During her Friday night opening monologue on The Briefing, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki theorized that President Trump was conspiring to “suppress the vote any way that he can.” She cited various loosely-related administration efforts and jumbled them together as proof of Trump attempting to wrongfully sway midterm results.
Psaki first mentioned the DOJ’s announcement to administer election monitors to California and New Jersey as evidence of chicanery: “And some of those counties just happen to be where key Congressional races will take place a year from now, which is definitely not a coincidence. We should see all of this as a trial run.”
Psaki failed to mention that California and New Jersey Republicans requested the monitors.
She admitted election monitoring was not unheard of, but decided the recent news deserved “context,” mainly that of the nationwide redistricting battle:
Trump's allies are trying to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act. Trump is sending military into the streets of American cities, in part to intimidate people from participating in the democratic process. They have been pressuring […] Republican leaders in red states across the country to redo their Congressional maps, to steal back seats.
Democrats couldn’t swallow their own medicine when it came to gerrymandering. Stealing was when you stuff or swipe ballot boxes, which has totally never happened before. And the recent National Guard deployments had nothing to do with any upcoming elections. Duh.
Psaki then relentlessly badgered Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon for their history of questioning past election results. Let’s not forget that Psaki’s own White House Press Secretary successor, Karine Jean-Pierre, was an election denier herself at one point in history.
She also mentioned the Pentagon’s new “rapid response” force, which we knew very little about but wanted to stoke fear anyway.
After connecting all the dots with her rhetorical red twine, Psaki made her ultimate conclusion:
Now, taking all of that together gets easier and easier to imagine that Trump himself is actively considering ways to hold on to power in 2028, or at the very least, that he will abuse his power to help his Republican allies try to stay in office in 2026. These are clearly not the actions of a party that thinks it can rely on the support of voters to stay in power, or their own policies. I mean, when you look at how they are running the country right now, it's like they're not even trying to win over voters.
Assuming the 22nd Amendment wouldn’t be repealed, Trump couldn’t run for a third term. So, why would Trump need to care what voters think anymore? And all of the efforts that Psaki named can be directly connected to populist MAGA support.
But Psaki didn’t want to end the monologue on a downer, and gave her audience a call-to-action, “So, when the President's top allies start encouraging him to ignore the constitution, to hold on to power, when the President is clearly gearing up to suppress the vote in any way that he can, we kind of have to pay attention.”
Suppress the vote? The real threat was the potential for the liberal media to spew enough lies, misinformation, and obfuscation that it could sway voters at the margins and turn states blue in the Electoral College.
The transcript is below. Click "expand" read:
MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki
October 24, 2025
9:01:12 p.m. EST
JEN PSAKI: Okay, okay. In any other political era this is something I would roll my eyes at. I mean, something I'd say, “Let's not spend too much time on it.” And I honestly, I sincerely hope that one day we get back to that world. I think we all do. But since we are living in this era, in this completely messed up moment in time, I think it's important that you hear this from one of the architects of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, his former campaign manager and adviser, Steve Bannon.
[Cuts to video]
STEVE BANNON [on The Economist, 10/23/25]: He's gonna get a third term. So Trump ’28, Trump is gonna be president in ‘28. And people just sort of get accommodated with that.
ZANNY MINTON BEDDOES [on The Economist, 10/23/25]: So, what about the 22nd Amendment?
BANNON [on The Economist, 10/23/25]: There's many different alternatives. At the appropriate time we'll lay out what the plan is. But there's a plan, and President Trump will be the President in ‘28.
[Cuts back to live]
PSAKI: Okay, let's start just with all the caveats. I mean, Steve Bannon says things like that to get attention. He relishes the attention. He spends hours on television — or kind of on his own streaming service every day. He loves the pot stirring. But this isn't really about Steve Bannon. It's actually about his former boss, Donald Trump, and how far he is willing to go when his supporters and former advisers and anyone who's in his ear eggs him on like that.
I mean, let's be perfectly clear here, as that question during that interview alluded to, the Constitution explicitly bars Donald Trump from serving a third term as President. But that has not stopped him from openly musing about it. Hasn't stopped him from falsely claiming there are legitimate ways to do it. And it hasn't stopped him from promoting Trump 2028 merchandise. And not even just to his supporters. I mean, he's definitely doing it to them. Remember when Trump 2028 hats just kind of randomly appeared in the oval office during his meeting with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer of all people? I mean, that happened.
And maybe you think all of that is just trolling. Maybe some of it is. Just Trump trying to get a rise out of his to get a rise out of his critics. After all, it's not what he says that matters, right? It's what he actually does. But when you look at what Donald Trump is actually doing when it comes to our elections, the prospect of Him trying to defy the Constitution to remain in office doesn't seem so hard to believe. And I'm not just talking about his last failed attempt to illegally stay in power on January 6th. I'm talking about things he is doing and his administration is doing right now.
I mean, today, the Justice Department announced that it plans to send election monitors to about a half dozen counties in California and New Jersey to monitor polling sites during their upcoming elections happening just 11 days from now. And some of those counties just happen to be where key Congressional races will take place a year from now, which is definitely not a coincidence. We should see all of this as a trial run. And I'm going to speak with a top election lawyer, who also lives in California, about this later in the show.
Look, election monitoring is something past administrations have done, usually not in off year elections. But let's also just put this in a bit of context. Trump's allies are trying to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act. Trump is sending military into the streets of American cities, in part to intimidate people from participating in the democratic process. They have been pressuring — as we all know, we've been covering this a lot — Republican leaders in red states across the country to redo their Congressional maps, to steal back seats. And, now, Trump wants to put his hand-picked lackeys in charge of monitoring elections.
That's not to mention that the Trump officials, who have been tapped for this election monitoring operation, are these two ladies: Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump's head of the civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, both of whom are election deniers, of course. I mean, in the days after the 2020 election, Pam Bondi, who had already been one of Trump's lawyers during his impeachment trial, sued the state of Pennsylvania, falsely claiming that Trump won the state he actually lost by 80,000 votes.
[Cuts to video]
PAM BONDI [on Fox News, 11/05/2020]: We are still on the ground in Pennsylvania. I'm here right now and we are not going anywhere until they declare that we won Pennsylvania. [Transition] The good residents who are all supporting us in Pennsylvania, their votes don't count by these fake ballots that are coming in late. And back to —
STEVE DOOCY [on Fox News, 11/05/2020]: Pam.
BONDI [on Fox News, 11/05/2020]: — observation, they're not letting us watch the process.
DOOCY [on Fox News, 11/05/2020]: Pam, did you just say, “fake ballots”?
BONDI [on Fox News, 11/05/2020]: There could be. That's the problem.
[Cuts back to live]
PSAKI: Of course, there were not fake ballots. There was no legitimate evidence of fake ballots. But Pam Bondi went out and promoted Trump's conspiracy theory that the election had been stolen. And now Trump is putting her in charge of monitoring polling places. And Trump's other new top election monitor is definitely not any better.
Harmeet Dhillon was also an adviser to Trump's 2020 election campaign, and just like Bondi, she spent that time promoting false election conspiracies. And she even called upon Trump's conservative Supreme Court appointees to put politics over principle and help overturn the results.
[Cuts to video]
HARMEET DHILLON [on Fox Business, 11/05/2020]: While we're waiting for the United States Supreme
Court, which — of which the president has nominated three justices to step in and do something. And, hopefully, Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up.[Cuts back to live]
PSAKI: She then continued to promote those same debunked election conspiracies for years after that.
[Cuts to video]
DHILLON [on Back to the People Podcast, 10/04/2024]: A few unelected bureaucrats, or elected perhaps, changed the outcome of an election in a few counties, and that changes the outcome of the national election. That's what happened in 2020.
[Cuts back to live]
PSAKI: Pure conspiracy theorist right there. Now, she frequently also refers to the Democratic Party as enemies, with some pretty colorful and pretty out-there comparisons.
[Cuts to video]
DHILLON [on Right Side Broadcasting Network, 07/15/2023]: We can identify our enemies by a number of names. You can call them socialists, communists, they've been called maoists at times, critical theorists, postmodernists, post-colonialists, sometimes they're fascists. Some of them call themselves proudly, “Democrats.” But it doesn't matter which name they use because they're all synonyms for Marxism.
[Cuts back to live]
PSAKI: And just listen to how she talks about voting in the very states where she will soon be in charge of monitoring elections.
[Cuts to video]
DHILLON [on Breitbart News, 04/16/2020]: Big states like California, which has over 40 million people, and some other liberal states, and frankly some conservative jurisdictions as well, have done a pretty poor job of making sure that only people entitled to vote are actually voting and eligible to vote in their states.
ALLUM BOKHARI [on Breitbart News, 04/16/2020]: What's a bigger threat, Vladimir Putin interfering in the election or corrupt Democrat officials interfering in the election?
DHILLON [on Breitbart News, 04/16/2020]: Yeah, definitely the latter.
[Cuts back to live]
PSAKI: Donald Trump is giving election deniers, like her, that unprecedented new power over our elections. And Pam Bondi and Harmeet Dhillon are not the only ones in positions of power. Heather Honey is a longtime leader in the election denier movement, and in 2020 she misrepresented voter data to falsely claim Pennsylvania had reported more votes than voters, a lie that Trump, of course, went on to repeat. And after Trump won the 2024 election, Heather Honey argued that he could declare a national emergency to take control of elections from state and local governments. And that recommendation apparently sounded so ingenious to Trump, he appointed her to an election integrity job at the Department of Homeland Security. Likewise, conservative activist Marcy McCarthy spent — spread debunked claims about voting machines in Georgia during the 2020 election. Trump made her the Director of Public Affairs at our nation's top cybersecurity agency.
I mean, these are just some of the people who will have key roles in government during the next election. And each day we get more and more alarming indications about what they might be ready to do. You might remember a few months ago when the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was preparing a rapid response force for crowd control across the country. Well, yesterday, Pete Hegseth did not deny those reports that the Pentagon is indeed preparing that rapid response force ahead of the midterms, saying he could not give, quote, “particulars on something that may be in the planning process.” That's not that comforting.
Now, taking all of that together gets easier and easier to imagine that Trump himself is actively considering ways to hold on to power in 2028, or at the very least, that he will abuse his power to help his Republican allies try to stay in office in 2026. These are clearly not the actions of a party that thinks it can rely on the support of voters to stay in power, or their own policies. I mean, when you look at how they are running the country right now, it's like they're not even trying to win over voters.
They are actively fighting Democrats in Congress over the extension of health care subsidies, which means costs are going to go way up for a lot of people unless something is done. A new analysis from the Washington Post finds that voters who get their health care from the Affordable Care Act marketplace will see their premiums rise by an average of 30 percent if Republicans get their way.
Now, at a time when the cost of living is the number one concern for most voters, they're doing that. We've seen electricity prices rise by nearly 10 percent on Trump's watch. On the verge of a critical election in New Jersey, Trump is canceling a major infrastructure project in that state in order to punish Democrats. On verge of another critical election in the swing state of Virginia, Trump's budget cuts and government shutdown has led to huge lines. You can see them there at Virginia's — at food banks, as Virginia's many federal workers go without pay.
Absolutely nothing they seem to be doing right now seems geared towards winning more voters, winning more people over. You can't really look at a single thing they're doing and think the goal of that policy is to win popular support. So, when the President's top allies start encouraging him to ignore the constitution, to hold on to power, when the President is clearly gearing up to suppress the vote in any way that he can, we kind of have to pay attention. But this country is still a democracy. Elections do still matter. It's going to require clear and decisive victory at the ballot box to prove Americans will not be intimidated by these tactics.
(…)
