by Maximillian Alvarez | Mar 23, 2026 | elections, midterms, Politics and Movements: US, Trump, video, Voting Rights
With the public outraged over the US-Israeli war with Iran, the Epstein Files coverup, and a cost-of-living crisis, even President Donald Trump’s base of supporters is fracturing, and Republicans are fixing to get slammed in the upcoming midterm elections. Perhaps that explains why Trump and MAGA Republicans are obsessively focused on attacking voting rights, taking federal control over the electoral system, and preemptively casting doubt on the midterm election results before the elections even happen. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, about MAGA Republicans’ effort to rig the midterms—and what can be done to stop it.
Guest:
Ari Berman is Mother Jones‘ national voting rights correspondent. He’s the author of the new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, as well as Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
Additional links/info:
Ari Berman, Mother Jones, “The world is on fire. Gas prices are rising. Republicans are trying to make it harder to vote”
Ari Berman, Mother Jones, “The GOP’s “show us your papers” bill is the latest effort to help Trump take over elections”
Credits:
Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network Podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Between the federal government’s coverup of the Epstein Files, President Trump’s catastrophic decision to plunge the US into a war with Iran, an
by Kenny Bruno | Mar 21, 2026 | Donald Trump, elections, Energy, Fossil Fuels, Iran, iran war, Israel, Liquified Natural Gas, LNG, Oil, Op-Ed, Russia, Trump Administration, War, war in Iran
Operation Epic Fury makes perfect sense. To understand it, you simply have to ignore previous political and military norms. The simplest explanation is that the war fits Donald Trump’s two primary principles: enrichment and domination. The consensus on the left is that the U.S. war on Iran is impulsive, senseless, incomprehensible, illogical, not strategic, and not in the U.S. national interest.
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by Doug Bock Clark | Mar 14, 2026 | DHS, Donald Trump, Election Deniers, elections, News, Trump Administration, Voting machines, Voting Rights
In his top post at the Department of Homeland Security, David Harvilicz sets policy on protecting the nation’s elections infrastructure, including voting machines. He’s also the co-founder of a company with James Penrose, who helped hatch debunked conspiracy theories blaming hacked voting machines for Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. Penrose assisted in a push to seize…
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by Steve Benen | Mar 9, 2026 | Congress, elections, Maddowblog, Politics
A few months before Election Day 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage of sorts to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump’s ring and unveil a proposal they seemed excited about.
The Republican duo pitched legislation that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. (The absurdity of watching two notorious election deniers pretend to be deeply concerned with the integrity of elections was a detail the public was apparently supposed to overlook.) Soon after, the proposal took legislative form, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (or SAVE Act) was born.
In time, however, this solution in search of a problem metastasized. Instead of just making it harder for Americans to register to vote, Trump and his allies expanded the original version of the SAVE Act by adding provisions that also made it harder to cast votes and renaming the package the “Save America Act.”
In recent weeks, the president announced that this still wasn’t good enough. In addition to making it harder to register to vote and requiring an ID to cast ballots, Trump decided the package also had to impose harsh new restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as new restrictions on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors.
He still hasn’t explained what punishing transgender Americans has to do with voting rights, but the president has begun condemning earlier iterations of the legislation as “the watered-down version,” which he expects Congress to disregard.
The far-right package doesn’t have any realistic chance of success in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to advance, though Trump apparently has a new plan in mind. After spending part of the weekend
by Brad Reed | Feb 27, 2026 | Article, elections, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump
by Jen Fifield | Feb 13, 2026 | DHS, elections, News, Voter Suppression, Voting
When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback. Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate. The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions.
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