Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: Congress must challenge Trump’s war on Iran and assert its constitutional duty to take up War Powers resolutions and assert its primacy over matters of war and peace. That shouldn’t be hard—the latest polls show that only 27% of Americans support Trump’s war on Iran. John Nichols will explain. But first: Trump’s new plan for attacking Democratic voting in the
midterms: David Cole will comment – in a minute. [BREAK]
Trump knows he’s facing a shellacking in the midterms, losing the House, maybe the Senate, then facing impeachment in the new Congress. His strategy to block this is to prevent Democrats
from voting in the midterms. And now we’ve learned of a new plan for an executive order, different and more threatening than what he’s tried before. For comment, we turn to David Cole. He’s the former national legal director of the ACLU, now teaches law at Georgetown. He also writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Review. And he’s The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent. David, welcome back.

David Cole: Nice to be with you, Jon.

JW: A year ago, Trump signed an executive order on voting. It required proof of citizenship for voter registration. It greatly restricted voting by mail and required voter ID at the polls. That
executive order was permanently blocked by a federal court in October, which ruled that the separation of powers provision of the Constitution gave Congress some power on voting, but none to the president. So he did not appeal. The heart of that ruling, they did the right thing and took it to Congress, where Republicans proposed the same restrictions on voting in what is now the Save Act. The House passed it. It’s now in the Senate, where it will be blocked by a
Democratic filibuster. What is next? Trump has a radically new approach. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that people in the Trump administration are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election and
could do the same thing again this fall. And that’s the basis for Trump to declare a national security emergency that he says would give him extraordinary power to restrict voting in the
midterms: banning voting by mail, requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration, and requiring voter ID for in-person voting. No president has ever declared a national security emergency as a basis for restricting voting. That is a new idea. What do you think of its chances in court?

DC: I think it doesn’t have any chance to withstand judicial review, for the same reason that the earlier executive order failed in court. The Constitution is very clear. It sets out authority for the
regulation of congressional elections by providing that the states have primary responsibility to set the terms, the manner, the times, the polling places of election. It allows Congress — Congress, not the president — allows Congress to alter state rules. And sometimes Congress has Voting Rights Act, for example. But it does not give the president any power to override state rules with respect to elections. And nor is there any emergency statute that I am aware of that
Congress has passed that gives the president this power. And we just saw the Supreme Court reject the president’s argument that a national emergency gives him extraordinary tariff authorities. I think he would fare just as poorly with this kind of an argument.

JW: You are absolutely right about the same claim being made for tariffs in the Supreme Court, clearly rejecting that. But if you remember, he declared the tariffs on April 2nd, 2025, and the
day the Supreme Court finally ruled against him on tariffs was February 20th, 2026. They spent more than ten months at this, during which time the tariffs were in effect. The midterms are only
six months away. So the question is, do you think the court would work faster on this national security claim than they did on the tariffs?

DC: Well, absolutely. I mean, the thing about the tariffs is that the government, you know, the lower courts, ruled against the president on the tariffs, but he sought a stay pending appeal. And his argument for the stay was, “look, if we’re wrong and we don’t have authority, we can always pay the money back.” That’s you know, that’s the situation they’re in now, having to figure out how to pay $130 billion of illegally obtained money back. But you can’t really undo an election, redo an election. And so, I think, you know, were he to try this again, the lower federal courts would almost certainly enjoin it. He might seek a stay from the Supreme Court, but I think the
Supreme Court would be very unlikely to grant him a stay, because, again, there’s no free standing emergency powers of the president. The president’s emergency powers, to the extent he has them, are set forth in statutes that Congress has enacted. It enacted the National Emergencies Act; it enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and enacted the Trading with the Enemy Act. There are a series of laws that give the president emergency authority, but not
this one. And the memo that you referred to, doesn’t suggest, at least in the reporting I’ve seen, doesn’t suggest that there’s some statute that they’re relying on. They seem to be relying on some
inherent article two executive authority, but that just doesn’t exist.
JW: Perhaps we should note that the premise of this claim is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. They did not try to defeat Trump. The American intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and their study concluded the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia trying to help Trump. Is that even relevant to this, this case?

DC: No. President Trump is the biggest loser, I think, in all of history. And, you saw that with his temper tantrum press conference after the Supreme Court declared his tariffs illegal. You saw that in 2020 when he went to 60 courts to file suits to try to change the result of an election that he fairly and squarely lost. And he still can’t admit defeat. But I think the courts, as they stood up to him the last time around, I think on this kind of a fundamental question, they’re likely to stand up to him and know if China interfered, then that might be a justification to go to Congress and to say we need some kind of security measures to be enacted that would stop this from
happening in the future. That’s what would be appropriate. Congress is not, thus far, anyway, has not responded. It also might be appropriate to, engage in investigations and things of that nature,
and they already are doing some investigations. My strong sense is that they will go nowhere. But he, he just cannot admit that he lost. He cannot admit that he lost. And he’s bringing us all down with him. He tried, in 2020 to do that, and failed. And he’s still trying.

JW: It’s pretty clear that he is preparing this case, looking for evidence. There was that otherwise inexplicable incident where National Security Adviser Tulsi Gabbard went along with the FBI
when they raided the election center in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized the ballots from the 2020 election. And everybody wondered, What does Tulsi Gabbard have to do with this? Well, now we can see that they’re going to make a national intelligence claim about the ballots of Fulton County, Georgia somehow coming from China. And in fact, we’re told–this I found hard to believe–suspicions of Chinese ballots spurred the hunt for bamboo fibers in Arizona ballots during a Republican led audit there in 2021. They, of course, ended up reaffirming Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Did you know that bamboo fibers in ballots are the key piece of evidence in
this case?

DC: I did not know that. Good luck to them. But I think the really the more serious threat here is he is– unless things change dramatically — he’s going to lose the midterms. And he’s going to
lose the midterms big because the American people are not happy with the way he is running this country. And this is our opportunity to say so. He knows that. And he doesn’t want to lose big. And so he will do whatever he can, I think, to interfere with people’s ability to go to the polls and register their disapproval of him. And so
even if he can’t do what the executive order suggests, he does have a lot of authority over ICE, over the FBI, etc.. And he may engage in a kind of voter suppression tactics that have plagued American elections in the past, but have generally not been directed by the president of the United States. And I think that’s one real fear.
And the other fear is that he’s able to gin up enough bogus concern that he’s able to push the senators to override the filibuster requirement, and then they could pass something like the Save
Act. And, thus far, he doesn’t have the votes to override the filibuster. There are a number of Republicans who recognize that this is not in their long-term interest to get rid of the filibuster, but he may ratchet up the pressure there. And Congress does have authority to set the rules for congressional elections. The president doesn’t, but Congress does. So that, to me, is the greater, the more realistic threat, the sort of enforcement actions on the day and or some effort to get the Republicans in line to get rid of the filibuster so that they can pass something like this.

JW: He did talk about this in his State of the Union speech. He said that if Congress failed to pass the SAVE act, failed to eliminate the filibuster and overrule the Democrats on this, he would not “sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”. He said he would issue executive orders to mandate that states turn over the voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. This would be for citizenship verification. The blue states have all refused to do that. I think only
three, only three of the red states have done it up to this point. But is there any basis for the executive branch going over the state voter rolls looking for evidence of fraud there?

DC: I don’t think so. And I think thus far not only have states refused, but the courts have gone along with the states’ right to refuse. So he’s doing everything he can. Again, last time around, he
did everything he could and some things he couldn’t. And the courts, the courts at least stood up to him. Sadly, Congress did not impeach him, which is what they should have done given the
shenanigans he engaged in after January 6th. But starting with his pardons of all the folks who engaged in that effort, that was sort of the first play. And he’s sending a message to his people, “hey, do it again. Be with me again. We need support. We’re going to challenge these elections.” I just hope that people will recognize that, when he loses, he loses. And the American democracy is predicated on the peaceful transition of power and not on those in power doing everything they can to suppress the will of the people so that they can keep their jobs oor keep their power in one way, shape or form.

JW: He’s also talked about invoking the Insurrection Act to send ICE or the military to, in his words, “surround the polls,” to ensure what he calls “integrity.” Of course, you and I are not the only people who have been worrying about this. The Secretaries of State of the blue states, the attorneys general of the blue states, have been reminding federal officials, Trump’s people, that the Voting Rights Act makes voter intimidation a federal crime. And it seems to us anyway, sending ICE to blue polling places is pretty clearly an effort at voter intimidation. I was also very interested to learn there’s a law that makes it a federal crime for any federal officer to send armed men to a polling place, unless it is necessary to repel armed enemies.
Maybe you’re aware of this, I certainly wasn’t, it’s a Civil War era law often referred to, I understand, as the armed men at polls law. I don’t know if you teach this at Georgetown: blue state attorney generals are reminding the president and federal agency heads that sending armed immigration officials to a polling site isn’t just a controversial political move. It is a felony that carries a lifetime ban from federal service as well as a five year prison term. Did you know about
the armed men at polls law?

DC: You know, I did not. I’ve practiced and taught constitutional law for 40 some years. It never came up before. And that’s a sad commentary on this administration that it’s now relevant.

JW: So we have the blue state attorneys general, the blue state secretaries of state preparing for all of these possibilities for months, actually, for years, they’ve already done quite a bit. So has the ACLU; so has the Brennan Center, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters. I learned there’s a national election protection coalition with 300 organizations that serve as a hub for resources from now until election day. So there’s a massive effort to anticipate and prevent
Trump from fulfilling his plans.

DC: That’s right. And, you know, I’ve been involved in that. When I was the legal director of the ACLU for every election, we and our sister organizations and state attorneys general and the like would prepare for every possible eventuality, because the reality is you have to act, you have to turn around on a dime. If something happens, it often doesn’t happen until election day or maybe
early election voting days. But that’s when it happens, and you have to be ready to go into court immediately. Courts respond very quickly. They know that these are big deals and that they have
to act quickly, but you have to be ready to go. And so and I think this time, more than sometimes those preparation exercises seem kind of speculative. And yes, we have to do it, but really, are they going to do this? But this time around, I think every piece of preparation is absolutely essential, because it’s clear that he sees the midterms as the first formal opportunity for the American people to register their disapproval of him, to take away his power over the Congress
to, take away his immunity from investigations, because the Republicans control the the committees right now that do investigations in the House and the Senate.

DC: And whoever the majority party is has that authority, that initiative, and he knows that. And so he’s trying to do everything he can to suppress the vote. And it always shocks me. Here we
are. We are a democracy. The legitimacy of our government turns on our vote. And yet politicians are willing to bend the rules in whatever way they can, and none more than President Trump to achieve a result, contrary to the ones that the people want. And that’s just not how a democracy is supposed to operate. So I am a big supporter of all the organizations that are fighting back. I think we all need to be extra vigilant. And if he tries to do these sorts of things, we should be out in the streets rejecting it. We have to defend our democracy against a president who will subvert it if it’s not going to lead to a result he wants.

JW: One last thing. Trump’s idea that the federal government should take over elections has very little public support beyond the MAGA base. A Washington Post – ABC News Ipsos poll this month found that only 23% of Americans supported it – 23% support for Trump on this. So you and I are not alone here.

DC: Yeah, well, that’s that’s and that is encouraging. And that may mean that he won’t be able to end the filibuster in the Senate to pass a law that only 23% of Americans are in support of. But, he won’t stop. He won’t stop there. So we we need to be extra vigilant.

JW: David Cole – he’s former legal director of the ACLU. David, thanks for talking with us today.

DC: Thanks for having me. Jon.

[BREAK]

Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about Trump’s war in Iran and its place in American politics. For that, we turn to John Nichols. Of course, he’s executive editor of The Nation. John, welcome
back.

John Nichols: It’s great to be with you, Jon.

JW: Our starting point is the recent poll from Reuters and Ipsos, which found that only 27% of Americans approve of Trump’s war against Iran. That means it’s not helping with his basic problem, which is his collapsing political support. It’s the background to what’s happening, the prominence in the news of the Epstein files, his failure to bring prices down. A lot of people think he’s going too far, sending ICE after undocumented people with jobs and families. He has had sinking approval ratings. He’s facing electoral disaster in the midterms. The walls are closing in on him. We’ve always said that as he becomes weaker, he’ll become more dangerous, and
certainly we’ve seen that in the last few weeks. He has deposed the Venezuelan leader. He’s menace Greenland. He’s occupied Minneapolis. He’s talked about regime change in Cuba. And over the weekend he launched a war against Iran that was opposed by the vast majority of the country. I have heard that Congress has the authority to stop this war. Is that true?

JN: It is true up to a point. But you see, Jon, this is where it gets complicated because for Congress to exercise its authority to stop this war, it would need first to respect that authority. And the problem is that we have had over the last, now better part of 90 years, a Congress that does not respect its own authority. The last president who sought and received a declaration of war from Congress, which is clearly outlined in the Constitution–that’s how it’s supposed to work–the last president who did that was Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Actually, interestingly enough, the history on it shows how easy it is to do. There was an attack on Pearl Harbor and the next day, Franklin Roosevelt said to Congress, “you’ve got to come together and give me a declaration of war so that I can deal with this issue.” And Congress came immediately. They had the vote. There was one vote against, it was Jeannette Rankin from Montana, but everybody else did it, and he had his power. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But since then, every president has engaged in military actions without seeking a clear declaration of war, and every Congress has let that president get away with it. What we’ve ended up in with now is a kind of absurd situation where we had a Congress that didn’t declare the war in Vietnam. That war became incredibly unpopular, and rather than
impeach Richard Nixon for waging that war, or impeaching Lyndon Johnson previously for waging that war in violation of the Constitution, as some people proposed at the time; rather than
doing that, they decided in the early seventies to enact something called the War Powers Act. And the War Powers Act was supposed to put some rules around things so that when a president was inclined to wage war without seeking a declaration, Congress would have some way to push back on it. The War Powers Act was not an entirely useless piece of work, but it was sort of an effort for
Congress to get around having to do the thing they were supposed to do, which was either have a declaration, or if a President waged war without a declaration, to impeach. We’ve had the War Powers Act now for the better part of 50 years, more than 50 years, and it’s
rarely been used even to the extent that it could be used. What’s going to happen this week is that some members of Congress, Ro Khanna from California and Thomas Massie in the House and Tim Kaine in the Senate, are going to apply or seek to apply the War Powers Act to at the very least, try and open up an honest debate about President Trump’s war with Iran and the ways in which it might be constrained. If they could muster the votes for this, then they begin a process of pushing back and basically restoring
congressional authority if they fail to get the votes right. If all the Republicans vote against and some Democrats vote with them and they just don’t pass the resolution, then we’re stuck where
we’ve been, which is a terrible place. And one final element of this is of course, that Donald Trump has an ability to push back on this
because he can veto a resolution. So it’s a murky, messy situation, a mess that Congress itself created over many, many decades. And now there are a few members of Congress that are trying
to dig us out of this mess. We’ll see how far they get.

JW: There’s one thing that’s not murky here, and that is Trump’s whole case for this war is a lie. Trump said, speaking of Iran, “they’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear
ambitions and we can’t take it any more.” But last Friday, this is before the attacks began, on the American News program Face the
Nation, the Omani foreign Minister–this is the guy who’s the lead mediator in the rounds of US Iranian nuclear talks–he said Iran had agreed to, “never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb, and to dilute their enriched uranium into ordinary nuclear fuel.” He said Iran was willing to grant inspectors from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, what he called “full access to its nuclear sites” to verify the terms of the deal. And he said there would be “zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification.” This is the foreign minister who’s been running the negotiations between the United States and Iran. So the whole thing is a lie. You’d
think this would be of relevance to a War Powers resolution.

JN: Exactly. There’s no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat, and that’s what you’re looking for with the War Powers Act. You’re looking for an imminent threat, something that’s very real and very immediate, and you look at it and you say, okay, we either have been attacked, this country has been attacked, or you can basically see the preparation of the missiles to come here, or the whatever else. And that’s always subject to some interpretation, I understand. The fact is that Iran is a country that has suffered a great deal of economic challenges. It has internal divisions and all sorts of other problems, and the notion that it is preparing to attack the most powerful military force in the world, it’s completely unrealistic. What Donald Trump has tried to do, and it’s a really kind of bizarre circumstance here, is he keeps trying to move the goalpost. And sometimes he’ll remember that he has to say the words “imminent threat,” right?

JW: That’s right.

JN: As he did in his initial announcement in some other places, sometimes he’ll forget that even now and come up with some other excuse. “There’s a fluid timeline.” “We’re going to do it in three or four days” or “maybe a month” or “three or four months” or all these other things. There is an incredibly ill-defined construction for what you seek to achieve. And then we had this bizarre statement by the President that we sort of had a line of succession there. We kind of knew who we wanted to have in charge, but it looks like our bombs killed all the people that we thought were going to be successors. And so now we’ve got to find some new people that maybe would be successors. And then he’s saying stuff like, “but we don’t know them.”

JW: Some people get confused over the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini was a brutal and repressive leader. He killed thousands of his own people. There were massive demonstrations recently
which were repressed, and therefore it’s a good thing that the Iranians now get a chance to form their own government. And Trump has said he believes there will be an uprising in Iran: “I think
it’s going to happen,” He said. “Wwe’re going to get a Democratic uprising in Iran.” But I read, in Reuters before the attacks began, that the CIA came to the conclusion that even if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, was killed in an operation, he would more likely be replaced by hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard then by a democratic revolution. So far, is there any evidence that the Ayatollah will be replaced by a democratic revolution?

JN: No. There is some evidence that there has been a celebration of the death of the supreme leader in some cases or some places, but there’s also evidence of great protests and marches warning the death of the supreme leader. So what you see is evidence of a divided country. You’re not quite clear where all the sentiments are, and I think that from the reports we’re hearing, the reaction of people on the ground is to do what many folks have suggested, which is stay in your homes, keep out of the way of the bombs. And the President said the other day that the worst of the assault has not yet come. That there’s more bombing, there’s more assaults to
come. This is already an attack on this country that has seen hundreds and hundreds of people killed, including a huge number of school girls in a school that was bombed, and some really horrific results. And so, the notion that people are going to come out and wage a small democratic revolution to take charge of their country is unrealistic at a point when the bombs are still falling. Obviously, Trump imagined that when the bombs stopped falling at some point, that would happen, but the war has already evolved to a point where it looks like it could go on for quite a long time. And so no, to suggest that there’s evidence that that’s happening, at least at this point, I
can’t see it.

JW: Getting back to the war’s place in American politics, there are MAGA people who remember that they supported Trump because he was “the peace president.” And now some of Trump’s staunchest allies are in open revolt. The most prominent one is Tucker Carlson. Not surprising, he’s being consistent on this. On his show, he called Trump’s attack on Iran,“absolutely disgusting and evil,” stronger words than we’re hearing from our Democratic leaders in the Senate or the House. And Trump felt he had to reply to this. He said, “Tucker Carlson’s opinions have no impact on me.” So right now, we are seeing this from outside Congress, from the MAGA leaders in the media. It’s not happening with Republicans in Congress yet, but I wonder if the Republicans who are facing reelection in six months really want this war.

JN: Well, not if it plays out along the worst of possible lines, along the ways that some people fear, in a country where we’re unfortunately very familiar with the term” forever wars,” a fear
that this could be something that’s very long-term. Secondly, you’ve got the fact that you’re dealing with a country that sits atop one of the larger oil reserves in the world and has control or had control, maybe still has control of the straits of Hormuz. What that means is that we’re looking at the prospect of dramatically increased oil prices at a time when Americans are not particularly happy about prices as it is. And then a final element is that as those oil prices
increase, if in fact they do, you end up in a situation where we could actually have broad inflation, real problems with how the Fed reacts to things and all sorts of other challenges, add that all up. For Republican member of Congress, I think you’re likely to be thinking in your head, “boy, I wish we weren’t doing this.” Now, if this were to be resolved quickly and with all the positive predictions that the President and others have made for at least many Republicans in Congress, that would reduce their anxiety. But what we are seeing right now is a reality that there are some Republicans who’ve already crossed over and said they’re with the Democrats on this. Not a lot.
The usual suspects: Thomas Massy in the House, Rand Paul in the Senate. But there’s others around them who have expressed concern, expressed skepticism. One of the big mistakes that we
make in this country is to assume that our politics doesn’t evolve, and that’s always foolish. Politics does evolve. People learn things over time. One of the things they learned was they didn’t like forever wars. They were concerned about being promised easy results in wars and then getting very difficult, long term, incredibly painful, both human level and an economic level, circumstances extending from a decision to invade some other country. And Donald Trump recognized that as a candidate for president, he’s running against all these other Republicans, some of them named Bush back in 2016. And so he says, “yeah, I’m against this stuff. I don’t think that was a good idea. I don’t think we should be doing these things.” And
it worked very, very well for him politically. It helped him to knock out other candidates, and also, he evolved it into a critique of the Democrats on a number of fronts that also worked well
for him. Then he attaches himself to JD Vance, who by the way, we’re not hearing a lot from, at the moment. And JD Vance was incredibly prepared to suggest that the Republicans were running as
a peace ticket. And Trump kind of went along with all that. I’m not sure if he was ever very sincere in this or whether it was just political tactic, but it became very identified with him. It also became very identified with the MAGA movement and with a lot of Republicans, suddenly they find themselves in a situation that is a complete kind of through the looking glass circumstance where they’re now being asked to defend a president who is launching the kind of
war that he seemed to always criticize Some folks who are not in Congress anymore, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, recently gone, have
been hypercritical. And you have to believe that that Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks for a lot of Republicans and a lot of conservatives and MAGA folks and others just as Tucker Carlson does. And for Trump, there is the possibility that he has stepped into a circumstance where an already bad political landscape may be made dramatically worse because they’re creating divisions within the base at a time when he doesn’t seem to be winning over any Independents or any Democrats, so, he becomes more isolated politically. Now, as you said before, this could be a time when he does things that are even more troubling. You don’t say, “oh, it’s great he’s weakened and everything’s fine.” But what you do begin to
recognize is two important tracks here. One track is trying to end this thing, and that’s why the War Powers resolutions, other initiatives, these matter. The second track is the political track,
whether it ends or not, it’s looking like a year when Donald Trump’s actions will make him and his administration more of a drag on the Republican line, more of a drag on Republican candidates than we even imagined.

JW: So as Congress prepares to vote on the War Powers resolution, we note that only 27% of Americans tell pollsters they approve of Trump’s military campaign against Iran. John Nichols, we’ll be relying on you for coverage of this in the days and weeks to come. Thanks for talking with us today.

JN: I’m honored to talk to you, Jon, and I hope I can bring you more good news in a future conversation.

JW: [LAUGHTER] Okay.