Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 2/6/26

Jeffrey Goldberg: Sometimes it's difficult to tell if President Trump is just idly musing or giving us an indication that he's about to do something dramatic and unprecedented. This week, he set off alarm bells by calling for Republicans to nationalize the upcoming elections. But as all Americans know, or should know, the Constitution mandates that states run elections, not the federal government. What do Trump's thoughts mean for the 2026 midterms? We'll talk about this next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

President Trump's obsession with elections, elections he's won an election he lost but claimed to have won, elections he's afraid Republicans may lose, is well-documented. There's a great deal of worry among election officials across the country that Trump will use whatever tools he has at his disposal, including most alarmingly America's intelligence services, to create doubt and confusion around the upcoming midterms.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Jonathan Karl, the Chief Washington correspondent at ABC News and author of Retribution, Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America, Liz Landers is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Jonathan Lemire is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW, and Michael Scherer is a staff writer and a White House correspondent at the Atlantic. Thank you all for joining me.

Let's talk about this word nationalize. There's a lot of stuff to unpack here. What -- Jon, what does it mean to nationalize an election?

Jonathan Karl, Washington Bureau Chief, ABC NEWS: Well, I think for Trump it means to go in there and run the elections and states and localities that he's lost. I mean, there isn't a great, grand strategy here, but he's talking about some sense of a federal takeover of the way the elections are run, and, again, primarily, exclusively focusing on places that he lost in 2020.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Let's listen to what Trump told former deputy director of the FBI and current podcaster, Dan Bongino, this week about this issue.

Donald Trump, U.S. President: The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. And then we have states that are so crooked and they're counting votes. We have states that I won that show I didn't win.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, here's a trivia question for all you political nerds. What does Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution say about this issue? Please feel free to hit your buzzer at any time. Michael, yes?

Michael Scherer, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: It says states run elections.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Ah, interesting.

Michael Scherer: So -- and, you know, President Trump came in. He issued a bunch of executive orders. He tried to get rid of mail voting, he tried to change voting machine technology. He tried to impose voter I.D. Almost all of that has been thrown out by the courts. There's some still pending, but it's not going anywhere. The courts can read the Constitution, even if the president can't. He can't get very far there.

Now, what we've seen in the last couple weeks, though, is something else. He's using the full powers of the federal government, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other people in the Justice Department to suck up information to try and confirm the debunked theories he has about the 2020 election, the 2022 election, in the hopes that he might find a spark in all the smoke that's been created by his allies. And that's a separate program that's been going forward.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, I don't want to get all schoolhouse rock here, except that I actually do, but why is it that the state, why is it the founders, the framers of the Constitution, thought it was important to devolve election supervision to local authority?

Jonathan Lemire, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, in part, to prevent exactly this from someone -- from a president or some sort of ruler to try to rig the system, that the authority should be in the states. That's the United States of America. That's right at the beginning of a set like that.

And I think there's other interviews where the president has given about this, where he's singled -- he's highlighted Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta. What are those? Those are big, blue cities where, frankly, majority minority cities, cities that he lost and he knows where Democrats will do well again. And Tulsi Gabbard heads there, you know, as DNI suggesting that there some sort of foreign interference in American elections. She made a separate trip to Puerto Rico, her team did, looking for it there as well. And this is President Trump, not just trying to re-litigate 2020, but Democrats are afraid this is about 2026, 2028. So, in confusion with the voter rolls and while also perhaps putting even ICE agents on the streets.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to come back to the extraordinary image of a director of National Intelligence being involved in a law enforcement activity in Georgia and also Puerto Rico. Obviously, I want to come back to that in a minute, but I want to stay on this question of how it would even work in Trump's conception. What would it -- it would literally mean federal officials moving into local election boards and supplanting those people? Like, Liz, what would he do in order to create this, what he would think of as a fair election, meaning one that he would be guaranteed of winning?

Liz Landers, White House Correspondent, PBS News Hour: Well, the White House was asked about this several times this week, and Karoline Leavitt said that what the president actually meant was that he was supporting the SAVE Act, which is now a bill that may get a vote in Congress soon. And this is something that the Republicans are pushing for and it has some pretty major changes to voting in this country, including voter I.D. would be required. There're some changes to some of the other parts of what makes every state vote differently across the country.

But the president himself, though, continued to double down on his own statement about nationalizing the election even after she said that's not really what he meant. He said in the Oval Office later on this week, after the Bongino interview, he said, a state is an agent for the federal government and elections. I don't know why the federal government doesn't do them anyways. So --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Say that again. A state is an agent of the federal --

Liz Landers: A state is an agent for the federal government in election. So, I think that he does want to see --

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know who never thought that? James Madison, or Hamilton, or really anybody, yes.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, look, the Constitution does say that Congress couldn't have a role.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Jonathan Karl: What -- the person that doesn't have a role is the chief executive, is the president.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right, the last person to have a role, the last entity that would have a legitimate role is the --

Jonathan Karl: So, the SAVE Act requires rather onerously a proof of not just a photo I.D., proof of citizenship, and you must do every time you interact with with your registration, when you're changing your address, when you're moving, any of that stuff.

But, look, what, what he wants is he wants to do away with mail-in voting and he wants Republicans to be basically in charge of administering elections. Not the federal government, he wants Republicans to be in charge.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, he's actually in his statements, he's been using two different -- he's like, I want Republicans in charge and I want it nationalized. And in his mind, they're interchangeable.

Liz, I want to just play an interesting exchange that you had with Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, the other day on election questions. Let's listen to this.

Liz Landers: Steve Bannon recently said, quote, we're going to have ICE surround the polls come November. Is that something that the president is considering?

Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary: That's not something I've ever heard the president consider, no.

Liz Landers: Can you guarantee to the American public that ICE will not be around polling locations or voting locations in November?

Karoline Leavitt: I can't guarantee that, an ice agent won't be around a polling location in November. I mean, that's frankly a very silly, hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Silly and disingenuous. I think we would agree that that's a pretty good question. What was your reaction to that to that answer? It didn't make it sound like ICE is not going to be deployed.

Liz Landers: Right. I think that that's the takeaway there. Look, it's not legal to have federal law enforcement agents outside of poll locations. We have laws and states have individual laws about this as well, how far you can be from a polling and voting location. But we've seen that this administration over and over has tested the bounds of the law, on immigration, on a number of issues.

So, I asked for this because Steve Bannon is an ally of the president, a former adviser to him. He has a very large microphone. And for him to be talking about this and sort of putting this into the ether, I thought it was important to sort of get it on the record with the White House, whether or not they're talking about this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Can I -- yes, go ahead.

Jonathan Karl: But, look, there's a context here, which is the Republicans fear major losses coming in the midterm elections. They've had a series of setbacks. You had the November losses in New Jersey and in Virginia. You had the loss in Miami. You also had just over the weekend a loss in a state race, state house race, in Texas, where a district that had gone overwhelmingly for Trump was suddenly won by Democrats.

The fear is that we're looking at a real blue wave for these midterm elections. That's the context here. I think that part of this is trying to intimidate Democratic voters. And part of it is laying the groundwork to challenge the election results from midterm.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You -- go ahead there.

Michael Scherer: There's also real tension over this in the White House. I mean, I was told this week that after the president came out with those statements, his senior advisers were saying, no, nationalizing is not -- these are people who are working on the investigation in Fulton, you know, working on the other --

Jeffrey Goldberg: The Georgia case.

Michael Scherer: Yes, the Georgia case, who support what Tulsi Gabbard's doing, but nationalizing is not the route to do this. I think they're going to let him continue to do what he has done now for, you know, ten years, which is to raise doubts about anything that doesn't go his way and claim fraud and mistakes. But they also know, his own advisers know that, you know, by -- if you remember back in 2020, there were two Senate seats in Georgia that were lost in a runoff because the president said, don't trust this vote, I won in Georgia, the voting lies. And what that meant was Democrats turned out and voted in the runoff and Republicans did not turn out and voted in the runoff. So, there are also Republican consultants who are very concerned about this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Let me ask all of you cover the White House. I'm interested in the way Bannon is used as a -- well, is he used to float test balloons or is it less coordinated than that? Does he put that out in coordination with the president or does it just happen organically?

Michael Scherer: I think there's communication, but I think there is a set of troublemakers that the president likes to talk to. I mean, we know a lot more names than just Bannon, who --

Jeffrey Goldberg: You mean like the Laura Loomer-type person?

Michael Scherer: Laura Loomer, yes, and other people, activists in the party, people who -- you know, conspiracists around election stuff he talks to, but they are not part of the internal government process.

Jonathan Lemire: But there are times where the president will reach out to Steve Bannon and take his advice on things. And Bannon -- and sometimes the coordination often is just Bannon getting -- going first, but sometimes the president gets there because Bannon has sort of planted the seeds.

And on this one, it's not just ICE agents. He's even suggesting the Insurrection Act should be called in November.

Michael Scherer: And 101st Airborne. He wants to send the 101st Airborne to polling places. He said that this week.

Jeffrey Goldberg: That's your question next week, I guess.

Liz Landers: Right.

Jonathan Karl: But what I have to -- some of the craziest stuff on this is on Donald Trump's Truth Social feed. It's not even from Steve Bannon or any of conspiracy theorists. I mean, as he is sending Tulsi Gabbard, his director of National Intelligence, to Fulton County, we also see on his Truth Social feed, he is posting one of the wackiest conspiracy theories that I ever encountered about 2020, which is that Italian spy satellites were used to flip -- to hack into voting machines to flip votes.

And it even added new elements to this -- it's an old theory. It goes back -- I wrote about it like five years ago. But the new elements of these -- of the theory is that the Chinese funded it, the CIA computer, big central computer was about it, and the FBI covered it up. This is on the president of the United States' social media platform.

Jonathan Lemire: The vice president of Italy right now is getting to the bottom of it.

Jonathan Karl: At the very time --

Jeffrey Goldberg: How many satellites does Italy have anyway? I mean, we spent a lot of time talking about Italian satellite technologies.

Jonathan Karl: What I learned in reporting on the last time we dealt with his 2020 stuff is that he asked his DNI at the time, who was John Ratcliffe, the current CIA director, to use the power of the DNI to look into this stuff. And Ratcliffe had to quietly explain to him that, you know, we don't do domestic law enforcement.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, let's stay on that because in the sort of litany of extraordinary events, the nerd in me thinks that one of the most unusual things I've seen in the last year is the head of National Intelligence going to an FBI raid of a local election board. I mean, not to get all schoolhouse rocking, but why -- explain why that is so odd.

Jonathan Lemire: I mean, that's not her job. I mean, she is not involved with election security. And the story has shifted so many times as to why she was there, who sent her there. Was it the attorney general? Was it the president? You know, to Gabbard, a letter to Congress, says that she went there on Trump's behalf, at his behest, you know?

But, I think, it's five or six different times that we've gotten different accounts as to why she was there pursuing these unfounded conspiracy theories about foreign election.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Can you think of another time in American history where, openly, an intelligence service of the United States focused on foreign threats has gotten this deeply involved in American election issues?

Jonathan Karl: It's not supposed to happen. And she's not supposed to be using the powers of the intelligence agency to effectively spy on Americans. That's not what it's --

Jonathan Lemire: she put the president on the phone with the FBI agents to congratulate them for what the work they were doing.

Liz Landers: And I would just add too that I spoke with an election attorney this week who was making the point that because the president has now been so involved with what happened in Fulton County, because he was on the phone with those FBI agents, because he apparently sent her down there, according to what she sent in a letter to Congress, that this is now completely bungled whatever investigation and whatever the DOJ and FBI tries to present going forward.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, there's nothing to really investigate.

Liz Landers: Right.

Jonathan Karl: This has been so thoroughly investigated.

Liz Landers: Yes.

Jonathan Karl: And, you know, I mean this, this also gets to the point of who is in the White House now, who is in the president's cabinet, because Donald Trump wanted those ballots to be seized in 2020. He wanted Bill Barr to activate the Department of Justice to do it, the former attorney general. And then when Barr left, he wanted Barr's replacement, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, to do it. When Rosen wouldn't do it, he threatened to fire him and install somebody who would do it, a guy named Jeffrey Clark. When the president was about to do that, the entire civilian leadership of the -- you know, political leadership of the Department of Justice threatened to resign in mass and it didn't happen. Now, he has an attorney general that will do what he wants, whatever he wants. And he has a director of National Intelligence who will also do whatever he asks.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me note that the president seems to be -- this is my impression, talking more and more about 2020 and more and more. Is this a sign that he's actually worried about what's coming down the pike in the midterms?

Michael Scherer: Well, he's almost -- he's basically said that presidents almost always lose. And one of the things the White House --

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, he's preparing the ground for a --

Michael Scherer: One of the things his advisers have been telling him is don't be so fatalistic about this. They want him out on the road. They're going to get him increasingly out on the road as the year goes on. They've got to excite people for this election.

And the truth is he's not in that mind space right now. He sees what most political observers see, that this is not -- the polling does not suggest there's much hope for a Republican Congress.

Liz Landers: I would just add, my observation has been that the president talks a lot about the election and the rigged election of 2020, his false claims about that. What I think is new that we're seeing more recently is that he's talking increasingly about how he's going to change the midterm elections and how he's using the government to investigate things in ways that we've never seen before. So, it's more the forward-looking part of this that I think is different.

That's interesting. I mean, at the National Prayer Breakfast this week, he spoke a about this in a way that one usually doesn't hear at the National Prayer Breakfast. Let's go -- let's just watch one minute of that.

Donald Trump: They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my -- now I really have a big ego though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I believe he's paraphrasing St. Francis of Assisi here, by the way. It was such an odd location. The reason that it struck me is because it's such an odd location to do that very honest riff in a kind of way. He's talking about his preoccupations. But you're saying that he's -- is he using those moments to lay the groundwork for this belief that the Democrats will never let him win? Is that the sort of thing that's going on?

Liz Landers: He's also been talking about the election and the fact that he thinks that he won places like Minnesota three times. This is something that he's also been saying recently when people are talking about the ICE operations there. And so he is really, really fixated on this, I think, more now that we're in the new year, now that the midterms are looming, now that he's talking about possible impeachment, which I think probably will happen if Democrats retake the House.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Liz Landers: So, It's all of those.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, you wrote this week, you talked about the president not helping his own midterm cause by doubling down on the wrong things. What did you mean?

Jonathan Lemire: Yes. Well, I mean, because of that race in Texas, in particular, a thunder clap for Republicans, this was a seat that the Democrats have not won since 1978. It was a 31-point swing since November 2024 when Trump was elected again. And they're telling -- Republicans are saying quietly and increasingly publicly, focus on the economy, focus on how you're trying to make people's lives better, and instead the president is -- he's doubling down on these election fraud conspiracies. He's doubling down on gunboat diplomacy. He's doubling down on leaving his lasting imprint on Washington, whether it's the White House ballroom, or we've seen the last week or so with the Kennedy Center. And they're saying to him, this isn't how you win elections or help us.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we'll stay on that for a minute, because, I mean, let's talk about the Kennedy Center, Penn Station in New York and Dulles International Airport, which I'll have a couple of things now in common. They're very drafty and impersonal, and Donald Trump wants to have his name on all of them. Is that not working for the base anymore, this desire to rename everything after him?

Jonathan Lemire: He's telling on himself that he clearly doesn't ride the train very much, because you wouldn't want your name on Penn Station in New York City, the Moynihan Station.

Jonathan Karl: The Moynihan. Moynihan's pretty nice.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I actually think since they put it in the post office --

Jonathan Lemire: The Moynihan part is nice. It's the Penn Station part is still very --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Dulles Airport, you're not going to get me to defend?

Jonathan Lemire: No, no one here would. No, I don't think that there are too many Republican voters who eagerly put President Trump back in office who said among their top three issues were, I hope he gets his name on more things.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I guess what I'm getting at, you combine that psychologically with what he said at the prayer breakfast, my ego needed it, it seems that we're moving into a phase where he's even more obsessed with building things to put his name on and just sort of grandiosity. Maybe I'm --

Jonathan Karl: He's always wanted to put his name on things, but there's something much more ramped up this time and that is, he's thinking about his legacy. You see it in what's happening at the White House, not just the reconstruction he is doing, but presidential portraits everywhere that you just didn't see last time. There were a couple his first term, but he's really thinking about his place in history, and that's why -- I think that's part of what's motivating him to make really big, dramatic changes that will outlast him.

But this Penn Station and Dulles thing goes beyond just putting his name on something. He's holding or trying to hold, and a judge just now at least temporarily blocked to this, he's trying to put $16 billion on hold that's been appropriated by Congress, signed into law for this big tunnel project and saying directly to Schumer, I'm told in the Oval Office directly to Schumer, well, hey, you know, you could name Penn Station and Dulles --

Jonathan Lemire: This already backfired once. This already backfired once. It was a gift to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey when he killed the tunnel the first time. That was a closer race and then it swung her way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I want to -- in the couple of minutes that we have left, I want to switch subjects and go to the subject of The Washington Post. We have a lot of people who come on our show from The Washington Post. We have a lot of people at The Atlantic who once worked at The Washington Post, including Michael.

Michael, I know it's hard not to talk about the 300 people who just lost their job, but I want to lift up and have you talk about maybe at a sort of a moral level, what does it mean for journalism and democracy when this happens to one of the three major newspapers of the United States?

Michael Scherer: I think it's a serious blow. And it's a serious blow because there was so much optimism in that paper, you know, when, when the new owner, Jeff Bezos, took over, it was 2013, President Obama had just been elected. He embraced this idea, democracy dies in darkness. That was a term that like even reporters of the Post were like, well, that's a little aggressive, you know? That's going to be our motto. He leaned fully in., And as soon as the winds changed, as soon as, you know, the president switched voters were looking like they were going to reelect President Trump, he entirely flipped.

And the decisions that have been made since 2024 have repeatedly hurt the place, not made it stronger. And I think history will almost certainly show that what happened this week is going to make it weaker still.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Was this an extinction level event or an extinction level threat for a newspaper?

Michael Scherer: I think it's a extinction level threat for Jeff Bezos' Washington Post, yes. I don't think there is a path for that to recover, and I think it's just a matter of time before he decides to move on from it and sell and allow somebody else to try and rebuild it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, last question to you on this. A lot of Republicans are saying, oh, well, The Washington Post is having these problems because it was too liberal, but they think the same thing about The New York Times, which is flourishing --

Jonathan Karl: Yes, which is massively --

Jeffrey Goldberg: How do you understand this ideologically? Or do you?

Jonathan Karl: I mean, look, The Washington Post thrived under -- in Trump's first term. The Washington Post really started to spiral after a series of editorial decisions actually in the direction of the right when they refused to do -- when Bezos didn't want to do an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris that had already been written, wanted to make changes in the editorial page, the slant of the editorial page, and they lost hundreds, 250,000 subscribers. That's a big blow.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, I mean, it is, and I don't want to dismiss this, it is a tremendous blow to a lot of people in our industry. They're very talented people. They will be fine, but we have to be very vigilant about independent journalism in this country. We really, really do.

I'm sorry to say, that's all the time we have for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

You could find Jonathan Lemire's article on President Trump's priorities at theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Goodnight from Washington.