American Doom

Justin Glawe
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  • Politics
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I’m Justin Glawe, writer and journalist, and I’ve spent my career chronicling the violence, unrest and chaos of American life. On this podcast, I’ll discuss the events roiling this complex and troubling country, and speak with some of the people trying to make sense of the madness that pervades our world. This is American Doom. www.american-doom.com

  1. 18h ago

    This week's election chaos was a preview

    We’re fighting 10 states for information about the Trump administration’s role in interfering with the midterms. You can help cover those costs with a discounted subscription to Doom for $3.60 a month here. If you appreciate us staying on top of all this chaos, spread the word and choose a paid subscription, or drop a few bucks in the Coffee Fund. Now, on to the news… - jg Last week began with the Georgia State Election Board passing a desperate (and arguably unconstitutional) resolution demanding that the federal government access state election systems. The week ended with a more formal request that the Justice Department and Homeland Security effectively prohibit the use of voting machines and Georgia’s entire election system in November. The State Election Board’s (SEB) actions were largely for show, but they have darker implications for what is coming — widespread attempts by government officials and bodies loyal to Trump and Republicans to overturn November’s election results. The White House has no role in how states conduct their elections under the constitution, but federal law enforcement does have jurisdiction over some aspects of our elections. What the SEB did this week was allege that Georgia is violating federal election law and demand that the government step in. But none of them can be trusted, because officials at the SEB, the DOJ, the DHS and many, many other government bodies across federal, state and local governments now operate as apparatchiks in service of Trump’s dominant wing of the Republican party. The SEB’s actions matter not because they will actually result in the DOJ investigating or prosecuting Georgia election officials — although they might — or that Georgians will actually be prevented from using voting machines, but because of the message it sends. That message is being sent to Americans already primed to believe that elections are full of fraud or who don’t have enough time to understand that, while it may look important that state election officials in Georgia are asking the DOJ to step in, the SEB’s request for federal intervention is not credible because of who runs both the SEB and the DOJ. Here are some facts about who is laying the groundwork for attempts to question or overturn an election in November that Republicans are on pace to lose: * SEB executive director James Mills - A lifelong Republican who has no experience in election administration and has a background as a state legislator and the owner of mini-storage businesses * SEB vice-chair Janelle King - A former Atlanta-area conservative social media personality with no background in election administration, King was appointed to her position by Republicans in Georgia’s legislature. King’s husband recently ran and lost to become Georgia’s next Secretary of State. * SEB board member Salleigh Grubbs - An election denial activist who rose to fame for chasing a truck she incorrectly believed was filled with shredded ballots in the 2020 election, Grubbs has no experience in election administration and was appointed to her position by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was indicted for his role in the fake electors scheme to illegally give Trump Georgia’s electoral college votes in 2020. * SEB board member Carolyn Roddy - Along with Mills, Roddy appears to be the driving force behind this week’s actions. Roddy was appointed to the SEB in July, has no experience in election administration, was an appointee under the first Trump administration, and began her career in politics working for Newt Gingrich. That’s on the SEB side of things. At the Justice Department, offices focused on voting rights and elections have been hollowed out of experienced staff, resulting in things like second-year lawyers representing the government in important cases like Democrats’ lawsuit seeking information about possible plans to seize ballots. One of those offices, the Civil Rights Division, is led by Trump sycophant Harmeet Dhillon, who is helping to lead the charge in the Trump administration’s attempts to amplify the statistically insignificant number of noncitizen voters. Dhillon is almost surely intimately involved what is Trump’s likely plans to seize ballots. At DHS, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made the extraordinary claim this week that his agency is looking into 300,000 cases of noncitizen voting, or noncitizens who are registered to vote — it’s not entirely clear and Mullin hasn’t clarified exactly what he meant by the 300,000 number. Even if 300,000 votes were cast by noncitizens in federal elections since 2020, it would not have had an effect on the outcomes of any of those elections. That’s because 300,000 votes amount to .07% of the roughly 406 million votes cast in those contests. *** What the SEB did this week is attempt to exploit Americans’ somewhat natural belief that the actions of official government bodies are credible. But the SEB and the DOJ, as well as government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, are now overtly political institutions in service of one party, the Republicans, and more to the point, one man, Donald Trump. At no point in the next month and, indeed, until Trump is out of office, can any government agency run by Republicans be taken at its word that it is acting in good faith. It should also be noted why the SEB did what it did this week: If Republicans stood a good chance of winning in November, the apparatchiks at the SEB would not be calling to essentially shut down Georgia’s election systems in order to possibly cast all of the state’s 3-5 million votes by hand — their ultimate goal. But as apparatchiks, they recognize the warning signs of steep losses for their party in November, and are therefore required to do something about it. The same can be said for noncitizen voting claims and prosecutions being amplified by the DOJ and DHS. We are witnessing a Soviet-style, whole-of-government operation aimed at securing power for the Republican party, through claims of election fraud, election lawsuits, attempts at federal intervention, ballot seizures and arrests of election officials and, finally, the parliamentary maneuvers that Republicans will employ in January in an attempt to overturn the election victories of Democrats. And it’s all going to get much worse. *** This week’s developments were a preview of the chaos to come. The credibility that the SEB has lent to claims that Georgia’s election systems and voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation are just part of a much broader threat matrix that Republicans are employing to cast doubt in November’s results. Republican lawyers, public officials across the country, members of the Trump administration and federal law enforcement will use that doubt to try to throw out Democratic votes via mail-in ballot challenges, recount and audit demands and more. This is standard practice in the new, Trumpian era of highly-politicized elections, but the ensuing weeks will see these efforts ramped up to 11. The best way to combat this massive and coordinated effort to overturn the results of November’s elections is to vote for Democrats in such overwhelming numbers that no reasonable person could conclude that Republicans have even a remotely plausible argument that fraud was committed. This is what happened in Hungary, when voters ousted right-wing authoritarian leader Viktor Orban in an unimpeachable landslide. Americans must do the same in this election, or what happened this week will become the norm: Republicans claiming any election they lose was fraudulent, and therefore doesn’t count. *** Doom social: * Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social * TikTok - @americandoom_ * YouTube - @americandoom_ * Instagram - @americandoom_ * Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

  2. 2d ago

    EXCLU: Meet the second-year lawyer defending Trump’s plans to seize ballots

    Things are really heating up. Have you seen all the news this week? If not, take a minute to go back and check out all of our reporting. There’s more coming later today. For now, you know what I’m going to ask: Choose a paid subscription (with a 40 percent discount here) or buy us a coffee to support our work reporting on election interference efforts across the country. You’ll be glad you did because you’ll be supporting reporting that finds troubling stories like this one. Thanks. - jg *** On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond. A federal judge apparently told the DOJ their request was denied, and gave the agency a much tighter deadline. On Monday, the DOJ filed its response to the DNC lawsuit. In non-lawyer terms, the DOJ’s response can be summed up in three words: Go f**k yourself. The DNC had provided several examples that gave background to their demands for information regarding ballot seizures — information that is behind the closed doors of the agency, and that the DNC is trying to obtain via Freedom of Information Act requests. The DNC noted that Donald Trump said in January that he regretted not seizing voting machines in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. Also noted were routine threats of arrests of state and local election officials from members of the Trump administration. Finally, the DNC went into great detail describing the dismissal of “guardrails against ballot seizures,” as the DOJ itself termed the guidelines regarding election investigations that it had removed from its website some time in the last several months. The DOJ didn’t even bother to deny the DNC’s allegation that the agency had purposefully removed the guidance, which for decades has warned agents against “overt criminal investigative matters” like seizing ballots or arresting candidates and officials “until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded.” In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans. That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA. The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered. The response was signed by Devin Iorio, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. (That’s former Fox News host Janine Pirro’s office.) So, I looked Iorio up and quickly found his LinkedIn page. Immediately, I couldn’t help but notice something. *** Sorry but…. That’s a kid, right? This couldn’t be him. So I looked up his bar license. Then, I gave the number a call. He answered. He said he couldn’t comment and apologized if that made him sound rude. It was the most polite “no comment” I’ve had in my life. But I had to confirm it was him. Yes, he just graduated from law school two years ago, he told me. And how long had he been at the DOJ? Within the last month, he said. Here’s our full conversation. Iorio has a pretty impressive resume for someone his age. He has interned at the DOJ before, as well as the SEC. He also served as a law clerk in D.C. Superior Court and U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell, according to his LinkedIn. But he’s only been out of law school for two years, and the DNC’s lawsuit contains very serious allegations on a very serious matter. If the agency follows Trump’s orders and seizes ballots or voting machines in November, it would be the first time in American history that the federal government intervened so forcefully in an election. Is that the type of case you send a second-year law school grad out to? It’s not just that case but more than a dozen others. Iorio is listed as an attorney of record on about 20 lawsuits that have been filed since the start of the second Trump administration — litigation that also deals with very serious matters like national security, the environment, prosecutorial misconduct, and more. Devin Iorio, the baby-faced recent law school grad, is now indeed the attorney tasked with fighting the DNC’s attempt to find out whether Donald Trump will seize ballots in the most unprecedented federal election intervention in U.S. history. This story is another example of a story that you’ll only find here at American Doom. If you appreciate our aggressive, adversarial reporting, support us with a paid subscription. *** For the past two years, I’ve heard rumblings of major problems inside the Justice Department. They began back when I was reporting on DOGE’s ravaging of the Social Security Administration for Rolling Stone. At some point in the course of my reporting I recall speaking to a high-ranking Democratic election official in the South who told that the DOJ had tried to coax one of their lawyers to Washington. The lawyer, who had previously worked for the ACLU, was being recruited by a DOJ office focused on elections, probably the Civil Rights Division. The election official chuckled as they recalled the story: Here was Trump’s DOJ, which was already well on its way to perverting the mission of the Civil Rights Division to focus on voter suppression instead of voting rights, for some strange reason recruiting their natural enemy: an ACLU lawyer. The anecdote told me two things: One, the rumors about the DOJ being emptied out from the inside as competent, experienced lawyers left under pressure to pursue bogus, politically-motivated investigations, was true. And two, the Trump sycophants who were left had no idea what they were doing. They couldn’t even do basic homework on prospective staff to weed out folks like former ACLU lawyers who wouldn’t take a job in the Trump DOJ if their life depended on it. In the time since that conversation there has been much reporting on the exodus at the DOJ and other massive government agencies, and how the people who have filled those empty desks are either incompetent, Trump sycophants, hyper-online conservative social media addicts, or all three. I don’t know hat category, if any, Iorio falls into. But I bet he’ll never answer a call from a phone number with a Peoria, Illinois area code ever again. *** Doom social: * Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social * TikTok - @americandoom_ * YouTube - @americandoom_ * Instagram - @americandoom_ * Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

  3. 3d ago

    More proof of ballot seizures, support for troops at the polls

    I’ve got some information you won’t find anywhere else today a DOJ lawyer fresh out of law school who is fighting for Trump on election interference efforts. Also, many signs are pointing to ballot seizures and arrests of election officials as a major part of the Trump administration’s game plan to interfere in the November elections, which I also reported today at Zeteo. More on that below. Finally, we’re fighting states to release information about their contact with the Justice Department and Homeland Security regarding Trump’s election interference. We’ll have to pay for those records, so I’m asking for your help to cover the costs. Get a 40 percent discount on Doom subscriptions — $3.60 a month — or drop a few dollars in our Coffee Fund to help out. Now, on to the news… -jg It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump and his underlings at the departments of Justice and Homeland Security plan to seize ballots in November. Both the DOJ and DHS are spending an inordinate amount of time and resources to hunt down an insignificant number of noncitizens who have voted in recent elections. Finding these cases won’t fix the problem of the extremely rare occurrences of noncitizen voting, but removing suspected noncitizen voters from voter rolls could alleviate the issue, as conservative groups have argued for years. But states are prohibited from federal law from removing the many thousands of people who the Trump administration says are improperly registered to vote, or who have allegedly voted illegally. That’s because, since early August, we’ve been in what’s known as the 90-day “quiet period” of the National Voter Registration Act. The law prohibits states from removing voters — even those who are ineligible — from voter rolls within 90 days of an election. So, if states can’t legally remove these voters, why is the Trump administration pursuing these cases so aggressively, while also threatening to arrest election officials if any noncitizens are found on voter rolls? Because the Justice Department is likely planning to use claims of noncitizens on voter rolls as probable cause in affidavits asking judges for search warrants to seize ballots. The Democratic National Committee has filed a lawsuit to try to get to the bottom of the Trump administration’s plans to seize ballots. In the DOJ’s response on Monday, a 2024 law school graduate who was hired by the DOJ within the last month completely dismissed every question and allegations regarding plans to seize ballots. The attorney, Devin Iorio, claimed that guidance that is missing from the DOJ’s website advising attorneys to not actively interfere in ongoing elections, which is part of the DNC’s lawsuit, is not pertinent to the DNC’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act for records related to ballot seizures. Iorio asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit entirely. The DNC has yet to respond. American Doom reached out to Iorio and spoke briefly to him. He declined to comment on plans to seize ballots, deferring to this 13 page filing on Monday. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I do believe I’m going to have to refer you to the response itself because that’s office policy,” Iorio said. Even if the DOJ doesn’t use claims of noncitizen voting as pretext to seize ballots, the Trump administration, in coordination with groups like the Republican National Committee and America First Legal, will surely file scores of lawsuits challenging election results. We saw this in 2024 — the RNC and aligned election denial groups like America First and the Public Interest Legal Foundation filed dozens of specious lawsuits over noncitizen voters and other ineligibility claims related to voter rolls. We’ll likely see that again, in addition to the many lawsuits that are likely to result from the RNC’s plans to train poll watchers to grab information from voting machines. CNN reports that those plans include photographing serial numbers and other information on voting machines — which is illegal in many states — in order to challenge the security of those machines in lawsuits. The next month will be chaos and include the following: * Much, much more amplification from the DOJ and DHS of the scant number of arrests of noncitizens who have voted in recent elections. * More attempts from election denial officials like those at the Georgia State Election Board to coordinate with the Trump administration in interfering with and challenging the validity of elections. * Lawsuits and fear-mongering over voting machines — on Wednesday DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, made strange and troubling comments about his agency’s apparent monitoring of issues related to voting machines. Reminder: executive branch agencies like DHS have no role in elections that the constitution dictates must be run by the states. * A possible Supreme Court decision that would allow for last-minute voter purges of tens of thousands of (likely Latino) voters. * Further calls for troops or federal law enforcement at the polls as the Trump administration attempts to claim that U.S. elections are beset with widespread fraud. *** With the RNC attempting to deploy thousands of poll monitors to aid in election challenge lawsuits, the Justice Department will also send its own observers. One of those observers may be David Michael Levin, a Florida lawyer who was arrested and pleaded guilty for hacking into state and county election websites in 2016 as part of a bizarre attempt to “advance” the campaign of a candidate for local election supervisor. It’s quite the promotion for Levin, who was spotted in Minneapolis in August while the Justice Department monitored primaries there. Prior to joining the DOJ, Levin was apparently making a living as a conservative social media influencer under the persona of “Dave the Lawyer,” where he hawked products like organic beef jerky and cures for low testosterone from a brand called “Barlowe’s Herbal Elixirs.” “Barlowe’s probably saved my marriage…” Levin posted in July 2025, apparently referencing his issues with low testosterone. “And let’s just say, Mrs. Dave the Lawyer noticed,” Levin said in a video for the elixirs. “You know what they say, ‘Happy wife, happy life.’” It’s not clear what experience Levin has that would be applicable to being a DOJ election observer. He does not appear to hold an active law license in Florida, American Doom found. If you appreciate the digging we’ve done on Levin and other election deniers, plus staying on top of election interference developments, support our work with a paid subscription. Levin is a near-perfect example of what has happened to federal law enforcement during the second Trump administration. Agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security have become official government arms of the extremist right-wing groups who have pushed harsher policies in the areas of election administration and voting rights, and immigration. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been especially hard hit, and is now a de facto government arm of the election denial movement. Some 300 attorneys have left under the leadership of Harmeet Dhillon, who has perverted the division’s mission to focus on white grievance claims of reverse racism, especially in higher education, and hunting for noncitizen voters. That’s in contrast with the office’s mission since its founding: protect the rights of minorities at the polls, in education, and in the workforce. Homeland Security, now a de facto paramilitary force for right-wing anti-immigrant groups, has also been dragged into the Trump administration’s growing hunt for noncitizen voters and proof of nonexistent widespread election fraud. Hundreds of DHS agents have been reassigned to work on election fraud cases, as ProPublica has reported. Whether at the Civil Rights Division or other DOJ offices, or DHS, everyone working on election fraud investigations is being directed from the top — Trump, Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller at the White House, Reuters reports. *** The DOJ and DHS are touting recent arrests of noncitizens who have allegedly voted in recent elections, but the numbers are scant. Since the start of the second Trump administration’s this whole-of-government effort to stamp out the supposed scourge of noncitizen voting has resulted in less than 200 arrests. The arrests have comes as the DOJ and DHS have made spectacular claims in virtually every state about the number of noncitizens registered to vote, which are often completely incorrect. It’s possible that the growing clamor over noncitizen voting is not meant to actually solve the problem by removing ineligible voters from rolls, but instead to lay the groundwork to seize ballots, arrest election officials, and challenge election results based on these cases. Meanwhile, Latino groups remain on alert about the prospect of ICE agents at polling locations in November. Mullin and others have refused to rule out the possibility of deploying ICE or the National Guard to the polls. Here in Georgia, two candidates have expressed their support for the completely unprecedented move to deploy federal law enforcement or active duty military to polling locations — such a development would mark a first in American history. U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican running to replace Sen. Jon Ossoff, and Rick Jackson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, are not just unconcerned by the remarkable federal overreach that the Trump administration refuses to rule out, but are supportive of it. In August, Jackson responded to a town hall question by assuring voters that “we’ll get the National Guard,” saying that current Gov. Brian Kemp “is going to watch it for us.” Jackson never fully clarified what he meant by tying Kemp to the possible presence of the Guard at polls in November. Last week, Collins r

  4. 5d ago

    Georgia tries to give Feds access to voting machines

    The Georgia State Election Board is trying to give the DOJ and DHS access to our election systems. Simultaneously, the board is charging me $134 for communications between Republican board members and those two agencies. Help me pay these costs with a discounted subscription to American Doom for $3.60 a month, or by dropping a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. Key points: * The MAGA-dominated Georgia State Election Board passed a resolution that likely has no legal authority to allow the Justice Department and Homeland Security unfettered access to the state’s voting machines and election systems. * Republicans on the board did this to enable the Trump administration to hunt for technical errors or other minor problems that will allow Trump to claim that the November elections were stolen from Republicans. * The move represents a new front in Republican efforts to insert control over elections by the federal government and Trump himself, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. *** The Georgia State Election Board took the unprecedented step today of attempting to give the Trump administration access to Georgia’s voting machines and election systems — a resolution that is likely to be ignored by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. In a 3-2 vote carried by the MAGA majority of board members, the board passed a resolution that would give the departments of Justice and Homeland Security access to servers and hard drives in Georgia’s voting machines and election systems. The resolution was passed under the guise of election integrity — Republican board members and election skeptics claim that Georgia’s voting machines have not been properly maintained with software updates. Election denial forces in the state argue that the lack of updates has made Georgia’s voting machines vulnerable to manipulation, a contentious accusation that Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly rebuffed. But the real impetus behind Monday’s resolution is to grant federal law enforcement access to Georgia’s election system so that those agencies can go on a “phishing expedition” as part of Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive hunt for proof of widespread voter fraud, according to a state election official with knowledge of the matter. Trump’s manic quest to prove widespread voter fraud is simply an effort to sow doubt in the November midterm elections, which Republicans are on pace to lose. Across the country, the DOJ and DHS have been threatening to arrest election officials from both parties for refusing to hand over voter rolls and remove tens of thousands of voters that the agencies questionably claim are ineligible to vote. In January, the FBI seized thousands of Fulton County, Georgia ballots from the 2020 election in order to prove Trump’s bogus fraud claims. The Justice Department and Homeland Security have also ramped up claims of noncitizen voting, arresting 16 people across the country who allegedly voted in presidential elections in recent years, and claiming that the agencies are pursuing hundreds of thousands of similar cases. In Nevada, DHS claimed it had found 185 noncitizens registered to vote on the state’s voter rolls only to have state election officials point out that all 185 people were citizens. It’s part of a pattern of DHS inflating numbers of noncitizens registered to vote as part of Trump’s efforts to sow doubt in the midterms. Monday’s resolution will almost surely be ignored by Raffensperger, the source with knowledge of the matter told American Doom. That’s because the State Election Board has no power to tell Raffensperger’s office how to conduct elections, or who is able to access voting machines and election systems. Additionally, there is the plain text of the constitution, which does not grant federal law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department or Homeland Security any role in election administration. Instead, those agencies have jurisdiction over investigations into election crimes, which the State Election Board does not allege have been committed. “I think this is a ‘Please pay attention to us, we can help you kind of thing,’” the source said. Under Trump, federal law enforcement is most certainly paying attention. Hundreds of agents within Homeland Security have been reassigned to hunt for noncitizen voters. Hundreds of lawyers have left the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has jurisdiction over election crimes, in protest of the Trump administration’s demands to find nonexistent widespread election fraud. The three Republicans on the State Election Board, which has been dominated by MAGA diehards for years, claimed that a “patch” of software on Georgia’s election systems could be updated in time for the November election, a claim that Democratic board member Sara Tindal-Ghazal said was “impossible.” “It is not a patch. It is an entirely new software system that would have to be loaded on, and it literally takes months,” Tindal-Ghazal said. “So what you are calling for is impossible to do before the midterm elections.” Republicans on the State Election Board did not respond to request for comment. For more than a year, American Doom has pressed GOP board members on their communications with Trump administration officials as well as the Justice Department. There has been no response. Carolyn Roddy, the board’s newest Republican who was appointed to her position by the Georgia GOP in July, said the purpose of the resolution “is to seek support from federal partners.” Congress is the only branch of the federal government that has any role in election administration under the constitution — not federal law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security, which fall under the executive branch. “The Times, Places and Manner of Holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators,” Article I, Section 4 of the constitution dictates. Republican board member Janelle King, who last year bragged of her contact with DOJ officials in spreading exaggerated or outright false fraud claims in Georgia, noted that Trump had mentioned vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election systems. “For God’s sake our own president said that they found vulnerabilities,” King said. “No matter who is in office, I do not support federal intervention in state-run elections,” Tindal-Ghazal replied, noting that the constitution does not allow for federal involvement in elections, other than Congress. Roddy and her Republican colleagues dismissed or ignored concerns over the constitutional limits of the federal government’s involvement in elections. “I’m not asking the DOJ to come in and tell the state how to run their elections, what we’re asking the DOJ to do is to come in and support us in nudging our Secretary of State’s office, who is overseeing federal elections as well, to do their job,” King said. The word “nudging” does not appear in the constitution. *** Doom social: * Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social * TikTok - @americandoom_ * YouTube - @americandoom_ * Instagram - @americandoom_ * Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

  5. 6d ago

    The political toxicity of Trump in November is becoming too obvious to ignore

    *** Through Election Day I’m offering a 40 percent discount on all Doom subscriptions. Access the discount here. We need your support to pay for records from 10 states that will shed light on Trump’s election interference. The clues to this interference abound, but our records request will expose more. That’ll cost money, though. Your dollars will directly fund those efforts. *** Americans hate data centers but Donald Trump tells them they’re “backwards and poor” for opposing them. Democrats like Zohran Mamdani are an existential threat to the nation, Trump says, but he glad-hands with him in front of the cameras. Democrats running for Congress are “crazy” “radical” “lunatics” who are completely out of touch with the average American. Meanwhile, most of those Democrats are spending their time talking about the cost of groceries, gas, and healthcare. The economy is both somehow booming but Trump and Republicans will also bring costs down. Which is it? No one seems to know. Across the country and in Trump’s constant appearances on every platform imaginable — does this guy ever work, by the way? — Republicans are desperately trying to coalesce around a messaging platform of “we’ve done everything right so vote for us or else the bad, crazy Democrats will take it all away.” Trump, meanwhile, dismisses Americans’ concerns about the economy and data centers, spends more and more money on vanity projects, seems to be completely uninterested in ending the war he started in Iran, meets with Mamdani, starts trade wars with allies, and is now picking a fight with the White House press corps, something that even many Republican voters simply do not care about. None of this is helping Republicans’ chances in November. Democrats continue to lead generic ballot polls from every major pollster. Greg Abbott is now in danger, per the latest polls, of losing the governorship in Texas. Also in Texas, James Talarico continues his path to an upset over Ken Paxton to become the state’s first Democratic senator in 38 years. Abdul El Sayed maintains his narrow chance at an upset in Michigan. At least one poll has Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon tied in her race for one of Florida’s seats in the Senate. Republicans are in trouble, but their blind allegiance to Trump requires them to ignore the danger signs. Some have begun to distance themselves from Trump, but many more are clinging to the sinking ship. The first major problem with Republican messaging less than 40 days ahead of the election is its fundamental incoherence: things are going very well, but also anything that’s going badly — like inflation and the economy — is Biden’s fault. Telling Americans that the high prices they’re feeling with their own wallets simply aren’t real doesn’t seem like a particularly good messaging strategy considering the decline of consumer sentiment. Blaming rising prices on Biden might work for some, but not all. Appearing on Fox Business on Tuesday, RNC chair Joe Gruters was asked why recent polling from Fox shows voters preferring Democrats over Republicans on the economy. “Voters have a short memory,” Gruters said, claiming that “under Biden,” “gas prices were higher than they are now.” Sure, but that was then. While it might make some highly-motivated members of the Republican base feel better to hear that gas prices were technically higher (for a brief time) under Biden, it does nothing to motivate voters who are dealing with those prices now — under Trump. And that includes a record high on diesel that will probably continue to rise. So, Trump and Republicans ignore reality or blame Biden for it at their own peril. The president is polling at historic lows and those numbers continuing to drop. Democrats are polling higher than Republicans even on issues that used to be in the GOP’s wheelhouse — national security and the economy. Trump has said he wants Americans to imagine that he is on the ballot in November. Democrats would very much like that, too. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Republicans don’t really have a plan and everything is sort of a mess because they have to do what Donald Trump decides on a whim each day. Help us fund public records requests to expose election interference efforts. Click below to get Doom for $3.60 a month, a 40 percent discount. Mixed messaging, desperate spending At the “Midterms Convention” in Dallas, Trump called Democrats “the most extreme and dangerous group of candidates for the House and Senate ever to seek office.” “In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals,” Trump went on. “They call themselves Democrat socialists, but actually they’re communists.” Among these radicals is Mamdani, who Trump called “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Why, then, in the midst of a campaign that Trump and Republicans have billed as a fight for the survival of the nation, did Trump politely defer to Mamdani during their appearance together last week? Part of the reason is Trump’s fragile ego, which requires him to suck up to anyone who remotely looks like a winner. The other reason for this strategic misstep is that, just like their stewardship of the U.S. government, Trump and Republicans don’t really have a plan other than that they would like to be in power so they can hurt people. Clearly, though, they don’t think they can win votes on the merits of their own policies. Vice President JD Vance said as much in a private meeting with House Republicans. At the meeting, Vance told Republicans running for re-election to simply mention El Sayed if their opponent wasn’t an outright radical, as Vance clearly believes El Sayed is. In response, El Sayed didn’t take the bait. “If the whole Republican caucus meeting is not about what we can do to actually make lives better but instead what we can talk about so that we can change the subject from what lives are because of their policies, fine, talk about me,” El Sayed said. “But you know what I’m going to talk about? Gas, groceries, how hard it is to see a doctor, the fact that our kids’ schools still look like they did 30 years ago.” Republicans are now dumping money into congressional races, including Senate contests that they thought they had locked up. They’ve given up in Georgia, refusing to significantly fund Mike Collins’ race against Sen. Jon Ossoff. So, El Sayed isn’t really a radical, as long as Americans can actually hear what he has to say and don’t simply listen to people like Vance. Mamdani must not be that much of a radical, either, if Trump is willing to meet and work with him. But this is just the second part of Republicans’ messaging problems a few weeks from Election Day. Data centers Across the country, Americans of all political stripes are rising up in opposition to data centers. Folks are showing up at local government meetings to oppose the projects, which have benefited from untold billions in tax breaks, are driving up utility costs, and polluting air and water. Much of this is in the service of tech companies trying to make breakthroughs on AI. Faced with this groundswell of real, on-the-ground voter sentiment, Republicans have largely failed to coalesce around consistent messaging over data centers. A handful of Republicans running for Congress have publicly opposed data centers. In Texas, Abbott finally succumbed to public pressure and halted permits for data centers, part of a growing trend of public opposition actually stopping the projects from being developed. House Republicans last week passed the initial version of a bill that would effectively protect Americans from paying increased utility rates if data centers are developed in their communities. Still, Republican candidates on the campaign trail can’t get their messaging straight on whether they oppose or support data centers that are increasingly unpopular among their own voters. In Ohio, Jon Husted is getting hammered in attack ads over his support for data centers. In Texas, Paxton talks a big game about his opposition to data centers but as attorney general fought to develop the facilities — and holds millions in investments in the projects, the Lever reported. In Iowa, Rep. Ashley Hinson’s exact position on data centers is unclear. In Alaska, Sen. Dan Sullivan has supported bringing data centers to the state. Last week Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said that data centers use less water than golf courses — risking alienating another key constituency of the GOP. Byron Donalds, running to become Florida’s next governor, has come out in favor of them. He’s also removed references to Trump from his campaign website. Again, this is all very contradictory. Leading the charge against voters’ wishes is Trump himself, who has never met a development project that is opposed by working Americans that he didn’t like. Under the guise of national security, “beating China,” or just plain making the piles of cash that Trump and his tech billionaire buddies think AI is worth, the president has gone whole hog on data centers. Meanwhile, two-thirds of Americans oppose them. In response, Trump calls them poor bumpkins. Costly wars on trade and in Iran Trump’s trade wars and his attacks on Iran aren’t helping the inflation crisis. Both are causing costs to go up. The Federal Reserve has identified tariffs as a significant cause of inflation. Even Trump’s former Treasury Secretary has said that his constant fighting with other countries — including allies like Canada — and his impetuous tariff-levying aren’t good for the U.S. economy But many Republicans blindly stand by Trump. He’s the deal-maker, after all. Except these deals aren’t working out, and Americans know it. Republicans are also on the wrong side of Trump’s war in Iran. Just seven House Republicans and three GOP

  6. Sep 26

    RNC demands Georgia initiate emergency ballot-counting

    *** You won’t find what you’re about to read anywhere else. We’re all over threats to the Midterms here — working sources, following court cases, and filing public records requests to expose interference efforts by Trump and many others. It will cost hundreds of dollars to obtain communications and other material via those records requests. To help cover the cost of these fees, I’m offering a 40 percent discount on all Doom subscriptions — $3.60 a month to support our work holding Trump and Republicans accountable. Access the discount here. *** On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Georgia GOP sent a letter to the State Election Board (SEB). In it, Republicans demanded that the SEB force counties to implement procedures that will cause chaos from now until Election Day, and that could slow the vote-counting process. The RNC is demanding that the SEB implement the rules laid out in the letter at its meeting on Monday. The letter is important not because of the claims it makes about voting system vulnerabilities in Georgia, but because it shows that the national Republican party and its Georgia wing are all-in on claiming that November’s midterms are rife with fraud before a single vote has been cast. Friday’s letter is further evidence that Republicans will point to anything and everything they can in order to cast doubt on the results of an election they are increasingly likely to lose. The dynamic of Republicans claiming fraud in elections that have yet to occur has been going on since the start of the second Trump administration, but those claims are about to reach a fever pitch as we inch closer to Election Day. The RNC and Georgia Republicans point to an AI-enabled test by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy that allowed researchers there to identify who voters voted for in the May primary. Using AI, the researchers were able to combine scans of ballots with other publicly-available voter information to match ballots with the voters who cast them, “thus undoing the secrecy of their cast ballot.” While that may sound troubling on its face, Republicans and SEB board members who have been warning about ballot-matching for months have never explained whether it’s even a reasonable possibility. In fact, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has already ordered counties to remove some voter information that would allow AI-enabled searching to match voters to their ballots. Just like supposed fraud that could occur by using mail-in ballots, the election deniers who hold a majority on the SEB have never shown that anyone has actually used AI to manipulate data in order to commit some form of election fraud. On the issue of matching ballots to voters, the SEB’s MAGA majority have effectively advertised a vulnerability in Georgia’s election system for months now. They’ve done so under the guise of “protecting the secrecy of the ballot,” as board member Salleigh Grubbs often says. But in reality, the three MAGA stalwarts on the board — Grubbs, Janelle King and the newly-appointed Carolyn Roddy — are using the vulnerability exploited by Princeton researchers to call for a complete prohibition of voting machines, and a switch to hand-counted paper ballots. Counting elections by hand would take far longer than using the voting machines that Georgia employs, and it would open the results up to a significantly higher error rate than machines. Not to mention, by forcing counties to count by hand, election deniers like those on the board as well as Republican officials in Georgia and elsewhere could make questionable fraud claims based on the glut of errors that hand counts would present. We don’t have paywalls here, which means we rely on your generosity to fund our independent, adversarial journalism. If you can afford $3.60 a month to subscribe to Doom, you’ll help ensure our reporting reaches those who can’t afford it. While Friday’s letter didn’t go as far as Grubbs and others would have liked — forcing the entire state to count November’s midterm elections by hand — its demands, if implemented, will cause a fair bit of chaos from now until Election Day. The letter demands that the board immediately implement the following policies: * Have poll workers shuffle ballots by hand before scanning them to count votes. Context: The errors this could cause will be used to call results into question. * Publish a report “on the status of ballot secrecy” before early voting begins. Context: Doing so would allow Republicans to raise fear among their voters that their votes could be exposed by unnamed actors, fear that Republicans hope will motivate their unmotivated base to show up in November. * “Seek federal assistance” to upgrade Georgia’s voting machines and other election equipment. Context: Election deniers like those on the SEB want the federal government involved as much as possible so that agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security can lend credibility to exaggerated or outright false fraud claims. You can read the full letter below. The SEB meets on Monday. By then, I’ll have more exclusive information to share about interference efforts here in Georgia. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

  7. Sep 16

    As disasters mount, Trump bribes voters

    A quick rundown today of all that ails Trump and Republicans as they try to make the case to voters to allow them to remain in power in Congress after November. If you appreciate what you see here, please spread the word, choose a paid subscription, or drop a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. Your support directly funds our independent, adversarial journalism. - jg We’re winning the war in Iran — which will be over right after the election. A “great healthcare plan” is right around the corner — forever “two weeks” away, according to Donald Trump. The economy is doing so well that Trump has promised $5,000 checks to every American — as long as they elect Republicans. These are some of the narratives that Trump and Republicans are trying to sell as November inches closer, and as Trump tries to buy votes in the midterms. But the reality of these competing catastrophes is far different than the rosy stories being told in congressional hearings and TV hits from Trump and members of his administration. Here are a few of the disasters brewing as Trump tries to bribe Americans to vote for Republicans, and as Republicans try to convince Americans that everything is someone else’s fault. Iran In Iran, the situation has deteriorated rapidly. Iranian-backed Houthi forces have taken a key island in Yemen, giving them control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the second-most critical maritime shipping chokepoint in the world. Iran also says it has destroyed a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz. These developments come after last week’s violence in the Strait. Last week, Iran attacked 10 ships in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. blew up several Iranian oil tankers, causing oil prices to rise. Then, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq severely damaged a Saudi oil pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, causing it to be shut down for at least the next few weeks, and maybe months. The damage to the pipeline is expected to cause a further spike in oil costs. Also last week, Iranians damaged U.S. fighter jets at a base in Jordan, and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted that Iranian forces “blew the hell” out of a naval base in Bahrain in June. Oil prices The cost of oil is a major problem for Republicans and their working class base. Diesel is now averaging more than $6 a gallon, hurting the truck drivers, farmers, and construction workers who Republicans desperately need to show up in November. Trump is so worried about the cost of diesel fuel on his working class constituents that he has asked Ukraine to stop targeting Russian refineries. With control of Congress and the White House, Trump and Republicans are running out of people to blame for the problems affecting the nation. Having deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the last two years, there are fewer of them to blame. In fact, the surge of immigration agents to major cities have caused job losses — and not just for the immigrants who have been arrested, according to a study released this month by the Brookings Institute. The study found that job losses outpaced arrests in 64 cities targeted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. In a city the size of Atlanta, about 13,000 jobs were lost thanks to the surge of immigration enforcement, the study found. With fewer immigrants to blame, Trump and Republicans can always rely on Joe Biden as a scapegoat for a sluggish economy. But two years into the Trump administration, Trump’s tariffs are more of a factor on inflation than anything left over from the Biden years. Those tariffs “continue to exert upward pressure on consumer prices,” according to the Federal Reserve. ‘The government’ The first months of the Trump administration were dominated by Elon Musk and DOGE slashing 400,000 federal jobs, cutting contracts and government leases, and other efforts to reduce government spending. Now, we know that DOGE can’t account for 96 percent of the $215 billion it says it saved American taxpayers, according to a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office. After the cuts, Trump and Republicans teamed up to run a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025. That debt-accumulation continues apace. The debt The national debt continues to rise under Trump at rates similar to Biden’s term in office — or higher, depending on the next two years’ federal budgets, and crossed the $40 trillion last month under Trump. Trump claims his tariff revenues will help cut down on the deficit. While tariff revenue rose to $264 billion last year, it has since dropped as refunds required by a February Supreme Court decision have cut into the amount, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Meanwhile, the rate of interest on the national debt is outpacing growth in the form of GDP. While the Trump administration claims that economic growth can help to balance this dynamic, the level of growth that would be required hasn’t occurred since the 1990s. Trump’s promised $5,000 checks to Americans — only if Republicans win the midterms, of course — would add $1 trillion to the national debt. That’s a steep price to pay for a single election cycle. *** Doom socials: * Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social * TikTok - @americandoom_ * YouTube - @americandoom_ * Instagram - @americandoom_ * Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

  8. Sep 11

    September 11 and the overlooked war it began

    A quick dispatch today on what I know I’m not alone in thinking about 9/11. If you like what you see here, spread the word and support us with a paid subscription or a contribution to our Coffee Fund. Your dollars fund our independent, adversarial journalism. - jg In my first year in what was once called “the newspaper business,” the city editor of the paper gave me my weekend assignment. I was an intern, and weekend assignments were always pretty bad — some fluff story about a local Boy Scout troop raising money, or a casserole cook-off. It was not the type of stuff a youngish, hungover reporter with a Nelson Algren complex wanted to spend a Saturday writing about. If anyone under the age of 25 is reading this, I know it must make me sound pretty old, but this was only 16 years ago, and this was the way it had been for a long time. So, on one of those warm-but-crisp Midwest autumn mornings, I drove my grumpy, hungover ass out to Canton, Illinois for a September 11 memorial event at a local church. The editor — who I think would call himself a Reagan Republican but was also a committed truth-telling journalist with Hunter Thompson quotes on his wall — had joked with me about the event, which featured a monster truck and dirt bike jumping. “Ask the pastor what dirt bikes have to do with 9/11,” he told me. I thought he was joking. Maybe he was not. At the entrance to the event was a mangled piece of steel from the World Trade Center that, during its demise, had formed into the shape of a cross. People solemnly looked at it as they entered a field near the church. We billed the event as a “unique” 9/11 memorial. I took the pastor’s words about how the historic attacks that had occurred just nine years earlier were part of the reason that Americans should accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and folks who picked up their Sunday paper had a nice little story to read. But the strange and, to me, troublesome blending of church and state — not to mention the religious iconography of what was, again, to me, a horrific tragedy that was nonetheless a historic event that had absolutely nothing to do with God and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy and its impact — was not lost on me. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a terrible, violent shock to Americans. But they did not come completely out of nowhere. And on that day at the church in Canton in 2010, we knew that. By then, we had come to understand why the 9/11 attackers did what they did, as wrong and evil as it was. Many Americans had also created a Christian-nationalist legend out of the attacks — a story that resulted in otherwise reasonable, perhaps more secular people, supporting or accepting a variety of authoritarian themes that continue to shape our society. Out of fear and anger, many Americans — for a time, myself included — went along with the nationalist fervor that followed 9/11, having little or no idea of its grave repercussions. It wasn’t my job that day to explore these haughty topics, so I wrote up something that avoided any of that potential controversy and instead described the scene, got some quotes, and framed the event as one community’s way of remembering the fallen. We used to joke in the newsroom that anniversaries of events only really mattered when there was a five or a zero at the end of them. No one cared about the 59th anniversary of D-Day, for instance. But you better make a big splash on the front page when the 60th rolled around. That muscle memory still resides in me, which is why I’m remembering that day in Canton on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and thinking a bit more about what it means. *** By now, we know that the surveillance state that came in the wake of the attacks has become a daily part of our lives. The expansion of federal government and executive power has grown to a point that it seems there’s no going back. On September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even exist. Now, it’s the largest federal law enforcement agency, with unbelievably sweeping powers to spy on and apprehend citizens and noncitizens alike. Under Trump, the vast powers initially granted to DHS out of our desire to never allow an attack like 9/11 to happen again have reached their inevitable, authoritarian scope. DHS is now a fully-fascist paramilitary organization that answers only to Trump and Christian nationalist forces in our government. Even under Democratic presidents, its power has expanded well beyond its original intent. Left unchecked, the agency will continue to expand its presence in everyday American lives, further threatening the liberties of even native-born men and women. But DHS isn’t the only example of the authoritarian shift in American society. That shift was relatively slow at first and threatened primarily those here from Muslim countries, but has expanded to focus on anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of patriotism that has now expanded to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a white, Christian-nationalist vision of American life. Under Trump, this dynamic has only accelerated. Following 9/11, the nation developed what I call the automatic hero complex. Under this framework, we collectively agreed to grant all first-responders the title and stance of heroes. It didn’t matter whether they were firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center or a paramedic in Peoria. They were heroes. But that designation began to apply more to police than anyone else. With this granting of hero status, we also gave away some of our collective skepticism of the power of police. American law enforcement has used this permission structure to collect more and more funding from cities and states, and more acquire surveillance and investigative powers. Perhaps most obviously — because we can see it with our own eyes in the gear and dress of the average police officer — American law enforcement has become almost absurdly militarized. The attacks of September 11 helped to shift the public’s perception of being a cop, which data shows is less fatal than being a roofer, to men and women who are risking their lives on the frontlines of wars against evil in their own communities. In reality, they’re often just writing traffic tickets. *** The great irony of 9/11 is that what began as a response to a war against us has become our own war against ourselves. Yes, 9/11 has been used as justification for our forever wars across the globe. But twenty-five years on, one of the unavoidable realities of our response to the attacks is that the American right has decided that as much as half the country is fundamentally anti-American for being skeptical or critical of the powers of law enforcement and right-wing government that have grown since that day. Those who question or criticize the American right’s vision for the nation are effectively viewed as enemy combatants in this war. At times, our post-9/11 war against ourselves has mostly been a culture war in which Republicans and conservatives decide who is, at heart, an American and who is not. But increasingly under Republican governments, the war is entering the physical realm, turning hotter. Without a societal shift away from the authoritarianism of the American right — sweeping election wins for moderates, significant policy changes at the national, state and local levels, a rebuke of authoritarian belief systems and behavior at the community level — this war is only going to get hotter, and our decline will accelerate. *** Doom socials: * Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social * TikTok - @americandoom_ * YouTube - @americandoom_ * Instagram - @americandoom_ * Facebook This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.american-doom.com/subscribe

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Ratings & Reviews

5
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5 Ratings

About

I’m Justin Glawe, writer and journalist, and I’ve spent my career chronicling the violence, unrest and chaos of American life. On this podcast, I’ll discuss the events roiling this complex and troubling country, and speak with some of the people trying to make sense of the madness that pervades our world. This is American Doom. www.american-doom.com

Information

  • Creator
    Justin Glawe
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    78
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Justin Glawe
  • Show Website
    American Doom

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