President Trump's obsession with elections, elections he's won, an election he lost, but claimed to have won elections he's afraid Republicans may lose is well documented.

There's a great deal of worry among election officials across the country that Trump will use whatever tools he has at his disposal, including most alarmingly, America's intelligence services to create doubt and confusion around the upcoming midterms.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more Jonathan Carl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News and author of Retribution Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America.

Liz Landers is the White House correspondent for PBS Newshour.

Jonathan Lemire is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS Now.

And Michael Shear is a staff writer and a White House correspondent at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

Um, let's talk about this word nationalize.

There's a lot of stuff to unpack here.

What John, what does it mean to nationalize an election.

Well, I, I think for Trump it means to go in there and run the elections in states and localities that he's lost.

I mean, there isn't a, there isn't a great grand strategy here, but he's talking about some sense of a federal takeover of the way the elections are run.

Again, primarily exclusively focusing on places that he lost in 2020, right?

Let's, let's listen to what Trump told former Deputy Director of the FBI and current podcast er Dan Bongino, this week about, about this issue.

The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting and at least many 15 places, the Republicans or the nationalize the voting and we have states that are so crooked and they're counting votes.

We have states that I won that show I didn't win.

So here's a trivia question for all you political nerds.

What does Article 1 Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution say about this issue, please feel free to hit your buzzer at any time.

Michael, yes, it says states run elections.

Ah, interesting.

So and you know, President Trump came in, he issued a bunch of executive orders.

He tried to get rid of male voting.

He tried to change voting machine technology.

He tried to impose voter ID Almost all of that has been thrown out by the courts.

There's some still pending, but it's not going anywhere.

The course I can read the Constitution even if the president can't.

He can't get very far there.

Now what, what we've seen in the last couple of weeks though is something else.

He is using the full powers of the federal government, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, um, and, and other people in the Justice Department to suck up information to try and confirm the debunked theories he has about the 2020 election, 2022 election in the hopes that he might find a spark in all the smoke that's been created by his allies and that's a separate program that's been going forward.

John, I don't want to get all schoolhouse rock here, except that I actually do.

But why, why is it that the state, why isn't the founders, the framers of the Constitution, thought it was important to devolve election supervision to to local authority.

Well, in part to prevent exactly this from someone from a president or some sort of ruler to try to rig the system.

The authorities should be in the states.

That's that the United States of America, it's right at the beginning of a set like that.

And I think there's other interviews where the president has given about this where he's he's highlighted Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta.

What are those?

Those are big blue cities with frankly, majority minority cities, cities that he lost, and he knows where Democrats will do well again.

And Tulsi Gabbard heads there as you know as DNI, suggesting that some sort of foreign interference in American elections.

She made a separate trip to Puerto Rico.

Her team did, looking for it there as well.

And this is President Trump not just trying to relitigate 2 020 but Democrats are afraid this is about 2026, 2028, sowing confusion with the voter rolls, and while also perhaps putting even ICE agents on the streets.

I want, I want to come back to the, the extraordinary image of a director of national intelligence being involved in a in a law enforcement activity in Georgia and also Puerto Rico.

Obviously I want to come back to that in a minute, but I want to stay on this question of how it would even work in Trump's conception.

What, what would it would literally mean federal officials moving into local election boards and supplanting those people like, like Liz, where, where, what would he do in order to create this, uh, what he would think of as a fair election, meaning one that he would be guaranteed a winning.

Well, the White House was asked about this several times this week, and Caroline Levitt said that what the president actually meant was that he was supporting the Save Act, which is now a bill that may get a vote in Congress soon, and this is something that the Republicans are pushing for, and it has some pretty major changes to voting in this country, including voter ID would be required.

There's some changes to some of the other parts of what makes every state vote differently across the country, but the president himself, though, continued to double down on his own statement about nationalizing the election even after she said that's not really what he meant.

He said in the Oval Office later on this week after the Bongino interview, he said a state is an agent for the federal government in elections.

I don't know why the federal government doesn't do them anyways, so say that again.

A state is an agent of the state is an agent for the federal government in elections.

So I think that he does want to see, you know, who never thought that James Mattis.

or Hamilton or really anybody, yeah, I mean, look, the Constitution does say that Congress couldn't have a role.

Uh, what the person that doesn't have a role is the chief executive, is the right, right, right.

The last person to have a role, the last entity that would have a legitimate role is the Act requires rather onerously proof of of not just a photo ID proof of citizenship, and you must do every time you interact with the uh with your registration when you're changing your address, when you're moving any of that stuff, um, but, but, but look, what he wants is he wants to do away with mail-in voting, and he wants Republicans to be uh basically in charge of administering elections, not the federal government.

He wants Republicans to be in charge, so he's actually in his statements he's been using two different.

He's saying I want Republicans in charge and I want nationalized and in his mind they're interchanging they're they're interchangeable.

Liz, I want to just um uh play an interesting exchange that you had with Caroline Levitt, the White House spokes wo man the other day on election questions.

Let's listen to this.

Steve Bannon recently said, quote, We're going to have ice surround the poles come November.

Is that something that the president is considering.

That's not something I've ever heard the president consider.

No guarantee to the American public that ICE will not be around polling locations or voting locations in November.

I can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November.

I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question, but what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ice outside of polling locations.

It's a disingenuous question.

Silly and disingenuous.

I think we would agree that it's a pretty good question.

What, what's the, what's the, what was your reaction to that, to that answer.

It didn't make it sound like ICE is not going to be deployed, right?

I think that that's the takeaway there.

Look, it's not legal to have federal law enforcement agents outside of polling locations.

We have laws and states have individual laws about this as well, how far you can be from a polling and voting location, but we've seen that this administration over and over has tested the bounds of the law on immigration, on a number of issues.

So I asked her this because Steve Bannon is an ally of the president, a former adviser to him.

He has a very large microphone and and for him to be talking about this and sort of putting this into the ether.

I thought it was important to sort of get it on the record with the White House whether or not they're talking about this.

Can I go ahead.

But look, there's a context here which is the Republicans fear major losses coming in the midterm elections.

They've had a series of setbacks.

You had the November losses in, in New Jersey and in Virginia.

You had the uh the loss in Miami.

Uh, you also had just over the weekend, a loss in a state race, statehouse race in Texas where a district that had gone overwhelmingly for Trump was suddenly won by Democrats.

The fear is that we're looking at a at a real blue wave for these midterm elections.

That's the context here.

I think that part of this is trying to intimidate Democratic voters and part of it is laying the groundwork to challenge the election results from midterms.

Go ahead.

There's also real tension over this in the White House.

I mean, I was told this week that after the president came out with those statements, his senior advisers were saying no, nationalizing is not it.

These are people who are working on the investigation in Fulton, you know, working on the other, the the Georgia, the Georgia case who support what Tulsi Gabbards are doing.

But, but nationalizing is not the route to do this.

I think they're going to let him continue to do what he has done now for, you know, 10 years, which is to raise doubts about anything that doesn't go his way and claim fraud and mistakes, but they also know his own advisers know that you know, by if you remember back in, in, in 2020, there were two Senate seats in Georgia that were lost in a runoff because the president said don't trust this vote.

I won in Georgia.

The, the voting lies, and what that meant was Democrats turned out and voted in the runoff, and Republicans did not turn out and vote in the.

So there are also Republican consultants who are very concerned about this test, right?

Let me ask all of you who cover the the White House.

I'm interested in the way Bannon is used as a, well, is he used to float test balloons, or is it less coordinated than that?

Does he, does he put that out in coordination with the president, or does it just happen organically.

I think there's communication, but I think there is a set of uh troublemakers that the president likes to talk to.

I mean, we, we know a lot more names than just Bannon, who mean like the Laura Laurer type, yes, and other people activists in the party, people who, you know, conspiracists around election stuff he talks to, but they are not part of the the internal government process, but there are times where the president will reach out to Steve Bannon and take his, take his advice on things, and Ben, and sometimes the coordination often it's just banning getting going first, but sometimes the president gets there because Bannon has has sort of sort of planted the seeds and and and on this one, it's not just ICE agents.

He's even suggesting the Insurrection Act should be called in November 1st airborne.

He wants to send the 101st Airborne to polling places.

You said that this week.

That's your question next week, I guess, but I have some of the, the, the craziest stuff on this is on Donald Trump's Truth social feed.

It's not even from Steve Bannon or any of the, of the conspiracy theorists.

I mean, as he is sending Tulsi Gabbard, his director of National Intelligence to Fulton County.

We also see on his true social feed, he is posting one of the wackiest conspiracy theories that I ever encountered about 2020, which is that Italian spy satellites were used to flip to hack into voting machines to flip votes, and it even added new elements to this it's an old theory.

It goes back, I wrote about it like 5 years ago, uh, but, but the new elements of these uh uh of the theory is that the Chinese funded it.

The CIA computer big central computer was about it, and the FBI covered it up.

This is on the President of the United States, social media platform.

The vice presidents of Italy right now getting to the bottom of it.

At the very time, how many satellites does Italy have anyway?

I mean, we spent a lot of time talking about Italian satellitenologies.

What I, what I learned in reporting on the last time we dealt with his 2020 stuff, is that he asked his DNI at the time, who was John Radcliffe, the current CIA director, to use the power of the DNI to look into this stuff, and Ratcliffe had to quietly explain to him that, you know, we don't do domestic law.