Trump’s “Meet the Press” Tantrum Also Revealed His Midterm Plans

His attacks on California’s ongoing vote count are really about challenging the November midterms results.

Images from NBC News via TV Insider

Donald Trump’s plans for the November midterms have been crystallizing over the past months. He’s ordered raids on election offices, made federal demands for state voter rolls, and issued executive orders purporting to end mail-in voting, which he doesn’t have the power to do.

Over the weekend, his playbook for undermining—and possibly even stealing—the midterms flipped wide open on “Meet the Press.”

Trump sat down with NBC’s Kristen Welker at a farm in Wisconsin, and the interview careened through familiar territory—January 6, the anti-weaponization fund, Iran—before arriving at California. That’s when things fell apart entirely.

Welker noted that Republicans were doing well in the state’s ongoing primary count, but Trump dismissed it. “They’re dropping fast,” he said, “because it’s a rigged election.” Welker explained that California’s multiday count is simply how the state tallies its votes, but Trump had a ready answer for that too. “Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election.”

When Welker asked for evidence, Trump replied, “All I have to do is look.”

“But that’s not evidence,” Welker interjected.

It went downhill from there. Trump called California election officials “crooked,” and then turned the word on Welker herself, and on NBC. “Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough,” he declared. He then unclipped his microphone, threw it on the ground, stepped on it, and walked off.

The episode would be easy to dismiss as another Trump tantrum after being challenged by a reporter. But something else also comes through: genuine alarm. California’s slow vote count has become one of the most important political narratives Trump needs to control heading into the November midterms, because if and when Democrats retake the House, as current polling strongly suggests they will, it will happen largely through California, and it will happen days after Election Night as mail-in ballots are counted. Trump needs that process to look like fraud before a single midterm ballot is cast. This week, his poisoning of the results began in earnest.

A method to his madness

Trump’s meltdown on “Meet the Press” was five days in the making, undercutting the idea that he was simply angry and speaking off the cuff.

His attacks began with Truth Social posts. “Look what’s happening in California, the Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the Vote.” Then: “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???” Finally, “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”

The two races Trump has been watching obsessively show the vote shift pattern in real time. In the gubernatorial primary, Trump’s endorsed candidate Steve Hilton held an early lead, but that lead has slowly narrowed as the mailed ballots dropped him into second place. Ballots more favorable to Democrat Tom Steyer than to Hilton keep arriving and being counted. Hilton may still hang on to qualify for one of two top spots, but it could be close.

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, the shift has proven more dramatic. Spencer Pratt, a reality TV personality, came out of Election Night with a 40,000-vote lead over City Councilwoman Nithya Raman as they vied for the second spot in November’s runoff. As of last night, with 83 percent of expected ballots counted, Raman has overtaken Pratt by roughly 3,100 votes, with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass holding first place comfortably at 34.7 percent. If the count holds, the November runoff will be Bass against Raman, meaning a Democrat versus a Democratic Socialist with no Republican on the ballot.

From the Oval Office, Trump elaborated on his unfounded suspicions and continued to spread disinformation. “You see what’s happening in California, they’re rigging the election, now maybe we caught them, and maybe they won’t be able to get away with it.”

The right piles on

Ron DeSantis was happy to amplify Trump’s conspiracies and false assertions. “California keeps dumping votes,” the Florida governor posted on social media Wednesday night. “Odds are shifting because the vote dumps always seem to go one way. Count until you get the result you want?” His reference to “dumping” echoes the vocabulary Trump deployed in the 2020 election. It’s designed to make lawfully cast ballots arriving by mail and counted in the ordinary course of business sound like something sinister and fraudulent dropped into the count.

Right wing mouthpiece Megyn Kelly went further and said the quiet part out loud. She called the delay “ridiculous” and “third-world crap,” and worried aloud that no one would trust the outcome if Hilton and Pratt were both eliminated. Then she turned on the voters themselves. “Do we really want to make it that convenient?” she asked. “I mean these are lazy-ass people. If they can’t get off their fat asses and get to election polling stations on Election Day, then we don’t want you.” In short, her complaint was never really about fraud. It was about participation, namely the legal votes of those who tend not to support Republicans.

Fox News hosts and Republican elected officials joined the pile-on. As MeidasTouch’s Ron Filipkowski compiled:

• Jesse Watters told his audience: “I can’t prove it, but everybody watching thinks there’s shenanigans.”

• Greg Gutfeld warned, “They said it’s going to take weeks to count. You know what that means: Shenanigans.”

• Laura Ingraham offered, “If mail-in ballots are so cool and great, why is it mostly Democrats?” (That’s a self-own, by the way.)

• Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri called it “this crazy Democrat scheme to sort of rig the elections.”

• And Rep. Randy Fine of Florida declared flatly and without basis, “They have designed a system to cheat.”

The White House went further still, sending First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli out to California to announce that his office was pursuing “multiple” election fraud investigations in the state. This happened the day after Trump’s accusations, and the DOJ has failed to identify a single specific case or present a shred of public evidence. Essayli also sent a federal prosecutor to observe the Los Angeles County ballot processing center in person.

Last November, when California voters approved Proposition 50—a redistricting measure that redrew the state’s congressional maps temporarily to favor Democrats—Trump immediately called it a “GIANT SCAM,” even though Texas moved first and now other red states have done the same. He claimed the ballot-counting voting process was “under very serious legal and criminal review.” With his latest attacks, it appears any California election that produces results unfavorable to Republicans will be labeled by Trump and the GOP as “stolen.”

Why it takes so damn long

Los Angeles County is home to nearly 10 million people. That’s larger than the population of 42 of the 50 states. The county must process the ballots of every registered voter who chose to participate, and in California, almost all of them vote by mail. Statewide, there are 23 million registered voters. In the 2024 presidential election, roughly 13 million of the 16 million votes cast arrived by mail.

California automatically sends a ballot to every registered voter, a policy made permanent by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. Under state law, those ballots are valid as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days. For the June 2 primary, that receipt deadline is June 9. There is no good workaround for this; the law deliberately created this window to ensure that voters who mail their ballots on time are not disenfranchised by postal delays beyond their control.

Each of those mail ballots goes through a signature verification process. That means every envelope must be checked against the signature on file with the county registrar. When a signature doesn’t match—for example because an older voter’s handwriting has changed, or they signed in haste, or any number of other innocent reasons—election officials are required by law to contact that voter and give them an opportunity to confirm their identity and have their ballot counted. That time-consuming process, called ballot curing, exists specifically to protect voters from having their votes thrown out on technicalities.

California also offers same-day voter registration at any voting center. Those voters cast provisional ballots, which can only be counted after officials have verified the voter’s eligibility—a carefully conducted process that historically results in 85 to 90 percent of provisional ballots being counted.

Election experts have described the cumulative effect using a vivid analogy: a pig moving through a python. The processing systems in each county must absorb an enormous pile of late-arriving ballots, all legally mailed but at the last minute. These disproportionately come from Democratic voters. This cycle, millions waited especially long to make their choices in the wide-open governor’s primary race. County election officials technically have up to 30 days after the election to complete the count; final results from the June 2 primary must be certified by July 3.

Critical to the GOP “election fraud” narrative, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to vote in person on Election Day or to return their mail ballots early. Those ballots get counted first, producing an initial tally that skews Republican. Then, as the remaining ballots are processed over subsequent days, the count shifts toward Democrats.

Election analysts call this the “red mirage,” an illusion of Republican dominance created entirely by the sequence in which valid ballots happen to be counted. In California’s June 2 primary, the electorate as of Election Day was 45.9 percent Democratic and 33.5 percent Republican. The final electorate, once all ballots are counted, is expected to look much closer to the 2022 primary, with 50.6 percent Democratic and 29.5 percent Republican. In 2024, when the count finished the same way it always does, Republicans still won several close House races in the state.

The Los Angeles mayor’s race is a perfect example of this red mirage. Pratt’s 40,000-vote election-night cushion was built almost entirely on in-person and early mail votes, the ballots that get counted first and skew heavily Republican. As the remaining mail ballots came in over subsequent days, his progressive opponent Raman, whose support is concentrated among the kind of late-mailing Democratic voters who dominate California’s mail electorate, steadily closed the gap. On Sunday night, Raman eventually passed Pratt, as the math had predicted. The Los Angeles County Registrar’s office confirmed that each batch of results reflected the continued processing of lawfully cast mail and provisional ballots.

The stakes go way beyond California

On one level, the current dispute in California is a primary election fight over a governor’s race and a Los Angeles mayoral contest. On another, it is a dry run for something far more consequential.

California holds 52 seats in the House of Representatives, the most of any state in the nation. Democrats currently hold 43 of them. After Proposition 50 redrew the congressional maps, five seats currently held by Republicans were shifted into friendlier Democratic territory. With Trump’s approval ratings at historic lows and the generic ballot tilted sharply toward Democrats, those five seats are very much in play, and they may well be the seats that determine which party controls the House when the next Congress is seated in January.

Those California House races will be competitive and close, the very kind that take the longest to call. In 2024, nine California congressional races were still uncalled a week after Election Day, with control of the House hanging in the balance. In November 2026, the stakes will be higher, the margins potentially tighter, and the count will proceed exactly as it always has, meaning that on the night of November 3, Republicans will very likely hold apparent leads in several of those districts. Those leads will narrow over subsequent days as mail-in ballots are counted.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta saw this coming. During last November’s Proposition 50 special election, when Trump was already calling the results a “GIANT SCAM” before the polls had even closed, Bonta warned publicly that Trump’s tactics were “a tee-up for something more dangerous in the 2026 midterms and maybe beyond.” He said it would be “naive” to assume Trump would accept the results of any California election given his history. The Justice Department’s decision to send federal election monitors to five California counties during that special election, which Gov. Newsom called an intimidation tactic, now looks like a rehearsal for what a full federal monitoring and investigation apparatus might look like deployed across the state in November.

As Democracy Docket noted, Trump’s use of the California primary this week to revive his doomed SAVE America Act, which would effectively ban universal mail voting, makes the picture even clearer. The Senate blocked the measure again on Thursday, with four Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. But the plan remains in place. If they cannot stop mail-in ballots from being cast, their next best option is to destroy public confidence in the counting of them.

What To Expect In November

Trump and the election deniers can’t succeed at this scheme if they and their game are called out early, so that everyone—from talking heads in the media to judges barraged with baseless lawsuits—understands the heist the White House and its supporters plan to pull.

On the night of November 3, Republicans are expected to hold leads in several of California’s most competitive congressional districts. The television coverage will reflect those leads. Trump and his allies will declare victory in some of those races before the counting is anywhere near complete, just as he did in 2020 and 2024.

Then, over the following days, as California’s lawful counting process proceeds, Democratic candidates will close the gap and in some if not most cases overtake their GOP opponents. At that point, the Trump/GOP election denial apparatus will be reactivated at full volume, pointed at a much higher-stakes target: the House majority.

The voters who will determine House control are, in significant numbers, California mail-in voters whose ballots will be counted last in the entire country. When their favored candidates begin gaining ground as the count proceeds—just as they did in 2022 and 2024—Trump will reach into his toolbox. Perhaps he’ll try to tie up cases in court for months, or declare a national emergency, or demand that Speaker Johnson refuse to seat the new members of Congress.

We all need to be ready for this. Because no set of facts, no amount of evidence, and no basic math will ever deter Trump from his false claims. He’s only ever interested in the result that favors him.

As he told Kristen Welker, “All I have to do is look.”