Transcript of Maddow cracks DOGE mystery as Trump fails again on the eve of the election

Um, and it's going to be important right from the beginning. I mean, Republican Kentucky Congressman Andy Barr is leaving the House to run for Mitch McConnell's Kentucky Senate seat. There is an outside chance, not a certainty by any means, but there is an outside chance that if Democrats are having a really, really, really good night tomorrow night, we might start to see evidence of that as soon as 6:00 p.m. Eastern in that race to replace Andy Barr in Kentucky's sixth district, where Democrat Zach Dembo is trying to flip that seat.

So right from the very beginning, there's going to be stuff to watch. It's going to be a long night. We're not going to know the total number of House seats for each party for weeks. We're not going to know the Alaska Senate results, like, maybe for at least a week. We might not know the Maine Senate result for days and days and days. And we definitely won't know all California's House results for days and days, more likely for weeks. It is going to take a long time to get to all the results, but the first results really are going to start coming in early, which is specifically why we are starting at 6:00 p.m.

Eastern tomorrow, which is why 6:00 p.m. Eastern tomorrow is a good time to plan to have your pizza ordered and your butt in your favorite chair. Election night special coverage and first results starting at 6:00 p.m. Eastern here tomorrow night. Also, you want the longest possible period of watching us to see us physically devolve over the course of the night to the point where we're, like, drooling and misstating our own names by 2:00 a.m. And you really only get the best contrast for that if you start us right at 6:00 when we're fresh.

All right. Um, do you remember that at the start of this presidential term, when Trump got back into the White House for this second term, I came back and did this show five days a week? Remember that? Uh, for the first hundred days that Trump was back in office, I stopped doing just Monday nights, and I did Monday through Friday. I did five days a week for the first hundred days. Well, at the end of that hundred days, on the final night of my 100 days coverage, I did one last show in which I focused in on one thing that these guys had been doing during those first hundred days.

One thing that I couldn't explain. One thing that I thought they seemed unusually focused on without explaining why they were doing it. And so at the end of the hundred days, literally my last night of doing that whole hundred-day stretch, I sort of came clean with you guys here on the air, and I said, basically, you know, hey, I've been here 100 days. I've covered all of this stuff as best I can. I think we all understand a lot now about what they're doing and how they're trying to do it. But there is this one thing that I am flummoxed by.

There is this one thing they have been really unusually focused on that I at least don't understand. I don't know why they're doing it. There is one mystery. Here's what I said at the time. Something that we sort of just, I think, haven't really gotten our heads around yet. Um, and it relates to DOGE and Elon Musk and what he's done in Washington. Um, but it's the sort of black box at the center of whatever he has been doing in Washington. The one thing they are consistently doing, and doing as aggressively as possible, and they haven't given us an explanation for why they're doing it, is that they are aggregating data.

So over the past hundred days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database. The master database will combine data from federal agencies, including Social Security, the IRS, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is a huge data grab from what appears to be every agency in the government. And that really appears to be their only consistent priority. The only thing they are consistently and aggressively doing everywhere they insert themselves. What is that about? Why are they doing that?

Why were they doing that? In the first hundred days, Trump sent his top campaign donor, the richest man in the world, uh, in with his team of interns to go into every agency of the federal government. And they basically wrecked every place they showed up, and they fired people and insulted people and left filth and trash and wreckage behind them. But they really seem to only care about one thing. The one thing they did everywhere, and they did it dutifully and really, like, with a lot of attention and as if it was the most important thing they were there to do.

They grabbed everyone's data. They grabbed every American's data from all of these agencies that they went into. Why were they doing that? Well, it took from the first hundred days until now to get clarity on it, basically. But we now know what probably happened. That was their big idea. That was their big dumb idea about how they were going to screw up the midterm elections.

They took the federal databases, the same data that DOGE stole, right? They Frankensteined this data together into a kind of fake national list under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. And in court, they haven't been willing to say what the origin exactly of that list was. And they haven't been willing to say what their methodology was for creating this list. But this thing they cobbled together. They have tried, basically, to proclaim this to be the new national voter roll, which is a thing we do not have in America.

We don't have a national voter roll because the federal government doesn't run the elections. But they created a sort of Frankenstein fake national voter roll. And the reason we can reasonably surmise that that's what they did is because DOGE got caught doing it in March 2025 using Social Security data to match state voter rolls for the purpose of trying to overturn election results in certain states. That seems to have been the plan all along, right? To insist that the real voter rolls in the states don't matter anymore because there's this new Trump list, this DOGE list, that they made out of, apparently, all the data that they stole from all of those agencies.

And with this fake Frankenstein DOGE list, that's how they'll decide from here on out who's allowed to vote. This new national Frankenstein list was the basis for them announcing in July that there were hundreds of thousands of non-citizens registered to vote in California and Nevada and New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It was the basis for them threatening Nevada's election officials with a whole tidal wave of subpoenas that still hasn't stopped. It was the basis for them threatening California election officials that, uh, maybe it's 190,000 people or maybe it's 20,000 people or maybe we don't really know.

Hard to keep track. But regardless of the number, you should definitely not let tens of thousands of people at least vote in California or else we might lock you up. Well, tonight in this unsigned order, the Supreme Court of the United States put a stop to that and told the Trump administration to leave California alone and know their made-up DOGE list cobbled together from eye of newt and toe of frog cannot replace the actual voter rolls of the state of California.

As the New York Times notes about this, uh, Supreme Court decision tonight, quote, "It came only hours after the administration filed its emergency request and without the court even calling for a response or briefing from the opposing parties." The Times says, quote, "It is nearly unheard of for the court to rule on an application filed by the federal government without first asking for a response from the opposing parties." But we now know this appears to have been the big idea behind DOGE, right?

DOGE didn't actually save any money, right? DOGE didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason beyond, like, pursuing weird internet conspiracy theories about what parts of the federal government they were wantonly destroying. The one big idea that actually seems to have been operative behind the whole insane DOGE thing in the first hundred days was that they wanted to steal all the data from all the federal agencies, including the IRS, including Social Security, including the Health and Human Services Department, all that private sensitive information on every American.

And then apparently they were going to use this information to try to mess up voting in these elections. That appears to have been the big idea. And it has failed in shockingly complete and unequivocal terms. And, you know, I'm no data scientist, but I do know the age-old principle of data management, which is garbage in, garbage out. And this was garbage 100% of the process.

These guys are garbage. The same slovenliness and arrogance and cocky no-nothing nonsense that led the DOGE geniuses to canceling genetic research of all kinds because they couldn't tell the difference between mice being transgenic and mice being transgender. The same slovenliness and arrogance that led these ignorant geniuses to cut Ebola response and to try to sell off America's federal courthouses. The same slovenliness and arrogance that led these geniuses to claim there were people who were 200 years old who were receiving Social Security checks because they don't understand what a birthday is.

That same level of genius which brought you all the supposed great savings of DOGE. Well, that's the proverbial knife they brought to the proverbial gunfight with the American people over whether we're allowed to vote or whether we're allowed to vote to keep our leaders or to check them out. I mean, when these guys wrote to Washington State demanding that Washington State not use their voter rolls and instead use the DOGE Frankenstein list to decide who was going to be allowed to vote in Washington State, the Trump administration's lawyers demanded in their letter that the state needed to bow to its demands before the November 2nd elections.

The what? The elections are on November 3rd. They apparently didn't know that. In the same letter, they demanded action on the state's voter rolls, but they spelled it wrong. They spelled it R-O-L-E-S, like the voters are playing a part in a play or something. When they wrote their threatening letters to counties in California demanding that those counties throw out their voter rolls and substitute this weird DOGE list instead, Trump's genius lawyers sent a list of voters to Mendocino County that included exactly zero voters on it from Mendocino County.

Trump's lawyers sent a list to Inyo County in California that included no one who had been sent a ballot in Inyo County. After humiliating themselves in their attempted attacks on California and Nevada, also with these thousands of false accusations and their own inability to spell one-syllable words, MSNOW's Laura Barone-Lopez reports now that Trump's Justice Department appears to have given up in some of the states they previously targeted.

In the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, those are states where earlier this summer the Trump administration made wild allegations about thousands of things, thousands of names being wrong on those states' voter rolls. But as of today, the Trump administration has decided apparently to not follow that up with any demands that people be disenfranchised or that people's votes be set aside. They had DOGE steal all that data from all those agencies in the first hundred days. They apparently wanted to use that data to mess up the vote everywhere.

They said this summer that they were at least going to use that data to mess up the vote in five states. In California, Nevada, Washington State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They gave up entirely, apparently, in two of those states, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And in the other states, they have thus far been blown back by their own shambolic incompetence. And now tonight, unanimously and instantly, they have been blown back by the United States Supreme Court.

Hasn't worked out for them. When a would-be authoritarian tries to take over a democracy, the way they do it is that they try for something called authoritarian breakthrough. They ascend to power through democratic means. And then once they have attained power and consolidated power, they try to use the power of the state to make sure they can never be ousted, to make sure they and their party can never be pried out of their positions of power.

They're trying for autocratic breakthrough. They're trying to use the power of the state to make sure that elections can never oust them again. But an autocratic breakthrough is not automatic, right? It takes effort. It takes skill. It takes spellcheck. It takes the ability to sound out hard words like roll and to figure out which day on the calendar is Tuesday. It's turning out to be too much to do for these geniuses.

That they cannot set aside 20,000 ballots in California because the DOGE magic eight ball told them those votes shouldn't count. That they cannot set aside the ballots of every vote for a man named Sullivan in Alaska. That they can't block the certification of the Alaska Senate race if their guy doesn't win. I mean, they've been blocked in all of these things. In that Alaska Senate race, you should know in advance, Alaska's counting process by design is intended to be slow and deliberate.

And the administration will presumably try to pretend that that's some kind of scandal, some sort of sign that something's wrong. It's not a sign that something's wrong. Alaska is the most physically far-flung state in the country. Lots of vote comes in by mail. And as long as that vote is postmarked by Election Day, your ballot in Alaska can come in as late as 10 days after Election Day or 15 days if you're mailing in your vote from overseas. In Alaska, if nobody gets 50% of the vote in, say, that Alaska Senate race, then they'll go to the second round of their ranked choice voting system.

They won't even start to do that, though, until 15 days after the election so they can make sure that all the votes that were postmarked by Election Day have been received. Not until 15 days after Election Day. That's not a mistake. It's not suspect. It's not a sign that something's wrong. That is how the voting system works in Alaska. And now we've got two different federal court orders that have blocked the Trump administration from trying to squirrel away some of those votes in that race or from trying to stop that race from being certified.

So they've tried their best, but it's not going to work. Alaskans have been voting in huge numbers. And Alaskans will continue to vote through the close of polls tomorrow. And those votes will count as normal no matter how much the geniuses in the administration would like it to be otherwise. Tonight, we're going to talk here on this show this hour about the worst thing they might try to do, which is to try to seize ballots before those ballots are counted or before vote totals have been certified.

MSNOW reporter Carol Lenning has been talking with sources inside the FBI who say agents are concerned. That's what they're going to be told to do. We're going to talk with Carol about that tonight and about what might happen if they try something that ham-fisted and that third world. But even that, which to me is the worst smash-and-grab, kind of hardest-to-fix thing that they might try, even that is something where it just seems like they didn't really factor in the fact that the rest of us, that the American people don't have to stand for that kind of thing and we can kind of see what they're planning.

Last week, MSNOW reported that one unnamed state attorney general had already contacted the federal district court judges in their state, preemptively requesting to that court that the state be given a right to reply to the court before any search warrant was granted, before any warrant was granted that might allow the FBI or any other federal agency to seize ballots. Tonight, we can report that the governor of the state of California has this weekend also written to the federal district court judges in his state asking the courts to be prepared for the federal government to seek warrants to try to seize ballots, advising the court that there's no legitimate law enforcement reason to grant any such warrant.

Tonight, we can further report that a third state has also made contact with federal district court judges to clarify the exact logistics for the state to seek emergency relief, to seek legitimate emergency immediate relief from the federal courts, even outside of normal business hours, which, of course, would be helpful to have if federal agents tried to seize ballots. The prospect of autocratic breakthrough, the prospect of a strongman using the power of the government to try to make sure that he and his party can never be removed from power, it is a super scary prospect, right?

It is a scary prospect if you imagine that the people carrying it out can spell poll or can count to three. But in our case, that's not what we've got. And in our case, we've got every normal election official in the country, even the Republican ones. We've got every normal voter in the country, even the Republican ones. We've got every normal law enforcement official in the country expecting and demanding and now taking every step, even preemptively, to make sure these elections are normal and free and fair and no one messes with them.

And that is up against a DOGE clown show holding a press conference today at the reflecting pool because algae or whatever. The early vote numbers this year are breaking records in almost every state in the country. The African-American vote, particularly in the U.S. South, looks stronger than at any time since Barack Obama was on the ballot for president of the United States. The elections of this country belong to the people of this country.

And they will be safeguarded by us and by public officials who take their work seriously and who know what they're doing and who, by now, have total clarity, as we all do, on the vindictive, ignorant, misspelled, hair-brained, slovenly, cocky incompetence of those acting on the president's behalf who thought they would shut these elections down. It's election eve.

More than 57 million votes are already cast. Whatever they thought they were going to do to mess with these elections, we can now say it. They were mistaken. They were wrong. We got this. Let's do it.

The assault follows comments by Trump playing down the possibility of a return to war with Iran after tomorrow's midterm elections. Trump told reporters today, quote, "We had a war with Iran. We won. I don't know if you even call it a war because we haven't been doing any fighting for months." On this election eve, it may be important to prepare ourselves for what happens alongside the election and for what comes next after the election results are in. We have to prepare ourselves for what happens after this president faces what is likely to be the last real check by voters of his presidency ever.

On that point, here's David Remnick in the New Yorker magazine under the headline Making Waves. He writes, "Because Trump is simultaneously an autocrat and a performance artist, because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it's difficult to reckon with the idea that a president might not be merely shambolic and incompetent, but something far darker, even evil." Quote, "After a decade defined by Donald Trump's unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears now to recognize the uniqueness of this president and the mayhem he's instigated from the Oval Office.

We are collectively on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage." A decade ago, those who believed that Trump's ascent represented a grave and multifaceted danger, a national emergency, were often met with sneering dismissal. Even on the left, some insisted that those who thought of Trump as aberrant and sought nightly salvation in a tankard of Chardonnay and the Rachel Maddow show ignored America's complicated legacy.

Was Trump really so much worse than his predecessors? You know, the tankard is an underrated vessel for wine. I think it really lets it breathe.

So let's all stipulate that. But let's all stipulate that people very quickly got comfortable with the idea of Trump as president. I hate that overused word, but normalized it because you have to psychology. You know, we'd see him do something semi-normal and everybody would get on cable television and talk about, "This is the night that Donald Trump became president," you know, that he's finally grown into this office. But, you know, we now watch him and we can't believe our eyes, these rants about how he could have won the Vietnam War in a week, how on the eve of an election he goes on about the reflecting pool.

This is just ordinary fare. We don't even bother televising it half the time. On election eve, he starts bombing in the Persian Gulf again. Yes, everybody's used to this. But I do think, finally, and the results we'll have to see tomorrow, I don't want to get too far ahead, that a lot of people, except for the hardcore, you know, diamond-hard MAGA base, have just said, "No, I'm out. I'm out." They watched what happened with DOGE, as you led the show with.

Some of them recognized just how many people's lives were lost because of eliminating so many government agencies that did real work in public health around the world. This and this and this and this. And they finally just said, "We can't do this." So now you have the possibility, the possibility of real inroads and a severe defeat for Donald Trump. Let it be so.

We are not so what this experience has proved to us already, many times over, is that we are not so exceptional that we are immune to these kinds of viruses. We are deeply vulnerable.

And it made me think, well, I'm sure that's what these guys call the deep state. But that's what I think a lot of Americans would call law enforcement being cognizant of the threat to their own ethics, to their own standing, and being willing to stand up for each other.

And this is across the board in the government. And one other cautionary note, no matter how the elections go tomorrow, let's say it is a great blue wave, he's still the president for two years.

Meanwhile, our own Carol Lennox has been reporting on grand jury subpoenas that Trump's DOJ has issued now to elections officials in California. These subpoenas direct employees of the LA County Registrar's Office that they must show up to testify in person, bringing with them voluminous documentation demanded in the subpoena, and they need to show up the very morning after the election, when they should be very busy at their day jobs processing millions of California ballots. We've been talking tonight about all the various Trump administration attempts at election meddling that have been blocked.

But these grand jury subpoenas to California election officials, commanding them to appear Wednesday morning, they do appear to be still in force. Joining us now is MS Now senior investigative reporter Carol Lennox. Carol, it's great to see you. Thank you for being here.

And what could that do to denying voters who are actually legitimate voters from voting? If you are afraid that you're supposed to that you're on the hook for something that you don't think you did wrong, but you're not sure what this administration might pull out of its trick bag, will you possibly deny a real voter the chance to vote?

And FBI.

Is that the most aggressive legal defense against that dangerous threat?

And on the lighter side of things, Rachel, there is now like a Schoolhouse Rock style video that's being presented on sorry, I dated myself by saying that.

But I'm always sort of on the lookout for the next George Santos. And here is what I think might be the closest we're going to get this time around. It's the second congressional district in Nevada. Now, since this gigantic district was first drawn in the 1980s, this district in Nevada has always and only been held by a Republican. Literally no Democrat has ever held this seat. There is a Republican member of Congress who currently holds the seat. He is retiring.

His name is Mark Amedei. But in the primary, in the Republican Party in Nevada, Republicans nominated a really exceptional candidate to try to run for Mark Amedei's seat. They picked a retired Air Force officer. He has made his military record absolutely central to his campaign. But that has become a real problem for him because he now admits that he has repeatedly exaggerated the story he tells publicly about earning a bronze star in the military.

There are two kinds of bronze stars. One recognizes service, the other recognizes valor in combat. This candidate, his name is David Flippo, because why not? Mr. Flippo, he won the first kind of bronze star, the one that's just for your service. But he has claimed repeatedly and incorrectly that he won the second kind of bronze star, that he won the one for valor. That is a very rare, very prestigious military honor that recognizes valor in combat.

His campaign called it an honest mistake by his staff. Mr. Flippo at one point blamed his grandchildren, saying it was his grandchildren who put the wrong military V for Valor insignia on a hat that he has been wearing on the campaign trail. Really? Blaming your grandkids? Mr. Flippo has also repeatedly claimed to have served during Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s. He says that during his he has said that during his military service, he was, quote, "in the desert" in 1991.

The problem being that during Operation Desert Storm, David Flippo was in the student union. He was a student at Montana State University, which is a lot of things, but not in the desert. The Republican who currently holds this seat, Mark Amedei, who's retiring, keeps doing interviews where he says David Flippo is a fraud and no one should vote for him under any circumstances. I should tell you that coming up on The Last Word tonight, Lawrence is going to interview David Flippo's Democratic opponent in this race. You will want to see that.

We'll be right back.