How Trump Could Break the 2026 Elections

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reaction to the racist AI video of Barack and Michelle Obama that was posted and quickly deleted by President Trump’s Truth Social account. He argues that when the president engages in this behavior, it undermines his administration’s other actions that resemble those of a normal presidency.

David is then joined by Stephen Richer, a former Republican county recorder of Maricopa County. They discuss Stephen’s experience navigating Trump’s 2020 election denial, standing up to pressure from the president, and confronting election denialism within his own party. They also examine the Trump administration’s current activities in Georgia and how they could set the stage for more election denialism in 2026.

Finally, David reflects on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the series marks its 250th anniversary. Though the monumental work remains essential to understanding the fall of Rome, David explores how Gibbon’s moralizing of history can lead modern readers to dangerous conclusions.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Stephen Richer, formerly recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, the chief election official in the city of Phoenix in the swing state of Arizona, and we’ll be discussing election integrity and the threats to election integrity—the conspiracy theories and lies that are told about elections past, and that present a threat to the integrity of free and fair elections in 2026.

My book this week is The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I choose because this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of that famous book in February 1776. There are six volumes altogether, the last published in 1788, but February 1776 announces the arrival of this tremendous achievement of historical research and English literary triumph.

Before turning to either the dialogue or the book, I wanna begin with some thoughts about a very upsetting thing that happened over the past few days, and that is the posting on the social-media account of the president of the United States of a scurrilous, racist, insulting, and stupid video about the past president of the United States President Barack Obama and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama.

I’m sure many of you have seen the video or images of it; you know what I’m talking about. You’ve heard the many stories that the Trump White House has told, many contradictory stories about how this came to be. I’m not interested in decoding which of those stories is closest to the truth or furthest from a lie, and I’m not interested in adding my voice, one more condemnation to this offensive and stupid act. The whole country has reverberated with condemnation, which is right and just, and I’ll say I agree. What more can be said?

But there is a deeper thing going on here that does deserve some comment. Race, of course, is the fundamental chasm, a fundamental wound in American society, and moving toward a more just racial constitution of the United States has been the work—oh, well, it’s been a work that you cannot date when it begins and you cannot date when it ends. It goes on and continues to this day. But the society is changing, and a new racial constitution has been coming into being. Right now, about 93 million Americans are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants; that’s almost a third of the country. It’s a different country than it was when the Civil Rights Act was passed or when the affirmative-action programs of the 1970s began to be devised. In the half century since those affirmative-action programs have come to be devised, the racial fabric of America has been reinvented in many ways. And one of the questions that we’re all left [with] in the 2020s is whether these programs of racial restitution continue to make sense in a country that is so different from the country that existed when these programs were put into place.

Now, it has fallen in the Trump administration’s time to respond to these changes. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled, in important decisions, that it is more and more skeptical of programs of racial preference to correct for past racial injustice. In 2023, a pair of cases ruled that preferential treatment of undergraduates seeking admission to colleges is probably almost always illegal. And the Trump administration, in one of its more normal actions, something that you would expect from a more normal kind of government, has followed up, or responded to this, the lead of the Supreme Court, by issuing executive orders rolling back preferential treatment in many areas of employment and hiring. And many American companies have responded by changing their approach to equal opportunity. They’re ending the practice of trying to ameliorate past injustice by having preferences in the present and moving toward an approach that treats all applicants more equally than they have been treated in the recent past.

I must say, I regard this as progress. I think this is the right way to go. I think it’s the only way to go in a country where, as I say, 93 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants to whom America’s tortured racial history was something that happened before their families arrived on these shores, and they don’t understand why their life chances should be abridged or artificially boosted because of something that happened in a past that was not their own familial, personal past. It’s not sustainable in such a country to treat people from certain backgrounds more favorably and people from other backgrounds less favorably. It’s not sustainable, and it will only inflame feelings that are already touchy enough. But the administration that has the job of bringing us to a more perfect union, of restoring more equal treatment, of finding some way forward from the preferential programs of the past, it is absolutely indispensable that such an administration show itself in every respect to be animated by ideals of equal treatment, racial fairness, justice for all.

When the president is acting like some kind of internet troll, some kind of Klansman with access to an AI machine, he discredits everything that his administration is doing that looks like something that another administration might also do. He ratifies every allegation of every critic of that administration, of every critic of the Supreme Court, of every critic of anyone who has ever held out for equal treatment under law by saying, You know what? The president is obviously motivated by racial animus. He’s overseeing these acts of racial profiling by a paramilitary force that is masked and poorly trained and poorly led; and that is apprehending people because they don’t like the way their accent sounds, they don’t like the look of their face, and sending them to prisons, where they’re held without due process for weeks and months; that is sending children under the age of 10 to similar kinds of camps—in every way that this administration tries to prove that it is indeed motivated by the worst, ugliest, most primitive kinds of prejudice. And then it asks Americans to trust it as it dismantles outdated correctives to the prejudices of the past. This isn’t sustainable either.

If you are going to attain equal justice, you have to do it by treating people equally; I believe that. I think the Supreme Court, its decisions on these matters have been broadly correct. I think it’s going in the right direction. And I think that the critiques of past diversity programs, maybe they were not as powerful at the beginning as they are at the end, but by the 2020s, they remain very powerful. And there are 93 million people to whom all of this has to seem oppressive, unfair, and none of their concern. But if we’re going to get from here to there, we can’t be poisoned by the kind of talk that comes off the president’s social-media page and comes from the lips of the people around him. The people who lead the government must be seen to be just for anyone to believe in the justice of what they do.