What Next - Trump’s White Whale
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Donald Trump seizes on an idea, he can riff on it nigh infinitely in any direction, which is why his fairly short and contained primetime speech on election security last week seemed so out of character. Why does Trump seem so determined to keep spinning his wheels on the likely-dead SAVE Act? How much damage can he do before the midterm elections this fall?
Guest: Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones.
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Podcast production by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick Fort.
Paige Osburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How did you take in the president's speech last week? The one that purported to reveal |
| 0:11.0 | brand new allegations of election interference. This speech, it had all the trappings of a primetime |
| 0:16.9 | presidential address. It was at 9 o'clock on Thursday. Trump spoke from a lectern between |
| 0:22.1 | a couple of flags. But that's where the normal part ended. Half of the major news networks actually |
| 0:28.5 | refused to carry it live. And when Trump opened his mouth, it became clear why. |
| 0:42.7 | Ari, uh, did you watch Trump's special primetime address last week? |
| 0:46.4 | Unlike most of the major networks, I actually did, yes. |
| 0:50.1 | Ari Berman covers voting rights over at Mother Jones. |
| 0:52.1 | So he kind of had to watch this speech. |
| 0:56.9 | You, however, are listening to a podcast after the speech, so we're going to spare you. |
| 0:59.3 | I mean, you called the speech a dud. |
| 1:01.8 | It was. I mean, it was a total dud. |
| 1:05.9 | If I was going to break down what made this speech a dud, |
| 1:11.1 | I might start with the fact that it was a whole lot of very old and unsupported allegations from the president. And these allegations, they were all backward looking. They weren't about the |
| 1:16.2 | election in 2024 because president won that one. They were about before that in 2020. |
| 1:24.1 | A former FEC official told the New York Times it reminded him of Captain Ahab going after Moby Dick. |
| 1:30.4 | This is. I mean, this is Trump's white whale. It probably will destroy him and it may destroy the entire Republican Party in the process. |
| 1:38.1 | But just the whole thing didn't really make sense, to be honest with you. |
| 1:45.7 | Among the things that did not really make sense were allegations that hundreds of thousands |
| 1:50.7 | of non-citizens were on voting roles. Allegations the Chinese government bought voter information, |
| 1:56.9 | which is not interference at all. There's also something about Venezuela and voting machines. |
| 2:03.1 | Hard to know what that meant. |
... |
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