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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. First note, because I see a lot of people are calling in already to talk to the mayor this morning, our Ask the Mayor segment is at 11:05 on Fridays and we open up the phones at eleven o'clock for our Ask the Mayor call-ins. I know there's a lot to ask the mayor about today and we will take those calls at eleven o'clock, so mayor callers be patient.

We're going to clear the lines because we have a couple of segments to do first on national politics. Have you noticed there's a little national politics to talk about this morning? That's the first hour, and the mayor, as usual, 11:05 on Fridays. We'll open up the phones for that as we go into the eleven o'clock news. Okay. Where are we now? First, more Americans have voted than in any presidential election ever. Joe Biden and President Trump are now the top two vote-getters in history. Biden leads the popular vote by about 4 million, approximately 74 million to 70 million votes.

Next, the vote-counting is going almost exactly as everybody knew it would and said it would before the fact. For people who are all inflamed and asking what's going on here, I'll repeat that. Remember, can we remember back to Monday and Sunday and Saturday, this vote counting is going almost exactly as everybody knew it would and said it would before the fact. There is not much that surprising that's taking place except for how true to form it actually is. This is true in Pennsylvania most of all, where Biden has just taken a small lead.

They weren't allowed to start counting the mail-in votes until after the election day votes were cast, right? Democrats who feared the coronavirus more voted largely by mail. Republicans who President Trump urged to vote on election day in-person did so. Their votes got counted first. Now the mail-in ballots are being counted and it's taking a long time because there were so, so many and Biden is winning the large majority of those.

In fact, Trump did even better in the day of voting than was expected so his lead looked bigger than expected on Tuesday night and Biden is doing even better than expected in the mail-in Pennsylvania. In other words, Democrats and Republicans were just as polarized in how they voted as in who they voted for. We know that President Trump made a statement full of lies yesterday, especially about massive voter fraud that no one is even claiming to have evidence of.

We won't fact-check statement again here as the networks, including Fox, have done repeatedly, but what's true is that the Trump camp is pressing claims in court that judges will have to rule on that could potentially affect the count. We will talk about those. Nancy Cook, White House correspondent for Politico joins us now. Nancy, I know you're going around the clock, so thanks for giving us some time today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Nancy Cook: Thanks for having me, Brian. I have been up since 4:00 AM, but I absolutely love your show as a former New Yorker and I'm thrilled to be on.

Brian: Thank you so much. The laughter caused by exhaustion or maybe nerves, nervous laughter, tired laughter, burnt out laughter. The count of mail-in ballots that I was describing has now resulted in Biden taking the lead in Pennsylvania about an hour ago, and in Georgia, a few hours before that. The counting process in Georgia is different, but the Pennsylvania one is going exactly the way I described. Both states are too close to call for the networks and The Associated Press. How do you see the state of the race according to the ballot counters?

Nancy: It does really look like Joe Biden is going to win it and is going to clinch the presidency. That could be called in the next few hours. I think that that's what we're anticipating. It does seem like the Trump campaign is privately feeling deflated and privately feeling a lot of pressure, but publicly not making any plans to concede. They put out a statement this morning saying the election is not over, that they plan to keep mounting these legal challenges.

What I'll be looking for today is, when is the race called? How soon do we hear from Biden? What starts to happen in terms of the machinery of his transition operation? Then, how does Trump react? Do we hear from him? Does he just tweet? Also, if he does end up losing, how do Republicans react? Do they start to distance themselves from him or do they go along with what he talked about last night in the press conference at the White House at 6:30, where he basically said the election was rigged and called into question all these mail-in ballots and put forward all of these claims, which there's really no evidence of it about what has happened in the election and the results?

Brian: One of the things that I'm interested in, and that we'll get to with a couple of clips in your analysis, is how official Republican Washington is reacting. If Trump tries to claim that the election was rigged and he's the legitimate winner when the AP and Fox News and everybody else are saying, "No, the math shows us that Biden won" What's Mitch McConnell going to do? What's William Barr going to do? Et cetera, et cetera. We'll get to that because I don't want to get ahead of ourselves.

Just so people understand how this works, to call a state, the AP and others have to see a mathematical certainty based on where the remaining votes are coming from and what they know about the voting percentages in those areas. How close do you think they are to that in these remaining states that Biden is now leading, in all of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada? He only needs one or at most two to put them over 270 electoral votes.

Nancy: What we're hearing is I think that we are within hours of the race being called by the AP and some of the TV networks. Again, I think that we're most closely watching Pennsylvania and Georgia, just because those results really seem to be coming in. If he wins those, those we'll just put him over. That is what I am most closely watching, those two States. Again, I think that we will know by the end of the day.

Brian: All right, to the question of how Republican Washington is reacting to Trump's baseless claims that he won the election due to massive voter fraud. Here's a clip on one side of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas, not quite going all the way, but supporting the President on the issue of the voting in Pennsylvania or I should say the ballot counting in Pennsylvania, not being observable enough by the people in the room.

Ted Cruz: By clouding the vote-counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal an election, not just from the President, but from the over 60 million people across this country who voted for him all across this country. It is lawless and they need to follow the law.

Brian: That's Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Here is Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Pat Toomey: I saw the President's speech last night and it was very hard to watch. The President's allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated. I'm not aware of any significant wrongdoing here.

Brian: I think his iPhone alarm is going off. I have the same ringtone for when I wake up. How significant is that? That the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania is saying, "The President's allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated. I'm not aware of any significant wrongdoing here," meaning in his state, which is going to be the make or break state apparently.

Nancy: I think it's very significant and I think that it's a foreshadowing of what will happen if we see the race called for Joe Biden today. Pat Toomey wasn't the only person yesterday calling into question some of the problems with the President's statements. The former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who is a close ally of the President, last night on TV on ABC was also saying like, "Look, there's no merit to anything he's saying." I think that what we'll see is, over the weekend, we'll see more and more Republicans start to distance themselves from him, in part because Republicans want to preserve their own political capital for 2024.

There's also going to be a bunch of Senate races in 2022. I know that seems so far off. Mitch McConnell, I think, is going to want to preserve whatever power he has. I do think that we will see more Republicans peel off. Interestingly, one of my colleagues reported this morning that the Biden campaign is reaching out to businesses around Washington and trying to build support for the idea that there needs to be a peaceful transfer of power if the race is called for Biden and urging businesses to get on board with that message.

The question for me is just how quickly people peel off from the President if he keeps putting these statements forward which were false about the problems with the ballots and if he refuses to concede after the race is called.

Brian: Tell me more about the Mitch McConnell factor because he, without President Trump, would be the most powerful Republican in America, especially if, because we can't assume either way right now, especially if Republicans maintain control of the Senate. Is McConnell asking himself, which cultivates more power, either going all-in with the President on the grievance that the election was allegedly stolen even if Biden takes office versus starting to throw the President overboard because he's not relevant anymore if he leaves office, something like that?

Nancy: Mitch McConnell has always been intensely interested in just power, political power. We already saw him distance himself a little bit from the President in recent weeks. He, for instance, told reporters that he hadn't been at the White House since early August because he thought that they were not taking the coronavirus seriously enough in terms of their protocols.

That was a really interesting moment for me because Mitch McConnell is a very, very cautious politician and he doesn't speak that much or he doesn't speak his mind that much, so when he says things like that, it's not a slip-up, it's very deliberative, putting daylight between him and the White House. I feel like, if the race is called for Biden, I do think that we'll see McConnell over the next few days, distance himself.

He's going to be most interested in, if he can, preserving Republican's majority in the Senate and really preserving the future of his members in the Senate. That will become his key priority much more so than President Trump's political future or his feelings or things like that. There's always been a fairly uneasy alliance between the two. They're such different politicians and I think that we'll see McConnell throw Trump overboard if he needs to, because he feels like that's the best way to keep his hold on the Senate and also protect his Republican colleagues.

Brian: Lou Dobbs from Fox Business, Trump supporter, said, "Where the hell are Mitch McConnell? Where is the Republican Party? Where is our NC chair, Ronna McDaniel? Why aren't they out? Why isn't the Republican Party in mass demanding the Department of Justice move in here? It's been absent for the entire process," he said, according to this quote that I have, calling it "a political crime.

That is starting to show some frustration on the part of Trump's most loyal supporters with where the rest of the party may be headed. Here's another one. Don Jr., tweeted, "The total lack of action from virtually all of the 2024 GOP hopefuls. It's pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that they're willing and able to fight, but they will cower to the media mob instead. Don't worry, Donald Trump will fight and they can watch as usual." Who's Don Jr. talking about and what are they doing?

Nancy: Don Jr., is talking about people who Republicans think will run in 2024, like Nikki Haley or potentially Senator Marco Rubio. They're all calling on, they want Republican senators to come out in support of Donald Trump. They want former Trump officials, but what we've seen over the last few days is just relative silence from very senior Republicans on this.

Part of the Trump camp's problem is that Trump is trying to call into question the integrity of ballots or saying the election is rigged because the results may not favor him but the fact of the matter is that the results do favor, have favored Republicans down-ballot. Republicans it seems like they may be able to hold onto the Senate. We don't know yet, but Democrats did not win as many Senate seats as people thought. The same thing happened with the House. Republicans picked up a bunch of House seats.

The problem is that Republicans want to tout those races and you can't call into question what is happening in the presidential race and then also say that, "There's problems in the presidential race, but look at all these down-ballot races, those are fine." Republicans are just not going to get involved in this idea that the election is rigged or conspiracy theories about it or talk that ballots are not legal because it just doesn't serve them in the long run and they know that.

They don't want to create a sense among their own voters that your vote doesn't matter. That's not a good message for Republicans moving forward. I think that Lou Dobbs and the Trump kids can believe Republicans all they want but I do think over the next few days I will be interested to see how Republicans distance themselves if they do and how publicly they do it.

Brian: Listeners, we can take your phone calls for White House correspondent Nancy Cook from Politico at 646-435-7280 as we talk about the count and the possibility that this is going to be called for Biden within the next few hours maybe even while this show is on the air before noon. Obviously, if that happens, if the AP or some of the networks start to call it based on the math, we will, of course, bring that to you right away and talk about it.

We're talking about the count and we're talking about the prospect of Trump not accepting the results and what that could mean and who might support him or not within Republican Washington and Republican America on that, 646-435-7280. If you have a question or a comment on those things or tweet @BrianLehrer. Coming up in our second segment today, around the bottom of the hour, we will do legal analysis, because the next step will be in court. That has started already and we'll have Jamie Floyd and Ari Berman talking about after the networks, presumably call the election, what the prospects will be, what the arguments will be in court for getting that reverse by getting ballots thrown out.

That's coming up second today, Nancy Cook on the topics that I said with us here first. You report, Nancy, that even without winning at this point, the President may start acting like he's starting a second term. What does that mean he may do?

Nancy: I reported yesterday, I talked to a bunch of people in the Trump orbit and there was a sense that the President had basically been watching TV and stewing over the results and he was mad at some of his aides that Biden came out and talked before he did on election night or early in the morning after. The President and some of his top allies decided that he should come out and start acting like he had won, even if the results were still being tallied and that included potentially firing some people that he had wanted to fire, like the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, or potentially the FBI Director Christopher Wray.

I think that there was also a lot of talk of potentially having the President sign a number of executive actions on trade, manufacturing, China, maybe like a cultural, social, hot-button issue, but the goal was really to get the President away from watching TV and ruminating over this and giving press conferences like he did last night where he put out a lot of baseless conspiracy theories. The goal was to have him instead really try to look presidential, try to look like he was taking action. There was some discussion of potentially maybe doing a rally or having them trave, but really the goal is to get him doing things and not just sitting around and talking about election fraud.

Brian: Do you get any sense that he's isolated even within the White House because his own appearance last night didn't have White House counsel or any private lawyers even or the Attorney General William Barr. I'm very curious about his role in any attempt to resist the election results. Where people stand within that orbit is significant if we can read the tea leaves.

Nancy: That's a great question, Brian. The President is incredibly isolated right now. He actually has been for the last several months. He has increasingly surrounded himself by a group of people who are just yes-men and people who he really trust, who helped him out with his 2016, but these are not people who say to him, "That's a crazy idea" or "You can't say that" or "You need to concede."

Really that group includes his family members, like Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and includes some long-time aides like Dan Scavino, his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has really approached the job much more so as like a buddy to the President, rather than someone who runs the staff or who tries to give the President good political advice. Bill Barr, I have not heard that he has been at the White House or involved in any of this at all. The group around the President are people who the President trusts, but they're not necessarily people known for giving him the best advice.

I would also put in that camp folks like Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager that was fired, David Bossie, a very long-time ally of the president. These are just all people that President feels comfortable with, but they're all people who also share some of his conspiracy theory mindedness and they're not really people who can talk him out of things. I think that that's why we saw him come to the podium last night by himself, looking deflated and putting out these theories that are not accurate and no one around him is saying this is not the time to do that, and if they are, he's not listening to them.

Brian: Here's a question from Twitter. This is a version of something we're getting a number of questions asking. This particular one asks, "Do you think there will be civil unrest soon based on the election results?" Nancy, the scariest prospect, I think, for many people, assuming Biden is declared the winner, is not that Trump's brain melts down into conspiracy tirade soup, it's that his most extremist supporters would take to the streets and commit acts of terrorism.

We know Trump has never promised a peaceful transition of power if he loses and somebody who is trapped and isolated and desperate, if they're of a certain psychological makeup will lash out. How are you preparing at Politico to report on this? What can we say without predicting things we can't predict?

Nancy: Yes, I don't have a crystal ball. I have no idea what will happen. I live in Washington D.C. and stores around the streets around the White House or just stores around the whole city have been boarded up, stores and restaurants, in anticipation of potential civil unrest around the white house or just around the city in general. I think people are preparing for it.

What I'll be watching there is the President, I think, we can expect him to, if the race has called for Biden, to have some sort of meltdown over Twitter, maybe he'll come out and say something, but what I'll be watching for is what others, senior Republicans do. What does Mitch McConnell do, which we already talked about? What do other leaders of the party do?

What do 2024 hopefuls do? What do businesses do? I feel like if there's a big chorus of Republicans coming out and saying, "We agree with these election results," or "We think there's integrity to the election," I think, it will be much harder for the President to come out and say that.

That doesn't mean though that he won't be able to rile up his base, he won't be able to rile up potentially some militia members or the Proud Boys or some of these extremist groups that have supported him. I think that some parts of his base will always view the election as rigged based on the President's statements. I think that the only way to counteract that is for potentially a wide swath of Republicans to come out and denounce the President's potential reaction.

Brian: The false equivalencies corner of my brain says, maybe we should inoculate people against the potential false equivalency to come. Hopefully, it won't come to this, but we have to acknowledge that there has been some left-wing violence in some post-election protests and that too is criminal, but small amounts done by individuals, not groups that would actively try to resist a called election result as egged on by the President, which would literally be an act of civil war.

Nancy: I think that's a great point, Brian. I think that there are people on both sides of the political divide who will potentially feel upset by the election. It's just a matter of, is there some call to arms from one group over the other from the President or others or can people diffuse some of the tension? If the race is called for Biden, I will be really curious to see how he handles things.

There was some reporting this morning that the Secret Service is already beefing up its presence around him in anticipation of the race of likely going to him. I think that he is much better than President Trump at trying to speak for all Americans and using language that has a bit more empathy and really trying to speak to a broader array of people, whereas the President Trump tends to speak more to his base. I'll be curious to see how Biden tries to politically, if the race has called for him, [unintelligible 00:24:26] over those potential tensions.

Brian: With Nancy Cook, White House correspondent for Politico. Dr. B in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Dr. B.

Dr. B: Hi. I just was wondering, what would happen, because it seems that this President is very anomalous. He does what he wants. What happens if he defies everybody and says, "I don't care what the constitution says. I don't care what the courts rule. I'm president, I'm not leaving," and he continues to take the role. In other words, if he refuses to hand over to Biden. Some of them Republicans, even though they know that there's been nothing wrong with the polls, are still supporting him. What happens if he says, "I'm not going." What do we do? What [unintelligible 00:25:13] do we have?

Brian: Thank you for that question, which I'm sure a lot of people are wondering.

Nancy: That's a good question. I think that that's unlikely to happen, but if it did happen, Republicans could call for him to leave. The military could remove him. I think that there's a bunch of ways that he could be thrust out of office either through cajoling by the Republican Party and some of the leaders, or he could just really be removed from the White House.

I personally, after four years of covering Trump, do not think it will come to that because I think that if the race does get called for Biden, I think that Trump will be a very sore loser and I'm not sure he will give a typical concession speech. I don't know if he would go to a Biden inauguration. I think that he will also be interested in some form of self-preservation and that would include things like wanting to preserve the idea that he could run in 2024, wanting to keep his brand name alive so that things like his hotels and his golf properties, Republicans will continue to flock to them.

I think that that's the argument that some of his aides and allies are making to him that, "Look, it looks like you might lose. Think about the future and think about your brand and think about--" They're really putting it in the terms of what is at stake for Trump himself and that's how he thinks about things. I do think that they will be able to get him to transfer power.

It doesn't mean in the meantime, if he does lose in the next few months, he won't try to create some mischief by potentially firing some people or doing some executive orders or policy things that could potentially gum up Biden, but I don't think that he'll have to be physically removed personally.

Brian: Jonathan in New Jersey. You are on WNYC with Nancy Cook, Politico White House correspondent. Hi, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Thank you for your work and your perspective. I appreciate everything that you can offer for Politico as well. I think that one thing that the media needs to shine a little bit of light on now is, Chuck Todd hit on it this morning actually and I loved hearing him say it, they need to discuss the issue of how this became so complicated and how Trump has been able to sow distrust in our institutions and that this starts at, it's not even at the national level, it's at the state level and what happened in the Pennsylvania legislature and how they're counting the votes versus what they did in the Florida legislature and having the votes released much earlier.

I think that the media needs to really look at this because it is part of what Trump likes to do. He likes to take things that are complicated and try to provide an easy explanation. Sometimes with our institutions, it's more complicated for a reason. I think that the media really needs to shine light on these issues of how these towns have gotten gummed up between the executive branch and the legislature is in the process of counting these votes. I believe fully in the integrity of the vote-counting process but I believe that it's almost coordinated on how this looks, there's so distrust in our institutions. That's all I have to say. Thank you for your work.

Brian: Thank you very much. I think I know exactly what Jonathan is talking about and could explain it, but Nancy, I hear you taking a breath so do you want to go first?

Nancy: Yes, I think that two things, one, the President is so good at sowing misinformation because he throws so many conspiracy theories out there and he casts out questions about all sorts of institutions, but I think the thing to keep in mind is that the election results are tabulated at the state level and Trump doesn't have anything to do with it and neither does the federal government. That's just something to keep in mind. He can cast all the doubt that he wants, but it's really a state-by-state process.

Some of my colleagues have Politico in conjunction with this great ProPublica project called ELection land have really been looking at the state-by-state election integrity and really their reporting shows that there haven't been problems. Yes, voting looks different this year because there were more absentee and mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus. People didn't want to necessarily stand in line. But really there haven't been problems that Trump keeps talking about and so I would point listeners to that on the ground reporting from both Politico and ProPublica on the state-by-state election things. Then I would just say misinformation and putting out conspiracy theories has been something that we've seen the President do with this election, with impeachment. It's really been a hallmark of his four years in office.

Brian: Here, I think even more specifically is the the Pennsylvania versus Florida thing that Jonathan was referring to and why it matters at this moment. Florida's legislature passed vote counting rules that have the absentee ballots counted, the mail-in ballots as they come in and ready to release on election night when the polls close. The Pennsylvania legislature, setting us up for this moment that we're at right now, passed rules that didn't allow the mail-in ballots to get counted until after the polls closed on Election Day.

That creates what they call a "red mirage", which is that since we know Trump voters tended to vote in person and Biden voters tended to vote by mail-in, the Trump in person day of votes got counted and reported first on election night so it looked to people watching TV or your phones or whatever on election night that Trump had a big lead in Pennsylvania. Now over a period of days, the mail-in ballots are being counted and Biden, as predicted, is winning those.

Now it's going to be close and he's taken a small lead. It looks to people who don't know it at that level of detail like, "Oh, Trump was winning Pennsylvania and suddenly there are these trenches of ballots coming as if they were coming out of nowhere that come up and take the lead and give the lead to Biden." That, the caller is saying, Nancy, was done on purpose by what the Republican Pennsylvania legislature to set Trump up for exactly this grievance.

Nancy: Yes. That's a great point. I missed the nuance of that question. I'm glad that you clarified it, Brian, but that's exactly right. That is part of the thing about elections is that those rules are set by state legislatures and so you're exactly right. That is why we are seeing the Pennsylvania results come in later and Florida was announced on election.

Brian: What it doesn't explain, and I don't know if you as a White House correspondent or on this enough to explain it, but this will be my last question before we switched guests and go to the legal analysis with these court challenges in progress. It doesn't explain Georgia, because Georgia had the Florida system. We talked for days leading up to Election Day on this show about how much we were anticipating early results from Georgia because Georgia could release their absentee ballot count on election night. Yet, here we are three days later with absentee ballots or mail-in ballots, as well as some late in-person voting, still being counted. Whereas it seemed to me the timeline should have been the other way. Is that something that you can exeplain?

Nancy: No, I'm just not in the weeds enough in Georgia to understand why there was that delay. I apologize about that. It may have something to do, a hunch I would say, is it may just have something to do with the huge number of people who decided to participate in the selection. Both Republicans and Democrats. I think there was just a historic turnout and a lot of people wanted to vote this year.

Brian: All right, we'll have to get Steve Koernke or John King or a Bill Hemmer, pick your network, on the show to explain things county by county, precinct by precinct. Nancy Cook, White House correspondent for Politico. Thank you so much.

Nancy: Thanks, Brian. I appreciate it.

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