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

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.After we recorded, a court blocked the new Virginia map, but that is likely temporary as it will be quickly appealed.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump exploded in crazed fury over the results in Tuesday’s referendum in Virginia. After Democrats narrowly passed a mid-decade redistricting there, which could mean four additional House seats, Trump ripped the result as rigged and begged the courts to step in and nullify it. Yet this comes as Republicans are admitting that this debacle is Trump’s fault. And that captures something essential about this moment. Republican cheating gets a lot harder when Democrats seriously fight back against it with hardball of their own.Brian Beutler has been arguing well on his Substack, Off Message, that Democrats must prepare now for some epic hardball in future years, because it’ll be needed to achieve post-Trump accountability and to Trump-proof the system against more abuses. So we’re talking to Brian about all this today. Hey, Brian, good to have you on.Brian Beutler: Good to be back.Sargent: So on Tuesday, Virginia voters narrowly approved this referendum by around three points to redraw the congressional map, allowing Democrats to add up to four more seats. That puts Democrats slightly ahead of Republicans in the redistricting arms race. They might be able to add one or two more seats than the GOP can, though a lot depends on what Florida does now. Brian, your reaction to all that?Beutler: It’s very promising that Democrats, once confronted with Trump’s order to Texas to further gerrymander Texas, didn’t simply wail about the unfairness and failure to respect norms, and just said, if this is a race to the bottom, then we’re racing to the bottom together. And it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Democrats would do that, because it’s not how they’ve done things in the past. It wasn’t really sort of their bent, especially in the first year of the second Trump term.But I think that they really understood that it was do or die. Not only did Trump make it clear that he was doing this to sort of steal power—and that meant, okay, well, if we’re just in a game of grabbing what you can, we’ve got to do the same thing—but the backdrop when this all started was Donald Trump making a lot of headway in his effort to essentially overturn the Constitution or replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian autocracy. And I think it dawned on Democrats that if through chicanery, but quote-unquote legal chicanery, Republicans managed to fight the midterms to a draw, not give up any power, that that would help cement the autocracy. And then it’s not a question of the midterms, it’s a question of every election in the future. Viktor Orbán just lost in Hungary after 16 years. Well, who in Democratic politics today wants to carry on if it’s going to be 16 years before we can undo all this. So they kind of had to act.Sargent: Absolutely. And let’s talk about how Trump erupted over the results because it underscores a lot of what you’re saying. Trump posted this on Truth Social: “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA.” Trump then said Republicans had been ahead in the count—well, you know, red areas were counted first. And then he said a massive mail-in ballot drop led to another “crooked victory.” And he even said the referendum language was deceptive. And he called on the courts to essentially step in and overturn the will of the voters on this. I think Democrats should take from that that they made the right move in every possible way. Donald Trump is essentially saying, we will not operate fairly and we will not, you know, hew to what the voters want in any sense. We will do whatever we can to essentially rig the system in a non-democratic and authoritarian way going forward. And Trump just said it openly, and that just basically should steel Democrats for more of this.Beutler: I think that’s right. And I think that they should not let him get too much in their heads, right? Like, he is clearly gunning for mail-in ballots and they need to have an offensive-defensive posture to stop that—to make it clear to people that it’s safe to mail a vote, or if he manages to compromise mail voting somehow, to be ready to go with alternative plans to help people vote in other ways. Not to say that he’s just a paper tiger and he never tries to do anything corrupt—he tries to corrupt things all the time. And there’s sort of no bottom to what he wouldn’t at least contemplate, right? But when he is saying an election was lost because it was rigged, he’s almost always operating from a position of weakness.