Transcript: Trump Rages at Epic Virginia Backfire—and Reveals Weakness

After Democrats narrowly passed a mid-decade redistricting there, which could mean four additional House seats, Trump ripped the result as rigged and begged the courts to step in and nullify it. Yet this comes as Republicans are admitting that this debacle is Trump’s fault. And that captures something essential about this moment. Republican cheating gets a lot harder when Democrats seriously fight back against it with hardball of their own.Brian Beutler has been arguing well on his Substack, Off Message, that Democrats must prepare now for some epic hardball in future years, because it’ll be needed to achieve post-Trump accountability and to Trump-proof the system against more abuses. So we’re talking to Brian about all this today. Hey, Brian, good to have you on.Brian Beutler: Good to be back.Sargent: So on Tuesday, Virginia voters narrowly approved this referendum by around three points to redraw the congressional map, allowing Democrats to add up to four more seats. That puts Democrats slightly ahead of Republicans in the redistricting arms race. They might be able to add one or two more seats than the GOP can, though a lot depends on what Florida does now. Brian, your reaction to all that?Beutler: It’s very promising that Democrats, once confronted with Trump’s order to Texas to further gerrymander Texas, didn’t simply wail about the unfairness and failure to respect norms, and just said, if this is a race to the bottom, then we’re racing to the bottom together. And it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Democrats would do that, because it’s not how they’ve done things in the past. It wasn’t really sort of their bent, especially in the first year of the second Trump term.But I think that they really understood that it was do or die. Not only did Trump make it clear that he was doing this to sort of steal power—and that meant, okay, well, if we’re just in a game of grabbing what you can, we’ve got to do the same thing—but the backdrop when this all started was Donald Trump making a lot of headway in his effort to essentially overturn the Constitution or replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian autocracy. And I think it dawned on Democrats that if through chicanery, but quote-unquote legal chicanery, Republicans managed to fight the midterms to a draw, not give up any power, that that would help cement the autocracy. And then it’s not a question of the midterms, it’s a question of every election in the future. Viktor Orbán just lost in Hungary after 16 years. Well, who in Democratic politics today wants to carry on if it’s going to be 16 years before we can undo all this. So they kind of had to act.Sargent: Absolutely. And let’s talk about how Trump erupted over the results because it underscores a lot of what you’re saying. Trump posted this on Truth Social: “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA.” Trump then said Republicans had been ahead in the count—well, you know, red areas were counted first. And then he said a massive mail-in ballot drop led to another “crooked victory.” And he even said the referendum language was deceptive. And he called on the courts to essentially step in and overturn the will of the voters on this. I think Democrats should take from that that they made the right move in every possible way. Donald Trump is essentially saying, we will not operate fairly and we will not, you know, hew to what the voters want in any sense. We will do whatever we can to essentially rig the system in a non-democratic and authoritarian way going forward. And Trump just said it openly, and that just basically should steel Democrats for more of this.Beutler: I think that’s right. And I think that they should not let him get too much in their heads, right? Like, he is clearly gunning for mail-in ballots and they need to have an offensive-defensive posture to stop that—to make it clear to people that it’s safe to mail a vote, or if he manages to compromise mail voting somehow, to be ready to go with alternative plans to help people vote in other ways. Not to say that he’s just a paper tiger and he never tries to do anything corrupt—he tries to corrupt things all the time. And there’s sort of no bottom to what he wouldn’t at least contemplate, right? But when he is saying an election was lost because it was rigged, he’s almost always operating from a position of weakness. And it’s not popular with anyone other than people who are already bought into Donald Trump.The fact that he’s resorting to claiming that the Virginia referendum was rigged is an indication that he knows that was an important defeat and that he will try to do shady, illegal, potentially even violent things to try to prevent the maps from going into place. So I think the message to Democrats is just understand who Donald Trump is. You’ve had 11 years to learn. You have some hints now as to where this is going—and be ready for all contingencies.Sargent: So we shouldn’t overlook one of the craziest things about what he said, which is he said the referendum language was deceptive and added, “I am an extraordinarily brilliant person and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.” You have any thoughts on that, Brian?Beutler: I mean, I think that he suspects that Republicans are going to try to challenge the result of the referendum on the basis of the idea that the wording of the question should invalidate the whole result. My understanding, as an amateur lawyer—non-practicing, non-law school graduate—is that any court that overturns something like this, where the legislature put something on the ballot and then the public voted on it and then it passed, they don’t have standing to overturn that just on the basis of whatever. And that it would be a power grab on behalf of Donald Trump, which is why the rest of his tweet—or post, or Truth, or whatever—is sort of written as a plea or a demand to the Virginia Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court, whichever has the final say, to do my work for me, throw this out, and here’s a pretext for you. Sargent: And he just put his face all over this, so it makes it harder for any judge to overturn the will of the voters when Trump basically said, hey, judges, corruptly overturn the will of the voters, please, please.Beutler: Right. Exactly. Sargent: Well, so a number of Republicans are now openly criticizing Trump for starting this redistricting war. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick told Politico that he warned the White House months ago that this could backfire. Representative Don Bacon said, “Chess players think three to four moves ahead. It doesn’t appear this happened.” Brian, I don’t think these Republicans would be objecting if they remained ahead in the redistricting wars, do you?Beutler: The fact that Republicans are coming out of the woodwork now to say this was a bad idea all along, I think conveys awareness on their part that this was, A, a big enough affront that it was going to invite a backlash from Democrats and that they were going to respond in kind. And B, that it’s not necessarily a smart idea to do hyper-partisan gerrymanders in an environment where the president is misgoverning the country badly and leading his party into a serious defeat. The people who are upset about this aren’t the people who just got gerrymandered out of their seats. It’s the entire Republican conference in the House of Representatives, because what has happened is almost certain to leave their minority next year smaller than it would have been if they’d just done nothing.Sargent: Yeah, I think we should underscore for people who aren’t following this as closely as we do that Republicans are worried because if they follow Trump down this road and start doing extreme gerrymandering in more states, it takes the safe Republicans and takes away some of their Republican votes in order to rig the map and then leaves them in a less safe environment, particularly with Trump tanking so badly. And I’ve got to think Republicans are looking at these special election results—in which Democrats are outperforming by 10, 12, 14 points—and thinking, holy shit, please don’t make my seat less safe. So I’ve got to think the party as a whole is really going to be rebelling against a lot of this more in coming days, don’t you?Beutler: Yeah, except it’s unclear what they can do because it’s done, right? I mean, there might be more—like maybe the results in Virginia and the fact that Donald Trump is pulling these polling numbers, 32, 33 percent, is going to persuade somebody like Ron DeSantis in Florida that it’s not worth doing this. Trump might want it like, you know, we have to thump our chest just as hard, we can’t be forced to back down, it’s not macho to do that. And he might realize, yeah, but we’re punching ourselves in the face if we do this. Because if DeSantis does what Trump wants, he’s going to take a bunch of R-plus-double-digit seats and turn them into R-plus-five, R-plus-six seats. And then if Democrats win in a national environment that’s Democrat plus nine, they’re going to lose those seats that they would have kept otherwise. So the degree to which Trump has not just endangered his congressional majority, but kind of confronted them with an extinction-level crisis, is starting to dawn on the people on Capitol Hill. It’s kind of too late, you know?Sargent: So let’s go big picture on the long term. Some political scientists have argued for what might be called defensive hardball, in which pro-democracy Democrats and liberals opt for extreme measures in order to right-size the system against other extreme measures that are already ongoing. It seems like this could unfold at two levels. Let’s take them in two pieces. The first piece is something like this Virginia move, in which Democrats fight fire with fire in order to ultimately try to dissuade Republicans from engaging in these types of escalations. It’s like mutually assured destruction in a way. So if Democrats win the House—and the Senate as well, obviously—they could say, let’s end the filibuster and pass a number of protections like an end to gerrymanders and an end to extreme voter suppression, that sort of thing. What do you think that should look like?Beutler: So you can see in the way Democrats structured their response to what Republicans did in Texas—what Donald Trump ordered Republicans to do in Texas—that they have this sincere idea that gerrymandering should not be allowed, that districts should be drawn fairly. And so when they get to power after the midterms, assuming they win, and Republicans sort of regret having tried to steal these seats, they can promote the kinds of ideas that would make elections fair going forward and offer it to Republicans as a way to say, if you want out from under these maps before the next election, work with us on this.And that would include, I think, national nonpartisan districting—I say that because that’s the idea that the party’s done the most work on. But there are, I think, better ideas. You could do multi-member districts. You could do proportional representation. So that basically, it’s impossible for maps to really matter anymore, right? And they can, obviously, if they win, end Republican efforts to pass anything like the SAVE Act. They can rest easy for the time being about national voter suppression laws or voter ID laws. They can try to bargain with Republicans about removing voter suppression laws with, I guess, the idea being that, like, if you push us far enough, now you see it. If you think this is okay, then it’s okay for us to get into power in 2029 and make it hard for rural America to vote. If you don’t want that, work with us on something that guarantees access, right? Like, the idea is, if you really believe in small-d democracy, you have to fight Republicans very hard because they don’t. But the goal at the end is that they relearn the value of it. And then you can kind of reconstitute a normal liberal democratic society in the United States.Sargent: Well, that’s the first level. And here’s the more challenging level, the second level. Presumably, you could see Democrats using hardball to seek accountability for Trump world’s crimes and also build in deep protections against more authoritarian rule. You’ve written really well about that. In a nutshell, what does that entail?Beutler: So in the immediate term, it entails fighting with the Trump administration over congressional oversight, right? Because winning the election doesn’t give them the power to conduct police investigations—they have to control the presidency for that. So in 2027 and 2028, it’s going to mean they’re going to have to do oversight more aggressively than they did in Trump’s first term when they had Congress in 2019. And they’re going to have to be prepared for him to try to essentially embargo oversight—to say that he won’t cooperate with any Democratic oversight, it’s all illegitimate, sort of like a version of all elections I lose are rigged.What can they do about that? They need to get comfortable with large segments of the government being defunded if people in agencies, leaders in agencies, are following Trump’s orders not to comply with proper oversight—then those offices are going to have to be shut down until they start following the law, essentially. And then they’re going to have to go around the executive branch by subpoenaing the corporate entities that have bribed Trump, or quote-unquote settled with Trump, or worked hand in glove with Trump in some cases. And they’re going to want state attorneys general to be their partner in this, because some of the things that might shed light on what’s been going on in Trump world can’t be accessed necessarily by Congress, which lacks law enforcement authority, but can be accessed by state law enforcement officials.Sargent: And Brian, also court reform and Department of Justice reform. Those are big ones too. Just to wrap this up, what would you do there?Beutler: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think that none of that can happen until 2029 with a Democratic trifecta. There are ideas about that—I’ve read one I think comes from Andrew Weissmann, the former DOJ and FBI official, who says that one of the reforms should be not specifically to DOJ, but to laws that essentially bar public officials who have lied about having lost elections. So a tweet like the one Trump sent about the Virginia election being rigged could cost politicians in the future the ability to hold office. I think a reform like that would be good. Obviously, you need as a threshold matter to get rid of the filibuster and then expand the Supreme Court, because none of the institutional reforms that will make democracy fairer will survive this court, which is the most corrupt in U.S. history. And many of the efforts at accountability—to investigate, prosecute, and possibly even imprison senior Trump officials—are likely to withstand appeal only so long as the judiciary is not controlled essentially by loyal Trumpists.Sargent: Well, I think the big story here, Brian, is that when Democrats use power, good things can happen—and they’ve got to get a lot more comfortable with that in some very, very aggressive ways going forward.Beutler: Yeah. I try to be delicate about this because I think that for the most part, people in Democratic Party politics got into politics for good reasons. They want to make people’s lives better. They want to coalition-build, they want to form consensus, they want to work across the aisle—and they really mean it. And they’re ambitious and they think that they can solve problems. And they didn’t get into this to be fist-fighting all the time with Republicans. So it’s not really in their nature to be this confrontational, but it’s the only way. And so they’re either going to have to sort of do or die.Sargent: Well, they’re learning that every day and that’s a good thing. Brian Beutler, always good to talk to you, folks. Check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message—it’s great on this topic and many other topics. Brian, good to have you on.Beutler: Thanks, man.