MS NOW's The Last Word on SnapStream The left has shown time and time again their willingness to use every weapon they can against their political opponents. These weapons range from smears to lawfare to actual weapons, as we saw in several Trump assassination attempts and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk last September. They hounded Trump throughout the 2024 election with lawfare, raiding Mar-a-Lago and posting his mugshot everywhere. And they’re still trying to accuse the President of election interference, as pushed by MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff on Monday as he guest hosted The Last Word.In the midst of the controversy rising around Elon Musk’s payments to Wisconsin voters last year, Soboroff and his guest, author and former Wisconsin state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, reverted to their old trick of equating Musk and Trump.  According to Wikler, if Musk is under fire for possibly violating election law, then Trump must be trying to take over elections again:So whenever Donald Trump has a freak out about the fact that he is so incredibly, hideously unpopular, he starts trying to come up with ways to take over the election system. He can't, as long as there are Democratic governors, attorneys general, state supreme court justices who stand in his way, they actually have the power over this. The Constitution entrusts elections to the states, but there are federal voting laws and restrictions, which the executive enforces. But for Democrats scared about those enforcements impeding their voter rolls, whenever Trump breathes towards election security, they have to panic and imply that he’ll launch January 6th, 2.0, "So this book is a battle plan to make sure that that line of defense is secure before we get to 2028 and his next chance to attempt a national coup."And, is it even an MS NOW segment without accusing Trump of being a kingly authoritarian? No, it’s not:WIKLER: We know that these local county clerks, we know that secretaries of state that do - never get in the national headlines.SOBOROFF: They're threatened with arrest.WIKLER: Yeah, they're threatened with arrest right now because Trump knows that they could actually thwart his ambitions to become a king. Of course, Soboroff and Wikler don’t name any examples of these secretaries of state. They just act like it’s a self-evident, everyday occurrence. Additionally, Trump doesn’t order someone’s arrest just because they “thwart his ambitions to become a king.” That’s more from the Democrats’ playbook, to engage in meaningless lawfare. Trump’s DOJ can and should, however, enforce federal voting laws. And no, attempts to secure our elections from foreign and domestic interference are not fascist.The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read:MS NOW's The Last Word7/20/2610:48:07 p.m. Eastern JACOB SOBOROFF: Tonight, Elon Musk could be facing criminal charges in Wisconsin, because it turns out that the world's richest Republican cannot just buy his way out of losing an election.  In April of 2025, just weeks after Elon Musk was seen on television upstaging Donald Trump in the Oval Office, you might remember that Wisconsin held a state Supreme Court election, the first big election anywhere in the country since Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time. And what happened? Elon Musk spent more than $20 million backing the conservative candidate in that race. He traveled to Wisconsin. He put on a Green Bay Packers cheesehead hat at a rally of about 2,000 people, and he handed out two $1 million checks to two voters while offering cash incentives to others tied to that election. And now the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission has concluded that Elon Musk likely broke the state's election bribery law. This commission voted 5 to 1 to refer the complaints to the Brown County district attorney, who will now decide whether to pursue criminal charges for Elon Musk's election tactics.Musk had repeatedly argued that the judicial election would shape the future of congressional redistricting in Wisconsin, and that matters, because that could ultimately affect which political party controls the United States House of Representatives next year.  But Wisconsin voters rejected Musk's preferred candidate by ten points, and they voted instead for the liberal candidate, former prosecutor Susan Crawford, on that particular election night.Our next guest, Ben Winkler - Wikler, excuse me, who was then Wisconsin's Democratic Party chair, called into this program, you remember, just after the liberal victory was announced and said Wisconsin voters saw exactly what Elon Musk was up to.[Cut to audio]BEN WIKLER [4/1/2025]: They know that he is grabbing money out of their pockets in order to stuff them into his own pockets. He was trying to buy the state the way he bought Brad Schimel, his preferred Supreme Court candidate, and voters found that outrageous. They flatly rejected it.  Now we know, and the jig is up.[Cut back to live]SOBOROFF: "The jig is up."That election offered Democrats a lesson that extends well beyond Wisconsin. State supreme courts, legislatures, governors too increasingly determine everything from voting rules to congressional maps.  Winning those down ballot races can be just as consequential as winning at the federal level. National generic congressional polls right now show Democrats with an advantage in single digit margins, though mostly still within the margin of error.  In his new book, This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy, Ben Wikler argues that the battles shaping American democracy are often decided far from Washington. They're decided in state courts and in state legislatures and local elections where the rules of democracy are written.Ben writes of the Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, quote, "This is a book about why elections like Susan Crawford's are so important — maybe not to the entire future of the human race, which will hopefully be pretty long — but to the future of democracy and the possibility of a fair economy in the United States. But this book isn't just an analysis. It's a prescription. The point is not to monitor the situation, but to change it."  Joining us now is Ben Wikler, the former Democratic Party chair of Wisconsin. He is author of this book, This Is the Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy, which is out tomorrow.  It's so good to see you. It's good to hold this in my hands. It feels pretty meaty.WIKLER: I'm pretty excited it's in your hands, and it's about to be in a lot more people's hands.  I wrote this book after six years leading the Democratic state party in Wisconsin. It was a state that, not very long ago, was more rigged, more gerrymandered, more voter suppression, more dominated by a far-right state supreme court than the United States of America is right now. It seemed more hopeless to people in our state, but thousands of people rolled up their sleeves.  And we tested and we tried a million different ways to fight and win elections and figured out how to unrig our state step by step. So in this book, I take that blueprint, that battle plan, and I map it out on the national stage for what people can do everywhere in this nation to get us out of this flaming train wreck that Donald Trump and the current GOP has - have driven the United States into.SOBOROFF: It's the exact book we need right now.  But this, even more recent news, when you hear that the Elections Commission says that Musk may have very well broke election law in Wisconsin, what goes through your head?WIKLER: The first thing that goes through my head is that Donald Trump's pardon power does not apply to convictions in state courts.SOBOROFF: You better believe it.WIKLER: States are, frankly, where a lot of the action is right now, and there, rightly, is a ton of energy to elect a new majority, a Democratic majority in the House and the U.S. Senate this cycle.  But it's states that the U.S. Constitution puts in charge of running elections. So whenever Donald Trump has a freak out about the fact that he is so incredibly, hideously unpopular—SOBOROFF: Yeah.WIKLER: —he starts trying to come up with ways to take over the election system. He can't, as long as there are Democratic governors, attorneys general, state supreme court justices who stand in his way, they actually have the power over this. So this book is a battle plan to make sure that that line of defense is secure before we get to 2028 and his next chance to attempt a national coup.SOBOROFF: It was really amazing to hear you — to play back that clip that I think viewers of this program will definitely remember, and think about what you said on that night that Wisconsin voters rejected the influence of billionaires in your state.  Does this new development vindicate that?WIKLER: Absolutely. The opening scene in the book is Elon Musk going in Green Bay and putting that cheesehead on his head and saying, “this race will affect the entire future destiny of all of humanity.”  And he thought that he was going to demonstrate that, as the richest man in the world, he had unchallengeable power, that he could buy whatever election he wanted, just as, in the view of Donald Trump at the time and a ton of the country, he had bought the presidential election for his preferred presidential candidate. If he had won, then candidates at all levels of government would have run screaming from the possibility that he might throw a few tens of millions of dollars at them.SOBOROFF: And hold those stupid, giant, fake checks up in order to convince these voters.WIKLER: Absolutely. It was the most disgusting and obscene and frankly, cynical approach to politics that you can imagine. And for a lot of people, it seemed like it might work. You know, later financial disclosures showed that his total investment in that race, including all of his, kind of, attempted election bribes, $56 million—SOBOROFF: Wow.WILKER: — more than anyone's ever spent in a judicial election anyway - anywhere. But we won in Wisconsin. Susan Crawford won that race not just because he pissed everybody off, and not just because she was an amazing candidate. She was, but also because of this neighbor-to-neighbor organizing across the state. The unions, the grassroots groups that decided not just to fight in the big elections where everyone's paying attention, but to fight in every election that might affect the future of democracy in our state.  And that's the kind of approach that we need now in this country. We know that these local county clerks, we know that secretaries of state that do - never get in the national headlines.SOBOROFF: They're threatened with arrest.WIKLER: Yeah, they're threatened with arrest right now because Trump knows that they could actually thwart his ambitions to become a king.(...)