Stacey Abrams’ On The Ten Steps to Save Democracy

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Over the past eight months, the Republican march to absolute power has seemed impossible to stop.

But we've tried through protests and litigation and social media posts.

We who believe in freedom have been pushing back against a foe that takes multiple shapes and forms and is everywhere.

To combat that sense of chaos, I've been talking about the 10 steps to autocracy, a framework that lays out the warning signs for when a country is headed towards authoritarian rule.

Because both the steps and the impact can hide in plain sight.

Autocracy is in education cuts and the slashing of ACA subsidies and slashing Medicaid.

It's in the rise of pro-natalism and Christian nationalism.

These actions are all distinct.

They're important.

They're connected.

And we need to recognize them as such.

But each time I've walked through the 10 steps to ruin, one consistent question that keeps coming up is what can we do about it?

As much as we must recognize the 10 steps to how they destroy democracy, we are also obliged to stop them.

But the protest and the angry calls to our leaders don't feel like enough.

But here's the truth.

From our couches and classrooms and offices to the streets and courthouses, from public libraries to secret convenings, we are the ones who will save us.

And I don't mean going back to the before times.

No, together we will not only stop the theft of our democracy, we will build the next best version of America.

Because if there are 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, there are 10 steps to freedom and power.

And we are going to use them all.

Today, I'm introducing you to the 10 steps campaign, which I launched earlier this week.

what the steps are, why they matter, and how we can align on what needs to be done right now.

The time for absolute agreement is over.

Now is the time to get to work with whomever is willing to work with us.

We don't have to do the same things in the same way or for the same reason, but we all have to take action now.

However, before I dive into the details, I do want to address something that's happening around us.

For some, the language that I use to describe these 10 steps will feel inappropriate in this moment.

That's natural.

It's empathetic and it's understandable.

However, we cannot stop calling out what is wrong if we want to make it right.

And that includes the increasing use of political violence, which is intimately tied to the rise of autocracy in every space.

The murders of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week and of former Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband earlier this summer are part of a horrific litany.

One that includes the attempts on President Donald Trump, the home invasion attacks on Speaker Pelosi's husband, and the home invasion attack against Minnesota Representative John Hoffman and his wife, the arson at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Across our country at every level of government, political violence has become a dangerous through line in our national life.

life.

But these heinous acts, driven by politics, cannot and should not be divorced from the other horrific instances of public violence we have become too familiar with these days.

Mass shootings in our schools, places of worship, and public spaces are no longer singular events

because the lack of official action and the absence of true empathy necessarily leeches into our politics.

Seeing these as separate and distant is appealing, but it's absolutely wrong.

To those who have studied world history, these tragedies portend a terrifying outcome.

The normalization of violence as political tools in our faltering democracy.

When murder is met with inaction or invective by our leaders, we learn a lesson.

When murder becomes a proxy for debate, we fail ourselves and our compatriots.

When murder becomes a call to action, we have lost our way.

Therefore, we must see and condemn this pattern clearly and consistently.

Otherwise, we risk letting intimidation and apathy rule.

But if we refuse to understand its source and the incentives for how violence is wielded and by whom, fear will quicken the end of democracy.

Because as we saw in Annunciation Catholic School and Evergreen High School most recently, violence as a weapon of discourse doesn't stay confined to politics.

It undermines the very institutions families rely on every day.

In our workplaces, our stores, our refuges, peril becomes part of the equation, and we need look no further than our schools to understand what we risk, because they, more than almost anywhere else, reflect where we stand, where our democracy stands.

Over the past few months, then, I've been talking about the 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, a framework by Dr.

Kim Shepel that lays out the warning signs when a country is sliding toward authoritarian rule.

Step one, the powerful are chosen in a free and fair election, but it's likely the last one.

Step two, the chief authoritarian then moves quickly to cement power by expanding and exceeding executive authority.

Step three, they weaken competing powers by making Congress complicit, and the Supreme Court declares itself impotent or worse, an advocate for their actions.

Step four, they break government so democracy seems worthless.

Gutted schools, inaccessible public services, fired civil servants who've been replaced by the inept and the deliberately incompetent.

Step 5, they install loyalists who betray the will of the people by dismantling institutions they swore to protect.

Step 6, they attack the media, defund public broadcasting, and create an echo chamber of propaganda and lies.

Step 7, to cast blame on anyone else but themselves, they scapegoat vulnerable communities and they target the protections of DEI.

Step eight, to stop an organized response, they attack civil society by harassing and undermining the groups that educate people, that mobilize civic participation, that defend our rights.

Step 9, over time, they normalize and incentivize violence and militarize law enforcement, creating secret police and occupying our cities.

And step 10, they end democracy itself by disrupting elections, undermining voting systems, and formalizing authoritarian rule.

But here's the headline.

If there are 10 steps to steal our democracy, there are 10 steps to freedom and power.

And I've been mulling over how to present them.

And it was last week that I had this light bulb moment right here on the show.

In two separate conversations, allies used action verbs that clearly articulate what we need.

There are lots of books that tell us how to stop authoritarianism, but what we need in this moment are calls to action.

And so I listened to them and to others, and I added my own ideas of what those action verbs are.

So this list is inspired by Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, Deepak Bhagava, the president of the Freedom Together Foundation, among many others.

In every nation that has faced this fight and reclaimed democracy, the 10 steps are these:

commit,

share,

organize, mobilize, litigate, disrupt, deny, engage, elect, and demand.

In total, the 10 steps campaign is about how we realize we are not alone and that we can win.

We can save ourselves.

Like one of those photo mosaics, each of us is part of the larger picture, even though we feel very small.

Yes, we may feel overmatched and like we've already fallen too far behind, but victories have been won with less.

Regardless of where we start, we can each participate in saving our nation, saving our community, saving ourselves.

This is a moment that calls for faith, for intention, for urgency.

I'm not waiting, and neither should you.

Joining me today to kick us off is Ari Berman, National Voting Rights Correspondent at Mother Jones and author of Project 2026: Trump's Plan to Rig the Next Election.

Ari Berman, welcome back to Assembly Required.

Hey, Stacey, great to see you again.

Thank you.

Well,

it is a delight to get to talk to you.

It is usually terrible why, but,

you know, you're good at what you do.

Yeah.

It's like when I show up on someone's screen, there's bad news coming.

Yeah, we have a support group on Thursdays.

I'll send you an invite.

Yeah, I could use that these days for sure.

So you recently wrote an incredible piece on what you call Project 2026, and you lay out the scale of Trump and the Republicans' efforts to interfere in our elections and how those efforts are escalating ahead of the 2026 midterms.

So let's start big picture.

We know that the midterms are more than 400 days away.

Why should people be paying attention now?

Well, people should be paying attention now because the efforts are already underway

to rig the election and to manipulate the midterms in the president's favor.

And Trump is going way beyond, as I'm sure you followed quite closely, Stacey, what any other president has ever done to try to influence the midterms.

Normally, what presidents do in a midterm when they're not on the ballot is they try to sell their policies, they try to boost their party by saying, we did X, we did Y, this is why you should vote for us.

Trump's not doing any of that because the policies that they've passed are very unpopular.

So what he's doing instead is he's doing what he's always done, which is trying to rig the voting process.

And he's using the full force of the federal government to do that in a number of different ways using every tactic that's available from trying to nationalize voter suppression, doing mid-decade gerrymandering, weaponizing the Justice Department, going after his political opponents.

I mean, I narrowed this down in my article to 10 different ways he's doing it, but I mean, each 10 has a subset.

So it's probably more like 50 or 100 different ways that he's doing it.

But I mean, it's extremely disturbing to see a president try to manipulate the outcome before a single vote is cast.

And of course, the midterms are so important, as you know, because this is the only way to really hold Trump accountable in a tangible way.

If there's a Democratic House, they can bring accountability to the federal government that has been completely missing thus far from one-party rule in Washington.

One of the reasons I wanted to have you on today today is that I have been banging the drum about the 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, and that we are not approaching authoritarianism.

It is here, it is operational, and we are watching in real time as it unfolds.

One of the reasons your article caught my eye is that you are also using 10 steps.

And what I want us to really dive into in this conversation is how what they do now impacts what comes next.

Part of understanding that is, I think, widening the lens from just Donald Trump to a very complicit Republican Party that is suborning, supporting, and sometimes architecting what he is executing as the president.

And we see that happening, as you pointed out, in Congress every single day, but we're also seeing it happen in the judiciary.

One of the ways we see this happening is the Voting Rights Act.

This is the landmark 1965 legislation that outlawed racial discrimination in voting.

It was gutted in 2013 by the Shelby decision from the Supreme Court.

We've seen them knock against other vestiges of protecting the right to vote.

But one of the remaining key provisions of the law is at risk, that's Section 2.

So I would love for you to talk about the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision and how the judiciary is helping to rig the elections and what will happen if the Supreme Court backs that Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision.

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked about that, Stacey.

The Voting Rights Act is really on its last legs before the conservative-dominated judiciary.

And this has been the most important civil rights law in the country's history and really one of the most important laws in the history of the country in terms of democratizing America and bringing so many new people who were previously disenfranchised into the political process.

And as you mentioned, it was gutted repeatedly by the Supreme Court.

Now the conservative dominated lower courts are going further.

So what the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year was that private plaintiffs, groups like the ACLU, the NAACP, that they couldn't bring lawsuits to enforce the key remaining part of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2.

And this was catastrophic because the federal government, even in the best of times, has filed very few lawsuits to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Under a Trump administration, they're not going to file any lawsuits to enforce the Voting Rights Act, certainly not good faith lawsuits.

And so if you said, like the Eighth Circuit said, that only the Attorney General of the United States could file lawsuits to enforce the Voting Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act would basically become a dead letter.

And so it's a grave threat to the VRA because you wouldn't even be able to file these cases, let alone win them.

And it's kind of like what the Supreme Court already did to partisan gerrymandering.

You may remember the Supreme Court said not too long ago, no matter how discriminatory a map might be to someone's political opponents, we're not going to...

hear these cases in federal court.

We're not only, we're not going to not strike them down, we're not going to hear them all together.

And that's kind of what they're trying to do to Section 2.

And as you're aware, that's just one threat to the Voting Rights Act because there's this whole other threat coming out of Louisiana, which is that they're trying to kill the last protections against racial discrimination in redistricting as well, because they've already said can't challenge partisan gerrymandering.

Now they're saying, well, maybe you can't challenge racial gerrymandering at all.

And that would turn the whole purpose of the 14th and 15th Amendment on its head, right?

Because what they're saying is in this case out of Louisiana that they didn't decide last term and that they're rescheduling for argument in the fall term is that they're looking at this question of whether the 14th and 15th Amendment is violated if you draw a district that could elect a candidate of color.

Not guarantee, but allow the possibility of that.

And this is amazing because that's exactly what the 14th and 15th Amendment was supposed to do.

It was supposed to bring previously enslaved people into the political process.

And now you're basically saying if you draw a district that would reminate, that would remedy.

those centuries of discrimination, that in and of itself is discriminatory.

So it's very alarming what the courts are doing to the Voting Rights Act.

And of course, that's just going to make it that much easier for Trump and Republicans to get through all their different discriminatory schemes they're planning right now.

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At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

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The University of Arizona, Wonder Makes You.

Start your journey at wonder.arisona.edu.

You wrote this extraordinary book, Minority Rule, that really traces the longitudinal efforts that have been underway.

And I know for a lot of folks, they're just paying attention.

They're just waking up.

These things are now affecting them.

Voter suppression, of course, has long been an issue in certain regions of the country, but it's now a national pastime.

Can you just, in a few words, really

give people the through line of what the point of all of this is?

Well, first off, I think it's really important to remember that we have a court that is constituted in an undemocratic and corrupt manner.

So we have five of six of the conservative justices who are appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote and by senators, confirmed by senators, elected by a minority of Americans.

So we already have a court that is not reflective of the popular will.

And then, of course, they are trying to make the political system more undemocratic by doing things like gutting the Voting Rights Act, allowing partisan gerrymandering, ruling that ICE can engage in racial profiling, things of that nature.

And this has been a long-term project of the court.

I write not just in Minority Rule, but in my previous book, Give Us the Ballot, about how John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, has been trying to weaken the Voting Rights Act ever since he served as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department in the 1980s.

So he is someone who tried to weaken it then,

failed largely in those efforts, but redoubled his efforts when he was on the Supreme Court.

And the justices are put there now to effectuate these kind of things.

And I think what's been, to me, and I'm curious what you think about this, Stacey, is to me, the scary thing is the ideological project and the political project matching up, where you have a court that is not just hostile to things like the Voting Rights Act, but basically completely subservient to the President of the United States.

And there are no checks and balances.

And that makes it even easier for Trump to get his way.

And I think people think these are two different things, right?

When the court weakens the Voting Rights Act or when they rule that Trump is the king.

They think these are two different things.

But I would argue they're the same kind of things on the path to authoritarianism that you've been writing and talking about.

I completely agree.

So step three is that you weaken competing powers.

You have a complicit Congress.

You have a subservient or obedient, in this case, an aggressively proactive court that is doing its best to give to the executive authority that is not accorded by either the Constitution or by traditional practice.

Because some of these things are constitutional.

We've just never seen anyone try to use the Constitution in such a cruel and egregious way.

And then step two of the steps to authoritarianism, you see the executive exceeding powers, expanding powers.

And when it all comes together, the reason I push back so hard against the notion that it's about Trump is that Trump is an avatar.

He's also 80 years old.

We forget that, you know, Hugo Chavez launched authoritarianism in Venezuela, but Maduro's been in power for years.

We cannot forget that this is the way that the nose gets under the tent, but the goal is for all of the rest of them to occupy the space with ideological beliefs that have long decried the 14th and 15th amendment's powers.

And for anyone who says, oh, that's high, that's hyperbolic, that's histrionic, to your point, we just had a Supreme Court that said it's okay to racially profile

people based on their skin color, their ethnicity, and based on the language that they speak.

That is entirely counterintuitive to what we have said for the last 100 plus years, we really want it to be as a nation.

And so,

one of the reasons I was excited to have you on is that you have been ringing the alarm bell for so long.

And we are now seeing all of those pieces, to your point, they're all coming together.

They were never separate, they were just operating like the army and the cavalry and the infantry, and now they're the infantry, the cavalry, and the artillery, and now they're coming together on the field of battle.

Yeah.

And I just found it, I mean, nothing is really surprising or shocking anymore, but it was still just unbelievable to see the Supreme Court say that ICE can consider race and ethnicity in racial profiling, but colleges can't consider race in admissions, or

states can't consider race in terms of drawing districts to alleviate centuries of racial discrimination.

I mean, it was such an unbelievable way to try to address that issue.

But I would argue that what the Supreme Court and lower courts are doing is as dangerous, if not more dangerous than what trump is trying to do because as you said trump is 80 he's not going to be around that much longer the supreme court is setting precedent for decades now and they're they're rewriting the most important statues in the history of the united states and when you lose the voting rights act you don't just get it back i don't think people are prepared for what a post-voting rights act america is going to look like uh and so some of this is just there's things that we never thought we would see, and they're happening under Trump.

And I think the Supreme Court has a similar, but more under-the-radar project to do that.

But they want to do it in such a way that it doesn't just wipe out four years or eight years of what a previous president did.

They're trying to wipe out 150, 250

decades of racial progress.

I mean, you talk about getting rid of the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act wasn't meant to enforce the 15th Amendment, which was basically a dead letter for 100 years because the federal government didn't enforce it.

And so this is a very long-term project by the court.

It doesn't get as much attention as the crazy things that Trump says every day, but it's an equal threat to American democracy.

I'm glad that people are waking up to it, but it's also going to require a strategy to counteract it that is not overnight.

But when I see what the current Supreme Court is doing, it makes me nervous that the courts would step in to stop Trump from doing the kind of things that he tried to do in 2020.

And that was a big reason why I was concerned in writing my piece:

the coalition that stood up to Trump in 2020, they have been systematically pushed aside, so many of those people.

And Trump has replaced them with sycophants at every level.

And that is going to make it easier for him to try to do the kind of election rigging that he was unable to succeed in doing in 2020.

That last piece, that's what we call step five.

You install loyalists.

You put people in place who will do what you want.

And where

I want to push on one point that you made.

We actually do know what this looks like.

My parents were born in Mississippi under Jim Crow.

We know exactly what they are recreating.

Where I'm deeply afraid is that we're actually going back to 1850, not 1950, not 1960.

Because part of what they are putting into place, to your point, what the the court is doing, which is separate from what Congress should be doing, such as protecting their statutory authority with the Voting Rights Act, what the president is doing, and I'm going to get to his executive order in a second, but what the court is doing is gutting the only protections we've ever been able to secure at a moment where we know in 17 years, this nation becomes a majority-minority country, a truly pluralistic democracy.

And this is what authoritarianism looks like.

It tries to contain power within a very select group of people.

And the most effective way to do that is to strip away any protections that would allow anyone else in that society to have a voice.

Is that too hyperbolic?

No, I think that that's absolutely true.

I mean,

you could make a very strong argument that the Voting Rights Act is needed now more than ever before as the country does become more diverse.

And as so many of Trump's schemes rest on disenfranchising people that are supposed to be protected by the Voting Rights Act, when you look at Texas, when they did the mid-decade gerrymandering, when they said, I need five new seats to make sure that we hold the House of Representatives, what did Texas Republicans do?

They targeted Black and Hispanic Democrats.

I mean, the Justice Department wrote this incredible letter that served as the pretext, the fig leaf.

for this special redistricting session that Texas held over the summer.

And they specifically said that four districts represented entirely by black and Hispanic Democrats were violating the Voting Rights Act.

Now, those districts were supposed to be protected under the Voting Rights Act, but they were weaponizing it so that they could then go after the very people the Voting Rights Act was supposed to protect.

What happens in Missouri when Trump says, I need another new seat?

They go and they target one of two black members of the U.S.

House, Emmanuel Cleaver, and they transform a district where black and Hispanic and white voters joined together to elect their candidate of choice.

That was not a majority black district, but it elected a black member of Congress because people were in coalition together and then shared the same interests.

And it says it draws it 200 miles to the east to rural Missouri that has almost nothing in common with Kansas City.

And so they're using race.

to try to achieve their political objectives.

And I think it's really important for people to understand that.

And if we had a vibrant Voting Rights Act that the courts and the federal government were interested in enforcing, a lot of this kind of activity would be blocked.

So we have a voting rights act that the Congress has refused to update in order to protect voters.

We have a Supreme Court that is actively engaged in dismantling the very few remaining protections.

And then you have a unitary executive who is nationalizing voter suppression.

And now, most of his executive order has been blocked for now until the court gets around to it.

But lower courts are acknowledging that this is a use of executive authority.

Some of them are saying he's exceeding it, but we don't know that that's going to hold.

So let's presume these policies go into effect as we have watched so many of the cruelties of this administration and this party.

do.

Voters would need proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Mail in voting would be reduced, if not eliminated.

And the Department of Homeland Security would be allowed to access immigration databases and state voting records to look for voter fraud.

Now, this order builds on voter suppression laws that have been passed by Republican governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia, Greg Abbott in Texas, Ron DeSantis in Florida, Mike DeWyn in Ohio, just to name a few.

Can you walk through why each of these things that to maybe the untrained ear sound perfectly reasonable, why they're a problem?

So let's let's start with why proof of citizenship to register to vote is a pernicious attack on democracy.

Well, I think people don't realize that proof of citizenship to register to vote is not voter ID.

It is much, much worse because you're asking people to carry around documentation like a passport or a birth certificate that people do not carry around with them in their daily lives, that millions of Americans don't have access to, and that there are side effects that people don't think of.

For example,

the Congress passed a similar bill called the Save Act, and that would require you to be able to basically show your birth certificate to have to register to vote.

Well, for millions and millions of married women, they have a different name than originally appeared on their

birth certificate if they put their partner's name.

So the Brennan Center for Justice found that 57 million married women, that's just one demographic alone, might be disenfranchised by this bill.

So it's something that tens of millions of people might not be able to comply with.

You already have to show that you're an American citizen to register to vote.

So that protection is already there.

But we've seen how this played out in real life.

Kansas did this under Secretary of State Chris Kobach back in 2018.

That law blocked one in seven new registrants from being able to register to vote.

Half of them were under under 30.

So it basically froze the electorate.

And that's what they want to do.

They want to freeze the electorate so that new people aren't able to register because they feel like new people, if they register, might not support Republican candidates.

So that's just one thing that Trump would do, but

it would make all the bureaucracies that people hate in their daily lives a requirement from being able to register to vote.

And I think that would be

just on itself deeply problematic.

Another one of the examples, and I appreciate the the fact that you pointed out how women were disproportionately affected or would be disproportionately affected by the SAVE Act and by this version of the executive order.

With mail-in voting, we know that the angst about mail-in voting spiked when so many people of color voted in 2020 and here in Georgia voted in 2018, so much so that Republicans who really were the pioneers of mail-in voting have suddenly decided it's a terrible idea.

But we know that mail-in voting is vital for the disabled population.

Can you talk about why mail-in voting being reduced would have a disproportionate effect on certain vulnerable communities?

Yeah, so what they're trying to do is they're trying to say that ballots have to be received by election day as opposed to post-marked by election day.

And that would upend mail voting rules in 17 states.

And it would basically mean you have to try to imagine what the post office might do with your ballot.

And so it makes sense that your ballot should be postmarked by election day because you can't control when the post office delivers your ballot.

And there's been lots of instances, most notably in 2020, but continuing after, of mail being delayed.

Mail voting is really important.

If you're disabled, you can't get to the polls.

If you're elderly, if you live in a more rural area, if you don't want to wait in line to vote, I mean, we've seen very long lines in places like Georgia to vote in person.

And so, I mean, we are moving towards a society in which people have more choices in terms of how they vote.

In a lot of states, they can vote early.

They can vote by mail.

People can still vote in person on Election Day if that's what they like doing.

And that's the way that we ultimately.

get people more involved in the process is by giving them as many choices as possible.

And so they're trying to cut back on mail-in voting.

Trump, of course, is promising to go further now and say he's going to issue an executive order to end mail voting because Vladimir Putin

told him that it was corrupt.

The noted election fairness expert, Vladimir Putin,

of course, the president doesn't have the power to ban mail voting via executive order.

It doesn't mean that even if his order is blocked, it doesn't mean that other states aren't going to try to do these kinds of things, though.

Because when the president tells states to do things, Republican states often fall in line.

And we're seeing states cut back mail voting in all sorts of different ways.

And so it continues to be a fixation for the president, even as a lot of Republicans vote by mail, even as Republicans continue to tell their voters to vote by mail.

But that would take away an option that sometimes up to a third of the public uses.

And then the third one is that Homeland Security would be allowed to access immigration databases and your state voting record to look for the non-existent specter of voter fraud.

Tell us why that shouldn't be permitted.

Well, and this is something where even though much of the executive order is blocked in court, the Justice Department and the Department of Home and Security are moving forward with this.

And what they want to do is they want to take immigration databases that are not met.

for voting-related purposes, and they want to run names through them to try to say, oh, we found illegal voting.

Now, I know what's going to happen, Stacey, because you've seen this before in Georgia.

They're going to find all of these names of people that are naturalized citizens who may at one point have had a driver's license or something like that that said they were not a U.S.

citizen.

These are people who are illegally, people on green cards, for example.

And they're going to say, we found all the voter fraud because they've done this in Georgia, they've done this in Texas.

And it's going to turn out, actually, these are naturalized U.S.

citizens.

These are people that may have been flagged at one point as not being U.S.

citizen.

They subsequently became a U.S.

citizen, and there's going to be a lag.

But Trump is going to use this as evidence of non-citizen voting, something that we already know is practically non-existent, that makes no logical sense why someone would risk deportation to cast a ballot.

But nonetheless,

this is going to be a propaganda tool.

They're going to say, hey, we finally found the non-citizens who are voting.

And they're going to then use that to push for proof of citizenship, to remove people from the voter rolls, to generate these crazy headlines that they plaster across Fox News and the whole conservative media ecosystem.

So that is something that really worries me because even though the executive order has been blocked, you have the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security already moving forward with doing this kind of thing with very little safeguards and almost no public notice of what they're doing and just completely operating in the shadows on it.

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So we've talked about step two, step three, step five,

all of the different ways on the march to autocracy, they are dismantling access to democracy.

Step four in the 10 steps is about gutting the government.

You break government so it doesn't work.

And in your article, you describe how Trump and his Republican cronies have dismantled the cybersecurity and infrastructure security, otherwise known as CISA, a CISA.

And this is the agency that is tasked with the security of the systems that support our elections and prevent the very election interference they say they don't want to have.

We know that Trump even pursued retribution against the agency's head, a former head, Chris Krebs.

Talk about the consequences of destroying this agency,

especially when it comes to the 2026 election, and then assuming we get there to the 2028 elections.

It's really astonishing.

I mean, you remember when Chris Krebs and Sissa tweeted that statement

after the 2020 election, right after the election, saying that it was the most secure election in American history.

And Trump went crazy and fired Krebs, but it didn't stop there.

He then issued an executive order specifically targeting Chris Krebs,

getting rid of his security clearance.

Chris Krebs had lost his job in the private sector, had to resign because they were going after the security clearances of his colleagues.

And so this was an example of the federal government being used in a way to try to quash dissent, to try to get rid of independent experts, to try to get rid of protections.

But it wasn't just one person.

It was the fact that they've now dismantled pretty much all of the protections against election interference that exist at a time when the Trump administration is picking fights left and right, places like Iran, China.

And so you can imagine not only that, but also closing up to countries like Russia, which have already interfered in our elections and can do so again.

And so the defenses that were built up on a bipartisan basis after 2020 and really after 2016, when Trump asked Vladimir Putin and the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails, which was in and of itself unprecedented.

The U.S.

very quietly and systematically, on a bipartisan basis, built protections against election interference.

And now we're getting rid of those, which means that there's a much higher likelihood that foreign adversaries or domestic adversaries might try to interfere in the election.

You remember, Stacey, on election night in 2024, there were bomb threats called in to places in cities like Atlanta.

And it's worrisome that that kind of thing could happen again, that Trump seems to be inviting that kind of interference to happen again.

So talk a little bit about why you believe that Republicans who knew better two years ago, knew better four years ago, knew better eight years ago, why are they so willing to sublimate their power, especially over the fundamental conversation of voting?

Why are they willing to throw that all away?

I have my speculation, but I'd love to hear what you think is happening here.

Well, I'm curious

on your take.

I'll give you mine.

I mean, first off, I think some of them agree with what the president is doing.

I think there's been an artificial distinction between Trump and some in the Republican Party, like your old friend Brian Kemp, who I think they may find some of the means distasteful, but agree with some of the end goals.

I also think that those people that legitimately disagree with Trump have been run out of the Republican Party.

I mean, we've seen what's happened to the Liz Cheneys of the Republican Party, the Adam Kinzingers, and on a local level, the election officials.

I mean, a lot of people don't have the name recognition or the money or the power to stand up to the president of the United States.

And so if you went back and looked at all the people that stood up to Trump in 2020 in some form or another and say, where are they now?

So many of them would no longer be in positions of power, whether it's in Congress or at the state level or on state and county boards of elections.

We've seen what's happened to those kinds of things in places like Georgia where they've been taken over by allies of the president, by election deniers.

And so that's what makes me concerned that if Trump tries to do what he tried to do in 2020, there might be a very different outcome because the people that stood up to him, the guardrails that were there, they no longer exist.

What do you think?

What's your explanation for it?

I would agree heartily.

I would also say that we mistook self-preservation sometimes for courage

or simply not having the ability to take action.

You and I both know that, and it's my personal pet peeve,

Brian Kemp was not a hero.

He simply did not commit treason because the law did not permit him to take the action that was requested.

And 49 other governors also managed to not take the actions that were not allowed.

But let's give the benefit of the doubt that Kemp and Rastenberger and others were in that moment in pursuit of the preservation of the outcome of the election.

I think we mistook the rationale for it.

And I think your point about means versus ends have always obscured what the ends are.

And the ends are the concentration of power.

That's what this whole thing is about.

And in a democracy, voting is our most fundamental power.

You and I have both spent so much of our time and our lives focusing on voting rights.

And for me, it's not the abstract idea of being able to cast a ballot.

It is the ability to have a voice in how your society operates.

And there is a concentrated, concerted, and right now extraordinarily effective attempt to

diminish who has a voice in how our country works and how our society works and who counts in the society.

And to your point about the recent shadow docket decision about racial profiling, it was a very clear statement that

you are insufficient if race is the reason that you've been precluded from education.

We will not let that be fixed.

It is insufficient if race has been the reason that you were denied justice in other ways.

But if race is the problem when it comes to stripping you of your constitutional right to due process, we're good with it.

But it's not just race.

It is all of the component parts that are secured by DEI, which is why I believe that DEI is foundational to democracy.

In our country, things like the Voting Rights Act and Title IX and Title I and the ADA are all instrumental in guaranteeing our participation in a society that lets us have a voice.

And I think we are watching a concentration of power and an elimination of competition because they do not want to hear from most Americans.

Yeah, and I think that that's why I wanted to lay out the threats to the midterms now, because one of the things that disturbed me is that this is all being described by so many people, particularly in the media, as just the usual kind of power politics, right?

Oh, Republicans gerrymander here, and then Democrats are doing their own kind of gerrymandering, and this is just like a political squabble.

Whereas as you've rightly pointed out, this is all part of a path towards authoritarianism.

The reason why the administration is trying so hard to rig the midterms, both at the federal level and in all of these states, is so that you can't register dissent with their policies.

So that if a majority of Americans disapprove of the quote-unquote big, beautiful bill, they're not able to do anything about it because they're not able to channel their anger.

into any kind of tangible political result.

And so

whether or not Democrats take back the House, it's not about whether Democrats take back the House.

It's about whether we actually have an ability for Democrats to take back the House.

We're not talking about the results.

of a free and fair election.

We're talking about whether we're going to have a free and fair election.

And I think that's what a lot of people are missing.

They think it's going to work the same way it's always worked.

Whereas the party in power does unpopular things and they're voted out of power.

That's what usually happens in America.

And what Trump is saying is, no, we're not going to do the kind of things that have been done in the past.

That even if I do all these unpopular things, you're not going to be able to get rid of my party and you're not going to be able to get rid of me

because I have systematically used my power to prevent you from having that choice in democracy.

And so.

I forget what step one is on your path to authoritarianism, but I've got to imagine that getting rid of or making free and fair elections meaningless would have to be, if not number one, then very close to the top, correct well it actually is it's number 10 because that's the end goal it's the end game it's the you just perfectly described step 10 because step 10 is you do all of those other things you weaken you install loyalists you do what you need to do to build up the power to accomplish what you've just described as step 10 which is you no longer have free and fair elections you can have elections putin has elections you know there are elections in turkey there are elections in hungary but the outcome of those elections are predetermined by the person who holds the power, by the party that holds the power, by the ideology that holds sway.

And that is step 10.

That is exactly the mission.

Yeah.

And I mean,

we have reached that point or come dangerously close to it right now in certain places.

I mean, you look at the gerrymandering that's going on right now.

And I mean, it's just shocking because this is the Stop the Steal playbook from 2020.

Trump went state by state by state and tried to get Republicans to overturn the election.

And they refused because it was illegal, as you pointed out.

They weren't actually able to do it.

Now what he's saying is, I don't need to overturn the election after the fact if I can predetermine the outcome ahead of time.

And so, yes, you never quite know how races are going to turn out.

But with the level of gerrymandering and sophistication that we can do with maps right now, it's almost certain they're going to get five Republican seats in Texas.

It's almost certain they're going to get another Republican seat in Missouri.

And they're not stopping there.

And the fact that this is just being treated as something that's normal has been so disturbing to me because it's so abnormal.

As you know, Stacey, redistricting happens.

You served in the Georgia legislature.

Redistricting happens at the beginning of the decade.

And absent some kind of major court order or something else, it doesn't happen mid-decade.

Not only are they doing it mid-decade, but the president of the United States dictating the policy.

Exactly.

It is so, so

abnormal, such a departure from democratic norms, that even if it is quote unquote legal, and I don't know that it is, but maybe let's say it is legal according to the way that the current courts are interpreting things like the Voting Rights Act, that doesn't make it any less objectionable, right?

It's just a different kind of election rigging.

It's less dramatic than overturning the election, but it has the same kind of effect.

You don't need to overturn an election if you predetermine it before anyone's actually cast a ballot.

And that's not all Trump is doing, but I think it's indicative of the steps he's willing to take.

And, you know, I laid out a lot of scenarios in my piece, and I'm curious what you think about these things.

But I'm saying, if the president is willing to use his political capital to force through these kind of things that have never happened before or happened in very rare circumstances, what's going to stop him?

from doing these other kind of things.

When the Supreme Court says ICE can racially profile you, what's going to stop them from trying to put ICE at the polls?

When he deploys the National Guard in L.A.

and D.C., what's going to stop them from trying to then use them as a voter intimidation force?

So I'm not saying all of these things were happening, but the groundwork is being laid for a lot of things to happen in this next election that we've never seen before or only seen in very limited and extraordinary circumstances in American history.

And I want to keep reminding people that Trump is the avatar.

He is the weapon being used now, but it's being wielded by an entire party that has the authority and the voice and the capacity to stop it, but they won't.

And so I think it's so critical.

What you've just laid out is absolutely true and real, but it's not just him.

He's not thinking all of this up.

Trump has,

I do not diminish his intellectual capacity.

or his imagination, but this is an architecture that preceded him and will exist after him.

And so I think it's so critical that we not ascribe to one person what we are watching an entire party actually glom onto.

And that brings me to one of the pieces you talk about is the fact that the Justice Department was in North Carolina, which has been an incubator for Republican voter suppression for years.

Can you talk a bit about what happened there?

Because that, again, is indicative of this broader exercise, but also just how vast this is.

This is more than just one man and one job.

This is an entire apparatus that has a very clear intention.

Yeah.

So let me just give you a little bit of context here, because this is a story that I felt like didn't get enough attention in the last election, which is that a Republican state Supreme Court candidate, Republican Griffin, lost by 735 votes in his state Supreme Court election to a Democrat, Allison Riggs, a former voting rights lawyer who both you and I know quite well.

And what happened was there were two recounts that affirmed the victory of the Democratic candidate.

The state board of election was about to certify that election, and then Griffin, the Republican, tried to overturn it.

And unlike Trump in 2020, he was able to convince two Republican-dominated courts in North Carolina, the Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court, to throw out enough ballots to potentially overturn that election.

And it was only when the federal courts and a Trump-nominated judge in the federal courts stepped in that the election was ultimately certified.

And so the Republicans got a lot closer to overturning the election in North Carolina than Trump did in 2020.

I think it's really important for people to understand that, that it was what one voting rights expert called me, told me, was a nonviolent insurrection, right?

It didn't have a January 6th, but it had the same kind of goals.

And so what happens there is that ultimately the Democratic wins, but

the Republicans take over the state and county board of elections, the very people that certify the elections, because the Republican-controlled legislature stripped power from the Democratic governor, another norm-breaking act that was very similar to what Trump is trying to do.

And then now, the Justice Department is involved in litigation to try to remove people from the voter rolls.

Because one of the things that the Republican candidate tried to do is he tried to disenfranchise nearly 100,000 people.

And now the Justice Department is trying to pursue that through different kinds of aims.

And I think we should get used to this because I think what the Justice Department is going to do, weaponized under Trump, is it's going to get involved in these states and it's going to put pressure on them to try to remove people from the voter rolls, to try to enact restrictive policies when it comes to voting rights.

They've already tried to get voter data in more than 20 states.

They have asked for voting equipment, extremely unusual in Missouri and Colorado.

And so the Justice Department has gone from an agency that is trying to uphold the law to really the foot soldiers in the Justice Department's, in the president's voter suppression crusade.

And I think it's one of those examples, Stacey, I know you know this a lot from Georgia, where often we think of the blueprint being written in D.C.

and passed to the states.

But it's this is a case where I think the blueprint was refined in the states and then sent back to Washington.

Absolutely.

I mean, look, Brad Raftenberger, Raftenberger, current Secretary of State, just purged 471,000 voters in Georgia,

including there were on that list when

it was produced, included military folks who, because they had a change of address form but didn't sell their house, were slated for being removed from the roles.

And so, yeah, we have to understand that this is not simply the behavior of one person.

He's not a magician.

Again, I intentionally refuse to give Trump all the credit for the destruction of democracy, especially our elections, because he's not a magician.

Republicans at the state and local levels, at the judiciary, and in Congress, have been active participants in the rise of authoritarianism.

And to your point, if we don't understand that it's not these big cinematic moments, it's these interstitial administrative actions that, when joined together, deny your right to vote.

There is no democracy.

There is no democracy when you don't have the right to vote.

And having made that very aggressive statement, what should people be doing right now to fight for free and fair elections?

And I know you're going to ask me what I think, but I'm going to make you answer it.

So I think first off, we need to get this out of the usual partisan terms and understand that we're fighting for a right, the right to vote, that is fundamental for all Americans, no matter how you cast a ballot.

And people can disagree on who you ultimately vote for, but we should be able to have unanimity that people should be able to cast that vote in the first place.

So I think we first off have to get this out of the normal R versus D fight and understand that we're fighting for something much bigger.

We're not fighting for big D Democratic Party.

We're fighting for small D democracy to continue to exist.

And then we have to rebuild or build new coalitions like we had in 2020, where people said, you know, I might not agree with this person on everything, right?

But I agree that protecting our election system transcends partisan politics.

And that's what we're not seeing enough of right now.

Because

when Trump is

saying to Texas, I want you to gerrymander, saying to Missouri, I want you to gerrymander, telling officials, I want you to remove this person from the roles.

I want you to prosecute this person from voter fraud.

All these people have the power to tell him no.

and they're refusing to do so.

And so we need to change the incentives that there's some kind of accountability for the people that are doing Trump's dirty work and to build, if it's not going to be the same coalition, it has to then be a new coalition.

And I also think that

if the traditional

parts of accountability are being foreclosed, right?

Then you have to find different ways to make your voices heard.

And that's where I think protests, mass mobilization, all of those things are really important, particularly to illuminate something that people might not know is going on, right?

Because there are moments where these things break through.

You know, the Texas gerrymandering got a lot of attention.

But generally speaking, most of these things are going to be done quietly, behind the scenes, described in really wonky ways.

And it's not going to illuminate for people exactly what's happening until it might be too late, including until the ICE shows up or the National Guard shows up or something like that.

But

steps have to be taken now

to make sure that we have a free and fair election next November.

You can't just suddenly, I don't know, I can't tell you how many times this happened.

People in October 2026 are like, what can I do?

You know, it's hard to do things a month before the election.

It's a lot easier to do them now.

And so I think we need a mass movement for democracy.

I think we have to make democracy the overriding issue in the country right now.

And I think we have to build new coalitions to make democracy that issue that we can all unite on, regardless of what personal disagreements or ideological disagreements we might otherwise have.

Ari Berman, thank you so much for being here once again.

You didn't tell me what you were going to do.

You didn't tell me what you were going to do.

We can't end it there, Stacey.

Okay.

Well, so I'm actually leading, we launched today the 10 Steps campaign because I agree with you completely.

And the 10 steps include we've got to commit to believing that we have the right to a democracy.

We have to share this information.

I think you articulated the core of it so perfectly.

This is not about the dramatic moments we remember seeing in movie and television.

It's not military juntas.

It's administrative barriers.

It's making it not that you have to have voter ID, but that the voter ID is impossible to secure because the paperwork that's required is not accessible.

It's what they did to Native Americans in North Dakota when they changed the rules to say you have to have an address on your ID, but the state doesn't have to give you the address.

And so we have to stop looking for the big dramatic moments and start watching the bureaucratic efforts.

And we've got to call them out every single time.

But to your point, this is not about Big D Democrats.

I am a Democrat, yes, but you and I got to know each other because part of my work was fighting for democracy small D, including helping Republicans who had to run a single election in Georgia three times because small D democracy failed them.

We decide who wins in the ballot box, but we have to make certain everyone gets to show up there to make that decision.

And so, yes, democracy has to be our primary objective because it is what guarantees every other societal good that we have in this nation that we count on.

Very well said, as usual.

All right, Vermin, my friend,

voting rights expert.

I know they usually condition it with journalists or something else, but I would say voting rights expert and really, really good American.

Thank you so much for being here on Assembly Required.

Thanks so much, Stacey.

Always great to see you.

Today's episode tackled multiple issues, but these challenges are not insurmountable.

We are building what we require.

Our job now is to scale up what we're already doing, do more of what we need, and refuse to be distracted or deterred.

So, this week, we're going to be curious by visiting 10stepscampaign.org to learn more about the 10 Steps Campaign and how you can help your friends, family, and community recognize, recognize, activate, and build.

Also, I encourage you to be curious by following the organization FairCount and signing up for their newsletter at faircount.org.

Learn how you can prepare for the 2030 census and why it's crucial that we get a fair and accurate count to protect democracy.

To learn more about voter suppression efforts and how you can get involved in the fight to protect our rights, visit fairfight.com.

To solve problems, I want you to pick one of the 10 10 steps to freedom and power and make it your mission for the week.

And to do good, reach out to someone feeling lost and share what you learned here today.

We must grow our confidence by growing our numbers.

As always, if you like what you hear, be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all your favorite platforms.

And to meet the demands of the algorithms, please rate the show and leave a comment.

You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen listen and learn.

Please also check out my sub stack, Assembly Notes, for more information about what we discussed on the podcast and other tools to help us protect our democracy.

In the next few weeks, we're going to continue talking about the 10 Steps campaign.

I'd love to hear more about what you're going to be doing and what tools and resources would be helpful.

If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Be careful out there and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Pallaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroat, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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