As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

It was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal.

In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable culmination for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of divisiveness and bigotry that featured multiple speakers launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump at the podium delivering the same demagoguery he has used in dozens of rallies this year: painting a wildly exaggerated picture of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theories, and stoking fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been at the dark heart of Trump’s politics ever since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes over the past few months, law enforcement and national security sources I’ve spoken with have warned about a growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messaging.

This is not theoretical. It’s based on a lengthy history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump, effectively, a terrorist leader—the de facto head of a violent extremist movement within the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and push anything damaging down the memory hole, the time is ripe to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years.

As I reported in an investigation begun in summer 2018, white supremacist attacks grew deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke with then. That included a wave of menace specifically targeting journalists, who Trump and his allies smeared repeatedly as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings—one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—involved perpetrators who were focused on a migrant “invasion,” a core theme also emphasized back then by Trump. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the El Paso case were particularly stark, as I detailed again recently:

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”

Notably, Trump backer Tucker Carlson, who has long pushed Great Replacement themes, alluded to the ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, has also been emphasizing it down the campaign homestretch.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement provoked the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since then trying to erase the truth about Trump’s indelible role in motivating that unprecedented attack on American democracy.

Numerous Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement of political violence, and some have since adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have just played dumb. As one national security source told me recently, “Silence is its own form of participation.”

Trump continues to weave his virulent strands of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory alleging the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. With the 2024 voting results imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism may take us next.

Earlier this week, North Korea apparently completed a successful test of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, lofting it nearly 4,800 miles into space before the projectile fell back to Earth.

This solid-fueled, multi-stage missile, named the Hwasong-19, is a new tool in North Korea's increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons. It has enough range—perhaps as much as 9,320 miles (15,000 kilometers), according to Japan's government—to strike targets anywhere in the United States.

The test flight of the Hwasong-19 on Thursday was North Korea's first test of a long-range missile in nearly a year, coming as North Korea deploys some 10,000 troops inside Russia just days before the US presidential election. US officials condemned the missile launch as a "provocative and destabilizing" action in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

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After Joe Biden’s debate debacle and Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the 2024 election looked like it could be a GOP blowout. Then Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris stepped up, the Democrats raised $1 billion-plus, the Republicans went full fascist … And here we are, a week before what feels like (another) Most Momentous Election of Our Lifetimes, and—if you believe the polls—no one has a clue who will win. 

Much depends on the outcome of the vote in seven states—the same ones that mattered in 2016 and 2020. This week on Reveal, my Mother Jones colleagues turn their attention to two of the swingest states of this election cycle, while I dig through my reporting archives to unearth a never-before-broadcast interview from 2013 that provides an intriguing glimpse into what makes Harris tick. 

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First, national correspondent Tim Murphy goes to Arizona, where flag-waving, gun-toting protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center in 2020, insisting the election had been stolen from Trump. Since then, dozens of court cases across the US have found those claims to be a big fat lie. Yet threats and harassment against Arizona election workers continue to be so common, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, told Tim, that top election officials in the state “have been turning over at the rate of a lunch shift at Taco Bell.”

Richer, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, has spent much of the past four years trying to dispel the election lies Trump helped create. To see how it’s going, Murphy visits the recently fortified Maricopa County election center, where Richer’s staff are on a mission to demonstrate to voters that the election process is free and fair and deserving of their trust. 

Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Trump and his minions have been indicted for their attempts to find enough votes (11,780, to be exact) to undo Biden’s victory in 2020, new MAGA-friendly members of the State Election Board have been trying to rewrite the rules to favor the former president this time around. Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman explains the fight to control election results in this crucial 2024 battleground and how it mirrors similar efforts in other swing states.

For the show’s final segment, I travel back almost 12 years, to when Harris was California’s attorney general—the first woman and first African American ever elected to that job—and I was an editor and reporter covering San Francisco. By then, Harris was a rising star in national Democratic politics, and editors at New York-based DuJour magazine wanted their readers to understand why. I jumped at the assignment.

I’d written about Harris a couple of times before; I’d even interviewed her mother. So when we reconnected in 2013, Harris was comfortable in my presence—far more so than with some of the journalists who’ve interviewed her in recent years. We spent about an hour together—an unimaginably generous amount of time in the current political climate—talking about many of the same substantive issues (the housing crisis, gun control, prosecuting sex crimes, and tech privacy and regulation) at the center of her campaign today. After my profile was published, I stored the audio on my laptop’s hard drive and forgot about it—until Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and reporters started complaining about how few interviews she was granting.

Listening back to our conversation, I’m struck by the similarities between Harris then and now—and not just when it comes to policy priorities. When she ran for AG in 2010, very few people—even in her own circle—thought she could win. Her Republican opponent Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, was extremely popular with the tough-on-crime types who had long dominated California criminal justice circles, not to mention he was older and white. “A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen,” Harris told me then. “What motivated me was I really wanted the job. I felt that I could do it well.” She campaigned hard in communities that were not her obvious constituencies. “I never foreclosed any group or constituency as being off limits,” she explained. “Everything and everybody is on the table, and I’m not going to accept that that door is not open to me.” On Election Night, Cooley declared victory—and many Harris supporters assumed she would concede. But she didn’t.

Three weeks later, in one of the closest elections in California history, Cooley was the one to finally concede, and Harris became the new attorney general.

The big unknown, of course, is whether she can do it again—this time against a Republican opponent who refuses to believe that he will lose and a disinformation machine intent on making sure he doesn’t. Here’s what Harris told me then: “I’m an eternal optimist. I really am. I’m a realist and an optimist. I think that those two can coexist, and they do in me.”

Two weeks from Tuesday, millions of voters across the country will fan out to polling places.

And when they do, there will reportedly be a GOP-backed, 200,000-strong army of volunteers watching them. Their task? “Establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.

That’s according to a new report in the New Yorker that sheds light on the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s plan—led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and Michael Whatley, its co-chairs—to use a giant grassroots group of Trump worshippers to question the integrity of the election.

In June, the RNC announced that the so-called “Protect the Vote” tour would make a series of stops in swing states to “train volunteers to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat this November.” (Never mind that research shows voter fraud is quite rare; that Republican-led gerrymandering has helped enshrine minority rule, as my colleague Ari Berman has covered; and that Trump still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election—despite more than 60 failed legal challenges affirming that he did.)

According to the New Yorker, much of the RNC’s strategy relies on indulging supporters’ paranoia over conspiracy theories about a Democrat-coordinated campaign to steal the election—via the usual suspects, undocumented immigrants and dead people—and training volunteers to be “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign,” as far-right Internet personality Jack Posobiec put it. If they suspect fraud, the volunteers are told, they should call the RNC’s “election integrity hotline,” which a team of volunteer attorneys will apparently answer.

The irony is that poll watching has, historically, been an important safeguard of democracy. Poll watchers helped implement the Voting Rights Act, for example, ensuring election workers were actually allowing Black people to vote. But experts also say that without clear guidelines—and under Trump’s GOP—the practice can help foment Election Day discord.

Recent history offers proof: In 2020, mostly white Republican poll watchers—including five activists linked to the Trump campaign—heckled mostly Black election workers in Detroit and spread disproven rumors of fraud, chanting “stop the count,” as NBC News recently investigated. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than a quarter of Republicans—compared with 14 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats—believe poll watchers should be armed. And nearly a fifth of Republicans surveyed said that if Trump loses, he should contest the results and do “whatever it takes” to assume the presidency—compared with 12 percent of Democrats saying the same of Harris.

The GOP is not waiting until Election Day to stoke doubt, though: The RNC has already filed dozens of “election integrity” lawsuits across the country, which challenge absentee and mail-in ballots and try to make it easier to purge voter rolls and allow local officials to refuse to certify elections, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote. As one expert told her, their forethought should be a warning to the rest of us:

“In 2020, the attempt to undermine election results by the Trump campaign [was] more of an afterthought,” says Sylvia Albert, who runs voting and election projects at Common Cause, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “Now it looks like a cohesive party strategy nationwide, and it’s not an afterthought. The lesson we’ve taken is to prepare for it.”

Two weeks from Tuesday, millions of voters across the country will fan out to polling places.

And when they do, there will reportedly be a GOP-backed, 200,000-strong army of volunteers watching them. Their task? “Establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.

That’s according to a new report in the New Yorker that sheds light on the inner workings of the Republican National Committee’s plan—led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and Michael Whatley, its co-chairs—to use a giant grassroots group of Trump worshippers to question the integrity of the election.

In June, the RNC announced that the so-called “Protect the Vote” tour would make a series of stops in swing states to “train volunteers to ensure it is easy to vote and hard to cheat this November.” (Never mind that research shows voter fraud is quite rare; that Republican-led gerrymandering has helped enshrine minority rule, as my colleague Ari Berman has covered; and that Trump still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election—despite more than 60 failed legal challenges affirming that he did.)

According to the New Yorker, much of the RNC’s strategy relies on indulging supporters’ paranoia over conspiracy theories about a Democrat-coordinated campaign to steal the election—via the usual suspects, undocumented immigrants and dead people—and training volunteers to be “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign,” as far-right Internet personality Jack Posobiec put it. If they suspect fraud, the volunteers are told, they should call the RNC’s “election integrity hotline,” which a team of volunteer attorneys will apparently answer.

The irony is that poll watching has, historically, been an important safeguard of democracy. Poll watchers helped implement the Voting Rights Act, for example, ensuring election workers were actually allowing Black people to vote. But experts also say that without clear guidelines—and under Trump’s GOP—the practice can help foment Election Day discord.

Recent history offers proof: In 2020, mostly white Republican poll watchers—including five activists linked to the Trump campaign—heckled mostly Black election workers in Detroit and spread disproven rumors of fraud, chanting “stop the count,” as NBC News recently investigated. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than a quarter of Republicans—compared with 14 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats—believe poll watchers should be armed. And nearly a fifth of Republicans surveyed said that if Trump loses, he should contest the results and do “whatever it takes” to assume the presidency—compared with 12 percent of Democrats saying the same of Harris.

The GOP is not waiting until Election Day to stoke doubt, though: The RNC has already filed dozens of “election integrity” lawsuits across the country, which challenge absentee and mail-in ballots and try to make it easier to purge voter rolls and allow local officials to refuse to certify elections, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote. As one expert told her, their forethought should be a warning to the rest of us:

“In 2020, the attempt to undermine election results by the Trump campaign [was] more of an afterthought,” says Sylvia Albert, who runs voting and election projects at Common Cause, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “Now it looks like a cohesive party strategy nationwide, and it’s not an afterthought. The lesson we’ve taken is to prepare for it.”

The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is easing restrictions on exports of space-related technology, answering a yearslong call from space companies to reform regulations governing international trade.

This is the most significant update to space-related export regulations in a decade and opens more opportunities for US companies to sell their satellite hardware abroad.

“We are very excited about this rollout," a senior Commerce official said during a background call with reporters. "It’s been a long time coming, and I think it’s going to be very meaningful for our national security and foreign policy interests and certainly facilitate secure trade with our partners."

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Last Saturday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance appeared at an event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, hosted by Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed “apostle,” which means he’s a leader in a rapidly growing religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR is a loose network of evangelical Christians, who believe that they are called to take over all aspects of society, including the government. They also believe that God speaks directly to certain Christians, whom they call prophets, often in dreams.  

Lance Wallnau, a former businessman who hails from Texas, has been an influential leader in NAR circles for some time. He popularized one of its most popular concepts, the idea that there are seven “mountains” that Christians must conquer: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. That last one has become a centerpiece of his mission. He has said he believes that the political left is possessed by demons, that there is “witchcraft” controlling the presidential election, and that Vice President Kamala Harris is a Jezebel—a reference to a prostitute in the Bible. As he put it in a recent broadcast, “When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation, and domination—especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth—you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit.”

But for Wallnau, politics are more than just material for fire-and-brimstone sermons, because he has an ambitious plan for the 2024 presidential election. It’s called Project 19, a reference to the 19 counties in swing states that could determine the outcome.

Fred Clarkson, a researcher with the religious extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, has reported that Wallnau sometimes says swing states aren’t fully red because people aren’t praying hard enough. Wallnau said earlier this year, “If we don’t have apostles and prophets in the territory, then demons control the territory and the minds of people are under the influence of devils.” As my colleague David Corn wrote this week, Wallnau has been promoting Project 19 on what he has called the Courage Tour—a multi-stop traveling road show through swing states to energize evangelical voters and encourage voter registration. The Pennsylvania event last weekend that featured JD Vance took place after visits to Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia.

“If we don’t have apostles and prophets in the territory, then demons control the territory and the minds of people are under the influence of devils.” 

The specifics of Project 19 are hard to come by, but one key detail is that Wallnau’s partner on the project is the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing political activism group helmed by a cadre of former Trump administration officials, including Brooke Rollins, who was acting director of the United States Domestic Policy Council under Trump, and Larry Kudlow, the former director of the National Economic Council. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump donated $1 million to AFPI.

AFPI hasn’t said much about Project 19 in recent months. But there are some signs that the initiative is quietly mobilizing for a final electoral push.

It turns out that over the past several weeks, America First Works, the political action arm of the America First Policy Institute, has posted several listings on Red Balloon, a right-wing job board. The posts, which have separate entries for each swing state, solicit applications for “county coordinators,” who “will lead and implement Project 19’s strategic vision in their region, providing boots on the ground and hands-on experience. This includes managing local research, content creation, coalition building, grassroots contact, and educational initiatives focused on America First messaging.”

Like its parent organization, America First Works is helmed by right-wing power players. Texas billionaire Tim Dunn serves as chairman, and Linda McMahon, a former pro-wrestler who led the Small Business Administration under Trump, serves on its board. The group has partnered with other conservative and Christian organizations around political organizing; last July, for example, it teamed up with Turning Point Action on a voter mobilization initiative.

Back in April, America First Works’ executive director, Ashley Hayek, appeared on Fox News. She explained that Project 19, which Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) leads, is about “messaging and data, it’s unifying the movement, it’s project 19, focusing on the counties that we believe will ultimately determine the next election, it’s our ballot harvesting and voter mobilization, and then, of course, day one of what a new administration looks like.”

How successful this initiative will be remains to be seen—evangelicals themselves point out that as a group, they are famously under-registered as voters. But getting out the vote is only part of the strategy. As independent journalist Judd Legum reported, Wallnau’s rally with Vance in Pennsylvania also featured Joshua Standifer, founder of the Christian political activism group Lion of Judah. Standifer described what he called a “Trojan horse” strategy: having evangelicals sign up to become poll workers. A guide that can be downloaded for free at the Lion of Judah’s website tells readers that by becoming poll workers, they can “bring light into darkness and influence the communities around them by running for office and actively seeking to bring Jesus’ Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

It continues: “Simply put, our goal is to elevate as many Christian Patriots as possible to become Election Workers. Having Believers in key positions of influence in government like Election Workers is the first step on the path to victory this Fall.” 

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is no stranger to voter suppression in Georgia and she sees a “nightmare scenario” for how Republicans could nullify a Democratic victory in the state in November.

In August, after Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the Georgia State Election Board by name at a rally in Atlanta, the MAGA-aligned majority on the board passed a series of rule changes—requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and review “all election-related documentation” before certifying an election—that Democrats and voting rights groups fear could lead GOP-controlled boards not to sign off on the results if Kamala Harris wins the state. “The discrete and immediate concern,” says Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022 and founded the voting rights group Fair Fight, “is that this will delay the counting of Georgia’s Electoral College votes.”

If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.

“It is not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams told me recently in Austin, Texas (we did a panel together on September 7 for the Texas Tribune Festival). “There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.”

What Abrams is outlining is known as a “contingent election” under the 12^th Amendment. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the House selects the president and the Senate picks the vice president. That’s only happened once in US history for the country’s highest office—in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College and popular vote, but the House installed the runner up, John Quincy Adams, as president.

“It’s not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams says.

In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.

A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)

That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.  

Currently, Republicans control 26 state House delegations, exactly what they need to pick the president in a contingent election, compared to 22 for Democrats, with the rest divided equally. Though a contingent election would take place after the new Congress is seated in early January 2025, Republicans are likely to add another state, North Carolina, where the GOP gerrymandered district lines last year to pick up three or more House seats. “Republicans should have a majority in at least 26 state U.S. House delegations in 2025, even if they do not retain the overall House majority,” writes Kyle Klondike of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. And if Republicans retain the House majority, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson could use his power to further tilt the rules in Trump’s favor.

Of course, a lot of things must go haywire for Abrams’ nightmare scenario to occur. Georgia law clearly specifies that counties “shall certify” the election returns. Democrats are challenging the state board’s new certification rules in court ahead of the election. And if counties refuse to approve the vote counts after the election, they will almost certainly be forced to certify the results by the courts or other state officials—which occurred when Republicans declined to certify election results in other states in recent elections. And Georgia may not be the tipping point state in the Electoral College anyway.

Jessica Marsden, counsel to the free and fair elections program at Protect Democracy, called a contingent election scenario “extremely unlikely.” She said that while she was alarmed by election deniers taking over state and county election boards in Georgia, she remained confident that top state officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, along with state courts, would once again uphold the integrity of the election.

“We’ve looked hard at Georgia law and we think it’s well-established that certification is a ministerial duty,” Marsden explained. “Even with the changes that the state board is trying to make, counties have a deadline and they have to certify by that deadline and state officials, based on our understanding, are ready to hold them to account. I think state officials are going to be all over this problem and will have the tools they need to make sure the election is certified.”

But Abrams’ concerns are not as far-fetched as they might seem given what happened in 2020. Yes, the effort to overturn the election failed. But it did lead to an insurrection at the Capitol. And the election denier movement is much stronger this time around, taking control over key election bodies in states like Georgia. Even if the election results are ultimately certified, any kind of dispute or delay in counting votes could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to disastrous effect.

“The biggest increase in risk post-2020 stems from the concerted, intentional effort to foment distrust in the election system,” Marsden says. “It’s less to me an issue that there are weak points that could be used to overturn election results. My concern is primarily the damage that gets caused along the way by people who have been lied to about the validity of the process.”

Before 2020, Republicans who wanted to subvert fair elections were focused on passing laws that made it harder to vote. But after Trump tried to overturn the election, his allies expanded the voter suppression playbook, shifting from simply limiting access to the ballot to contesting election outcomes, as Georgia clearly indicates.

“Georgia is an incubator for voter suppression and has been for decades now,” Abrams says. “We will not be the only state, and in fact, we’re not the only state, that has seen variations on this certification theme. Those who want to destabilize the system realized that voter suppression has three pieces: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? Does your ballot get counted? Well, they have done what they can to interfere with the first and the second. The ultimate does your ballot get counted is not allowing the certification of your votes, because that is the final administrative step to a vote actually being counted in an election.”

When Vice President Kamala Harris used Tuesday night’s debate to tout her bipartisan appeal, she emphasized the backing she’d received from two particularly notable GOP officials.

“I actually have the endorsement of 200 Republicans,” she said, including “the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congressmember Liz Cheney.”

On its own, Harris welcoming the Cheneys to her tent is no big shakes. Liz’s work on the January 6 committee left her popular with Democrats. Dick is 83, old enough to seem less likely to start a reckless war, and long ago surpassed as a top Democratic bogeyman by Trump himself.

But if the Cheneys are no longer Republican voters, they remain unrepentant hawks, advocates of aggressively using US military power to achieve American policy aims. And Harris’ embrace of a top architect of the disastrous militarism of George W. Bush’s administration was one of several signals she offered suggesting fans of the neoconservative foreign policy associated with the Cheneys should feel comfortable with her as president.

On Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and other national security matters, Harris appeared to deliberately strike notes aimed at appealing to the interventionist consensus in Washington’s foreign policy establishment. The result was Harris’ latest and perhaps clearest suggestion that she will not venture far to the left of President Joe Biden, or former President Barack Obama, on national security. That may or may not be good politics, but it is a disappointment to the substantial number of Americans hoping that Harris would pursue a more restrained, anti-war foreign policy than Biden.

Harris, eager to make the election about Trump’s unfitness for office, is clearly trying to play it safe on national security, as with other policy areas. What’s notable, though, is what playing it safe entails.

Nowhere is that dynamic clearer than on Israel. While a handful of pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with Philadelphia police outside the debate, Harris responded to a question about achieving a ceasefire in Gaza by emphasizing her support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” To be sure, she then pivoted. “It is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” she said in a by-now-familiar caveat. “Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end.” She also called for a two-state solution. But Harris’s formulation provides no real departure from Biden’s policy, which has, so far, failed to end the war.

On Tuesday Harris even seemed to suggest that she would limit US efforts to restrain Israel from actions that could cause a broader regional war. “The one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel,” Harris said.

On Ukraine, Harris focused on distinguishing herself from Trump, who has touted his cozy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and repeated his dubious claim he could settle that war “before I even become president,” presumably by letting Russia keep the Ukrainian territory it now occupies.

Harris—appealing to “the 800,000 Polish-Americans right here in Pennsylvania”—argued that without US support, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.” What the vice president did not mention is that Poland, as NATO member, enjoys protection Ukraine does not, a mutual defense agreement with the US and its allies. Russia has invaded former Soviet republics, but never, dating to the formation of NATO, risked nuclear war by attacking a member of the alliance.

Harris also avoided offering her own prescription for ending the war in Ukraine, absent Ukraine, which is currently losing ground, achieving its increasingly far-fetched goal of regaining all the territory Russia has seized since 2014. (Nor did she or Trump opine on whether the US should allow Ukraine to launch missiles supplied by the US and other states at targets more than 60 miles inside Russian territory.)

Harris “acted as though it was still 2022 and would be forever as long as the U.S. kept funding the war,” with “no real explanation as to why this was in anyone’s best interest, even Ukraine’s, to continue on this course,” wrote Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, a think tank advocating more dovish US policy.

On Tuesday, Harris ticked off policy goals that included “ensuring we have the most lethal fighting force in the world.” Asked about US soldiers who died during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Harris said she “agreed with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan.” But the vice president also ripped Trump for launching the negotiations that preceded that pull-out. “He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban,” Harris said. Harris argued that the Trump gave away too much in those talks and failed to include Afghanistan’s then-government. That may be true, but her answer left her supporting the end of a 20-year war while deriding the mere existence of negotiations with the group the US had been fighting in that war.

Harris also mocked Trump for exchanging “love letters with Kim Jong Un.” The details of Trump’s diplomatic efforts are very much open to debate. But in singling out negotiations with the Taliban and North Korea, Harris flirted with the argument that the US should avoid talking to bad actors at all. That kind of criticism that has more often come from the hawkish right, and evokes the attacks that Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney—both of whom Harris name-checked Tuesday—once hurled at Obama.

In speaking about Afghanistan, Harris also made the curious statement that “as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” That’s true if you do not consider the roughly 3,500 American solders in Syria and Iraq to be in war zones. But many of those troops are on bases repeatedly targeted by rocket attacks attributed to allies of Iran. In January, three American solders stationed in Jordan near the Syrian border were killed, and 30 injured, in a drone attack.

A Harris campaign spokesperson did not respond to questions about that statement. But the vice president’s comment does not suggest she sees an urgent need to end the US military presence in the Middle East.

Dick Cheney, who helped put US troops in Iraq 20 years ago, presumably approves.

Noah Lanard contributed to this article.

At tonight’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated baseless claims, increasingly popular among Republicans, that there is mass noncitizen voting in the United States. It has been a persistent theme of the campaign—one that combines two of Trump’s main recurring grievances: anti-immigrant sentiment and the Big Lie.

“Our elections are bad,” Trump said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one. Some of it goes back to a debunked video. In late July, the Oversight Project—a self-described “legal and investigative” group linked to the Heritage Foundation that purports to be “battling corruption and weaponization”—promoted a video with supposed evidence of widespread cases of noncitizens admitting to being registered voters. Behind the camera, a man introduces himself to residents of an apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia, saying he works at a company that helps Hispanic people register to vote. He goes on to ask them if they’re US citizens or not, and a handful of respondents appear to confirm that they are noncitizens who are registered to vote.

In the video, Anthony Rubin—the founder of the right-wing Muckraker website known for pulling undercover stunts like infiltrating migrant caravans to denounce an “invasion” and exposing flyers allegedly calling on migrants at a border encampment to vote for Joe Biden—says 14 percent of noncitizens with whom they spoke admitted to being registered to vote, and then extrapolated that statewide to claim 47,000 noncitizens would be registered to vote in Georgia. “Based on our findings,” he concludes, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.” The video reached 56 million views on X, with a boost from Elon Musk, who has been spreading false claims about noncitizen voting and accusing Democrats of “importing voters.”

NON-CITIZENS REGISTERED IN GA

Footage obtained by @realmuckraker shows numerous non-citizens admitting to being registered voters.

A staggering 14% of the non-citizens spoken to admitted to being registered to voters. pic.twitter.com/0p38irDBZH

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) July 31, 2024

It turns out, these unfounded allegations of noncitizen voting can be—and have been—easily and exhaustively debunked.

As the New York Times recently reported, three of the seven people depicted in the video later provided context that contradicts the assertions made, saying they had either only told the man what they thought he wanted to hear to make him go away, or that they feared that by telling the truth, meaning that they weren’t registered to vote, they might be coerced to register and get in trouble with immigration authorities. Georgia investigators also found no evidence that those people had voter registrations, according to the Times.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of “suspected noncitizen voting” for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes. In 2020, the Cato Institute concluded that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” Even the Heritage Foundation’s own data proves that the idea of massive noncitizen voting in the United States amounts to a long-lasting myth. An analysis by the American Immigration Council of Heritage’s database containing 1,546 instances of voter fraud found just 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s. And only 10 of them involved undocumented immigrants.

Despite all the evidence, the GOP and right-wing activists continue to push conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting and are even proposing legislation barring noncitizens from voting in federal elections (which already is the law).

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference earlier this year about the introduction of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), a bill making it a requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

With Johnson now trying to attach the proposed legislation to a stopgap funding bill, Donald Trump suggested congressional Republicans should force a government shutdown if the effort is unsuccessful. “The Democrats are trying to ‘stuff’ voter registrations with illegal aliens,” he posted on Truth Social. “Don’t let it happen—Close it down!!!”

Critics of the SAVE Act say the legislation can only result in more voters of color and naturalized citizens being disenfranchised, pointing to the fact that millions of US citizens don’t have access to a passport or birth certificate to present as proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Moreover, states already have systems in place to verify the citizenship status of voters. “This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the White House said in a statement in July.

“In 2020, we heard wild stories of voting machines flipping votes, of boxes of ballots, of ballot paper that supposedly had bamboo fibers in it to prove it came from China,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said in a congressional testimony. “This year, we’re hearing the beginning of wild stories about widespread, huge numbers of noncitizens voting in federal elections.”

Why now?

“It’s being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election,” Waldman added. “This year, the ‘Big Lie’ is being pre-deployed.”

At a Tuesday panel dedicated to “Protecting the Vote” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an expert speaker sounded as if he was holding back tears as he explained what motivates him to do the work.

His wife gave birth to a son just two weeks ago, he shared. Suddenly, his job wasn’t just about protecting democracy for the country, but also for his newborn. “I have to fight for his ability to continue to be a respected member of his community and a citizen of his country in a full way,” said Jake Kenswil, director of voter protection at the Democratic National Committee.

“This subject is emotional for us,” said Yvette Lewis, another speaker and the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party. “What we need you to do is to be just as emotional when you’re talking to your communities,” she added, “and get them to feel what we hope we made you feel today—which is the urgency of why this is so very important.”

But there weren’t many people there to hear their pressing message. In a conference room that could have accommodated hundreds, less than 40 people showed; out of two dozen press-reserved seats, only one was filled (mine). The sparsely attended meeting hosted by Democratic legal experts belies the tremendous threat to voter confidence proliferating this cycle: Deepfake videos projecting fictitious messages from seemingly real officials. Disingenuous lawsuits amplifying debunked theories of fraud. Widespread challenges to voter rolls. Stricter laws on voter identification documentation. Plus, a torrent of requests and threats to local election workers trying to hold down the fort through all of the tumult.

“We have a lot of work to do to prepare for early voting, to ensure our elections are secure, [and] to protect the accuracy of our laws,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me the following day. “And every minute we spend worrying or thinking about planning to protect against these threats is a minute that’s taken away from our ability to do our jobs.”

Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has a theory on the event’s low attendance Tuesday: “Lawyers are boring,” she, a lawyer herself, quipped at a separate event on Wednesday. Moreover, elected officials and election security experts have some trust in reforms that have occurred since President Donald Trump’s supporters infamously broke into the Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.

“There is no legitimate loophole through which somebody can steal an election. It is actually illegal to throw out legitimate votes. It is illegal to reject certification. It is illegal to try to thwart a congressional count,” she said, pointing to the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, which raised the threshold for members of Congress to challenge the Electoral College and clarified the role of the vice president in election certification.

That being said, with significant progress on protecting the sanctity of elections has come more aggressive tactics to undermine it. “There’s been a strengthening of safeguards,” Weiser said. “There’s also been an increase in risk level.”

In the spring, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump went on conservative cable news channel Newsmax to talk about the GOP’s efforts to ensure her father-in-law, former President Trump, is pleased with the election outcome in November.

“We have lawsuits in 81 states right now,” she said. Late-night television talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was quick to mock her slip-up on elementary-level geography. “Not just Tennessee, eleven-essee, twelve-essee,” Kimmel joked about the impossible number of states. “West Dakota, South Virginia. Indiana, Out-diana, you name it—they’re suing.”

But as I reported in the September-October issue of Mother Jones, her claim was barely an exaggeration.

The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. 

Despite the GOP’s claims repeatedly failing in courts, the lawsuits are effective in the sense that they “create smoke” before judges ultimately dismiss them, said Weiser. “They are exploiting a loophole in the system: Courts are slow.”

In our interview, Benson agreed that Republican National Committee lawsuits in Michigan—such as challenges to her state’s voter roll maintenance—are merely “an effort to drive a PR campaign, to drive a public narrative that sows seeds of distrust,” she said. “When the lawsuits ultimately get dismissed, the damage has already been done.”

Lawsuits aren’t the only weapon in the right’s arsenal. Several GOP-led states have enacted stricter voter identification laws that will increase barriers for voters who don’t possess identification for a variety of reasons. Election deniers are also running and winning positions in local election administration. Conservatives in Georgia are pushing for the ability to challenge voter registrations with limited data. And without an ounce of credible evidence, Trump also continues to insinuate there is fraud afoot, especially if he loses.

He maintains that the only way Democrats could win in 2024 is if they cheat. Therefore, he adds, his lead at the ballot box needs to be “too big to rig.” On the question of whether he will accept the 2024 results, Trump said during the June presidential debate: “If it’s a fair and legal and good election.” 

Legal experts on the left are countering Trump’s steady drumbeat of lies with tactics like publishing information about election rules in multiple languages, ensuring Democrat-allied lawyers observe court hearings related to election rules, and building relationships with local election boards to build trust, the panelists explained Tuesday.

At the state level, officials are also implementing new tools to fight the second iteration of the Big Lie.

Benson shared that her office is connecting overwhelmed election officials in her state with organizations that provide free legal support. Under her leadership, Michigan has also launched a “Democracy Ambassadors” program that distributes newsletters disproving election rumors and sharing helpful facts. The state has also emboldened messengers such as religious leaders and athletes to serve as sources of credible election information.

Michigan has also held “tabletop exercises that enable scenario planning and partnership building between law enforcement, first responders and clerks, so that there’s a direct line for them to call if something happens.”

“We at our office have all the information necessary to assure voters that their votes will be safe—their votes will be counted,” she added.

Efforts to fortify trust and stability in the electoral process will hopefully ensure that the vote of Kenswil’s newborn son will also be counted…in 18 years’ time.

Earlier this month, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees mail-in voting, voter registration, and property records in America’s fourth-largest county, reached out to Elon Musk with an invitation.

“Can I please give you a tour of our election facility and mail voting process,” he wrote on Musk’s social-media platform, X, after the red-pilled billionaire declared that “electronic voting machines” and “anything mailed in” were “too risky” to use in elections.

“You can go into all the rooms,” Richer continued. ”You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound.”

For three-and-a-half years, Richer has been asking skeptical Republicans just to hear him out about how elections really work in the most closely contested county in the nation’s most closely contested state. First elected in 2020 amid right-wing fears about George Soros, Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, emerged as one of the nation’s most outspoken voices against the myth of stolen outcomes. He held the line against election deniers such as Kari Lake (who Richer is currently suing for defamation) while attempting to make the election process as transparent as possible. Richer opened the doors to the county’s Tabulation and Election Center for more than 150 tours, turned the security cameras on 24/7 for people to watch at home, and tirelessly fielded questions on Musk’s platform—all while facing a stream of violent threats and criticism. 

But it turned out that good cheer and transparency could only accomplish so much. Musk, for one, did not take Richer up on the offer. And on Tuesday, Richer finally ran out of time to change his fellow Republicans’ minds: He lost his primary to state Rep. Justin Heap, a member of legislature’s Freedom Caucus, who was backed by many of the state’s most prominent election deniers. The single-digit margin only tells a part of the story; with another Richer critic running a strong third, just 36 percent of Republican voters backed the incumbent. 

Heap managed to never say whether he thought the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen during his campaign. But he didn’t really have to. To understand what he represented and why he was running, you only had to look at the endorsements he racked up from many of the biggest names in what Richer has called Arizona’s “cottage industry” of election denial.

Chief among those backers was Lake, who ran for governor in 2022 while calling for her Democratic opponent to be imprisoned for the 2020 presidential election to be “decertified,” and is still—still!—attempting to get a court to declare her the winner of a race she lost by 17,000 votes. Lake—who in her memoir described a lengthy dream sequence she had about being kidnapped by Richer, taken to the desert, and nearly murdered—is now the Republican nominee for US Senate.

Another prominent supporter was Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer for Turning Point Action, who was indicted in April for his role in the 2020 fake elector scheme. Heap had the support of Arizona Reps. Paul Gosar (who coordinated with “Stop the Steal” leaders on January 6th), and Andy Biggs (who tried to round up support for the state’s fake electors in the run-up to the Electoral College certification). As the Arizona Mirror reported in April, one of the people who nudged Heap into running was his colleague in the statehouse, state Rep. Jake Hoffman—another fake elector.

The vitriol Richer faced from current party leaders was intense. Earlier this year, Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican party told an audience that if it was up to her, she “would lynch” Richer. Busch, who later said that she was joking, went on to lead the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention.

Because of the way elections are run in the county, a new recorder can’t just rewrite the rules on his own terms. The Board of Supervisors is responsible for tabulation and election-day voting, for instance, and the state’s vote-by-mail system and use of electronic voting machines are set by statute. But notably, Heap has voted to get rid of both of those things, while also voting to mandate hand-counts. (At the same time, Heap is running to be Recorder on the promise of speeding up the counting of votes, which a hand count is not likely to accomplish.)

With support from independents and hard-earned respect from some Democrats, Richer was in a decent position to win a second term if he managed to survive the primary. One Indivisible activist from Scottsdale, who took an election-facility tour with Richer, told me that Richer was going to be the first Republican she ever voted for. But Heap’s victory is far from guaranteed in a county where Democrats have won a succession of key races by appealing to independents and moderate Republicans. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Tim Stringham, an Army and Navy veteran who previously served as a JAG attorney. 

When we spoke in June, Stringham told me that he had entered the race reluctantly, after being nudged by the county Democratic party. But he cited Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a pivotal moment in his decision to become more involved in politics.

“And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly. My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?”

“Watching on TV, and being like, holy cow, the President of the United States is really trying to overthrow the republic here,” Stringham said. “And I always tell people that it’s like, you know, if there’s just a riot, there’s just a riot, those things happen. But somebody actually handed fake electoral votes to Mike Pence and said we want you to read these votes. They no-shit tried to overthrow the Constitution. And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly.”

“‘My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?,'” he said, recalling his thought process at the time. “‘I’m clearly not in the right place to actually protect American democracy.'”

Stringham did not believe there was a “huge philosophical difference” between he and Richer on how the recorder’s office was run, but he was adamant about wanting to preserve the availability of ballot drop-boxes and protect vote-by-mail from Republican legislators’ attempts to end it.

The incumbent’s defeat is a setback for election officials who have faced threats and tried to clarify the process amid a deluge of misinformation. Scores of election workers across the country, and particularly in Arizona, are leaving their jobs in part due to the added strain of dealing with sometimes-armed conspiracy theorists and endless lawsuits. In Maricopa, Republican county supervisor Bill Gates, who joined Richer in defending the election process in 2022, chose not to run for re-election this year and has talked publicly about suffering from PTSD. Another Republican supervisor who has been a target of election deniers, Jack Sellers, lost his primary on Tuesday too. It’s tough to see how things might have played out differently in recent years if the people screaming about stopping the steal also had allies in some of the most important election administration positions in the land. But it probably wouldn’t have been great.

Richer’s loss won’t, at least, have much of an effect on how the 2024 election is conducted. The recorder’s term won’t end until January—meaning that the lame-duck Republican will still be around to do one last job this November.