Then and Now: LBJ and Voting Rights (1965) and Trump and Voting Rights (2026)

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Welcome back to Then & Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.

JONATHAN ALTER:

And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.

JULIAN ZELIZER:

Last night, President Trump gave an address — covered by some television networks and online outlets — about voting. Throughout the speech, he repeated numerous allegations about voter fraud, some old, a few perhaps somewhat new, none of which really showed much of anything. Many have already been disproven, and there remains no evidence that votes were changed in the 2020 election.

But it is striking to see a president in 2026 go after the electoral system while inviting comparison to March 15, 1965, when, after the brutal attacks on civil rights protesters in Selma, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress to ask for a voting rights bill. He affirmed his commitment to voting rights, called on the nation to protect its most basic political right, and even said, “We shall overcome,” adopting the language of the civil rights movement as his own.

How do you think about how far we’ve come—or how far we’ve gone back?

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JONATHAN ALTER:

I think the first thing people should understand, if they don’t already, is that before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the United States was not really a democracy.

It wasn’t until that bill passed—and Lyndon Johnson signed it, partly as a result of Bloody Sunday, following one of the greatest speeches in American history, when a president of the United States said, “We, too, shall overcome” — that Black Americans could vote freely throughout the South.

You had majority-Black counties where you could count the number of Black voters on two hands before the Voting Rights Act. That’s not a democracy.

So we’ve come an enormous distance since then. We now have a functioning democracy, but it is under assault from Donald Trump. It’s almost a crime against history for these two speeches to be spoken of in the same breath.

Just to give one small example —because there was so much craziness in Trump’s speech — there’s no evidence that China got access to our voting machines or anything like that. They gained access to some publicly available voter data that political campaigns routinely use. They basically got nothing. And all of that took place during the Trump administration. So the terrible things he was describing happened on his own watch.

But I want to focus on one provision of the SAVE Act, which, fortunately, will not become law because even many Republicans recognize that it’s deeply flawed.

One provision says that you must provide your birth certificate in order to register to vote. Tens of millions of American women would effectively be disenfranchised by that requirement because their married names differ from the names on their birth certificates.

So this bill that Trump urged everyone to call their members of Congress about would disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, whereas the Voting Rights Act did exactly the opposite. It enfranchised tens of millions of Americans.

On that note, let me end by reading a little from Lyndon Johnson’s speech, because I think it’s worth hearing again:

“The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.”

Last night, we heard a president with very different priorities.

So that’s Then & Now. John and I will regroup next week and continue the conversation.

Thanks again.

(edited transcript)