Norm Eisen: Fighting Trump’s Threats to Voting— Plus Protest Success Stories

Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: how protest pushed ICE to abandon most of its warehouse detention center plans, and pressured Georgia Republicans to abandon their redistricting plans – John Nichols will explain. But first: Norm Eisen on election protection. That’s coming up, in a minute.
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Election protection: that seems like our number one challenge in the midterms, more fundamental than the candidates and the campaigns. For that, we turn to Norm Eisen. He’s co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund and Democracy Defenders Action, which work on stopping Trump’s assault on democracy and on protecting elections. Before that, he worked as co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment and trial. 2019 – 2020. Before that, he was Obama’s White House ethics czar, and then Ambassador to the Czech Republic – from 2011-2014 — that’s why we call him “Ambassador Eisen.” He’s written many books, he’s a freqent guest on CNN and MS NOW, and his writing appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and online at his substack The Contrarian. Director Wes Anderson says Eisen was the inspiration for the character of Deputy Kovacs in the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, where he was played by Jeff Goldblum. Ambassador Eisen, welcome to the program.

Norm Eisen: Thank you for having me. Jon. So nice to be with you.

JW: For starters, how many times have you sued Trump since he took office a second time?

NE: Well, if you count everything we’ve done, we have over 300 legal cases and matters. That includes all of our civil litigation, includes all of the criminal defense. It includes all of the work we’ve done filing briefs on behalf of our bipartisan judges group. Like the brief that knocked out the slush fund case. Includes all of our landmark civil wins, like the Kennedy Center case. And then the criminal cases that, that we have worked on where we for example, knocking out the phony crony Trump U.S. attorneys. That was the legal theory we developed with our great partners that led to the Tish James and Jim Comey, those cases being thrown out. Or the work for Doctor Lisa Cook, the Fed governor, where I think we’re about to win at the United States Supreme Court. And of course, all the election work that we’ve done that we’re going to talk about today. So — over 300 cases and matters.

JW: I’m sure you agree that the courts alone won’t save us. So I wonder what you see as the role of litigation in the larger project of resisting Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy.

NE: You know, it’s such a good question, Jon. And it’s changed over time. When we started with this Democracy Defenders Fund and Action work in January 2025, it actually started before Trump took office. You had the feeling that the country was sleepwalking into autocracy. That was actually the title of an editorial that I wrote with a professor in the New York Times: “Are we sleepwalking into autocracy?” These cases were intended to strike sparks of light, and to kindle a loud conflagration, set off the smoke alarm of democracy, and wake the people up. And they did. And they did so.
The purpose has shifted from those initial cases, which were meritorious cases. But we wanted them to trigger a broader resistance to now pivoting — from bringing the civil litigation, some of the criminal defense that we do or, the election work, that work that we now do is intended not to sound an alarm, but to get court orders that protect the functioning of democracy — in particular, free and fair elections, which are the foundation of everything we do. And, you know, the American people can’t express their opposition to authoritarianism, they can’t do that, without free and fair elections. So we’re pivoting some of our landmark case energy over there.

JW: Everything Trump is doing is losing him more support. It’s astounding, as the midterms approach, that any political leader would do this. But obviously, he’s got a different way of preserving Republican power. And that’s by undermining the elections, preventing people from voting, challenging the results once they’re in. So that’s what we want to talk about here. What can be done? What is being done? and what has been done about all of that?
I want to start with the current news. When last week, 100 FBI agents raided the biggest voter registration project in Ohio, where it looks like Democrats will flip the Senate seat and maybe the governor’s office, too. This is a group called Ohio Organizing Collaborative. They registered 100,000 voters in 2024. The FBI raided the group’s office. Also the homes of people connected to the organization. They seized documents and laptops and cell phones. They said they were looking for evidence of fraud in voter registration. What can you tell us about that case right now?

NE: Jon, I grew up in a Yiddish speaking home in Los Angeles, aqctually, where you are. English is not my first language. So often I find, particularly now that I’m in this, my 60s, that the first language comes to mind in this sham, bogus intimidation and harassment in Ohio. The word that came to mind is “bilbul.” It’s a made up slap dash combination of nonsense. Those people in Ohio did nothing wrong, and they put out a strong statement saying they’ve been investigated over and over again by the feds, by by the state of Ohio, and no wrongdoing has been found. This is an excuse to harass. They got some subpoenas together, and they’re going around Ohio and hassling and harassing people. But it’s like the Streisand Effect 2.0. You know, the Streisand effect is if you say something is a phony, you actually call people’s attention to it. Well, here the government is just, with their phony behavior, calling attention to how decent and all-American the Ohio Organizing Collaborative is. So I think it’s garbage, it’s nonsense, and it’s unAmerican what they’re doing. Your listeners then should know that this is phony baloney.

JW: And then there’s the recent executive order of where Trump is trying to enlist the post office in limiting voting by mail. He wants the mail carriers to refuse to deliver mail ballots to people who are not on a federal list of registered voters, which he is trying to compile. Right now, that seems like a surefire loser, both because the national federal list is something that’s very hard to achieve in our constitutional order. And because the Postal Service knows their job is to deliver the mail, not to check recipients against a list. Does the president have any authority to do this?

NE: He hasn’t gotten anywhere because it has not been implemented. It’s being litigated. There is progress being made in the litigation. We sued early, like with his first election takeover executive order. You know, this is his this is not his first crooked rodeo, John. He tried it last time. Eventually we got it enjoined. Blocked. Cut off. We’re suing to block and cut off this one. There’s multiple cases all over the country. We’re waiting in D.C. we’re waiting for them to take affirmative steps. But at the as the judge said, they’re not far enough along in putting it into place. And the Postal Service cannot do crazy things like interrupt certain ballots because they don’t line up with a junky federal database of who the citizens are. It’s nuts. It’s not constitutional. The president does not have that role. And the whole thing is the whole thing is cuckoo. So I don’t think he’s going to get anywhere.
And there just was a win in court, one of the cases last week. And you know, we’re going to keep on winning. We have a case in DC and we’re going to keep on going and fight. Trump is he’s on one of the great losing streaks of any president in American history in his litigation cases. Yeah. So many of the cases that we’ve worked on have flopped. This one will flop for him also.

JW: Yeah, I just saw a piece at Democracy Docket that says his record right now on getting states to comply with his demand for their voter rolls is zero wins and nine losses. And that’s the only ones that have been litigated so far. And that includes, of the nine, five of them are Trump-appointed judges who have made that ruling.

NE: Yes. And we’re we’re litigating those cases as well. We’re representing counties and election officials who’ve gotten these subpoenas and illegitimate demands, warrants. So, you know, we’re fighting and pushing back on him across the country. And when you get to trial, I’ll tell you a story that exemplifies why he’s they should not have called his show “The Apprentice. “They should have called his reality show–maybe the sequel based on his presidency will be “The Biggest Loser.”

JW: [Laughing) Okay!

NE: He tried to steal five congressional seats in Texas. The Latino community in California came to us and said “can you help us?” We had represented the Texas legislators who were fighting him. Long story short, we ended up supporting California’s addition of five congressional seats to cancel out Texas. Jon, you’re there. You know perfectly well it was called “Prop 50.” We took that case to trial. We won. And then not only did we win the trial, we went to the United States Supreme Court and it was upheld without a single dissenting vote.
So I think that that is a harbinger of things to come. We are going to protect these elections. We are working with a huge democracy movement, including the tens of millions of Americans who have come to peacefully protest in the streets, the hundreds of litigants who with us are in court winning. They’re the political leaders. The press is now calling Donald Trump out much more. He’s losing in elections and at the polls, with the lowest popularity ratings. And Democrats have won or outperformed by double digits in about 300, more than 90% of all key races over the past 17 months of the Trump administration. So on every front, you’re seeing this pushback.
And of course, it results in Trump is as unpopular as Nixon was before he was forced to resign. Unfortunately, there’s no shame left. There’s no Goldwater and Howard Baker go to the white House and tell Trump to quit from his own party. But you’re seeing all the signs of health in the body politic going very strong after 17 months.

JW: I want to ask specifically about how you work, how the people in this Election Protection Coalition work — because there’s a lot of people, as you have said, working on election protection. They start with the state attorneys general, with Tish James, Rob Bonta, Keith Ellison, our heroes. And then there’s the big legacy organizations: the ACLU, the Brennan Center, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP. Then there’s the litigators: you, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Protect Democracy. Then there’s the grassroots mobilizing groups: Common Cause, Movement Voters Project.
And there’s big time funding: the MacArthur Foundation in March gave $100 million to organizations working to protect democracy this year.
And of course, there’s also, let’s not forget the Democratic Party, the Senate campaigns, the House campaigns. They have lawyers and defense committees.
So what I wonder is, given this large, complicated array of extremely talented people who’ve been working on this since, as you have, before Trump got elected. How do you coordinate? How do you work together on all this?

NE: We all bring those cases together and we meet publicly. We do it in, of course, the light of day. We meet publicly at places like The Nation or my publication, The Contrarian. I have people on, with our about 500,000 subscribers at The Contrarian. And you know, we talk to each other. And that is I sometimes I do it, I go on podcasts like this one with the wonderful allies at the ACLU or Democracy Forward or Protect Democracy or Public Citizen. And, you know, we are we are doing that work together openly, vigorously and in the best tradition of the Civil Rights movement. Linking arms and and marching. Sometimes, literally.
I marched in the Selma march a few weeks ago, which culminated in the Montgomery rally. I was very honored to speak there. Inspired by the ancestors. And the Civil Rights movement has so much to teach the democracy movement.
So very proud to stand in open public solidarity with my brothers and sisters– by the way, including those in the center and on the right. Jon, they don’t agree on everything with the two of us. Probably they don’t agree on everything with most of those who are listening to the Nation podcast today, but they do agree on the importance of American democracy. And I have many, many conservatives who were previously my debate Partners or debate opponents in prior administrations and decades who now have joined with us to be part of this democracy movement.

JW: One last thing before we let you go: right after Trump’s birthday cage match on the White House grounds, you attended the opening of the Obama Center in Chicago. You worked as Obama’s ethics czar when he took office in 2019. I think you go back with him even before that.

NE: I do. President Obama and I met the first week of Harvard Law School. My wonderful friends Cassandra Butts and Dan Rabinovitz, both passed now, tragically, were were among those who introduced us. And Barack and Michelle are such marvelous, such marvelous people. Barack is a very unchanged from the man I first got to know in law school.
And I always knew that that he had great things ahead of him. I used to say to him when we were students, “Someday you might be the mayor of Chicago!” It shows you what a great political prognosticator I am, Jon.
If you go to the Contrarian you’ll see my column about me and Barack, the pictures of us together and the behind the scenes and all the other old friends and some of my observations from behind the scenes of the opening of the center. Walking the halls of the center. Meeting the people who built it, the artists seeing old administration friends, Barack and Michelle, the kids.
I remember those daughters. I was backstage when he won Iowa and those little girls playing ring around the rosy with their cousins, so innocent and little. And now look at them all grown up. I was talking to them about their Hollywood careers.
So, a very wonderful occasion, and, you know, a decency. Look, Obama didn’t always do everything we hoped for on the left. I know some of my friends are very critical, but he was a paragon of decency and he tried to do his best. And I disagreed at times, too. I’ll keep those disagreements–They’re privileged. I was a lawyer. But, you know, I just love the guy, and Michelle, for the decency that they stand for. And we need to get that back in politics. And I think we will.

JW: Norm Eisen — thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.

NE: Jon, thank you for having me. Marvelous.
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Jon Wiener: It’s time for today’s political news roundup with John Nichols. Of course, he’s executive editor of The Nation. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: Hey, it’s a pleasure to be with you, my friend.

JW: The big news this week, of course, is about the arrest of people for what Trump says is vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. How could we resist this story? Trump said Saturday that vandals at the algae-filled pool cut a 250-foot-long gash in the pool. Monday, he said it was 300 feet. the latest is 350. Where will it be next? He also said vandals dumped chemicals illegally in the water. This, just in case people have not heard about this story: Trump spent $14 million on a project to what he called turning the reflecting pool “American flag blue,” which meant painting the bottom blue. But almost immediately the pool turned green – because of algae. And then the pieces of the blue paint started coming loose and floating to the surface in the algae.
Among those arrested at the beginning of the week was a former U.S. Olympic canoeist named David Hearn. How do these things happen? He was held for five hours Friday, he said, after he touched a piece of detached blue coating that was floating in the reflecting pool. Trump on Monday morning said, “there is a ten-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things, which will be fully enforced!” Good luck on that. In the past, grand juries have, let’s say, been reluctant to bring felony charges against people who have challenged Trump. And this guy didn’t even challenge Trump.
Jimmy Fallon said it was too bad Trump didn’t hire the Blue Man Group to do this job. Others said it’s time to call Sealant Team six.
Now, some people think this story is insignificant. We’re wasting our time on this, especially in comparison with Trump’s other actions, like losing the war with Iran. What do you think?

JN: How we define vandalism was not really where I expected we’d be heading this week in our conversation.

JW: Yeah.

JN: But I mean, obviously that’s what it’ll come down to. Yeah, if somebody did harm to a national site, that’s consequential. And accountability is appropriate. By the same token, if somebody touched something that was floating in the pool, that probably shouldn’t have been floating there anyway, good luck on making that hold up in court.
But this gets us to a deeper reality to the American people. A lot of what Donald Trump has done to Washington is consequential. People have followed the Kennedy Center debacle, followed this argument about building an Arc of Trump. They have followed the destruction of portions of the White House very, very closely.
And polling suggests that while many of us might say some other issues of foreign policy or domestic policy issues are more consequential, there are a lot of Americans who are most aware of some of these heavy-footed moves around D.C. and in some ways, some of these actions seem to create a shorthand for our understanding of a president who doesn’t follow the rules. There is so much evidence of incompetence that’s become one of the watchwords as regards this administration, be it, launching wars that have not been thought through, be it, cutting federal agencies in ways that are so messy and so disorganized that you end up having to hire back the people you fired, or be it, trying to fix up a pool and ending up with it filled with algae and all the other problems that are related to it at the end of the day. Something’s supposed to come out better after you fix it than worse. People vote on a mix of things, primarily affordability, I think primarily their own lives, but also just a sense of whether the folks who are in charge know what they’re doing. And I think we’re getting an awful lot of evidence that they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing.

JW: Yeah, I agree completely. The incompetence this is a microcosm of, Trump’s incompetence in fighting Iran starts out with doing something completely unnecessary, intended to demonstrate his triumph and power and mastery. And, but because he is so incompetent, it ends in failure, chaos. And in the case of Iran, much more destructive. It’s all part of the same pattern. I agree with you completely about that.
There’s a couple of interesting stories this week about how protest has succeeded, something we always wonder about and look for evidence of, especially against Trump. ICE, you may recall, spent $700 million buying warehouses that it was going to use to house detained people accused of violating immigration laws. There was a huge uprising in the small towns, often in red states, against placing these Trump prisons in their towns. Now ICE has announced it’s going to sell $700 million worth of seven warehouses. Just get rid of them. There were only 11 to begin with. The plan had been to convert these empty industrial spaces into prisons that would house thousands of people. It required lots of remodeling, water and sewer capabilities, ventilation, and people didn’t want these in their towns. And now ICE is giving up. They’re getting rid of seven. They’re trying to keep four. I think it is one of which already has been blocked by a judge. This shows that protest works in some cases at least.

JN: Of course, it does. One of the big stories of 2026, what happened in Minneapolis, had a profound impact on sentiments for people who weren’t necessarily watching these issues very closely, but suddenly became very focused on them. The end result is that now polling suggests that the American people are exceptionally uncomfortable with Trump’s approach on a lot of these issues. And I think that has come back to resonate in a fundamental way in places all over the country. You’re seeing in Newark, as an example, with Delaney Hall, real protests and protests where a range of political officials have been willing to step up and say, “we don’t like what we’re seeing here. This is fundamentally wrong.” This pressure from below is hugely significant. And I also, as you know, we should note to folks who are listening in that Jon Wiener and I, we’ve both been working on the nomination of Minneapolis to get the Nobel Peace Prize. I guess what sums up my sentiments on a lot of this stuff is in this terrible, frustrating, awful year where we have seen so many abuses by the administration, so many abuses by ICE, the real story of 2026 is that people at the grassroots in places like Minneapolis, but also a lot of places that we don’t hear that much about, have chosen to take a stand. And their stand is for immigration policies that are humane and decent and try to resolve challenges rather than make them worse.

JW: And this detention center thing, I would just add, makes it impossible for the Trump administration to achieve the goals that Stephen Miller set of a million people detained every year. One other example of successful protesters in Georgia, the governor of Georgia called a special session of the state legislature for the sole purpose of redistricting, of gerrymandering, of eliminating Black congressional districts and electing white Republicans instead of Democrats. But a couple of grassroots groups, Fair Fight Action, founded by Stacey Abrams many years ago, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, much embattled right now with the Trump administration, we might add, organized massive protests where thousands of mostly Black protesters filled the capital of Georgia the day that they were supposed to have their initial meeting to redistrict the state. And the Republicans who control the state legislature decided to cancel the special session and not do it. This was a case of confronting power in the most direct way. Bodies on the steps of the building inside and outside. Pretty impressive for the militant street action in Georgia.

JN: And I give credit to Republicans who backed down on some of these issues, because they’re under a lot of pressure from Washington to do something. And, you know, in a representative democracy, yeah, you’re going to feel pressure from the top. But what you’re supposed to listen to is the pressure from the streets, from your grassroots people, from your voters, your constituents. And I think, for better or worse than this year, we’re going to see a lot of this, especially around voting rights issues, some real efforts to make sure that our democracy is protected. And it’s not always easy, but to me, there’s something very, very beautiful and very, very good about people who maintain that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience, which I think has for a very, very long time, especially voting rights issues, made this a better country.

JW: And last but not least, Trump and Iran. There’s a new book out published on Tuesday. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book about Trump’s first year titled Regime Change, which is about, in part about the decision making around a war in Iran. There’s one part of the book which as a professional historian I found irresistible. They describe interviewing Trump in the Oval Office just a couple of months ago to do some fact checking about the origins of the plans to go to war with Iran. They say that Trump handed them a two-page document that he said had been written by a historian that argued that he was one of the most powerful leaders in the history of the world. He read them the document, and then he handed it to them. The list, compiled by what he said was a historian included Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler. And he was proud that his name appeared on this list. And Haberman and Swan say they asked him who the historian was, who put him on this list. And he said the author was presidential historian Dave King. Now, I’ve never heard of a historian named Dave King.

JW: They’d never heard of a historian named Dave King. They went out to find out who is presidential historian Dave King. They found out there is no historian named Dave King. But the Dave King who wrote this document was a golf caddy who had caddied for Gary Player, the famous South African golf champion. And the big news in this book, of course, is that virtually everybody in the Trump administration recommended not going to war with Iran. The intelligence people, the military people, the political people, the Treasury secretary. Trump was told what was going to happen. They would close the Strait of Hormuz. It would cause an international crisis. It would be very difficult to bring about regime change, probably impossible. And JD Vance seems to have been the strongest in making his opposition clear. But Trump went ahead anyway, they say, saying he thought the Iranian regime would fold quickly. Of course, once Trump attacked, all of them became his defenders. But I wonder what you make of Haberman and Swift’s evidence that everybody told Trump not to do this.

JN: Well, it certainly raises many of the White House aides in my esteem. If they said this was wrong because it was clearly wrong. And I was a little bit surprised to find out that there was that free discourse within those circles. Maybe that’s to the good. Unfortunately, the good advice wasn’t followed. This gets to a fundamental reality. The history of Donald Trump’s presidency, to my view, is a fascinating one. Donald Trump, who is, who has some significant political skills and who mastered social media in a way that other political figures didn’t. And, you know won elections that people didn’t think he could win, etc., etc., has a power within the Republican Party and within the circles of administration that he’s developed, that creates a situation where people will tell him he’s wrong, know he’s wrong and still continue to facilitate what he does. And that’s very true in Congress, I think. And sometimes they slip away like Paul Ryan, but more often than not even when they know that this is a bad idea, they continue to facilitate it. Look at who was approved for the cabinet as an example. And so, if we begin to look at it in this way, the circumstance with a book like this or with situations like this is you say, well, it’s good. It’s good that there’s folks who are dissenting or maybe I’ve got a different impression of JD Vance than I did before.
But at the end of the day if it comes out in a book six months or a year later it doesn’t really change the circumstance. It doesn’t really change the reality. And I do think that at some fundamental level, the question is, are you going to check and balance a president who is doing that which is highly destructive? And so while I will read this book as I read most of the books on the stack about this White House and this president, I do think that the final thing, the fundamental thing to remember is that what’s happened to the Republican Party and what’s happened to the conservative movement over the last ten years is deeply troublesome — because if there’s any argument for political parties, and often there isn’t, but if there is any argument for political parties, it ought to be that they’re bigger than the individual. And that if an individual, you know, spins out of control, or does something that is fundamentally destructive, the party and its individuals, leading individuals will say “no” and will try to stop that. The Republican Party hasn’t done that for a decade, and as a result, we’ve ended up in a situation where our foreign policy looks to be a mess. Our domestic policy looks to be a mess. And if the polling is correct, overwhelming majorities of Americans, and even a lot of Republicans, think we’re heading the wrong direction.

JW: John Nichols – read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.

JN: Honored to be with you always, Jon. And I really do believe, and I don’t say this facetiously, that nomination of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize is an important one, and I hope we can keep the light shining on that.