Latest / The Kinzinger Report / "We'll See" | Trump Won't Rule Out Troops at the Polls — October 2, 2026

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"We'll See" | Trump Won't Rule Out Troops at the Polls — October 2, 2026 · The Kinzinger Report

• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Adam Kinzinger, and you're listening to the Kinzinger Report, where I bring you top stories and analysis on current events and the growing threats to our democracy.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: After serving over a decade in Congress, I hope you know what's true and what really matters so that we can all work to save this country that we love so much.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, everybody happy Friday.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can even see the time today.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our top story today.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Trump sat down with time magazine and he was asked a very simple question.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Would he rule out declaring a state of emergency or invoking the insurrection act around the midterms his answer?
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't rule anything out or in.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what he always says.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then he added that he could use it and a lot of people think he should.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, after six years of him being an office, it's the same script over and over.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a present, by the way, whose party is losing five weeks before the boat leaving the door open to put in troops on the street during an election.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're also going to get into the Justice Department reopening Watergate to clear Richard Nixon, Trump saying he regrets his own supreme court picks, Bill Palty, gutting the watchdog that was supposed to be watching him and Republicans
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nothing to show for it while Democrats gain ground.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, do me a favor, like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, subscribe, you don't want to miss an episode.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's get to it, because this makes this smartest person in the world.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: At least smarter.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, we're going to start with the insurrection act and a president who won't take it off the table.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: President Trump had a sit down interview with time.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't on camera, which was a real shame because based on the transcript, he lost his cool, serval time, sounded like a man who had just completely lost his mind.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there was one exchange that I wanted to highlight.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Trump, a time-ass Trump, whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency before the mid-terms.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: He said, I don't rule anything in or out.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You mean, the insurrection act, the reporter said, yes, he's Trump said, well, no, I've never used it.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I could use it a lot of people think I should sometimes.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They also ask if he plans to send ice agents to polling places, his answer was that he hadn't thought of it.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting because his people certainly have Steve Bannon said back in February your damn right we're going to have ice around the polls.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: His press secretary said that she can't guarantee ice agents will avoid polling locations and DHS secretary said last month that ice could walk right in if they were serving a warrant on someone inside.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So even if Trump hasn't thought about it, which
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure I'd buy.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: By the way, his administration has.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's be clear about what the insurrection act is.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a law from 1807 that tests that lets a president send the military into American cities even if the state's governor objects.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's meant for actual rebellion.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's only been used to handful of times in modern history and never around an election on top of that.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Federal law makes it a crime to station armed troops at a polling place.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So look, hopefully none of this ever happens, but the president's answers aren't very reassuring.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're even less reassuring when you look at the people around him.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: For months, a network of election deniers have been telling Trump that he can declare an emergency and take federal control of the vote,
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not hard to notice that the president is running out of options.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the biggest thing he's panicking.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Supreme Court shut down his attempt to restrict voting by mail.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: A judge threw out his attempt to force states into changing their election rules as the legal doors close can we really trust this president not to open a window.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The parties behind, the polls are dismal when ask if he used the military around an election
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's actually the only answer he's got left.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: He can never accept losing.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, the DOJ is stuck on a scandal from the 70s.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: The department that is laser-focused on fraudsters and scammers is spending time and money digging through files from the Vietnam era.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Wall Street Journal reports that DOJ officials have opened a preliminary review into whether the prosecutors who investigated Richard Nixon committed misconduct more than 52 years after his resignation
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So how did this get started?
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: A former Nixon aide who's been calling Watergate a setup for decades managed to get a meeting with the DOJs internal watchdog.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: He framed Nixon as a target of law fair and convinced the DOJ to look into whether he got a raw deal.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is not just one bitter aid on the French.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: The conspiracy theory is a widely held belief among administration officials.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: J.D.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vance echoed this claims and claimed an event last June, when he compared Nixon's fall to what the deep state tried to do to Donald Trump.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yesterday, Congressman Riley Moore made the same argument at a Nixon Foundation event.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Have a listen.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that truth being that Richard Nixon was absolutely couped out of office and was framed.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of this was fake.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we now know more about the deep state and its power.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And its ability to literally change things at the top.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Trump faced this in his first term with the fake Russia collusion hoax and all that.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the last line there is revealing.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Once again, this is all about Trump, Maga doesn't care whether Nixon was treated on Jocelyn in 1974.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: To them, the Republican Party began in 2016.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Watergate is the one example of a president being held to account by both his party and his country.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nixon may not have been convicted, but that was because Republican senators walked into the Oval Office and told him that the jig was up.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that he needed to resign, they did one thing Maga could never do, speak truth to power.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't want the American people to remember that there was once accountability for the most powerful man in America.
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they're trying to rewrite history because if you believe that watergate was a hoax, you lose faith in what comes after the Russian investigation.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: January 6 and the various inquiries that will come once the Democrats retake the house.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So make no mistake.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: This review is not clearing Richard Nixon's name.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's been dead for decades.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: The man they're really trying to exonerate is Donald Trump.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And let me tell you guys something.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is most definitely a crook.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Next, Trump has buyer remorse for his Supreme Court justices.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the same time interview that we talked about where he fell apart, Trump was asked about the three justices he picked for the Supreme Court, Gorsuch Cabinon Barrett.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: He sounded like a disappointed father, telling the interviewer, I gave them the position of a lifetime and they, vote against me often.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trump is clearly like a tough grader.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: By my scorecard, those justices have given him plenty of wins.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trump's come out of on top in major cases on abortion, presidential immunity?
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Count was smaller ones unlike the emergency docket, but he seems to be stuck on two major losses, birthright, citizenship, and tariffs, two legal Hail Mary's, which were like it even reached the court in the first place, by the way.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: On tariffs, he was especially annoyed that the justice has made him return $400 billion that the government illegally collected.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Time-asked him if he was looking for loyalty, and he said, I do like loyalty, yeah.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then he caught himself clarifying, no, no, I don't want loyalty, I want good decisions.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, in Trump's mind, no decision against him is a good one.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look, I don't have to tell you how twisted this view of the court is.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the right and left have their different view of courts.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody with a sane mind has this view.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Justices get lifetime appointments.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's the whole point so that they don't have loyalty.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: No loyalty is necessary and a president should never try to influence or intimidate the justices like Trump did when he showed up at the court in April.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: but civics was never the president's strong suit.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: The court starts its new term next week.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're going to be looking at whether ice can lock up immigrants with American spouses and children for months without a hearing.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Among other cases on the document, many of them will come down to three justices that Trump just trashed.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can only hope they're just as disloyal as Trump thinks because every disappointment for him is actually a big win for the country.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now Bill Paulty just cut the budget of the one office that could investigate his own misconduct.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Paulty runs a federal housing finance agency last year, just like plenty of other Trump appointees, he turned that job into a political weapon.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Palty dug through the mortgage records of the president's enemies before sending criminal records to the Justice Department.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: The investigation brought by Palty didn't go far, a judge throughout the indictment, ruling that the prosecutor her brought it forward had been illegally appointed.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's more, Reuters reported that the housing director had also broken the ethics rules to make those referrals in the first place now he's trying to block an investigation into that abuse.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: The New York Times reports that Paul T. had slashed the budget of his agency's inspector general.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the independent office that oversees the agency and investigates mortgage fraud and it had reportedly opened a case against him.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's bad news for Paul T. The office won more than 12 on a criminal convictions and recovered nearly $75 billion.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He could have been next.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he cut its budget to $20 million that is $64% less than what the White House itself asked for.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The acting inspector general told Congress, that means his office will have to cut as much as 80% of its staff including around 40 special agents.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that the slashed funding eliminates our capacity to investigate mortgage bank and fraud schemes.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Baltic Clems is the office budget was bloated compared to other agency with who's he kidding?
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the man who declared war on mortgage fraud.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now he's gutting the office that fights it.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: We all know what's going on here.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: He broke the rules to target Trump's enemies, then he cut off the people investigating them for it.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Both Schumer and Jeffries have called for his resignation, but for this administration destroying the watchdog isn't a scandal.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what they're hired to do.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And finally, Republicans went home to nothing, Democrats went to work.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Congress's left until after the election, the New York Times says it, left with a whimper and for Republicans that's being generous.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: A data center message, a price transfer and to build neither got through, perhaps the GOP has finally accepted that their president has created an affordability crisis.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: But either way, it's far too late, even Senator Lisa Murkowski was honest about it, quote, if we had done enough, our constituents wouldn't still be raising it, and she added, it wouldn't be the number one thing every campaign is talking about, also.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another Republican Senator echoed the remark, if you're not worried you're living in a cave,
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: As for House Republicans, well, they didn't even try.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Remember, Speaker Johnson decided that he would rather send the House home to avoid a vote on excess impeachment in the Epstein files than fix the country's problems.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So while Republicans went home with nothing, Democrats went to work.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: After 2024, Republicans built a real registration edge in swing states.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But NBC News reports that Democrats are now cutting into that lead.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Listen, Republicans had months to show voters they were listening to concerns about Trump's agenda.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Instead, they shut out constituents in left town with nothing to show.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, Democrats were capitalizing on Republicans' broken promises.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see what strategy works.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Come November.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have an idea, what I think.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, that's the show for October 2nd.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: If this was worth your time and it was, like it, share it with someone who needs to see it and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Have a good weekend and we will see you back here on Monday.