STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Former President Trump is trailing in many polls. But when he's spoken with crowds recently, that is not the problem he tells supporters to worry about.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: Our primary focus is not to get out the vote, it's to make sure they don't cheat, because we have all the vote you need. You can see it. Every house along the way has signs - Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump-Vance, Trump-Vance.
INSKEEP: Trump's party is preparing to challenge the results of the election, if necessary, just as he tried to overturn his defeat in 2020. His supporters in state after state are eager to help. They hold top to bottom control of much of the Republican Party. Many Republicans who upheld the 2020 election results are gone. Isaac Arnsdorf has traced how Trump's MAGA movement advanced. He's with The Washington Post and wrote a book called "Finish What We Started." He tells a story that begins with a longtime Trump supporter soon after Trump was forced to leave office.
ISAAC ARNSDORF: Steve Bannon, through the talk show that he hosted, really kind of became the center of the MAGA alternative media ecosystem.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "WARROOM")
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: "WarRoom." Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
INSKEEP: Bannon is an investor and a former White House aide who is in prison these days for contempt of Congress. In 2021, he was hosting a regular podcast.
ARNSDORF: And he and his guests on that show developed this story of the way to understand what happened was that Republicans had sold Trump out.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "WARROOM")
STEVE BANNON: We're not complaining about them. Remember, there are no whining and no tears in the war room. We're taking action. And that action is we're taking over school boards. We're taking over the Republican Party through the precinct committee strategy. We're taking over all the elections. Suck on this.
ARNSDORF: The answer that Bannon and the movement came up with was that Trump's supporters needed to take over the actual party organization all the way down to the tiny, little precinct committees. And then they could purify the party, run everybody out and make sure that the people who wouldn't cooperate wouldn't be there next time.
INSKEEP: I want to just emphasize how local, how granular what you're describing is. When you talk about a precinct, that's just, like, one polling place. It's one neighborhood, and they may have a party activist or a party committee for that. And you're saying they tried to take over even at that local level?
ARNSDORF: Yeah. And because they're not super familiar or high profile, a lot of those positions were empty, just there for the taking. And what happened was largely inspired by Bannon's podcast. All of a sudden, people who had never been involved in party politics before came out of the woodwork and took those positions. And that had a chain reaction moving all the way up the ladder and culminating with the change at the top at the Republican National Committee that we saw just this past March.
INSKEEP: Are there also election deniers who are in a position to influence the counting of the ballots this fall?
ARNSDORF: Well, I should be precise about the word influence. They're pouring a lot of resources into litigation and then into getting observers, or in some cases poll workers. Also, in some cases, they can be the actual people counting the ballots. There's a lot of concern from Democrats and from democracy advocates that, that is all setting the table for trying to find predicates to challenge the results. You know, that's a real concern. It's also true that in the battlegrounds that are going to decide this election, the executive authorities are either Democrats or non-election denying Republicans.
INSKEEP: Democrats have the governorship in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, are pretty strong in the legislatures in some of those places. That's the sort of thing you're talking about, right?
ARNSDORF: Exactly. And in Georgia, you have a Republican governor, but one who didn't go along with it in 2020 and wouldn't again.
INSKEEP: I want to ask one other thing and it's about the events of the last several years. People who questioned the results of the 2020 election actually got to run massive audits in places like Arizona and eventually had to admit that they couldn't find enough problems to overturn the election result. There was an entire election across the country in 2022, and people who turned out to watch the polls by all accounts had a very boring time. It was a normal election. Have you run across anybody in the MAGA movement who experienced those real-world facts over the last several years and came to the conclusion that maybe there's a little less fraud than they imagined?
ARNSDORF: Well, the hard thing about it is, you know, the facts - the details are not really important. What the stolen election myth is really about is a feeling about who the country belongs to. And that goes back a lot deeper than Trump. That goes back to the rise of the modern conservative movement with Barry Goldwater. It's just a given. It's just treated as a starting premise that America is a conservative country. And if the elections indicate otherwise, then there was something wrong with the elections.
INSKEEP: Isaac Arnsdorf is a political reporter for The Washington Post and author of "Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War To End Democracy." Thanks so much.
ARNSDORF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
