Matthew Chapman

President Donald Turmp wanted a "bombshell moment" with his primetime speech about election interference, MS NOW's Jen Psaki said on Friday — but if an explosion happened, it was one more of the Looney Tunes variety.

"Remember that cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote?" said Psaki. "Okay, he spent every single episode putting together elaborate plans to chase the Road Runner, tying himself to rockets, to finally catch the Road Runner, and always blowing himself up in the process. It's kind of what happened to Trump."

The president, said Psaki, wanted his speech to "stand out" from six years of hollering about election fraud and not offering any proof. And he did it by declassifying a bunch of documents about Chinese interference in the election. But "not only did those documents not prove Trump's allegations, the documents actually seem to disprove a lot of Trump's points," she said.

For example, Psaki continued, "the intelligence community showcased how vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results ... and despite Trump's claims that China carried out, quote, 'the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in china's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files,' it turns out China only access data from seven states and did so through legal public records channels.

"And of course, there were also other documents reiterating the intel community's consensus that Beijing has not deployed influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election," said Psaki. Trump "hurt himself" by releasing that, she said, "sort of like Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel on a rock wall only to run into it himself."

In fact, she added, "not only did the documents Trump release debunk his claim that foreign powers were trying to stop him from being elected," they revealed "the intelligence community believed that at least one foreign power was actively trying to help Trump get elected. Surprise everyone! And this won't be a surprise. Just like in 2016, Russia was trying to help Trump win."

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The November midterm elections are coming closer, and President Donald Trump has signaled his intent to interfere with them as much as possible as he fears a wipeout for the GOP. But MS NOW's Chris Hayes has one big fear about a scenario that could happen.

Hayes elaborated on his fear in discussion with UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen on Friday's edition of "All In."

"I was really underwhelmed by not just the delivery, which was kind of a low-energy delivery, but the substance," said Hasen. For one thing, he said, Trump was just rehashing a lot of information that was already known about foreign election interference, and "didn't even make his usual claims that the elections were stolen or rigged." Meanwhile, his demands to pass the SAVE America Act don't really change anything, as the votes still don't exist in the Senate.

The bottom line, he said, is that "I'm hopeful, so long as we don't have a really close election, that we're going to be able to squeak by through this 2026 midterm without Trump being able to significantly interfere."

But that, Hayes explained, is precisely his fear.

"You raise one thing which is important, which is the margins will matter a lot for the outcome. I mean, I really do — although again, my nightmare scenario is that James Talarico beats Ken Paxton by 5,000 votes in Texas, and I really think you will see them pull out every possible stop," said Hayes. He noted that longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon is aggressively pushing to nationalize elections, as are many advisers in Trump's orbit like conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell. "How does that scan to you?"

The key thing to remember, Hasen replied, is that "the president has no power over elections. Our system is decentralized. It's states and localities."

There will be a deluge of lawsuits and court actions if Trump tries anything, Hasen said, but the risk still exists he could try a number of things. For instance, "we have to think about situations like: what if Trump sends the DOJ to collect ballots before they've been tabulated? What if they attempt to try to interfere with how election administrators are doing their jobs? But so far it's been all talk and no action, and I'm hoping that trend continues."

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The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board tore into President Donald Trump on Friday over his stubborn fixation on passing the SAVE America Act, a controversial piece of legislation that would put new restrictions on the right to vote and has hit dead ends every time it is considered in the Senate.

This comes after the president delivered a rambling primetime speech the day before, alleging foreign election interference rigged the 2020 presidential election, despite none of the documents he declassified providing evidence for this.

"Since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t," wrote the board. Specifically, the memo says, “Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results. The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” And even if some results were compromised, “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”

Furthermore, the board pointed out, the legislation Trump is pushing goes well beyond what the public is comfortable with in restricting access to the ballot box.

"The public likes voter ID, with a poll last year finding 83% of adults, and 71% of Democrats, favor it," the board wrote. However, Trump's SAVE America Act requires such rigorous documentation that "most driver’s licenses [would be] insufficient to register to vote, and that’s to say nothing of Mr. Trump’s push to override laws in many GOP states — Florida, Georgia, most of the Midwest — that offer mail ballots for convenience."

The whole approach of undermining public trust in elections, wrote the board, "is a political backfire for the GOP," as Trump's "fraud outbursts" already cost them two Senate seats in Georgia in 2020.

The bottom line, wrote the board, is that the GOP should stop relitigating a six-year-old election and instead "be campaigning on what they want to do with two more years in power. There are ways to improve voting integrity, but Mr. Tillis is right that it’s reckless to sow generalized suspicion that American elections aren’t honest."

President Donald Trump wants to lean even harder than ever on Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr to strip broadcast licenses from networks that don't do his bidding — but he is playing with fire, a legal expert warned.

According to Politico, the drama kicked off after NBC and ABC both declined to carry Trump's Thursday night prime-time address on election security live, prompting the president to demand the Federal Communications Commission strip both networks of their broadcast licenses entirely. Trump didn't hold back on Truth Social, framing the snub as evidence of corruption.

"Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses," Trump said.

It's a threat that has popped up periodically as Trump vents against the media; in one of the most glaring examples, CBS backed out of allowing Stephen Colbert to broadcast an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico as the FCC re-evaluated longstanding rules about political interviews. "The View" has also come under scrutiny.

If Carr actually follows through on threats to revoke broadcast licenses, though, said First Amendment litigator Robert Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, it would come back to haunt Trump.

“We’ve never in this country had a law that permits a royal decree for news coverage,” he told Politico. “If you expressly link a licensing proceeding to whether or not the networks are airing coverage that the president wants covered, then whatever legitimacy that those proceedings might have had is automatically diminished if you link them.”

MyPillow CEO and outspoken election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell won President Donald Trump's coveted endorsement for governor of Minnesota, leaving the GOP in the state flat-footed as they were trying to navigate a crowded field of other candidates — a situation Trump is also causing in some other states.

But there's a new complication, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune: Lindell isn't even registered to vote in Minnesota.

"A Minnesota Star Tribune review of voter records shows Lindell has an active voter registration in Texas," said the report. Lindell, who has become notorious in recent years for his fanciful claims that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump, "acknowledged last year he had been living in Texas and that he’d have to reestablish residency in Minnesota to run for governor, something he says he has now done."

Despite Lindell's claims, he has "not signed up to cast a ballot for himself since his return to Minnesota, and Texas lists an active voter registration record."

Trump's announcement of a Lindell endorsement earlier this week, which came just months after the state was ravaged by a federal Department of Homeland Security takeover of Minneapolis, touted the pillow salesman's loyalty to the MAGA cause.

President Donald Trump's endorsement of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham's sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to fill his South Carolina seat permanently caught the GOP flat-footed, as she had only been intended to be a caretaker appointment to serve out the remainder of her brother's term, and it wasn't even clear whether she intended to run for a full term.

Already the president's endorsement was met negatively by a number of MAGA commenters, some of whom hadn't even cared for Graham in the first place and don't see the point of elevating his sister.

According to Punchbowl News, the move isn't terribly popular behind the scenes among Republicans, either.

The president's decision "is puzzling to many Republicans, who feel it’s premature to anoint an untested replacement," said the report by Ally Mutnick and Andrew Desiderio. "Graham has only been in the Senate for a few days and Republicans have, understandably, given her space to grieve her late brother, with whom she was extremely close." Furthermore, she has "little political experience" beyond informally advising her brother on his campaigns.

Moreover, noted the report, "Trump’s pronouncement throws into further chaos what’s already been a rushed and unclear process," as a number of powerhouse politicians in South Carolina, including multiple U.S. representatives, already expressed interest in running.

Complicating that issue was the fact that there is no legal process to replace Reps. William Timmons or Russell Fry on the ballot, both of whom have considered running, which would in theory mean the generally very GOP-favoring seats would be an automatic flip for Democrats.

GOP state legislators have debated coming back to change the law to allow a replacement, but if Trump's endorsement of Graham sticks, "this may be moot now," the report said.

On Friday, President Donald Trump's newly appointed far-right U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Aaron Reitz, issued a statement about the fatal shooting of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston. The statement did its best to absolve the officers of any wrongdoing and emphasized that Salgado is an "illegal alien" despite him not even being the suspect ICE agents were looking for during the incident.

However, some legal experts noticed that a specific passage of the statement appeared to directly indicate ICE officers lied about a critical detail.

From the start, ICE has claimed that Salgado tried to run down agents with his vehicle. But that doesn't line up with the details Reitz gave in his statement.

"At some point, two of the four officers got out of their vehicles and instructed the non-compliant aliens to put the van in park," Reitz said. "Preliminary information indicates the driver shifted the van into reverse, then forward again, while an officer was partially inside the van or immediately next to it. During this confrontation between federal agents and a group of illegal aliens attempting to flee, one of the officers fired a single shot," which struck Salgado, later killing him despite officers administering aid.

If these details are correct, David Bier of the Cato Institute pointed out on X that he couldn't have been running down anyone.

"This statement admits DHS lied," wrote Bier. "There is nothing about weaponizing the vehicle or attempting to run over the officer. He says the agent was "'inside the van or immediately next to it.' OK, he was not 'inside the van,' so he just gunned him down from the side of the van."

In other words, per American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, "ICE admits now that the *best case* scenario is that the ICE officer who shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in the chest ran up to a moving vehicle and shoved his arms into the passenger window and opened fired seconds later. No vehicle 'weaponization'; no effort to run anyone down."

A federal judge in Connecticut just handed the Justice Department another gut-punch in its nationwide crusade for state voter rolls — and buried a savage one-liner in the fine print while doing it.

The Trump administration has been filing lawsuits like this all over the country, seeking a comprehensive trove of sensitive information about voters that even includes their driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Some states have complied, but many, including GOP-controlled states, have refused — and so far, the DOJ has failed to compel the info from any of the holdouts.

In the 16th such decision, U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley, herself a Trump appointee, tossed DOJ's bid to force Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas to hand over the state's complete, unredacted voter registration list, finding the list doesn't count as a record that "comes into" the state's possession under the 1960 Civil Rights Act provision DOJ was leaning on, because Connecticut officials build the list themselves out of data fed in by all 169 municipalities.

Dooley leaned heavily on a Sixth Circuit ruling involving Michigan's Secretary of State, and made clear Connecticut is just the latest domino to fall — nearly identical DOJ losses have already piled up in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, Maryland, Wisconsin, Maine and Arizona.

Dooley didn't pretend this was a novel legal frontier, either.

"So too here," she wrote, dryly applying the same fatal logic that's now sunk the government's case in courtroom after courtroom.

The ruling zeroes in on a technical landmine for DOJ's theory: the same 1960 law criminalizes altering the very records it claims must be preserved — so if voter rolls counted as protected documents, the routine updates states are legally required to make (removing dead voters, changing addresses) would turn election officials into federal criminals. Dooley rejected an interpretation that "would place Title III on a collision course" with the very voter-list-maintenance laws Congress separately demanded.

Marc Elias, the voting rights attorney representing Connecticut in the case, took a victory lap at the ruling, posting to X, "DOJ is now 0-16 in cases to gain access to state voter files. Elias Law Group remains undefeated."

MS NOW spoke to a MAGA voter in Iowa, whose terse response to the president's speech on Thursday night could be another ominous sign for him.

Mark Bogue, who backed the president at the ballot box, told MS NOW's Alex Tabet that he sees Trump's claims about the 2020 election and foreign interference as a distraction from real issues.

"What do you make of the fact that the president is continuing to look backwards?" asked Tabet, noting that it is now six years since the election he spent a half-hour complaining about.

"I would like to see him move forward and get off that topic," said Bogue. "I'd like to get back to what we're really trying to accomplish, you know, and that's even today. I want to hear where we're going. You know, I — I'm not all for that conversation at all."

Tabet asked what Bogue would prefer to be the focus of the national debate.

"Well, let's get Iran figured out," said Bogue. "Get the economy, get gas prices back down, which I think they will be if we can get that figured out. So I think right now that's the biggest topic. And is Iran, you know, where are we going with this thing?"

This comes after a New York Times focus group found a number of younger Trump voters souring on him as well, fearful the economy is going in the wrong direction.

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President Donald Trump's controversial elections speech on Thursday night has "scrambled" the agenda for Republicans in Congress once again and left one in particular with a big problem, Politico reported on Friday.

Per the report, Republican leaders have been trying to walk back the idea of adding portions of the SAVE America Act, Trump's pet project bill to place a bevy of new restrictions on voting, instead pushing a "clean" reconciliation bill.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has pushed a plan that "would fund the government well ahead of the normal Sept. 30 deadline in a Congress that’s already seen two record-breaking funding lapses."

According to Politico's anonymous sources, Johnson has been working hard to lobby Trump for his support.

"According to three people granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, " Politico reported, "Johnson has also been privately trying to convince Trump to endorse the plan in hopes of stoking another shutdown fight far in advance of the midterms, which Republicans believe would work to their party’s advantage at the polls."

This conflict arrises as Johnson and fellow House GOP leaders face mounting pressure, Politico noted.

"House GOP leaders are trying to put that budget resolution on the floor next week, too — setting up some serious whip operations for leaders trying to get buy-in from all corners of their conference on both measures," according to the report.

"It won’t be easy, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune provided Johnson with another cold reality check Thursday. After learning the speaker was telling reporters the Senate would adopt the House’s budget framework before August recess, Thune responded, 'That’d be news to me.'"

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) are "on completely different planets" as they try to push President Donald Trump's agenda, Laura Weiss and Andrew Desiderio wrote for Punchbowl News on Friday.

Johnson muscled a $95 billion budget reconciliation bill through the House Budget Committee this week, aiming to fund the Pentagon, farm aid, and pieces of the SAVE America Act, Punchbowl reported.

Vice President JD Vance is fully behind the push but Thune has publicly trashed the chances of it surviving his chamber and warning of "significant political and procedural risks," according to the report.

The rift got personal fast, according to the report.

After Johnson claimed the Senate would pass the House's budget blueprint before the August recess, Thune shot back that it was "news to me."

When pressed on whether Johnson even understood the Senate's objections, Thune insisted the two had talked it through — even as he kept blasting the plan as a "risky proposition" and "an uneven path," openly questioning whether the "juice is worth the squeeze."

"Thune’s allies feel like Johnson is constantly offloading problems onto the South Dakota Republican, ultimately forcing him to be the bad guy letting down the MAGA base," Punchbowl reported. "This has been the case especially with the SAVE America Act, over which Johnson has also been facing immense internal strife."

With midterms barely four months out, some Senate Republicans are grumbling the whole reconciliation push ignores the affordability crisis actually driving voters.

Trump has repeatedly demanded the SAVE America Act's passage be given total priority, convinced it's existential to the Republican Party's survival.

Sen. Thom Tillis' demand that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche meet with Jeffrey Epstein survivors or risk losing his confirmation vote signals a dark turn in his confirmation process, a political analyst argued Friday.

Podcaster and CNN analyst Luke Thomas argued Tillis had done the bare minimum to hold President Donald Trump's problematic nominee to account.

"This is a small hurdle to put in front of a guy who is manifestly unqualified," Thomas said. "If you really had genuine antipathy for the president's agenda, in any kind of real way, that's not a real hurdle."

Blanche faced a backlash during this week's confirmation hearings in the Senate after Epstein survivors condemned him for meeting Epstein's convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, but not them.

When Tillis ordered him to "do it," Blanche rushed to follow orders and meet with survivors, Politico reported. Sources told the news outlet the meeting did not go well.

“Unfortunately, Todd Blanche treated the meeting as a mere ‘check-the-box’ exercise intended to secure votes for his confirmation,” Danielle Bensky said in a statement.

“He danced around his wording, repeatedly interrupted us and could not commit to anything that would demonstrate good faith."

Thomas on Friday predicted Tillis would ultimately vote to confirm Blanche in the position — even after a slip that saw the acting attorney general refer to himself as Trump's lawyer.

"That's not a real hurdle," Thomas said. "And [Blanche] clearing it wouldn't mean anything to begin with. So I'm of the belief that ultimately they're going to fold."

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Republican candidates are getting crushed in fundraising in some of the most important midterm contests, Punchbowl News reported on Friday.

"A new trove of campaign-finance reports released this week showed a concerning reality for the GOP: Democratic candidates raked in gargantuan amounts of money last quarter in key battleground districts," reporter Jake Sherman shared on X.

He gave the hat-tip to colleague Ally Mutnick who revealed the findings.

Federal Election Commission documents show at least 25 GOP incumbents and Republican-turned-independent Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA) got beaten in fundraising by a Democratic challenger, according to Punchbowl.

Republicans face one of their narrowest House majorities on record, as well as the historical trend that the party in charge nearly always loses seats in midterm elections.

And President Donald Trump is scrambling to shore up Republican odds in the election, demanding a number of GOP-controlled states redraw their district maps to give themselves extra seats, and last night delivering a primetime speech that sought to lay the groundwork for greater federal control over elections.

The GOP may get a boost in coming weeks and months, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that gives greater fundraising power to the party committees.

Sherman called Mutnick's findings a "stunning story."

Forget slick campaign ads shot on film — the new weapon of choice for MAGA world is glitchy, glossy, and 100% fake, Alice Marwick wrote for The Bulwark on Friday.

"By visually conjuring political talking points in an instant, genAI enables the right to bring its inflammatory rhetoric to life," Marwick wrote. "If you can prompt a right-wing fantasy, perhaps you can create it."

Researchers have a name for this growing political medium: "slopaganda." And according to a new deep dive, conservatives have embraced AI-generated imagery — from a mocked-up Time cover of Trump crowned as king to deepfakes of Texas Democrat James Talarico singing pro-trans show tunes — in a way the left simply hasn't.

Part of it's political: the Trump administration's cozy relationship with Big Tech and AI investors. But there's an aesthetic angle too. Another Pratt-produced clip shows a suspiciously flawless pilates class of thin, shiny women cheering for a Republican candidate — a stark contrast from the diverse faces that powered Zohran Mamdani's viral mayoral campaign videos in New York.

The White House itself has gotten in on the trend, blasting out AI images casting Trump as Superman, the Pope, a Jedi and even Jesus. That last one led to a public outcry, and Trump officials tried to claim he was simply being depicted as a doctor.

Journalist Shahzeen Khan, who's tracked similar AI-fueled fearmongering targeting Muslim communities abroad, posed a haunting question about the technology's power to shape minds: "How should it shape your voting choices?"

This comes as a number of other scandals emerge in how AI is being used, including a judge accusing the Trump administration of citing a nonexistent, AI-hallucinated case in a recent court filing.

President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech on Thursday, during which he alleged that China engaged in systematic election interference in the 2020 presidential election, attempting to manufacture "illegal ballots" and seizing tens of millions of voters' personal data — doing everything in his power to validate his yearslong conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from him.

But reporter Isaac Saul of Tangle News took a deep dive through the documents Trump announced he is declassifying — and what he found, or rather, didn't find, spoke volumes.

"I know very few people are actually going to download and read these things, but just to be clear: Trump is *not even alleging* that any election tallies were impacted, just that our systems are vulnerable to foreign interference," Saul wrote on X. "Which Ds and Rs have both been warning about for decades."

The nature of Trump's speech was leaked days beforehand, with experts already poking holes in the argument and even Republican lawmakers themselves panicking that Trump could drag up a losing issue for the party during a midterm year.