AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Wisconsin, where billionaire adviser to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, spoke in Green Bay ahead of Tuesday’s state Supreme Court election. Musk has spent around $20 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford in what’s become the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. On Friday, Wisconsin’s attorney general sued Musk for offering to give a million-dollar checks to two voters who signed one of his petitions. On Sunday, Musk went ahead with his giveaway.

ELON MUSK: Let me first hand out two $1 million checks in appreciation.

AMY GOODMAN: Musk is heavily involved in Wisconsin’s judicial election, claiming liberals could use the four-to-three they have on the state Supreme Court to change voting districts and impact election results in the swing state.

ELON MUSK: The importance of the election on Tuesday is gigantic. It could — it could decide the — the future of the House of Representative. It could decide then the future of America and the future of the world. So, it’s absolutely critical that you really — you need to just drag friends and family to vote on Tuesday for Justice Schimel and for voter ID.

AMY GOODMAN: As Elon Musk backs conservative Republican Brad Schimel, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has countered with political ads endorsing Judge Susan Crawford.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF WISCONSIN AD: Firing air traffic controllers, cutting rape crisis centers, attacking Social Security, Elon Musk is out of control. And now the power-hungry billionaire is unloading millions to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He knows MAGA politician Brad Schimel is for sale.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by longtime Wisconsinite John Nichols of The Nation magazine, his recent piece headlined “The Wisconsin Supreme Court Race Has Become All About Elon Musk.”

John, welcome back to Democracy Now! As Elon Musk says himself, I mean, this judicial race, which usually doesn’t get anything like this attention, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars that has been put into the race, could affect not only the balance of the House of Representatives, well, what Elon Musk said is it could affect Western civilization. Talk about the significance of what’s going on.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I’ve often been teased for saying Wisconsin is the center of the universe, but apparently Elon Musk has confirmed that. And what’s going on in Wisconsin is a very intense race for state Supreme Court. Wisconsin has had quite a few of these in recent years. That’s because our court is incredibly powerful. And we are a very divided state. Wisconsin is the ultimate battleground state in the U.S. Of the last seven presidential races, five of them have been decided by around 30,000 votes or less. And so, often things come to the court — cases on abortion rights, cases on labor rights, cases on voting rights. In fact, in [2020,] the court decided by a narrow 4-3 margin to reject Donald Trump’s challenges to Wisconsin’s vote for president. And so, for a variety of reasons, both parties have focused on this court, even though it’s a nonpartisan court.

And this year’s race is incredibly significant because currently the court has a 4-3 progressive majority. That’s for the first time in a very long time. That progressive majority is likely to protect abortion rights, to encourage labor rights and to protect voting rights. This is something that Republicans in Wisconsin are quite upset about. They made it clear they were going to try to upend that 4-3 majority and shift it to a 4-3 conservative majority.

The thing that is different this time is that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has since January been obsessed with this race. He messages about it on social media. In February, he started giving substantial money. He is now up to at least $20 million. I think when the final count comes, it will probably be substantially more than that. And as you’ve noted, last night he flew into Green Bay for what was actually not that big a rally — you know, a decent number of people. But he gave away two checks for $1 million. He is also now making a new offer that — to people who are going door to door. If you communicate that you’ve gone to the doors, you’ll get $20 or something like that.

And so, he is just pouring money into the race in an effort to tip it to Brad Schimel, who is a very, very right-wing Republican, long associated with former Governor Scott Walker. And if Schimel gets on the court, I mean, there’s very little doubt that he will rule in a very friendly way not just to Republicans, but particularly to corporate interests. And I think that’s what really interests Elon Musk.

AMY GOODMAN: His position on abortion, very quickly, John?

JOHN NICHOLS: Brad Schimel has been a longtime opponent of abortion rights. He comes from Waukesha County, which is a very — historically very conservative county in Wisconsin. And his whole career, he has been a militant foe of abortion rights. That’s a big deal, because Wisconsin has a battle going on about an 1849 law that effectively bans abortion, and if Schimel went on the court, it is within the realm of reason that that law could be reanimated.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the televised debate on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election between Schimel and Crawford, both judges. In this clip, Schimel is asked if he would ever rule against President Trump if a case ever came into his courtroom.

JUDGE BRAD SCHIMEL: If President Trump violates the law or President Trump brings a lawsuit that he’s wrong on the law, of course I would. I don’t have any personal loyalty to him that supersedes the oath I take as a judge.

AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s been described as a MAGA judge, but what about his response, John?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, he’s a politician. You know, the thing to understand about Brad Schimel is he really is a career politician. He’s been on the ballot multiple times, on the Republican ballot line for district attorney and for state attorney general during the Walker years. And he does say that, but he’s also said that he thinks that we have to develop a, quote-unquote, “support network” for Donald Trump to make sure that his agenda is protected. And after he did that debate appearance, he appeared at an event, or there’s circulated a picture from an event, with him standing in front of a 20-foot-tall blow-up Donald Trump balloon. So, I think he might have been fabricating just a little in his statement there.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about the special elections, if you can talk about what’s going on in Florida right now, Waltz and Gaetz’s seats, and also what’s happening in Louisiana, and the significance of this moment for Donald Trump as he pulls Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations because he’s concerned of her leaving her seat?

JOHN NICHOLS: Right. This is a politically volatile moment for Donald Trump. It often happens in the first months of a new presidential term. You have special elections, local elections, state elections which begin to give you a sense of whether people are impressed with what the president is doing or are upset and angry with it. And we’re starting to see some real signs of resistance to Donald Trump at the ballot box.

In Louisiana on Saturday, there were four constitutional amendments. These were described as MAGA amendments. They sought to put a cap on taxation. They sought to put a cap on spending and on budgets. They sought to pull back a stipend for teachers, all sorts of things like that. The governor of Louisiana, who’s very powerful and a Republican who was elected not that long ago, campaigned for these four amendments. They all went down by overwhelming margins. They were all defeated. And that’s very surprising coming out of Louisiana. In fact, some people are referring to it as a political earthquake. And what happened was, you had a very significant turnout of Black and working-class voters, mobilized by a coalition that was saying this is a real problem. So, in Louisiana, a very conservative state, you saw a pushback against Trump and Musk.

On Tuesday, you have the Wisconsin race, which has become, you know, center of political news in the U.S and even around the world. But you also have two special elections in Florida for seats that were vacated when Donald Trump appointed, as you mentioned, Matt Gaetz and Waltz to positions in his administration. In both of those races, the Democratic candidates are running way better than expected, even though those are very Republican-leaning districts. I’m not saying the Florida races will flip, but it is within the realm of reason that one of them could.

And if you have this scenario where Louisiana rejects these amendments, where a Florida seat flips, where Wisconsin rejects Elon Musk’s money, you could have a real significant measure of the popular objection to what Trump and Musk are doing. Obviously, if the Wisconsin race goes the other way, if the Florida races go Republican, you won’t get that message. But that’s why everyone is looking at what’s happening on Saturday in Louisiana and now on Tuesday in Florida and Wisconsin, because we may get the first real electoral measure of where America stands on Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

AMY GOODMAN: Bernie Sanders has endorsed Weil in the Waltz open seat race right now in Florida — Bernie Sanders, who’s been going around the country in a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and been getting unprecedented thousands of people coming out. The significance of this in Florida, in DeSantis’s Florida?

JOHN NICHOLS: It’s very interesting, because, as you say, Weil, the Democratic candidate in that 6th District race in Florida, has gotten an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders. I talked to Senator Sanders about it yesterday, and Senator Sanders said that the Weil campaign really wanted this endorsement, and, in fact, on social media, they very much embraced the endorsement of Bernie Sanders. Now, that might not have been a typical thing in a Republican-leaning district, except that one of the things that is fascinating about Bernie Sanders’s tour of the United States, this “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, in which he’s been joined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greg Casar and others, is that he is going generally to Republican-held districts. And that’s one of the kind of lost realities of this. He is drawing thousands of people in Republican-leaning areas.

The theory is, or the thinking is, that this may be a moment where the typical Democrat might not do so well. There’s a lot of objections to where the Democratic Party is, even people who believe that the Democratic Party hasn’t done enough to fight against Trump and Musk. But there is a high degree of buy-in, if you will, for Bernie Sanders’s message that billionaires should not be controlling our government. And so, we’re going to, again, get another test of that down in Florida.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, John Nichols, for being with us and ask you to stay with us. Later in the broadcast, we’re going to remember your colleague, the well-known media democracy activist and professor Robert McChesney. John Nichols is The Nation's national affairs correspondent. And we'll link to your piece, “The Wisconsin Supreme Court Race Has Become All About Musk.”

But first, when we come back, as President Trump fires most of the board and leadership of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, we’ll speak with ousted artistic director, Vice President Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jon Batiste singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the Super Bowl earlier this year as President Trump saluted, attending the game — the first president to do so. The performance came just days after Trump fired Jon Batiste and others from serving on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.