't matter at all.

He knows that judges can rebuff him. He knows that they do this on a regular basis. Even the bootlickers on the Supreme Court rebuff him occasionally.

But while he'd prefer to win, just fighting these judges is lifefuel for him. He enjoys the combat, and he doesn't feel the least bit chastened or afflicted by self-doubt when he loses.

Trump is corrupt, and he believes everyone else is as corrupt as he is. When he loses in court, he tells himself -- and often tells the entire country -- that the courts are crooked and the system is rigged.

This belief is soothing to him, especially as he's approaching midterm elections his party is likely to lose badly. Believing that the courts are rigged (and that grand juries are corrupt as well) tells him that he's not really losing, or he wouldn't be losing if it weren't for the fact that the judges are enemies and crooks.

Notice that his underlings generally keep their jobs if they file weak cases that get thrown out of court, even if the filings are prepared hastily and riddled with typos.

A letter federal prosecutors sent on Monday to officials in Washington State seeking help in protecting “the integrity” of the midterms referred to “voter roles” — misspelling voter rolls. The Justice Department’s lawsuit in Alaska last week omitted the key verb describing the action it wanted the court to take.

It's fine with Trump even if an indictment isn't really an indictment.

The fact that Comey is charged in an information, and not an indictment, has legal significance. As a reminder, here’s the difference: An indictment is a criminal charge issued by a grand jury that hears the prosecutor’s evidence and makes a finding that there is probable cause to support the charges. An information is a document drafted by prosecutors and signed only by them....

The Fifth Amendment requires the government to go to a grand jury to charge a federal felony. Informations are used when a defendant has cut a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to waive indictment. Comey did not. So this is a “waiverless information.” Prosecutors ... could not proceed with this case without taking it to the grand jury for indictment first.

Trump is using the Justice Department to file weak cases. When their weaknesses are exposed, Trump feels persecuted -- a feeling he deeply enjoys and treats as proof of his rightness. He could theoretically be shutting down courts that rebuff him -- as I assume some future, even more fascist Republican president will -- but he isn't. He's content with this. The fight alone is like a deep-tissue massage for him.

THE ELECTION-STEALING PROBLEM TRUMP HASN'T SOLVED: THE SPECTACLE OF ELECTION DAY

Surprising absolutely no one, the president and his allies have been arguing that the upcoming midterms are rigged. The Washington Post reports:

President Donald Trump and his allies have spent the final weeks before the midterms showering his supporters with a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, priming them to question results if Republicans lose.

In court, the administration is telegraphing its readiness to challenge results based on alleged fraud. In podcasts and social media posts that are delivered nonstop to Trump’s core backers, right-wing influencers are telling supporters to expect cheating.

... That messaging has, in particular, pushed overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud — themes that are twice as prevalent as they were during the 2024 election cycle, The Post’s analysis found.

This has been going on for a decade -- as the Post notes, "Trump has questioned election results ever since 2016, when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote and alleged that more than 3 million people voted illegally." But all it's done, except among Trump's base, is convey the impression that Trump is a whiny little sore loser.

A survey this month by The Post, ABC News and Ipsos found just 28 percent of Americans are confident Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.

A solid majority of Americans think the election will be fair and honest, according to multiple surveys. From the Post:

The New York Times says:

And from NPR:

Three-quarters of likely voters are confident that their state and local governments will run a fair and accurate election.

That includes solid majorities of Democrats (88%), Republicans (68%) and independents (75%), but Republicans were 20 points less likely than Democrats to think they would be run well. MAGA supporters were almost 30 points less likely.

Trump, his party, and his media allies have succeeded in making Republican voters much more paranoid about elections than Democrats, but even among Republicans, only a minority believe that elections are crooked and rigged.

Why have the would-be election stealers failed at thoroughly discrediting elections?

I think there's something about Election Day, and the election process in general, that they haven't found a way to discredit and don't quite understand. I know that there's no single "Election Day" anymore, but even across multiple days, the process has the feeling of a good old-fashioned civic ritual, with ordinary people -- people who could be your neighbors -- checking in voters, and ordinary people voting. It doesn't feel corrupt. It feels wholesome.

The vote counting is more of a media spectacle, but it taps into our inclination to enjoy contests -- sporting events, reality TV, entertainment awards. I've said this a few times over the years: the media rituals of vote counting seem straghtforward and focused on fine details. Harry Enten and Steve Kornacki will be on your TV talking about not just the current vote totals, but how many votes are outstanding in which precincts, suggesting a potential for certain outcomes that might or might not happen. It's similar to the way baseball announcers might discuss a pitcher's statistics as he's facing a batter with the potential winning run on second base. The impression conveyed is of a contest that's real and legitimate.

On Election Night, even Fox News covers the results this way, for the most part. This year, I assume CBS will do the same. The results are genuinely in doubt. Reporters and analysts don't talk as if the whole thing is fake and predetermined. We hear about waves of emotion at party headquarters. Some races are called quickly and others are in doubt for hours or days, and no one seemed to know in advance which ones would fall into which categories. It all feels real. And it feels real in part because we participated in it.

I don't think Republican disinformationists understands this. They certainly haven't figured out a way to counter it. I think that partly explains why they haven't even persuaded most of their own electorate that the whole thing is fake.

WHY THE TRUMP REGIME'S ALASKA INTERVENTION MAKES ME ANGRY (BESIDES THE OBVIOUS REASONS)

This isn't the most important story in the world right now, though it could be hugely significant after Election Day.

For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.

Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.

... the Justice Department ... asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.

But the Constitution says that elections are supposed to be run by the states, and the state of Alaska has addressed this issue, as Steve Vladeck notes:

For starters, the “voter confusion” issue has already been litigated in Alaska’s state courts. In June, the state disqualified Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher, on the ground that he filed to run for the Senate “with a purpose to confuse or mislead.” But a superior court judge reinstated him, holding that the state’s decision rested on a “previously unstated, ‘good faith’ criteria” found nowhere in Alaska law, and that the state had other tools to address confusion. On June 29, three hours after oral argument, the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed.

Let me just stop here and point out that there was a similar situation in the Massachusetts gubernatorial election of 1978. The Democratic nominee was a conservative known as Ed King -- he'd beaten Michael Dukakis in the primary. (Dukakis won his old job back four years later and was perceived as a successful governor when he ran for president in 1988, but he'd fallen into disfavor in '78.) Ed King was Edward J. King -- but there was another conservative candidate, named Edward F. King, who lost the Republican primary and then made his way onto the November ballot as an independent.

I was in college in New York in 1978, but I still voted back in Boston. I remember my mother getting postcards from the Edward J. King campaign that showed his middle initial in large, bold type and made clear which King was which. If you're in this situation, that's what you need to do -- find ways of clearing up the confusion for the voters. (Can't Elon Musk just pour a few millions or billions into that effort on Sullivan's behalf?)

Edward J. King, the Democrat, won the general election, beating Republican Frank Hatch by more than 100,000 votes. I can't find the other King's vote total -- the website of the Massachusetts secretary doesn't even report it -- but there were fewer than 6,000 votes for "all others."

Massachusetts voters in 1978 probably found it slightly easier to distinguish the two Kings -- ballots listed each party's candidates vertically under the party's name. They would have found Edward J. King under the Democratic header.

Alaska ballots don't look like that -- but the state has made it very clear which one is the incumbent Republican senator, by designating him on the ballot as both a "Republican" and an "Incumbent."

It's his job to tell people: Vote for me, the guy with "Incumbent" after his name.

Are Alaska voters capable of learning a new thing in a Senate election? They were in 2010. Remember, that's the year when a Tea Party extremist named Joe Miller beat incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary. Alaska now has all-party "jungle" primaries and sends the top four vote-getters to the general election, but in 2010, Alaska had a traditional voting system. Once Murkowski lost her party's primary, she couldn't appear on the general election ballot, not even as an independent, the way Edward F. King ran in Massachusetts in 1978.

So she ran as a write-in -- which meant she had to teach voters how to spell her name. As it turned out, the state accepted ballots that misspelled her name but matched it phonetically. It didn't matter. She beat Miller by more than 10,000 votes. Miller challenged the accepted ballots that had slight misspellings of her name, but, as the Anchorage Daily News reported at the time,

Even subtracting all the votes counted for Murkowski but challenged by the Miller campaign, Murkowski would still be ahead by 2,247 votes. That margin appears to make Miller's lawsuit asking the courts to toss out misspelled votes irrelevant. There aren't enough misspelled votes identified for Miller to win.

So Alaska voters are capable of learning. That means they're capable of learning which Dan Sullivan is which.

And as Steve Vladeck notes,

Alaska has ranked-choice voting—meaning someone who is confused can rank the two Sullivans first and second, which, barring some incredibly unlikely scenario, means a vote for the imposter Sullivan will effectively end up as a vote for the incumbent Sullivan.

Right. And we also know that the two Sullivans were on the ballot in the primary -- Alaska has all-party "jungle" primaries now -- and all evidence suggests that the presence of the non-incumbent was not the reason Peltola finished first:

... when this same issue arose in the primary, not only did the imposter receive far fewer votes than the margin separating Sullivan from former Rep. Mary Peltola, but it at least appears that many of the votes the other Sullivan did receive came from heavily Democratic precincts.

Here's how the top three candidates finished:

All of this is moot if Mary Peltola wins more than 50% of the vote in the general election -- though it wouldn't surprise me if the Justice Department sues anyway. A flat-out Peltola majority would mean, to a rational person, that a majority of Alaska voters wanted her to beat the incumbent and nothing else in the electoral process matters. But it wouldn't surprise me if the Justice Department refuses to drop the suit, claiming that an unquantifiable miasma of confusion led to the result, even though Alaska voters have demonstrated that they know how to read and process basic information.

The administration wants newly elected Democrats to come in under a cloud of suspicion. That's why this lawsuit wasn't filed before the Alaska general election ballot was finalized. Republicans know they're going to suffer some serious losses. They want their base to perceive all of those losses as fake.

NOTHING TODAY

Busy day today. See you tomorrow.

REPUBLICANS ARE TRYING TO ROY COHN THE MIDTERMS

The Department of Justice is brazenly intervening in the Alaska Senate election, on the president's orders.

Donald Trump says he ordered the Department of Justice to sue the state of Alaska in an effort to block the results of a U.S. Senate election from being certified, unless the incumbent Republican wins.

Government attorneys filed a lawsuit Friday arguing that the presence of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot would confuse voters who support the sitting senator, Daniel S. Sullivan, in the unusual matchup of two candidates with the same name up against a Democratic candidate.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday. “They have two Dan Sullivans.”

As The New York Times notes, this has already been litigated at the state level. (Keep in mind that the Constitution says that states run elections, though they're constrained by laws Congress passes. The Executive Branch has no role to play.)

Carol Beecher, the director of the state’s Division of Elections, initially rejected the other Mr. Sullivan’s application to run for the Senate seat, finding that he was not a good-faith candidate and was trying to confuse or mislead voters. But Mr. Sullivan sued, and a trial court held in June that he could be on the ballot. The Alaska Supreme Court affirmed that ruling.

The Trump administration appears to have no case.

“It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen,” said Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor who specializes in election issues. “It should have no realistic chance of success in the courts.”

While the administration is doing this, it's also threatening election officials in California.

The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots.

The letter — sent to every county in the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — also said local officials would “risk significant federal scrutiny” if they failed to comply with the Justice Department’s demands.

Some of what the Justice Department has sent to California counties is already demonstrably wrong:

In rural Inyo County, along the Nevada border, the registrar of voters said the list she was sent included just two people, and neither of them had been issued ballots. Danielle Sexton, the registrar, said her records showed they had never voted anywhere in California.

And in Mendocino County, a rugged stretch on the north coast, the registrar said the list she received was completely wrong.

“It’s not our voters that were listed,” said Katrina Bartolomie, the Mendocino clerk-recorder. “It’s from another county.”

Meanwhile, the administration's efforts to obtain unredacted voter rolls have been rebuffed in court in 27 out of 27 cases. The intimidation efforts in Alaska and California are likely to suffer a similar fate.

But apart from the Trumpers' apparent belief that they might as well try everything in case something works for them, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill, I see something else going on here.

This is an effort to create a vibe. I'm sure "vibe" is not the word the president would use, but it's a concept he's familiar with.

Trump learned how to manipulate public opinion from his early mentor, Roy Cohn. The mob lawyer's advice was simple: Never apologize. Never admit error. Never admit defeat. Always stay on offense.

Cohn wouldn't have used the word "vibe" either, but a major reason for this strategy is that if it works, it creates what we'd now call a vibe. The vibe is: We're fighting. We're the aggressors. And we're going to win.

I think that alone is intended to motivate the portion of past Republican base voters who up to this point seemed likely to sit out the midterms or vote Democratic. Up till now, the vibe has been: Democrats are winning. Democrats are winning in places where they shouldn't be winning. Trump is weak. The MAGA era is over. This White House aggression is meant to create a new narrative and a new vibe, even if none of the aggressive acts succeed.

They think their voters will turn out if they see their party fighting. I think that's also a major reason Vivek Ramaswamy is all in on that ad featuring a denunciation of his opponent, Amy Acton, by Acton's pedophile-enabling, fugitive-harboring mother: In Ramaswamy's view, it doesn't matter that the ad is morally repugnant and dishonest, nor does it matter that even some Republicans have denounced it. Ramaswamy may not care whether voters believe it -- he just wants them to believe that he fights.

This is what Trump's supporters have always said about him: he fights. Until the price of gas crossed $4 a gallon, it didn't seem to matter to them whether he fought wisely, or fought for the right things. He could fight people who have no impact on their lives -- Rosie O'Donnell, Kaitlan Collins -- and they'd cheer.

For weeks we've been talking about terrible Republican candidates (Ken Paxton, Roger Marshall), and Democrats who are clearly punching above their weight (James Talarico, Jon Ossoff). If we start talking about GOP aggression -- it's already happening in the Ohio governor's race -- the vibe might shift. And somewhere in hell, Roy Cohn will be smiling.