Sometimes it's difficult to tell if President Trump is just idly musing or giving us an indication that he's about to do something dramatic and unprecedented.

This week, he set off alarm bills by calling for Republicans to nationalize the upcoming elections.

But as all Americans know, or should know, the Constitution mandates that states run elections, not the federal government.

What do Trump's thoughts mean for the 2026 midterms?

We'll talk about this next.

This is Washington Week with the Atlantic.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

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 News Hour.

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

And Michael Shearer is a staff writer and a White House correspondent at the Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

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

I mean, 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 listen to what Trump told former deputy director of the FBI

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