On the second Sunday in April of this year, some 50,000 Hungarians — about one out of every 200 people in the country — spent the day inside polling stations, watching votes get counted. They weren’t election officials; they were volunteers who signed up, took the training, and sat through the count because their movement asked them to and they said yes.

That night, Viktor Orbán conceded.

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Of course, the monitors didn’t beat him by themselves. They were among the most visible components of a strategy months in the making in which nearly everyone had a job. For context, for the United States to match that effort per capita, it would take about 1.7 million people, including you.

The administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy is designed to feel overwhelming. But our movement has a strategy too, and most of what it asks of you is simple. What follows is the practical companion to everything this series has argued: the actions that matter most between now and November, organized by the job each one does. Think of it as the page to print out and stick on the fridge.

Read more — Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect

1. Start close to home. You have the most influence over your own actions and your immediate community: your family, friends, coworkers, faith community or union. That’s where your effort goes furthest.

2. Find a lane and move. Many campaigns and groups are organizing to defend our elections, and every successful effort has used a wide range of tactics, adjusting as the facts changed. You don’t have to find the perfect tactic. Pick action over agonizing.

3. Bring what only you can. Your skills, relationships, and resources are the movement’s raw materials. Lean into the actions that fit your daily life and interests, because those are the habits you’ll keep.

With those in mind, here’s how we win.

Organize

Stop voter suppression and election sabotage, starting now. This is the counter to Disrupt.

• Double-check your voter registration status, then send the lookup link to friends and family.

• Check your state’s key dates and deadlines, and put them in your calendar or sign up for text alerts. Make sure you understand your state’s ID requirements.

• Make a plan to vote early and in person, then make sure your community has one too.

• Find your people. Once your friends and family are set, decide who you’ll engage over the coming months. Start the conversation about what you can do together.

Show up

Vote for the candidates of your choice. And as an act of solidarity, get out the vote everywhere. This is the counter to suppressed turnout, and the foundation for everything else.

• Think through who in your community may need support to vote: a ride, a reminder, time off if you’re an employer, a young person voting for the first time. Set a goal to support as many people as you can.

• Sign up to be an election worker. Competent, compassionate poll workers make an extraordinary difference in whether elections run smoothly and every eligible voter can cast a ballot and have it counted.

• Sign up to help cure ballots. In most states, voters who make a minor mistake, like forgetting to sign the outer envelope, get a chance to fix it and have their vote counted. Cure programs reach those voters in time to do it (look for opportunities to sign up with the League of Women Voters or Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the fall).

Prove

Make the results unquestionable. This is the counter to Deceive.

• Serve as a poll observer across the process: logic-and-accuracy testing (where election officials test the machines before voting begins), early vote, election day, mail ballot canvassing, and any audits or recounts. Then share what you saw, however feels comfortable. Firsthand accounts build trust in a way that can’t be replaced.

• Be your community’s trusted source. Before and after the election, our communities will be flooded with misinformation about the election process and results. Decide now where you’ll get reliable information — Electionline and Votebeat are good places to start — and be the person who shares it. Learn more about how to combat disinformation here.

Hold the line

Make sure the winners take office. This is the counter to Deny.

The precise work of the post-election period will become clearer as the administration’s strategy plays out, and we will tell you about it as it does. Some of it we can predict now. The officials who certify results answer to our communities, so learn who yours are, and let them know, before the election, that you expect a lawful process. Sign up for updates and alerts so that if the moment calls for mass mobilization, you hear it early.

Everything above is preparation for this stage: a movement that fought, won, and is ready to hold.

Additional resources

• How You Can Protect Democracy — our team updates this page every week with resources and priority actions from across the movement.

• Gen Z Election Defense Toolkit

• Business Election Defense Toolkit

• Faith Communities Election Defense Toolkit

• How to spot (and push back against) federal voter intimidation

Undoing Trump’s golden age of corruption

Protect Democracy’s Amanda Carpenter has a new piece in The Bulwark that is all about the president’s corruption, and how we can still get justice:

No one is allowed to keep the profits of ransacking the public trust. It does not matter if your name is Donald Trump or Bernie Madoff, the same rules should apply to everyone: You loot, you lose.

Read the full piece

On July 16, President Trump used a primetime address from the White House East Room — a platform historically reserved for major national moments — to reiterate long-debunked claims about the 2020 election, alleging a “deep state” conspiracy involving Barack Obama and Joe Biden and accusing China of “sinister election meddling.” Experts found no credible evidence to support his claims, while several points merely exaggerated findings publicly released by the intelligence community years ago.

The speech brings into focus the administration’s organizing priority through November — to use disinformation that has the patina of legitimacy to undermine confidence in American elections, and the 2026 midterms more specifically. By raising these claims now, Trump and his allies are also laying the groundwork to, after Election Day, deny election results they don’t like. American elections remain safe and secure, even as the president works to undermine the confidence Americans have in them.

See The Authoritarian Action Watch.

In the 2024 elections, only about four percent of U.S. House seats changed hands from one party to another. Four percent. It doesn’t seem possible to make our political system even more rigid. But the two major parties are trying anyway.

In advance of the 2026 midterms, state legislators are racing to redraw congressional maps to make seats safer for one party or the other. To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that for decades allowed voters of color to challenge maps drawn to dilute their voting power.

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Most Americans live in districts where the outcome was decided long before Election Day by politicians drawing lines to protect their seats. This November, millions of voters will cast ballots that are powerless to affect those outcomes. With this latest wave of mid-cycle redistricting, we’re entering a new phase of a problem that’s plagued American democracy from nearly the beginning.

It’s also a problem that most other democracies have managed to solve.

Gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it

In 1968, the political scientist Robert Dixon quipped that “all districting is gerrymandering.” Dixon was making an observation about a fundamental feature — and flaw — of the U.S. electoral system itself: our use of single-member districts.

Single-member districts are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. Gerrymandering works by exploiting a common feature of them known as “wasted votes.” When a candidate wins with 60% of the vote, the 40% cast for other candidates doesn’t help to elect anyone; those votes are considered “wasted.” So, too, are the 10% the prevailing candidate earned beyond what was needed to win. Gerrymanderers are essentially engineers of this waste, designing districts to maximize the opposition’s wasted votes and minimize their own.

Read more — How to end gerrymandering

Take Austin, Texas, as an example. In 2011, mapmakers sliced up the city by drawing parts of it into several surrounding districts. This dispersed the city’s largely Democratic voters across multiple districts. Republicans were able to win in race after race by small but comfortable margins (minimizing waste) while Democrats were spread thinly across the map (maximizing waste). The result: the next year, Republicans in Texas won roughly 58% of the statewide vote but secured 67% of the state’s House seats. Of course, this cuts both ways. In 2024, Democrats in heavily gerrymandered Illinois won about 53% of the vote but ended up with 82% of the state’s seats.

That each of our congressional districts elects only one representative seems natural enough — by and large, that’s the way it’s always been. But globally, this is unusual. The reason we so rarely hear about gerrymandering elsewhere is that most democracies use a system where gerrymandering simply doesn’t work.

Proportional representation inhibits gerrymandering at the source

Today, Protect Democracy released a new report, “When Maps Don’t Matter,” that unpacks how adopting a single reform for the U.S. House would end the redistricting wars for good.

Read more — When Maps Don’t Matter

Most democracies now use multi-member districts where winners are allocated proportionally to votes: a system we’ve long supported called proportional representation. In a five-seat district, a party that wins 40% of the vote receives two seats, and another that wins 60% receives three. As districts grow in size — from one to three members, or from three to five — the ability to manipulate outcomes through line-drawing rapidly diminishes.

Proportional systems aim to align seats with votes: winning about half the vote gets you about half the seats — not 82%. Try as they might, would-be gerrymanderers can’t do much about it, because proportional systems deprive them of their one key tool: wasted votes. Recall that a party that wins 40% of the vote in a single-member district wins nothing (lots of waste). But in a five-seat district, that same party wins two seats: instead of being wasted, nearly all of the votes contribute to representation.

Consider what happens when mapmakers try to gerrymander under proportional representation. Certainly, one could move voters across a district line. But doing so just means those voters bring their representation with them. If 40% of voters are shut out of representation in one district, they simply elect their proportionate share somewhere else. Shuffling the map just shuffles where their seats come from, but ultimately leaves them with the same amount of representation.

Sign up to learn more about proportional representation

Proportional systems make gerrymandering prohibitively difficult for another reason: It tends to generate multiparty competition. In a two-party system, mapmakers can often make educated guesses about how voters will split between the two sides and draw districts accordingly. But when three or five or more parties are competing, those calculations become much less predictable. A smaller party might surge unexpectedly, drawing support from several different parties and reshuffling the political landscape. Multipartyism increases uncertainty — and uncertainty is the enemy of gerrymandering. When it’s harder to predict outcomes, it’s harder to manipulate the maps in advance.

Over 500 scholars call on Congress to end the redistricting wars through proportional representation

Ridding our politics of gerrymandering will ultimately require reforming the system that enables it.

So say (and we agree) more than 500 scholars — including the nation’s leading democracy, voting rights, and redistricting experts — who also today released an open letter calling on Congress to adopt proportional representation as an end to the redistricting wars.

Read the full letter

“These developments are serious,” wrote the scholars, referring to recent developments like the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais and the escalation of mid-cycle redistricting. “But they should not obscure the underlying diagnosis: gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it. We write to urge Congress to do what most democracies have already done: adopt proportional representation.”

Reforms that preserve single-member districts are not enough

It’s possible (sometimes) to get rid of intentional gerrymandering while leaving single-member districts intact. But here’s the catch: Lopsided results tend to persist anyway.

In the 2024 election, California used maps drawn by an independent redistricting commission. Under these maps, Democrats won roughly 60% of the statewide vote but still earned about 83% of the state’s U.S. House seats. This gold-standard commission had all but eliminated gerrymandering, but Democrats still won far more seats than their vote share would suggest. What happened?

In California, Republicans tend to be dispersed geographically, spread out across regions dominated by Democrats. Despite the commission’s best efforts, this prevented mapmakers from drawing districts that would group Republicans together and allow them to win seats commensurate with their actual numbers. This problem is known as geographic sorting. Even in states where gerrymandering isn’t much of an issue, single-member districts are still uniquely sensitive to voter geography — producing distorted results similar to those generated by gerrymandering.

To be sure, reforms like independent commissions or proposed bans on gerrymandering are an improvement over the status quo. California’s results would almost certainly be even more lopsided otherwise (as they will likely be again, now that the state has voted to pause the commission). But as the more than 500 scholars explain, the use of single-member districts “makes the drawing of district lines consequential in the first place. As long as that system remains intact, distorted election outcomes will persist.”

It’s time to eliminate the problem at its source

Americans have never been fond of gerrymandering.

The term itself was coined to mock a salamander-shaped district drawn to protect the party of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812. Over 200 years later, Americans continue to deride the practice. In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, roughly seven in 10 said states should not be allowed to draw districts to favor one party.

And over 200 years later, the problem is still with us — for the simple reason that our system makes it possible. It’s time for a new system that eliminates the problem at its source.

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On Thursday night, the president will address the American people. Reporting suggests he will cite newly (and selectively) declassified “intelligence” about the 2020 election to further his longstanding conspiracy theories.

That claim, on its face, might seem like Trump indulging a personal obsession — he thinks he won in 2020, and he needs to prove it. As we’ve covered over the past few months, though, his claims serve a larger purpose. They are designed not just to relitigate 2020, but to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterms and to justify new measures to enable his allies to override our elections.

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This is one piece of a broader strategy that the president has pursued for months: Deceive the American people about the security of our elections, Disrupt the playing field in ways that favor his party, and ultimately Deny results he doesn’t like after ballots are cast. Protect Democracy first described this strategy in our Executive Override report, issued in March. This week, we published an update that explains how the strategy has evolved in the last four months and how the pushback is faring

Read more — Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect

Politicized intelligence is one threat among many

Politicized intelligence has been a concern since the start of Trump’s second term. After Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard took part in an FBI raid on Fulton County related to the 2020 election earlier this year, Ben Berwick and Ansley Skipper wrote this:

“Gabbard is steeped in election conspiracies and appears to be looking to curry favor with the president by being his election denial point person in the executive branch.”

In the months since, the president has replaced Gabbard with Bill Pulte, an interim appointee with no intelligence experience who seems to have been selected primarily for his willingness to serve the president. Jess Marsden warned:

“Unlike lies about vote-counting or voting machines — which have been circulating for years and have never been proven — misinformation about foreign interference in elections is territory that’s not nearly as well-worn. The DNI could use selective disclosures of raw intelligence — on its own, not evidence of wrongdoing, but potentially highly suggestive to a lay audience — to bolster false claims about the election.”

Like most of Trump’s playbook on elections, then, this threat was entirely predictable. And it’s far from the only development in the Override strategy since we first published our report. Since March, the president has leveraged all three parts of the playbook:

Deceive: The president has spent the spring spreading lies about California vote counting and using the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to go after the news media — on top of his politicization of the Office of the DNI. These efforts have different targets, but each is designed to use the power of the federal government to sow doubt about the security of our elections and lay the foundation for the administration to interfere in them.

Disrupt: Trump’s continued obsession with the SAVE Act has been joined by an executive order and a proposed Postal Service rule that would let the federal government decide which mail ballots get delivered (both of which have been enjoined by courts for now). Add to that, he’s advocated for a series of Supreme Court decisions that have furthered the administration’s efforts to sow chaos this election season. These developments, along with several others, are part of a broader strategy to tilt the playing field toward Trump and his allies.

Deny: Any effort the president makes to deceive or disrupt also gives him ground to deny results he doesn’t like after the fact. To further that effort, the president has purged dissenting voices from the Republican Party and sought to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward allies willing to break the law on his behalf. And his allies in the states have engaged in their own small-scale version of denial, canceling elections midstream and nullifying completed results. All of this is only likely to ramp up as Election Day gets closer.

Read more — The strategy hiding in plain sight

The override strategy is facing pushback

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Even as the president has weaponized the federal government against the midterms, he has met resistance at nearly every turn. And that’s because his approach has no legal authority. Our elections are run by state and local officials across the country; not by the President.

Federal courts have blocked the Postal Service rule, and the administration is 0-15 in cases over its attempts to seize state voter roll data. Congress has, for now, rejected the SAVE Act, forced Trump to back down — at least initially — on the slush fund (which also received a stinging rebuke in court), and pushed him to change course on Pulte’s official nomination before he installed him temporarily.

Civil society has mobilized as well. More than 100 activist groups signed a joint letter of solidarity after the Southern Poverty Law Center and Ohio Organizing Collaborative were targeted. A federal court, in a lawsuit brought by the New Hampshire Youth Movement, struck down a state law that would have made it harder for students to register to vote. 50 labor and religious groups condemned the indictment of anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota. And Illinois, Vermont, New York, and Connecticut have passed laws letting residents sue federal agents who violate their constitutional rights — a direct response to fears that armed agents could be deployed to polling places.

There’s more work to be done, but we have built a strong foundation.

What we can do

We don’t know exactly what Trump is going to say on Thursday night. Odds are, it will be as inflammatory as possible — designed to make some Americans feel unsure about the security of our elections, and to convince others that the president and his allies are already stealing the midterms.

In the months ahead, we expect Trump’s election subversion efforts to become even more focused, and new tactics to be added to the playbook. The administration might use zombie lawsuits to seed legal challenges to election results ahead of time, activating them when results don’t go their way. It could declare emergencies to try to wrestle control over elections from state and local officials. It could set up a conflict with the courts as it continues trying to decide who is and is not eligible to vote. It could also use federal law enforcement to intimidate voters in key areas in the weeks before Election Day. And, as now seems likely, it could politicize intelligence with the goal of sowing doubts about the security of our elections.

Right now, Trump’s election subversion effort is not succeeding — because the American people are not letting it.

The best way to combat election lies is to understand how much control each of us still has over the outcome of this election. The president and his allies want us to feel like we won’t be able to vote, or our votes won’t be counted or won’t matter. Our job is to prove them wrong.

Next week, we’ll have more to say about the actions you can take in the months ahead.

In the last few months, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged protesters in Minnesota with engaging in a criminal conspiracy, secured sentences of a combined 450 years in prison against protesters in Texas, reindicted former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post, and opened investigations into nonprofits it claims fund political violence. While each case is framed as a response to the threat of political violence, some seem to have little to do with it at all.

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These cases share a pattern: the Trump administration is using allegations of political violence as cover to violate individual rights, chill dissent, and intimidate civil society. Direct connections to actual acts of political violence seem to be, at best, a secondary concern. Taken together, this is a classic authoritarian playbook tactic — a blatant attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor ahead of the midterms, borrowed from the same script used to label nonprofits as foreign threats abroad.

The strategy could work because Americans are genuinely worried. Political violence has been on the rise for a decade, and now includes violence that comes from the government itself. Americans know that things are trending in the wrong direction, but polling shows they lack the full picture and they don’t agree on where the threat is coming from. That gap between fear and understanding is exactly what the federal government is exploiting.

Read more — Media Guides: Covering political violence

The data doesn’t match the narrative

The Trump administration has baselessly claimed the country faces “an organized campaign of radical left terrorism” that has broad support. That characterization may fit their narrative, but it doesn’t fit the data.

Experts broadly agree that threats and violence have increased in recent years. While high-profile attacks have come from both the left and right, most documented episodes over the last decade have come from individuals seemingly identifying with the political right. The number seen as coming from the left has begun to rise only recently, from a prior baseline of almost zero. And in fact, ideology itself is a poor lens for this problem altogether: Many perpetrators of political violence hold mixed or incoherent worldviews that don’t really map onto our conventional notions of left and right at all. The administration’s claims of organized, ideological violence campaigns just don’t reflect the realities of a serious and complex problem.

What is clear is that Americans across the ideological spectrum reject political violence. Just 16% of Americans think violence for political ends is ever acceptable, and only 2% are confident that they themselves would personally consider participating. These numbers are consistently low across the partisan spectrum — the differences between self-identified Republicans or Democrats are minor because support is so low across the board.

Covering political violence requires principle and clarity

Careful journalism is how most Americans make sense of the gap between perception and reality — but even good faith reporting can unintentionally stoke fear, push targeted communities from public life, or feed authoritarian narratives. This is why Protect Democracy and Over Zero have developed a series of resources to help newsrooms cover instances of political violence responsibly. How do we know if our news sources are living up to best practices? Three questions are worth asking of any story:

1. Is the reporting concrete, or does it sensationalize? Responsible reporting gets the facts right while avoiding language that stokes fear, misrepresents scale, or obscures accountability. If coverage heavily features natural disaster or war metaphors, or leaves you feeling powerless in the face of events that feel uncontrollable and unattributable, those are red flags. Precise numbers beat vague language. “Three protestors threw rocks at police” conveys a precise scale; “violence exploded” does not. It also avoids mistakenly implying that responsibility or support for violence extends to an entire group.

2. Does the reporting provide context? Reporting should note whether a targeted community has a history of being scapegoated and whether the event is connected to broader political narratives. Relying on experts for context is also important. Extremists use violence as a tool to amplify their reach, so reporting should never provide an unfiltered platform for violent actors and their ideologies. When a violent event involves agents of the state, journalists cannot limit their coverage to the immediate episode. They must explore whether and how the incident was part of a larger set of operations or events, and whether anyone faces accountability. Context is also critical for reporting on government responses. Violence can serve as a pretext for infringing on rights and freedoms or intimidating political opposition. Reporting should indicate when violence is being used to justify authoritarian crackdowns in the name of restoring “law and order.”

3. Does the reporting include the people targeted, their response, and additional condemnations of the violence? Political violence frequently aims to push targeted groups from public life — from voting and running for office to attending everyday community events — and to make everyday community members feel powerless in the face of repression. It has historically targeted Black, immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish, Arab, and Muslim communities. But the threats to these communities are not the entire story. Communities take concrete steps to repair harm in the face of violence and protect public participation, particularly for those targeted. Reporting should cover these as well, taking particular care to engage with and amplify the perspectives of those targeted. Coverage should also highlight condemnations of political violence, especially from voices whose politics might otherwise seem to align with those responsible. Condemnation from an unexpected place reaffirms how widely violent tactics are rejected — and that itself is important context.

The stakes rise with the midterms on the horizon

Violence is a tool for disrupting elections. It can create an environment of fear and uncertainty that primes voters to believe conspiracy theories or false claims of fraud.

Read more — Are reporters doing a good job covering protests?

We have already seen the Trump administration lay the groundwork: surveillance and intimidation of protestors and physical violence against the administration’s opponents. Violence can also serve as a pretext for the crackdown itself — a rationale for “restoring law and order” that conveniently expands federal power over dissent. When Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis, video footage undercut the federal government’s claims of terrorism almost immediately, showing how far the official narrative had drifted from reality.

As communities across the country organize to ensure every eligible voter can safely participate in the midterm elections this fall, responsible coverage is not a luxury; it’s a democratic necessity. All of us should ask whether the news we’re reading or watching gives us facts we can act on, or just feelings we can’t.

There is a lot each of us can do to help protect our democracy in this critical moment. Caring for our neighbors, engaging our communities, and finding ways to use our voices are all essential. As we confront the dual challenges of political violence and authoritarian attempts to weaponize it, being clear-eyed about both the real risks of violence and the risk of its exploitation is a responsibility we all share.

In late September of last year, President Trump declared that Portland was “war-ravaged” after Portlanders protested his deployment of the National Guard there. It wasn’t true.

That didn’t stop the Trump administration. To make good on the president’s claims of violence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) brought pro-Trump influencers and its own videographers to the Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, where many of the protests had occurred. As the cameras rolled, DHS fired huge quantities of chemical munitions. When the influencers filmed the smoke-filled streets, it looked like a scene Trump had only imagined.

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But the streets of Portland aren’t a movie set, and chemical munitions have real consequences. The toxins, released again and again at the ICE facility without real justification, caused grievous physical and emotional harm to community members, including families living in the affordable housing complex across the street.

Residents and their landlord sued to stop the rampant use of these munitions, represented by Protect Democracy and co-counsel. The judge who granted a preliminary injunction highlighted the shocking nature of this propaganda-creation behavior by law enforcement officers. A Ninth Circuit panel later stayed that decision, but the government has never contested that it deployed chemical munitions during this period for the sole purpose of creating content, including staged videos that DHS posted to its Instagram account, to support the president’s false story about Portland. On July 10, we’re back before the Ninth Circuit, asking that the injunction be reinstated so our clients can be safe in their homes.

Learn more — Challenging the federal use of chemical weapons against Portland residents

The government is now the superspreader

Portland is one example of a much larger operation. DHS has invited influencers on ride-alongs and inside ICE facilities in cities around the country. It has produced glamorized depictions of ICE raids, set to dramatic music and edited to omit footage of U.S. citizen children being detained. The White House has released videos depicting the war in Iran as a video game or a movie trailer, pointedly omitting any depiction of what happens when the bombs hit.

This strategy has a second half: suppressing the reporting that would undercut the story. The administration excluded local Portland press from the ICE facility while granting access to right-wing influencers. It adopted rules that exclude mainstream media outlets from covering the Pentagon. And the Federal Communications Commission, under Chair Brendan Carr, has repeatedly used threats of regulatory authority to push broadcasters toward the president’s preferred coverage — on the Iran War, and even on late-night TV.

We have been fighting election lies since 2021, when Protect Democracy launched Law for Truth to hold those who knowingly or recklessly spread election disinformation accountable for the damage they cause. But the biggest superspreader of election lies today is the federal government itself, assisted by authoritarian allies in state governments and by many of the same people who have been lying about elections since 2020. In fact, many of those people are serving in the administration to help it elevate these false narratives. Election denier Heather Honey now serves as DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for “Election Integrity;” Harmeet Dhillon, who represented Trump in litigation to overturn the 2020 election, is now Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. (There are many more.)

As the administration works to ensure its preferred candidates take office after the midterms — regardless of who the voters choose — this propaganda machine will be aimed at the election. As we explain in Executive Override, the plan is to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the elections, creating a pretext to disrupt election processes and, eventually, to deny the results. Content that depicts a false version of events (or places real events in a false context), as in Portland, will be a key part of that deception.

Read more — Inside the federal campaign to sow distrust in elections

We know that Trump will claim fraud wherever his partisan allies lose, and that the pro-Trump ecosystem will back that claim up with manufactured content built on the lies already circulating about noncitizen voting and mail balloting. We may also see propaganda created to justify sending federal forces to key voting districts — showing they are needed to quell out-of-control protests or to control crime.

Rather than using the bully pulpit to persuade Americans, the administration seeks to control the information environment — a kind of manipulation that effectively bypasses the consent of the governed.

Every election lie falls into one of five categories

Knowing the playbooks is the best protection. Researchers at the University of Washington have found that election lies always fall into one of five categories:

• False evidence: The rumor is based on fabricated or manipulated evidence, such as false statements, deceptively edited content, and synthetic (AI-generated) content.

• Misinterpreted evidence: The rumor is based on real evidence that has been mischaracterized or misinterpreted to create a false impression.

• Omitted remedies: The rumor highlights real or perceived issues with election administration but overlooks or obscures remedies, such as downstream security measures, to imply an untrustworthy process or untrustworthy results.

• Exaggerated impact: The rumor exaggerates the impact of real or perceived issues with election administration to imply an untrustworthy process or untrustworthy results.

• Falsely attributed intent: The rumor falsely attributes intention to real or perceived issues with election administration to imply voter or election fraud.

Once you know the framework, the recycling becomes almost comically predictable. The most common category is misinterpreted evidence, when the evidence is real, but its meaning is distorted. Think about the ordinary, effective use of Sharpies on ballots recast as a plot to disenfranchise in-person voters, or accurate vote totals shifting over the course of the count recast as proof of a steal. This year, AI will likely help false evidence become a more common category, so it’s worth reviewing best practices from our partners at the Brennan Center for evaluating potentially AI-generated election content.

2000 Mules, with subpoena power

In many ways, none of this is new. Remember 2000 Mules, the “documentary” released by election deniers that falsely portrayed footage of legal voting at dropboxes as evidence of a nationwide network of “ballot mules” stealing the 2020 election? Millions of people saw it, and it surely fueled mistrust in our election system — but it led to no prosecutions and had no legal effect on the election.

What is starkly different in 2026 is that the federal government itself is executive-producing the movie. Imagine the equivalent in 2026: The White House posts a video that it says portrays election fraud. Millions of Americans see the false allegation, at immeasurable cost to anyone shown in the footage. The Department of Justice will file criminal charges against those it decides to blame. The White House’s allies will seek to use the video in court and in Congress to fight certification of the election results. And they will use it to win in the court of public opinion.

Each of us can do our part. First, learn the five categories. And when the disinformation comes, name the category to your family, your followers, your readers, before the lie sets in. Keep consuming, paying for, and elevating independent media, so that the lies don’t go unanswered. And speak up now when you see government use its power to suppress speech from those who oppose it. Their playbook depends on duping Americans, but we don’t have to let that happen.

What we’re reading

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, a new book from Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, offers a roadmap to political courage with practical steps for anyone who wants to take collective action.

Together, we can work to save our multiracial democracy and reverse the cycle of capitulation that authoritarians need to thrive.

Learn more about the book

Supreme Court rulings extend the president’s control over federal agencies

On June 29, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 91-year-old precedent that has allowed Congress to shield independent agency leaders from removal except “for cause.” In a 6-3 ruling, the Court found that Trump’s 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts dismissed the precedent as “a result in search of a rationale” and declared that “subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him.”

The ruling’s reach extends far beyond the FTC. For decades, Humphrey’s Executor has protected roughly two dozen agencies designed to operate above partisan politics — including the FCC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Stripping their leaders of removal protections clears the way for a president to purge regulators who resist his agenda and replace them with loyalists, collapsing the independence that allows these institutions to police elections, markets, communications, and safety without fear of retaliation.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

On Saturday, the United States turns 250.

In 1787, as the story goes, a woman stopped Benjamin Franklin outside the Constitutional Convention and asked what kind of government the delegates had made. “A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.” This newsletter took its name from that answer. But Franklin left one thing unsaid: kept by whom?

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The presumption, now more than ever, is that the keeping and the tending of America belong to someone else; to institutions, elected officials, and public figures. That presumption is wrong. A democracy cannot be sustained by any one person or group. Ours has lasted this long because everyday Americans chose, in words popularized by Theodore Roosevelt, to “do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

To be sure, it’s a mindset that runs against many of the forces shaping American life today: institutional and interpersonal distrust, the loneliness epidemic, and a sense that the challenges facing our communities are simply too large for any one person to influence. Everyone’s feeling the weight.

Read more — How you can protect democracy

It’s natural, then, that we would scroll and search for the fix for our lives and for the candidates who swear they’ll solve it all.

The actual necessary work can seem frustrating, even pointless, in contrast, when so many already feel like we have so little else to give. But this work isn’t asking for more; it’s asking for something different — a democratized heroism where we acknowledge our responsibility to shepherd in a brighter future and appreciate the power found in a commitment to principle, participation, and connection rooted where we are. These principles have guided our democracy at its best over the past 250 years.

Lessons from abroad and our own history

This spring, Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year authoritarian grip. Much was deservedly written about the savvy political leadership of Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party, but the breakthrough was equally built by ordinary Hungarians who refused to bow to cynicism and organized localized community groups known as “islands” — small groups of neighbors who met, talked, and built the civic muscle necessary to bring their democracy back from the brink. Their names won’t appear in a history book, but the result of their resilience and commitment will.

Read more — Is Budapest the bellwether?

Our own history tells the same story of everyday courage. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement — we remember the generals and the speeches, but the foundation was laid by people whose names are lost: the free Black communities just across the Ohio River who supported the Underground Railroad despite the risks and the Southern families cooking meals for the Freedom Summer activists.

What we look back on as sparks that led to sudden movements are really the natural sprouting of seeds, sown by hundreds of thousands of Americans, most of them unknown, for a harvest they knew they might not see.

Civic life is more than one moment

Movements, in other words, are made of steady personal habits that strengthen over time. For a democracy “by and for the people” to sustain, we the people must integrate democratic principles into who we are. And just like going to the gym or starting a new hobby — intentional, consistent effort is the key.

That sort of engaged life is a meaningful life, and that commitment to the places and people around us shapes how we show up, who we stay connected to, and ultimately what our democracy becomes.

The pattern usually starts in small, day-to-day ways. Someone might start by staying informed about what’s happening locally — checking community updates or attending a local meeting. Over time, those small steps can lead to conversations with neighbors or community groups and a clearer sense of where they can make a difference. Staying informed can also open up new opportunities to get more involved, like becoming a poll worker or helping organize a local voter registration drive after learning that many young people in the community are not registered to vote.

Over time, these efforts form a powerful pattern. They become a way of living that keeps us connected to the communities we’re part of and ripples out.

None of these steps is heroic on its own. But added together, they are the answer to how a democracy keeps itself.

If you’re looking for a place to begin, our How You Can Protect Democracy webpage gathers dozens of ways to start — in your community, with your local institutions, at whatever scale your life allows.

Here are a few entry points:

• Refresh your knowledge on how American democracy is supposed to work

• Connect with your neighbors

• Go to a local community meeting

• Support community engagement at your local library

• Help people register to vote

• Reach out to your elected officials

• Prepare for a local budget meeting

• Join or host America’s Potluck on July 5

• Explore the activity library for America’s 250th

• Start a conversation about what comes next for America

Consistency matters more than intensity. Do what you can, when you can, and stay engaged where you are. Don’t assume someone else will take responsibility for what you care about, and don’t wait for the “perfect” moment to get involved.

America is waiting for us

Each of us might be tempted to wait for a big moment of change or a heroic fix — a savior, the “perfect” candidate, or a transformational political realignment. But the truth is harder and calls us all to account. What strengthens democracy is a people committed to shared, steady work scaling over time.

So, this weekend, do one small thing. Join a table at America’s Potluck. Look up when your town council meets next and put it on the calendar. Head over to a neighbor’s porch and ask them how they’re doing.

America is waiting for us to realize that democracy’s story is the collection of our own. Its promise is dependent on the commitments we each make to live out democracy in our share of the pages.

The president now has more control over federal agencies

The overruling of Humphrey's Executor v. United States gives the president much more direct control over the operations of federal agencies. Earlier this week, we hosted a conversation with Sen. Cory Booker, former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, and Protect Democracy Special Counsel Amit Agarwal, where they discussed the ruling, which dramatically expands presidential power and weakens Congress’s longstanding ability to ensure that independent agencies can make decisions free from political pressure. You can watch highlights from the conversation below:

Community resilience in the 2026 elections

Election interference has, in recent history, been mostly associated with foreign actors. There were concerns about the role Russia played in the 2016 election, and much of America’s election infrastructure is built to ward off threats from foreign adversaries that might undermine this crucial lever of American democracy.

As we’ve covered extensively, this cycle is different. During the 2026 midterms, election interference from the United States government could be an even greater threat than that posed by any foreign power.

That’s why Over Zero and Protect Democracy created a guide to support communities around the country who are taking action to ensure that all eligible voters can cast their ballots in free, fair, and safe elections — even in the face of threatened interference and voter intimidation.

Read the full guide

Governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” The founders’ approach to that promise was both brilliant and flawed. A constitution that excluded slaves and women from participation was nonetheless set up with the understanding that neither government nor its people are stagnant. We change. We grow. We amend. But a government that represents us was always the point. Two hundred fifty years in, it’s fair to ask whether that promise still holds.

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The American people seem skeptical, to say the least. Poll after poll shows deep pessimism about whether our political system is working. Two-thirds think the Founders would be disappointed in the country today. Americans distrust every major political institution, with the possible exception of the military: Congress, the Supreme Court, local governments, the federal government. Clear majorities expect a future where we are more divided politically, have a worse standard of living, more economic inequality, and less freedom. A rapidly growing share feel that neither major political party represents them at all, with independent registration now outpacing both parties in much of the country.

And perhaps worst of all, we have lost our sense of agency. Nearly two-thirds of us feel we have little or no “direct or indirect role in what America becomes over the next 50 years.”

This is not ordinary economic anxiety or partisan midterm divides. It is a crisis of representation. A widening gap between our founding promise and the lived reality of a political system that an increasing number of Americans experience as something that happens to us, not something we get to shape.

The crisis has more than one author

One reason for this is obvious. Since first elected in 2016, Trump has aimed to remake our country in ways very few Americans want. He has only supercharged that effort in his second term, deploying his Project 2025 authoritarian playbook. Ignoring our checks and balances, he’s upended our economy, enmeshed us in foreign wars, ignored the law, and dismantled government programs that protect the health, safety, and finances of the American public. Although he’s a term-limited president, he behaves like a despot, insisting that he gets to make these monumental decisions, steamrolling Congress despite the fact that the Constitution specifically assigns it these powers.

In the face of plummeting popularity, he’s aiming to deny voters a meaningful chance to choose representatives who can hold him democratically accountable. Trump’s Executive Override strategy has weaponized the power of the federal government in an attempt to block our ability to exercise the ultimate check — throwing out those in Congress who are enabling Trump. Through deception, disrupting the conduct of our elections, and denying results he dislikes, Trump’s goal is not merely to win elections but to make our elections incapable of serving as a genuine check on his power.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

Trump’s had plenty of help in this, and not just from his allies in Congress. His fellow partisans on the Roberts Court have spent two decades contracting the sphere of democratic self-governance: gutting the Voting Rights Act, enabling extreme gerrymandering, dismantling the government Congress created, inventing presidential immunity, and allowing unlimited spending to drown out the voices of ordinary voters.

Trump’s private-sector allies among media, tech, and AI oligarchs are spending hundreds of millions to prevent the public, through our representatives, from having any say over how those technologies are deployed. Decisions are now being made about artificial intelligence that will shape American life for decades, and they are being made by a handful of people accountable to no one but themselves.

And corruption runs through all of it. Starting with the first family and extending through government insiders and their well-connected allies, public office is being used to cut private deals, enrich the powerful, and foreclose accountability for those at the top. All this is being done at the expense of the rest of us; those who can’t fund the ballroom, buy seats at crypto dinners, or spend hundreds of millions through super PACS are given little say.

Add it up, and the pattern is clear: Concentrated power, across multiple institutions and actors, is systematically eliminating the mechanisms through which ordinary Americans exercise control over our collective future. No wonder so few people think their voices matter.

Not for the first time

We have been here before. The story of American history is one of possibility and hope. The Founders did not create a perfect democracy, and Americans have never been satisfied with what is. In every generation, we strived for what can be. Progress has been far from linear, but in each generation we have demanded and created a more fulsome democracy.

This fight started 250 years ago, when, facing destruction by the British army, the Founders didn’t just fight against the king — they fought for a government by and for the people. Articulating, for the first time with the force of law, that government must derive its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

In the darkness of the Civil War, Lincoln understood that preserving self-government required expanding it: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” A month later, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. And out of his charge came Reconstruction and the amendments that remain the constitutional jewel of American democracy.

In 1919, after 70 years of organizing, World War I made the contradiction between fighting for democracy abroad and denying it to women at home impossible to sustain, and Americans adopted the 19th Amendment to give women representation.

And in 1965, after decades of terror and struggle, the footage of state troopers beating peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge shocked the national conscience and gave Congress the moral obligation to finally pass the Voting Rights Act, making good on the promise of Reconstruction.

Read more — Why collective action is the only way

The pattern is consistent. Generations of Americans stood up to say: We must not despair in crisis, we must demand change. The question at 250 is whether our generation will do the same.

Working toward a government where we have a say

The road to a renewed political system that genuinely represents us will not be straight or short. But we know where it begins. Our charge over the coming months is to prevent Trump’s Executive Override strategy from denying the people a meaningful say in the midterms and a chance to decide whether those in power have our consent. Together, we can insist that in these midterms, eligible voters can cast ballots, have them counted, and see winners take office — without voter intimidation, without the machinery of the federal government interfering in the count, and without the president and his allies overthrowing results they dislike.

From there, we can build toward that fuller representation.

Where a Congress of elected representatives sets national policy on major questions, so that one man cannot unilaterally send armed forces into American cities, upend the economy by executive decree, drag the country into foreign conflicts without democratic authorization, or pilfer from the public to enrich his friends and family. And one in which the Supreme Court helps ensure a fair democracy as opposed to serving as handmaiden to its demise.

Where we have a genuine democratic process for deciding how artificial intelligence reshapes American life — a conversation conducted by the public and its elected representatives, not by a handful of autocrats and oligarchs.

Read more — A steel mill the president might not be able to seize

And where a new system of representation gives Americans meaningful choice, and translates votes into power with reasonable fidelity, so that everyone’s voice counts. That means moving toward proportional representation and reforms that would make our political system reflect the full range of views among the American people, rather than forcing them into a binary that fewer and fewer find adequate.

As we mark America’s 250th, our charge isn’t just to defend what we have been handed down — it’s to remember that we’re still allowed to want more, that questions as large as how we govern ourselves remain ours to decide together rather than have one man decide them for us.

Generation after generation of Americans, in moments darker than this one, insisted on that. They did not wait for the crisis to pass. They used it. Now it is our turn.

Since the 2024 election, we’ve been speaking directly with young leaders across the country about their views on democracy, the barriers to participating in our elections, and what holds back youth-led collective action. One thing we hear again and again from these chats is that efforts to engage youth in the midterms feel “transactional,” which tracks with our personal experience. At this point, we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been told not a single candidate actually understands what it’s like to be a student, a job-seeker, and a young American today.

It’s a critical midterm year for the pro-democracy movement, and the traditional playbook for engaging young voters is failing.

But as Gen Zers who spend our days organizing and warning about the threats to our democracy, we know the story is far more nuanced than some of the narratives we’ve seen in the media. It isn’t that we don’t care. We do. We are simply exhausted by a system that refuses to deliver for us.

Building a truly resilient, cross-generational coalition to combat authoritarianism starts with treating our youngest citizens as full partners, rather than apathetic stakeholders. And today, National Youth Takeover Day, is a great time to start.

Myth-busting youth disillusionment

Data from The Generation Lab confirms that labeling Gen Z as apathetic is wrong. In fact, Gen Z remains deeply committed to core democratic principles like a belief in free and fair elections and opposition to elected leaders going “above the law.” Commitments to democratic guardrails are also widely shared and cut across some deep partisan divides.

What sets Gen Z apart from other generations, though, is a deep distrust of institutions and democratic systems. The Generation Lab poll finds only 21% of young people believe democracy is currently working well for them, and only 26% are confident that it can address the issues our nation faces. What’s eroding isn’t Gen Z’s belief in democracy, it’s the confidence that this version of it can deliver.

Read more — How do young voters really feel about democracy?

(Rational) skepticism vs. apathy

These stats highlight consistent frustration with the way our democracy seems to ignore young people’s priorities and dilute the political voice of young Americans. For Gen Z — the most racially diverse generation in American history — the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which essentially gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is a potent example of the system failing in real time. Every young person who has ever wondered whether their vote actually matters has just been handed evidence that it might not.

And just this week, rather than reduce high housing costs (a top concern for Gen Z), the president blocked housing relief to try to coerce passage of the SAVE America Act. The SAVE Act’s changes to mail registration and ID requirements would disproportionately affect student and young voters through proof-of-citizenship mandates and limits on mail-in ballots. So housing relief is in flux, and it’s in flux to make voting harder for our generation, in particular. Actions like these don’t just dilute youth voting power — they confirm exactly what young people have been saying all along. Our skepticism is rational.

It can be easy to mischaracterize skepticism as apathy. But the data tells a different story: in the first two months of this year, 61% of young people participated in at least one act of civic engagement. Gen Z isn’t opting out of civic life — we are expanding it and leading organizing efforts that have led to political wins.

After New Hampshire passed a strict law eliminating sworn affidavits for voter registration, the New Hampshire Youth Movement filed a federal lawsuit to protect first-time and out-of-state student voters. Last month, a federal court struck down the law as unconstitutional, letting tens of thousands of young citizens vote without facing ID hurdles.

And earlier this year, students in Maryland pressured state lawmakers to pass state-level voting protections. Their efforts led to the passage of the Maryland Voting Rights Act of 2026 (SB 255), legislation that gives state authorities new power to fight voting discrimination.

The path ahead for 2026

This is the context in which we approach the 2026 midterms: The anti-authoritarian impulse among Gen Z remains fiercely active, even when trust in institutions is low. That’s a reality the pro-democracy movement has to reckon with if it wants us to mobilize. Failing to acknowledge Gen Z’s real feelings of despair and disenfranchisement by just telling young people to “vote” isn’t an effective strategy.

Our advice for pro-democracy leaders looking to improve youth engagement this election season? Commit to these key practices:

1. Stop misdiagnosing youth disillusionment. Don’t treat youth frustration as a lack of care or a failure of civic duty.

2. Remain open to non-traditional forms of civic engagement. Young people are championing different kinds of civic engagement strategies (including digital organizing) that may be less visible.

3. Embrace intergenerational collaboration. Meaningful collaboration with Gen Z takes more than just featuring a young person on your next event panel. It will require including young people in decision-making spaces and viewing them as genuine partners.

4. Hear directly from Gen Z about their priorities and needs, and amplify by-Gen Z-for Gen Z resources. We know firsthand how helpful it is to hear from our peers about the challenges they face, and what solutions could look like. This consistent dialogue informed the creation of The Gen Z Election Defense Toolkit in partnership with Gen Z leaders from youth-serving pro-democracy organizations.

Young people are eager to join a pro-democracy movement that empowers them, and one they can identify with. As we grow older and gain more experience, we are committed to cultivating a new generation of young leaders that creates a broad multi-generational pro-democracy coalition. That coalition is going to be essential to realizing the democratic values we’re working so hard to defend and strengthen.

We are not asking the movement to flatter us. We’re asking it to take what we’ve been saying seriously — fix what’s broken and treat us as partners. This National Youth Takeover Day, let’s build a democracy that doesn’t just ask for youth participation but earns our trust.

Facing losses in court, the White House is pushing multiple levers of interference

This week, the Trump administration threatened to withhold a portion of more than $1 billion in annual homeland security grants from states that refuse to adopt sweeping election changes — including phasing out electronic voting systems and running voter rolls through a citizenship verification database that produces false matches and could wrongly remove eligible voters.

Courts continue to push back on parallel efforts to compel states to hand over voter data. A federal judge in Maryland dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter registration records — joining at least eight other courts — finding the administration’s legal theory contrary to the plain text of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

The administration also faced losses in court over his executive orders seeking to alter the 2026 midterms. His executive order on mail-in voting was struck down in federal court, and his 2025 order requiring proof of citizenship was permanently blocked.

Even as he faced losses across multiple fronts in court, the president is also working to undermine faith in free and fair elections through legislation. Trump has halted progress on his nomination for the Director of National Intelligence, and the signing of a bipartisan housing bill, in a desperate attempt to force the passage of the SAVE America Act, a bill that would effectively disenfranchise millions of Americans and has become a top priority for the president.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Los Angeles hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 2001. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won more than two-thirds of the vote in Los Angeles County. Even in 2013, amid a harsh political environment for Democrats across the country, the top-two vote getters in the mayoral primary were both Democrats. So why are President Trump and his allies now up in arms over the failure of reality TV star-turned-LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt to advance to the general election this fall?

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Spoiler alert: It doesn’t have anything to do with Pratt at all. It’s all about how California counts its ballots (slowly) — and how that can be weaponized to erode trust in the elections.

In the hours after voting closed in California on June 2, Pratt — a Republican — had a small lead amongst the first ballots to be counted in the race for a second-place spot to challenge incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. But in this race, tabulations released on Election Day represented somewhere in the range of 60% of the total, and did not include the 25% of votes in California that are typically vote-by-mail ballots cast on or shortly before Election Day. These ballots can be counted if they arrive within seven days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. As those Election Day ballots were counted, they favored Nithya Raman, a progressive challenger to Bass from within the Democratic party, by a sufficient margin to secure her spot over Pratt in second place.

In other words, it played out as a repeat of the presidential election in 2020: The initial vote count was a “red mirage” favoring Republicans, influenced by the fact that Republicans are more likely to send in mail ballots early and vote in person. As the full picture of the ballots cast on and before Election Day became clear, we learned that they favored Raman, and she secured the second-place spot to challenge Bass.

There’s nothing surprising about this outcome — similar patterns have occurred in races since at least 2020. And there’s nothing surprising about Trump using his megaphone to spew election disinformation. But Trump and his allies aren’t stopping with spreading rumors. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli posted on social media that he was opening “multiple election fraud investigations” to look into the results in the state. He told Glenn Beck this week that he expected to bring prosecutions after the primary was certified. There is not, as of this writing, any reason to think that these investigations will turn up actual evidence of fraud.

And, it’s worth noting, Trump and his allies don’t seem to care that Steve Hilton, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, made it out of the primary to compete against Democrat Xavier Becerra. In fact, Hilton himself acknowledged that his team hasn’t found evidence of interference. “We’ve seen nothing that would warrant that kind of intervention,” he said in a June 9 press conference.

In fact, Trump and his allies’ crusade doesn’t have anything to do with the California primaries at all. It’s part of their overall plan to interfere with the 2026 midterm, which we explain in Executive Override: to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the elections, thereby creating a pretext to disrupt election processes (for instance, by imposing unlawful new rules on mail voting) and eventually to deny the results.

Read more — The Post Office has no business deciding who votes

A possible silver lining? By claiming that California’s slow vote count is somehow fraudulent now — and giving California officials the opportunity to debunk those claims and continue ongoing work to count ballots faster — Trump could wind up inoculating the public against his claims. In the fall, when control of Congress could come down to the outcome of House races in California, those same fraud claims may be less effective, as election law expert Rick Hasen has argued.

In Ohio, the deceive strategy turns into a show of force

If California shows how the administration manufactures a pretext for election interference, recent events in Ohio show the next steps in the playbook. On Thursday, FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy group that runs grassroots voter registration drives in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, with a focus on helping underrepresented communities register to vote. Federal agents — more than 100 — reportedly showed up at the homes of the group’s leaders and staff across the state, serving subpoenas and seeking devices and information. Agents told the people they contacted that the search related to a voter-fraud investigation.

Board member Prentiss Haney described the raids as “straight-up intimidation tactics,” and that seems spot on. As of now, there is no public evidence that the group did anything wrong — and notably, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative has joined lawsuits challenging Ohio’s redistricting on behalf of Black voters, making it exactly the kind of pro-democracy actor the administration has been eager to target. Whether or not these investigations ever yield charges, the immediate effect is to intimidate the organizations that help eligible Americans register and vote — and to feed the “voter fraud” narrative the administration needs to justify intervening later.

Shenanigans at the ODNI could supercharge the deceive strategy

At the same time, Trump and his allies are spreading disinformation about California and intimidating nonprofits in Ohio, they are laying the groundwork for another even more concerning deceive tactic: Trump’s effort to install a loyalist (first Bill Pulte, now Jay Clayton) as director of national intelligence (DNI), replacing Tulsi Gabbard.

The DNI has access to a host of highly sensitive national security information, which affords major opportunities to spread disinformation about candidates, their supporters, and the electoral system itself. This could look like a selective leak designed to tarnish a political opponent or false claims about foreign interference in the election process itself. Gabbard pulled a page from this playbook when she involved herself in the FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, where hundreds of boxes filled with ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election were seized.

Because the DNI has so much responsibility for sensitive intelligence, and is a role that is prime for weaponization if placed in the wrong hands, Congress required that the position be filled by someone with “extensive national security experience.” Neither Pulte nor Clayton has any. Pulte (who is still on track to take the DNI role, at least briefly) began his career at his family’s construction company, where he had a history of targeting his relatives with weird, vindictive attacks. He then leveraged campaign donations to President Trump into an appointment to be director of the ​​Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — and turned that agency into a key node in Trump’s retribution campaign. As director of FHFA, Pulte was behind investigations into New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook. (To be clear, none of those investigations have led to convictions — Cook and Schiff were never charged, and the mortgage-fraud indictment against James was dismissed.)

Clayton’s career is more conventionally distinguished — he was a longtime partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and served as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term. He was confirmed last year as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. But he, too, has been willing to embrace (or at least not resist) Trump’s agenda of weaponized law enforcement. He reportedly advised Southern District of New York (SDNY) prosecutor Danielle Sassoon (then the acting head of SDNY) to follow the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) order to drop the criminal case against then-NYC mayor Eric Adams. He didn’t intervene when the DOJ fired respected SDNY prosecutor Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey. And just last week, he jumped on the California voter-fraud bandwagon, going on CNBC to endorse Trump’s false claims about California’s elections, saying “On the [election] integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job, and the American people are right to question it.”

As DNI, Clayton (or Pulte) would have access to a new set of tools to supercharge election conspiracies. Unlike lies about vote-counting or voting machines — which have been circulating for years and have never been proven — misinformation about foreign interference in elections is territory that’s not nearly as well-worn. The DNI could use selective disclosures of raw intelligence — on its own, not evidence of wrongdoing, but potentially highly suggestive to a lay audience — to bolster false claims about the election. And media outlets will have less willingness or ability to conclusively debunk lies that purport to be grounded in sensitive national security information.

An additional reason for concern is that Trump is signaling that he wants to make changes at the agency to erode its nonpartisan, professional bona fides. Trump said this week that Pulte should be “less shackled,” and that he would encourage Pulte to fire many of the national security professionals who work in the agency. That’s likely to discourage future whistleblowers about misinformation, a play we’ve seen the administration run at other agencies. (Add to that a new proposal that would allow agencies to require employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, another layer of chill on disclosures of wrongdoing.)

Read more — Muzzling America’s workforce

Senate Democrats are signaling that they will go along with Clayton’s permanent nomination to the post at DNI — and preventing Pulte from a lengthy tenure as acting DNI is definitely a win. But there’s still more we can do to head off the administration’s misinformation strategy, including by continuing to debunk ongoing lies about California:

1. Help inoculate against misinformation by exposing the strategy in advance: Public understanding of Trump’s override strategy is an effective form of inoculation. Sharing that California is following its laws and processes and that there is no evidence of fraud or irregularities is crucial to preventing the spread of conspiracies in the short term. So too is noting Trump’s rush to claim things are rigged whenever his partisan allies lose — something we all need to be prepared for come November.

2. If you lead a nonprofit or civic group, prepare in advance: The Ohio raid is a warning to every organization that helps Americans register and vote. Protect Democracy’s Nonprofit Toolkit walks through how to respond to government investigations — and as we saw with the SPLC, the groups that fare best are the ones that prepared in advance and refused to face it alone.

3. For Californians, call your state legislators: Let them know that they should continue to invest in and protect elections. These instructions on the app 5Calls can help you do so. Bonus points for calling the offices of Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón and Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas, since they are actively in budget discussions about election funding this week.

ICE surges are ramping back up as we head into the summer

Deployments of ICE agents to cities across the country began in earnest in the summer of 2025, and a year later, they are set to ramp up again. White House border czar Tom Homan has said that one of those surges will target New York City, explaining that the surge would happen because Governor Kathy Hochul is no longer allowing state and local law enforcement to double as immigration officials across the state.

While Homan acknowledged that he “had to” surge ICE into the city, he also made it clear that he doesn’t want to repeat what happened in Minnesota. “You will not see a Minnesota. I will not let Minnesota happen,” he said.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Dear Civil Servant,

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently proposed that agencies effectively require their employees and new hires to sign a standard nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that would restrict them from speaking up about a wide number of topics.

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The proposed NDA would restrict civil servants from speaking outside government about “Confidential Government Information” — but it defines that term incredibly broadly:

all non-public, confidential, or proprietary information, to include, but not be limited to, information relating to internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law, whether or not marked as such.

This proposal would almost certainly chill public employees from engaging in constitutionally protected speech. If you’re a civil servant trying to avoid violating your NDA, this vague definition makes it hard to figure out where the line is. You can’t disclose “non-public . . . information relating to internal agency operations,” for example. Does this mean a USPS worker can’t talk about his route? A doctor at the VA can’t speak publicly about how veterans receive care? An office worker can’t tell her husband about who’s organizing the goodbye gift for Ralph’s retirement? With this wildly broad definition, most public employees are likely to at least pause before speaking. Many are likely to self-censor and stay silent to avoid risking their job — and that’s an issue for all of us, and for our democracy.

Read on for information on how to comment directly on OPM’s proposal.

Silencing the peoples’ workforce

Trump tends to treat public employees like they work for him personally, ordering them to go after his enemies, punishing them for lawful work investigating him or his allies, and subjecting new hires to loyalty tests. But that’s not what the civil service is for. This is America’s workforce, and civil servants swear an oath to the Constitution. Most go to work everyday to serve people — the people — not one man. The NDA proposal runs headlong into American values. It functions as a universal gag order on thousands of citizens and keeps the public in the dark about their government’s functioning. In a hallmark of authoritarianism, this NDA proposal would ensure that only a few individuals determine what information the public is allowed to receive.

Read more — The “patriot” in the cubicle next door

Many critics of this proposal have highlighted how the NDAs would curb whistleblowing and hamper civil servants’ ability to report waste, fraud, and abuse. Ensuring functional channels for this kind of reporting is critical — the public needs to know if data is being manipulated, if the administration’s cronies are suddenly receiving plum contracts, or if the government’s enforcement powers are being used to retaliate against people. But the public also deserves to know how the government works, period. Whether that’s reducing disaster workers at FEMA, changing how we file taxes, rewriting nuclear safety rules, or anything else. Because this is how democracies work: People participate in the project of self-governance, and to do that, people need to know what the government is doing.

Generally speaking, the First Amendment protects civil servants’ right to speak out on matters of public concern, and it also protects the public’s right to receive that information. Coercing public employees to surrender a vital constitutional right is not just bad for the employees — it’s devastating for the public. By muzzling those who observe and understand government operations, the public is kept in the dark. The proposed NDA would allow a small handful of officials to be prepublication gatekeepers of information about government activities and public affairs. It’s not good policy, and we don’t believe it’s legal.

OPM’s insistence that this new NDA requirement is really not a big deal is belied by the ways it could chill the speech of thousands of civil servants. By its own account, the requirement wouldn’t change the rules the federal workforce operates under, but even OPM can’t seem to explain why the requirement would be necessary if that were the case. OPM points to a handful of leaking incidents as proof an NDA is needed. At the same time, it claims that the NDA does not create new substantive restrictions — it is simply a “standardized mechanism for employees to acknowledge and agree to comply with obligations that already exist under law and regulation . . . .”

The fear and chilled speech — which some see as a bug — might actually be a feature to this administration. It famously came in saying that it wanted to put civil servants “in trauma” and has repeatedly retaliated against public workers for their speech, including for speaking on issues of public concern, like food assistance during the 2025 government shutdown. Given the administration’s track record and how endemic and widespread its First Amendment deficiencies are, this proposal looks like an attempt to further silence civil servants and assert total control over the federal bureaucracy.

The nitty gritty: how the NDA proposal and “suitability” work together

Here are some of the basics of how the NDA proposal would work:

• OPM would create a standard NDA that agencies could choose to require their new and current employees to sign as a condition of keeping their job. (The proposal claims that signing the NDAs would be “voluntary” but also warns that failure to sign may result in being fired and/or being barred from future federal employment for a period of time.)

• The NDA would forbid civil servants from speaking publicly about “confidential information” unless specifically authorized to do so, incorporating the expansive and vague definition of “confidential information” described above.

• The obligation to stay silent about “confidential information” would last for five years after the end of federal employment. It could last for decades if a person remained employed, and would follow former civil servants into future jobs and lives after government employment ended.

• If the government accused a current or former employee of violating the NDA they signed, it could subject them to a disciplinary or suitability action that could result in removal, pursue civil penalties, or attempt to criminally prosecute them.

One of this president’s favorite tools for asserting total control is, of course, firing people. So it shouldn’t be surprising that being fired is a risk of refusing or violating the NDA, but this proposal goes beyond a run-of-the-mill threat of termination.

Read more — Are you on the list?

What the administration proposes here is that it not only makes the rules — it interprets them, determines who violates them, and doles out the punishment it sees fit. It does this by creating an interaction between the proposed NDA and OPM’s proposed rule on Suitability and Fitness, which it is in the process of finalizing. We wrote about the suitability proposal previously, but as a refresher: The American public is protected against a politicized civil service in part via “tenure” protections for civil servants, and there are rules about how and why they can be fired. The proposed Suitability and Fitness regulation would circumvent these protections by creating a fast-track firing process. It would give OPM — the same agency that created this proposed NDA — the power to decide when a civil servant is “unsuitable” for continued federal employment, with no meaningful avenue to appeal that decision. A bad suitability determination could lead to being fired or even barred from future federal employment for a number of years.

Can you guess what one of the new criteria for being found “unsuitable” for federal employment is? “Refusal to certify compliance with, and/or adhere to, non-disclosure agreements.” OPM has already given itself the power to punish civil servants for refusing to sign an NDA, or for (in OPM’s own view) violating one. Now they are creating the NDA. If you are a civil servant and refuse to sign the NDA, or if the administration accuses you of violating it, OPM gets to decide if you actually violated the NDA and how you should be punished for that. The lack of any standards for interpreting or enforcing the NDA creates an open invitation for discriminatory and arbitrary enforcement. And the lack of an independent decision-maker, external oversight of the personnel decision, or meaningful appeal right means that enforcement decisions would lack transparency and due process. This is why the NDA proposal is so chilling: The threats of noncompliance are real, severe, and meaningfully unreviewable. Such schemes are unconstitutional. Yet this rule seeks to make submission to an unconstitutional arrangement a condition of employment.

How to comment on the proposed change

Right now, OPM’s proposed NDA requirement is just that — a proposal. They are in the process of soliciting public comments on that proposal, which they are supposed to consider when deciding on the final course of action. This process is meant to include the voice of the people in governmental decision-making, so there is no need to be an expert to submit a comment.

Maybe you’re a former or current civil servant who can speak to how this would affect your own speech. Maybe you work in an industry that interfaces with the government or regularly hires former employees, and you could speak to the impact on your industry. Maybe you’re just a regular person who believes your government’s workings shouldn’t be shrouded in secrecy. You can speak out.

The deadline for commenting is June 26, 2026, which is soon. But along with our friends at Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong, we’ve got your back. Here’s what you can do:

1. Review Democracy Forward’s guide to the proposed change, which does a deep dive on some substantive issues with the measure.

   • You can also view the docket for this proposal, where you can review the comments that have already been submitted and the proposed NDA itself.

2. Review our explainer on “What Makes an Effective Public Comment”

3. If you want an assist, follow our step-by-step guides to submitting a comment, available here for individual commenters or organizational commenters

4. Submit that comment! You can submit a public comment on the proposal here.

   • This proposal is referred to as: Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement, Docket ID OPM-2026-0100.

Submit a comment

What We’re Reading

• Trump wants all federal employees to sign NDAs | Don Moynihan

• The Cost of Cutting American Science | Partnership for Public Service

• Policy Brief: Safeguarding the US Federal Government Workforce | Karen Baehler

This publication should not be construed as legal advice on any specific facts or circumstances. The contents are intended for general information and educational purposes only, and should not be relied on as if it were advice about a particular fact situation. The distribution of this publication is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship with Protect Democracy. This publication also contains hypertext links to information created and maintained by other entities. Protect Democracy does not control or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of this outside information, nor is the inclusion of a link to be intended as an endorsement of those outside sites.

Picture the path a ballot takes to get to your mailbox. A county clerk prints it, seals it in an envelope, and hands it off to a letter carrier, who drives it to your street and walks it to your door. It’s a route that has run, more or less unchanged, for as long as Americans have voted by mail.

Last Friday, the Postal Service proposed a rule that would add a checkpoint to this process. Before that ballot could reach you, your name would have to be checked against a federal list. If your name isn’t on it — or if USPS rules there are other technicalities, like the envelope not conforming to new standards — the USPS could refuse to deliver your ballot.

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There are so many problems with this proposal that it’s hard to know where to begin. But to briefly name a few:

First, it isn’t the Postal Service’s job to be the gatekeeper of who can vote by mail, and the president has no authority to make it do that job.

Second, it’s built on a fiction: that mail voting is rife with fraud. Worse, it’s designed to manufacture proof of that fiction. The voter lists states would hand over, the rule says plainly, are meant to “facilitate law enforcement efforts” — letting officials cross-check how many ballots went out against how many came back and flag the gaps for investigation.

Third, it asks states and USPS to build expensive new systems from scratch, just a few months before an election. Exactly when every hour should go to running a clean election.

Finally, the rule would do what its design all but guarantees: sow confusion, and leave eligible voters without the ballots they’re entitled to.

That last point is the key to explaining what is going on here. It fits a pattern we’ve been tracking all year — what our Executive Override report calls the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy. This rule falls in the “Disrupt” bucket: using federal power to change the rules of the game and throw sand in the gears of an election.

An election the administration is afraid to lose.

What the rule actually does

The proposed rule implements part of an executive order Trump signed on March 31 — his second attempt to seize control over how elections are run. It would impose new requirements on mail ballots for federal general, special, and runoff elections (though, notably, not primaries, and not military and overseas ballots):

A master federal dataset of mail voters. States would have to submit to USPS the name and address of every voter receiving a mail ballot, along with unique barcodes for both the outbound and return envelopes, through a new “Federal Ballot Mail Portal.”

New envelope specifications. Every ballot envelope would have to carry the official Election Mail logo, be “automation compatible,” bear a uniquely serialized barcode, and pass a USPS design review. To be clear, those are good practices if adopted with the time and funds to do so. As proposed here, it’s a chaotic and unworkable mandate.

A federal gatekeeping function. Before accepting a ballot mailing, USPS would check it against the state-submitted list. Mailings to people not on the list — or that don’t meet the new standards — “will not be accepted and will be returned” to election officials. And any state that doesn’t certify compliance gets shut out and its mailings “will not be accepted.”

Read more — The U.S. Postal Service’s role in elections, explained

It isn’t the Postal Service’s job

Step back from the envelopes and barcodes for a moment, because there’s a more basic problem: The Postal Service has no authority to do any of this.

The president doesn’t run the Postal Service, and Congress built it that way on purpose. USPS answers not to the White House but to a bipartisan board of governors — no more than five from one party, serving staggered seven-year terms — and they, not the president, appoint a postmaster general the president can’t fire. Congress structured it this way in 1970 for a reason: An institution that carries the nation’s mail, ballots included, has to operate free of partisan interference.

The president has even less authority over how elections are run. The Constitution hands the “times, places, and manner” of federal elections to the states and to Congress — not the executive branch. So a presidential order directing the Postal Service to police the nation’s ballots bulldozes two limits at once: It commands an agency the president doesn’t control to do a job the Constitution gives to someone else.

That’s why this is not merely bad policy — it’s very likely unlawful, and the courts have already said as much about its predecessor. They blocked major provisions of Trump’s first election executive order on exactly these grounds, with one federal judge writing that the president “lacks the authority to direct such changes.” This rule implements part of his second order and rests on the same shaky foundation. A coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia has already sued.

Two ways this rule fails the voter

Even if you take the rule on its own terms, as a piece of policy, it still does not work.

Election officials would have to build almost everything it requires — new envelopes, uniquely serialized barcodes, a roster of every mail voter fed into an untested federal portal — in the few months before November. This is a sizable task, and many simply cannot. As one former official told Votebeat, ordering compliant envelopes for a small county of 2,500 voters can run about $10,000, and rural jurisdictions often have no barcode tech at all. The executive order provides no money to close that infrastructure gap. Many states have no time to find the funding, and many local offices are prohibited from accepting outside help. A financially strapped USPS gets no new funding for these new duties either.

In fact, the rule absolves the Postal Service of the consequences, stating it’s “not responsible for service delays” caused by noncompliant mailings, and “assumes no responsibility” for a ballot until it is accepted into the mail. New hurdles with no money to clear them on an impossible timeline, and when ballots are delayed or denied as a result, it is the voter’s problem.

This points to the second failure, which is not, in fact, a failure in the design: The unworkability is the design. An administration that wanted mail voting to run smoothly would not rewrite its machinery five months before an election with no funding attached. An administration that wants confusion would do exactly this.

This is not the administration’s first reach for voter data. Its Justice Department has already demanded the rolls from nearly every state and pushed to run them through the error-prone SAVE system (an effort being challenged in court). A registry of everyone who votes by mail is another piece of the same project.

Read more — Election deniers want your data

Put plainly: This looks less like a way to deliver the mail than a way to watch the people who use it.

This rule doesn’t stand alone

The postal rule is one move in a larger pattern: the administration and its allies changing the rules while the game is already being played.

Consider Watson v. RNC, which the Supreme Court will decide by the end of June. At issue is whether states can count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but delivered a few days later — a protection 14 states and D.C. extend to military, overseas, and rural voters. A Votebeat analysis found a ruling for the RNC could have put at least 750,000 ballots from 2024 at risk, wiping out those laws months before November, after voters spent years relying on them.

Or consider Callais. On April 29, the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, leaving Section 2 all but a dead letter two weeks before Louisiana’s congressional primary. The chaos was immediate: the governor declared an “election emergency” and suspended the U.S. House primary days before early voting, while Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida raced to redraw their maps mid-cycle, and Trump cheered that if voters “have to vote twice, so be it.” In some places, voters and candidates didn’t know which district they were in.

Each of these moves — the postal rule, the ballot-deadline case, the redistricting scramble — changes the rules close to, or even during, the election. That is not incidental to the strategy. It is the strategy. When the rules keep shifting under voters’ and officials’ feet, no one can be sure what’s required, ballots get lost in the confusion, and confidence in the whole system erodes. Authoritarians around the world have long understood that you don’t need to cancel an election to control it — you just have to keep everyone guessing about the rules until the confusion itself does the work.

What you can do

Here is the good news: This rule isn’t final. It’s a proposal, and a proposed rule has to go through a 30-day public comment period before it can take effect. That is a real window, and public comment on rules like this one carries weight, especially from the election officials who would have to carry it out. If you run elections, this is the moment to document, on the record, what it would cost and what it would break. If you don’t, you can still file a comment saying so.

And if you vote by mail, the most useful thing you can do is the simplest: Don’t let the noise change your plans. Mail voting is safe; this rule is not in effect, and it may never be. Check your registration, know your state’s deadlines, and return your ballot early. The administration’s strategy runs on confusion and on the feeling that resistance is pointless. Neither is true.

The Postal Service has carried America’s ballots for two and a half centuries without deciding which ones count. It shouldn’t start now.

Register for The UnPopulist’s Liberalism Conference

Protect Democracy is proud to be involved in this year’s LibCon, which will focus on rebuilding American democratic institutions. The event, which will be held on July 16 and 17 at the Watergate Hotel, will feature The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer and Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama, and Protect Democracy co-founder Justin Florence.

Register for LibCon

Trump doubles down on politicization

An executive order signed on June 3 will recategorize thousands of protected civil servants as political appointees, meaning they can be fired at will for no reason. The removal of these protections will extend the president’s reach into more of the operations of the government, and could mean that everyone from epidemiologists to meteorologists who track severe weather could now face political pressures that will be totally new to them. The order does not hit every civil servant, but it’s another attempt to chip away at the independence of the federal workforce, which touches the lives of every American in ways that they usually don’t have to think about.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Dear Civil Servant,

Since at least 2020, Trump and his allies have been working on a plan to formally turn certain civil servants into at-will employees who could be easily fired. Originally called Schedule F and now called Schedule Policy/Career, the details of the plan have been public for some time, but the actual list of positions that will lose employment rights (i.e., the list this Administration has been working on for well over a year) has been shrouded in mystery. (We should know; we tried to FOIA it).

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No longer. With Executive Order Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service, the Trump administration published a list of positions that were formally moved into Schedule Policy/Career, which have now purportedly lost the tenure protections Congress created to protect the American public from a politicized civil service.

There are some surprises in the list and many questions that remain unanswered. The list itself is written in a way that obfuscates key information — such as how many employees were reclassified at each agency, the GS levels of the reclassified employees, and more. That’s why we need civil servants’ help. In order to effectively challenge the rule in court, we need to hear from you in this survey.

Fill out the survey

Not sure if you’re on the list? You can view the list here and search for your job title. If you spot it, note the “position description” number listed next to it. You can ordinarily find your position description number on your SF-50, which should be accessible on eOPF. You should also be notified by your agency within a week of the date the executive order was released — so by June 10, 2026.

What we don’t know (for sure)

The list of positions appended to the executive order gives the absolute minimum amount of information about the reclassified positions — and as a result, the list itself doesn’t inform the public about the scope or nature of this fundamental change. This includes basics, like:

• The total number of positions,

• The number of positions covered by each of the position descriptions being reclassified,

• The number of impacted positions and current employees at each agency,

• The seniority level of each of the impacted positions, or

• The occupational series of the positions (more on that below), which would identify specifically which jobs were reclassified and what those positions do.

A “fact sheet” accompanying the executive order states that it moved about 8,000 positions into Schedule Policy/Career and that it overwhelmingly affects high-level positions — it states that ”97% of reclassified positions are GS-15 or Senior Level positions.” However, those numbers are not apparent from the executive order’s list of positions, which includes only job title and “position description” number — a non-standardized number that varies from agency to agency and is not generally publicly available.

And many of the listed job titles — “attorney advisor,” for example — apply to many people. So a single listing of a position could indicate that a single job is being reclassified, or it could mean that three dozen jobs with that job title are being reclassified. There’s simply no way to know by looking at the list.

This list could have been written in a way that made this basic information transparent, so that the public could judge the change for itself. It could have listed the GS-level of each position, a number that generally reflects the level of difficulty and responsibility required for the position. (The scale starts at GS-1 and goes up to GS-15.) It also could have listed the occupational series number for each position, which is the federal government’s code for classifying jobs based on the specifics of what they do. (For example, nurses are all part of one occupational series.) This number identifies each position with specificity and transparency, as the codes are publicly available. The list also did not specify the number of positions — overall, at each agency, or under each job title — that were reclassified. Given that the administration clearly has these numbers, as it’s been citing numbers and statistics publicly, the fact that it has kept that data secret does not seem accidental.

Finally, we do not know if this is the end or simply the beginning. It’s unclear if more executive orders will follow, moving additional positions, and if so when that will happen.

What we do know about who’s on the list

As information begins to trickle out of the government about who actually got reclassified into Schedule P/C, we are likely going to get a fuller picture in the coming weeks. But there are some basic takeaways that jumped out at us right away, which might help civil servants or the public make some sense of the new information:

The top three agencies in terms of number of positions moved into Schedule P/C are:

• The Department of Defense (~1600 positions),

• The Department of Homeland Security (~570 positions), and

• The Department of Health and Human Services (~390 positions).

In terms of job titles:

• Over 400 positions had the word “attorney” in the title

• Around 150 positions had the word “budget” in the title, and

• Around 50 positions had the word “grant” in the title.

The list includes some jobs with safety implications. One of the reasons Congress insulated civil servants from at-will employment is to ensure they could keep us safe in the face of political pressures. Some of positions that the administration claims it can now fire without even giving a reason include:

• Policy analyst at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tracks extreme weather like hurricanes,

• Supervisory program analyst at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which protects the public from dangerous consumer products, and

• Program manager at the Nuclear National Security Administration, which manages our nuclear weapons stockpile.

The list includes some jobs that rely on scientific or medical expertise. In crafting our nation’s civil service law, Congress tried to prioritize merit, believing that the American public deserved the best experts working on their behalf. Some of those experts now alleged to be subject to firing without cause are:

• Supervisory biologist at the Environmental Protection Agency,

• Epidemiologist & health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and

• Physician at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

The list includes some jobs where political neutrality is necessary for success. Congress created some agencies to help ensure fairness and neutrality. Some regulate the government itself, such as the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and some regulate banks in order to ensure the stability of the nation’s financial system. Key employees at both of these agencies and more are now alleged to be under more direct presidential control:

• Attorney advisors at the MSPB

• Chief data officer at the FDIC

Finally, if it’s truly the case that the EO moves 8,000 positions that are all relatively senior, the executive order moves dramatically fewer positions than predicted into Schedule Policy/Career, and much more senior positions than results of our earlier FOIA work would suggest. Some have called this move “defensive” due to the lawsuits filed against Schedule Policy/Career, though the administration has not explained its rationale. (Though this executive order could be a stalking horse — the administration could be preparing a much longer or more junior list for a future executive order.)

Read more — The latest move to make civil servants more vulnerable than ever

If fewer people are ultimately moved into Schedule Policy/Career, that’s a win of sorts. However, Trump is claiming vast, unchecked power over these people to fire them at any time for any (or no) reason. We do not want — and Congress did not create — a system where all civil service leaders and senior employees fear retaliatory firings if they are seen as questioning the president’s agenda. And that’s what this move creates, even in its more modest form.

Have you been moved? Get in touch

One of the tactics of this administration has been to cloak its decision-making in secrecy and hide facts, so that its acts can’t be effectively challenged. We can counter that tactic by sharing nonconfidential information, and we’re asking you to do that here.

If your position has been moved into Schedule P/C, let us know by filling out this survey.

What happens now

The administration has designated the positions on the list as being in Schedule P/C, and it will act like the people in those positions lack civil service protections against things like firing without cause. And the multiple lawsuits challenging Schedule P/C — including our own here at Protect Democracy — will kick into high gear. We know limbo is basically the baseline for civil servants lately, but this means Schedule P/C employees will be in limbo for a while longer while we wait for a court to rule on Schedule P/C’s legality. OPM has put out guidance on the implementation of these personnel moves, including slide decks and explainers that might be helpful for those who see their jobs listed.

Our continued democracy depends on all of our continued willingness to fight battles large and small. And now, as we gear up to challenge this latest threat, we are grateful for your help and persistence.

Resources & further reading

• Breaking Down the New Schedule Policy/Career Rule | FedsForward Webinar

• Federal Public Service in Peril: A Report Card on the Trump Administration’s Management of Our Government | Partnership for Public Service

• A Civil Service for a Mission | Margaret Mullins, Director of Public Options and Governance at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator

• We’re Failing our Public Servants & It’s Making America Weaker | Public Service Alliance

This publication should not be construed as legal advice on any specific facts or circumstances. The contents are intended for general information and educational purposes only, and should not be relied on as if it were advice about a particular fact situation. The distribution of this publication is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship with Protect Democracy. This publication also contains hypertext links to information created and maintained by other entities. Protect Democracy does not control or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of this outside information, nor is the inclusion of a link to be intended as an endorsement of those outside sites.

Autocratic leaders around the world often use prosecution strategically — neutralizing some opponents and sending a signal to others, while preserving just enough credibility in the justice system to remain useful. Early in this term, Donald Trump and his loyalists appeared to be following this playbook. They targeted perceived opponents for technical legal violations like errors on mortgage applications, the kind of colorable but minor infractions that authoritarian regimes have long used to sideline rivals. Charges like these can be just plausible enough to keep some would-be detractors from speaking up.

That pretense is gone. In its place are ambitious displays of performative loyalty by subordinates.

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The DOJ’s reported investigation into Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit is the latest example. Prosecutors are investigating American Future Republic over its funding of E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits against Trump — cases in which Carroll won $5 million in 2023 and $83.3 million in 2024.

The investigation has two targets. Hoffman is the primary one — a warning to major donors who might fund similar challenges to Trump. But the 82-year-old Carroll is in the crosshairs, too, in what appears to be nothing more than vengeance for her successful litigation against the president. The prosecutors’ theory centers on a 2022 deposition in which Carroll said she was receiving no outside funding. This ploy didn’t work at trial — the judge found no credibility issue and barred Trump’s lawyers from raising it, and the Second Circuit upheld that ruling on appeal. The DOJ is now trying to do what two courts already refused. Whatever the legal theory, the veneer is transparent: This is what punishment looks like when it’s no longer trying to hide.

Read more — No attorney general can deliver on Trump’s retaliation agenda

Seashells and sycophants

The second indictment of James Comey follows a similar pattern — one we outline in more detail in our tracker of this administration’s retaliatory prosecutions.

In Comey’s case, prosecutors have abandoned even a pretense of legitimacy. The DOJ is accusing the former FBI director of threatening the president’s life because he posted a photo over a year ago of seashells on a beach arranged to look like the numbers “86 47.” In the restaurant industry, “86” means to take something off the menu. Trump is the 47th president.

The DOJ is alleging that restaurant slang is a literal blueprint for violence. Comey, of course, is not a tactical threat to the president’s life; he is a retired official with a Substack. A former DOJ official dubbed this the “worst case” filed in their lifetime. Legal analysts like CNN’s Laura Coates have called it “laughable.” But seriousness isn’t the point.

Read more — Tracking retaliatory use of arrests, prosecutions, and investigations by the Trump administration

As we’ve noted before, prosecutions like these are performative acts of loyalty-signaling. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is auditioning to keep the role full-time by demonstrating a willingness to pursue charges irrespective of facts and law. Blanche recently made his personal priorities clear when addressing the uncertainty over who will lead the DOJ permanently. If President Trump “chooses to nominate me, that’s an honor,” Blanche told reporters. And if not? “I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’”

The serious consequences of comical behavior

The instinct for visible fealty has trickled down from the courtroom to the very shoes officials wear. Senior officials like JD Vance and Marco Rubio have started wearing identical Florsheim leather wingtips because the president likes them — even if the shoes don’t actually fit. In this administration, mimicking the president’s taste is a more valuable professional asset than actually being able to walk comfortably in one’s own shoes.

While it might seem laughable, performative flattery has serious consequences. Targets of farcical cases must still hire counsel and defend themselves against criminal charges. And each act of leader-pleasing further degrades the moral and legal authority of the DOJ — and ultimately, the principle that we are a country of laws, not men.

When those wielding state power fear displeasing the president more than they fear looking ridiculous, they’re incentivized to overshoot. From cabinet officials on down, this logic can lead individuals to pursue ever-more aggressive, creative, and absurd tactics, outpacing the actual top-down directives to punish opponents and consolidate power.

Implications for the midterms

As our colleagues explained in detail in our recent Executive Override report, the White House is proceeding with its orchestrated campaign “to deceive the electorate about the security of their elections, to disrupt the electoral process, and to deny the results” of the midterms if opposition candidates win. At the same time, efforts to protect free and fair elections must account for the reality that executive actions are increasingly driven by subordinates devising new ways to flatter Trump and benefit themselves professionally — to secure a nomination, or simply keep their current job.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

The case of Thomas Albus is instructive. Albus, a Missouri prosecutor whose earlier work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office didn’t involve election law, was tapped by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and given special authority to handle election-related cases nationwide. Albus understood the assignment. He coordinated with Ed Martin and White House lawyer Kurt Olsen — both of whom had worked to overturn the 2020 election — and then authorized the FBI seizure of roughly 700 boxes of election material from Fulton County, Georgia, far outside his usual jurisdiction. The raid — which legal experts described as a significant escalation in the breaking of democratic norms — wasn’t traced to a Trump directive; it emerged from a network of loyalists who had built careers anticipating what he wanted.

Self-starting sycophants could very well play a starring role this fall, as ambitious officials seek out opportunities to ingratiate themselves by tilting the playing field in favor of Trump’s preferred candidates — potentially without waiting for an explicit directive from the White House. Now that “bootlicking” is the currency of the realm, one of the serious challenges we encounter this fall could be as simple as a prosecutor looking for a promotion.

Laughter isn’t the only medicine

When a federal indictment is based on a message spelled out in seashells, a reasonable response is laughter. Humor is also a bedrock tactic in resisting those who demand to be taken seriously while acting absurdly. But as satisfying as it is to call out the absurdity, we can’t let the cartoonish nature of these actions distract us from their underlying danger — or from the opening they create.

What makes these prosecutions so hard to stop is that subordinates often don’t need to be told. They know what Trump expects, and they know what happens to those who don’t deliver it. The result is a race to the bottom — ever more ridiculous and sycophantic displays of performative loyalty. But sycophantic prosecutions are, by definition, bad prosecutions. And bad prosecutions are vulnerable ones.

No single institution can fix this. But there are meaningful steps we can all take — and the very absurdity of these cases gives us more tools than we’d otherwise have:

• Criminal defendants can demand fee awards from the DOJ under the Hyde Amendment when charges are “vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith.” They can also pursue civil claims for malicious and vindictive prosecution to keep the spotlight on misconduct and seek accountability.

• Federal judges can set aside the “presumption of regularity,” as DOJ and other federal agencies no longer deserve a default rule that assumes they’ve acted in good faith and in a lawful manner. Judges can demand greater transparency into dubious prosecutorial behavior, granting tailored discovery requests, reviewing grand jury transcripts, and authorizing public disclosure when necessary and appropriate.

• Federal district courts can update their local rules to ensure adequate oversight of DOJ’s failed efforts to secure indictments before grand juries.

• Congress can exercise oversight of the DOJ and other federal agencies, demanding transparency into dubious executive actions and imposing clear limitations on the use of appropriated funds. The Senate can reject nominees who broke the law or otherwise disqualified themselves in the pursuit of presidential approval.

• State bar officials can strictly and promptly enforce their ethical requirements against federal prosecutors and other attorneys in the executive branch when presented with credible allegations of misconduct.

• State legislatures can authorize private lawsuits against federal agents who violate their constitutional rights — including officials who retaliate against individuals for criticizing the president or otherwise engaging in protected First Amendment activity. Over the last few weeks, New York and several other states have passed such laws.

• Individuals can follow and share the work of journalists and watchdog organizations tracking prosecutorial misconduct. Public pressure and reputational cost can be real constraints on bad-faith prosecutors — the Comey and Carroll cases are generating pushback partly because coverage has made the absurdity visible. Readers who amplify that coverage are participating in the accountability ecosystem.

Governance by flattery is no way to run a democracy. While federal officials bend over backwards to impress an audience of one, the rest of us must work even harder to protect our elections and the rule of law.

The Supreme Court’s decision to gut what remained of the Voting Rights Act is the latest blow to our democracy; states in the South immediately began mobilizing to redraw congressional and state legislative districts in a way that further dilutes the voting power of Black and Latino voters.

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The situation for minority voters was dire to begin with. Latinos, for example, are dramatically underrepresented in Congress, occupying only 11 percent of its seats despite making up 20 percent of the population. Our voting power has been diluted by extreme gerrymandering for decades, which will likely grow more severe this year. In Texas, for example, where nearly 40 percent of the population is Latino, minority voters have long been underrepresented in the House delegation. The new gerrymandered voting map in Texas was specifically designed to eliminate Latino and Black-held seats; we will see more of this as a result of the Callais v. Louisiana decision.

Because this year’s midterm elections are vital to the fate of our democracy, with their potential to check the president’s authoritarian agenda, the Administration’s opponents are responding to these dynamics with gerrymandering efforts of their own in states controlled by Democrats. While this is an understandable impulse, given the high stakes, extreme gerrymandering is terrible for the health of our democracy in the long run. Even before the current rush to redraw districts, only 4 percent of congressional races this year were judged to be competitive overall.

Uncompetitive elections are a sign of a broken system that affects all Americans and contributes to our disillusionment with both major parties, as well as with our seeming lack of ability to do anything about our nation’s political gridlock. We are living through a year replete with evidence that our winner-take-all election system incentivizes the creation of uncompetitive elections that further political polarization. This has contributed mightily to the horrifying excesses of the Trump era, while Congress seems powerless to check even the President’s most egregious actions.

But even if we were somehow to prevent the further gerrymandering that dilutes minority voting power, it is not clear that even districts where Latinos and Black Americans are the majority of voters are the best way to ensure that our voices are heard fairly. In states with smaller but still significant Latino populations, like Colorado or Georgia, for example, the number of districts we control is likely to remain small, even without gerrymandering.

Beyond that, the idea that majority-minority districts will concentrate power among people whose views are similar because of their shared ethnicity has never held up in a community as diverse as ours. Just ask a Latino Republican in California or a Democrat in Florida.

We can do so much better than this. A growing body of research strongly suggests that Americans of all types, including Latinos, would benefit from a move to a fairer system for all voters, one that aligns voters’ actual preferences more closely with our electoral outcomes, and where every vote matters. A different electoral system — one used by most other mature democracies around the world — would ensure this: under Proportional Representation, multi-winner districts are used to allocate votes proportionally so that our elected representatives reflect the actual preferences of voters.

Read more — Proportional representation, explained

In a single-member district like the ones we have now, 51 percent of voters can elect one candidate, and the other 49 percent get nothing. But if four single-member districts collapse into one broader district that elects four winners, a minority population that makes up 25 percent of the district can elect one of the candidates. The 50 percent majority can still elect two candidates in proportion to their numbers, too. This means that voters are represented in proportion to their preferences regardless of whether the district lines are drawn to favor them.

In fact, gerrymandering tends to be far less of an issue in democracies with proportional representation. Because parties win seats according to their share of the vote, it typically doesn’t matter much how voters get shuffled around — wherever they are, their electoral power generally remains the same. And because votes are more likely to matter everywhere, parties and candidates are incentivized to broadly compete for those votes — including among voters of color. The system could even open up our two-party gridlock by allowing new parties to compete, reflecting a multipartyism in line with the diversity of American political perspectives.

Latinos have never waited for permission to shape this country’s future. We’ve built communities, forged coalitions, and fought for our voice in a system that was rarely if ever designed with us in mind. This moment, as dark as it feels, is not new. But we now have a growing movement of Americans from a diversity of backgrounds who want the same thing we do: elections that actually capture the will of the voters, representatives who have to earn every vote, officeholders who reflect the diversity of our communities, and a politics capable of solving very real problems rather than manufacturing endless conflict.

We should not continue to accept a system that dilutes our power, rewards extremism, and leaves the majority of Latinos and Americans feeling like our vote doesn’t matter. The choice before us now isn’t just between the two major parties: it’s between the broken system we inherited and a fairer one we can build together. For Latino voters and organizations, building a politics where our voices are heard and our votes counted is the next frontier of the fight for our representation and our rights. In this moment of peril for our democracy, it’s a fight we should take on.

This piece was originally published in Democracy Journal.

The second Trump administration has set about dismantling the institutions of American science.

Over the past 16 months, the administration has eliminated thousands of federal scientific positions, imposed sweeping funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), dismantled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee, and worked systematically to manufacture political justification for abandoning the evidence that underlies public health and environmental policy.

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These attacks are not random. They are interconnected parts of a nationwide strategy to erode shared truth, manufacture doubt, and teach the public to distrust what it once took for granted.

Science has been a testing ground. If you can make people doubt peer-reviewed research, vaccines, and climate data, you can make them doubt anything. An electorate that doubts everything is an electorate that can be told anything.

So as the 2026 elections approach and the administration escalates its efforts to deceive voters and deepen that distrust, it would be fair to assume the scientific community might stay quiet based on its initial response in 2025. When the first attacks came, the impact was profound. Many scientists were paralyzed by fear of losing funding, fear of political retaliation, fear that speaking out would cost them everything they had spent their careers building. Some self-censored, avoided controversy, and waited for the storm to pass.

Read more — Courage is (mildly) contagious

But something has started to shift. Scientists are fighting back. A resistance that began as individual acts of courage is now taking collective shape, and what has emerged over the past several months is beginning to look like the early architecture of a movement.

Inside out and outside in

Inside federal agencies, scientists and career workers have faced these pressures most directly. The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD) has built a growing coalition of workers and allies mobilizing the federal workforce to refuse compliance with dangerous and illegal orders, building networks across every federal agency in every state. Aisha Coffey, FWAD’s communications director, explains:

The thing about messing with career civil servants is that those are the same people this administration will rely on to carry out dangerous, illegal orders. If federal workers refuse to comply, we take an extraordinary amount of power away from a government that’s trying to do us harm.

It’s a powerful strategy. And to add to it, the resistance isn’t only coming from inside. Scientists are also building power from the outside.

In June 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (the body that has guided U.S. vaccine policy since 1964) and replaced them with a group that included vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine advocates, some lacking relevant expertise.

The dismissed scientists did not simply step aside. They formed the Immunization Scientific Advisory Collaborative (ISAC) and published independent, evidence-based evaluations of the reconstituted committee’s proceedings. When the committee voted to end the decades-old recommendation that every newborn receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth (despite no new safety data and no new evidence that the shots don’t work), ISAC documented what that process looked like. Together, they created a public record of what evidence-based vaccine policy requires and clearly told the public what had been abandoned.

Young scientists are adding their voices to the chorus

While many of these examples involve established scientists and career workers, early-career researchers have stepped up too. Without tenure, established reputations, or institutional protection, they have the most to lose by speaking out, but this isn’t stopping them. Graduate students turned hallway conversations into the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), now a nationwide coalition of more than 150 active members across 30 organizations.

SNAP’s McClintock Letters initiative coordinated more than 600 scientists to write op-eds for their hometown newspapers (not elite national outlets, but local papers) in the communities they grew up in. They have already published more than 200 pieces across 45 states. As JP Flores, speaking on behalf of SNAP, explains:

We wanted to get back in touch with the people we grew up with, the communities that shaped us, and the people who, in many cases, we became scientists for in the first place. We hoped our peers would join us and were amazed by how many did. If scientists want to continue to earn the support and the funding we’ve received from the American public, we have to not only communicate with them but also recognize their vital role as partners and stakeholders in our work.

The scientific community has been criticized, often fairly, for operating at a remove from the public. These early-career scientists are working to close that gap at precisely the moment it matters most.

Healthcare workers were crucial to resistance in Minnesota

Nowhere has that urgency been clearer than in health care. When the Trump administration designated hospitals as fair game for immigration enforcement, the Minnesota Nurses Association doubled down on their efforts to educate members about patient rights, what to say to federal agents, and how to protect immigrant patients, including Minnesota’s large Somali and Hmong communities. They developed badge buddies for nurses (printed cards with instructions and a QR code for resources) and built partnerships with immigrant rights groups, faith organizations, and legal aid groups.

Then, on January 24, 2026, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA. He was off duty, observing protests against Operation Metro Surge. That day, he stepped between a federal agent and a woman who had been pushed to the ground. Alex had spent years helping care for patients in the ICU and was doing the same for a neighbor. Federal officials said he had brandished a weapon. The video tells a different story.

Pretti’s death galvanized nurses nationwide. National Nurses United declared that “ICE messed with the wrong profession” and organized a nationwide week of action: candlelight vigils at hospitals and VA facilities from Minnesota to California to New York, with explicit demands that Congress defund ICE or face electoral consequences.

Year after year, Gallup finds Americans rank nurses the most trusted profession in the country. When a profession like that organizes, it brings the power of everyone it has spent decades caring for.

Where to plug in

These examples are far from comprehensive. Organizations like HealthBegins have been training frontline clinicians to treat pro-democracy work as an extension of their professional identity, not a betrayal of it. Stand Up for Science returned to the streets in March 2026 with rallies in 46 locations nationwide. New cross-sector coalitions are forming in states across the country. Momentum is building as scientists get in formation ahead of November 2026.

One example of this growing momentum: On June 3, the Union of Concerned Scientists is launching Science Rising, an initiative aimed at mobilizing the science community for sustained engagement, building the political infrastructure to defend science and democratic accountability through the 2026 elections and beyond. As Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says:

If ever there was a time for scientists to step into our power, it is now. Science Rising recognizes the gravity of the threats to science and democracy at this moment and harnesses the power of scientists and science supporters to fight back.

The launch webinar on June 3 (3-4 p.m. ET) will feature three concrete actions: signing up for SMS alerts for rapid mobilization, raising awareness in your own networks, and joining the Science Rising Action Corps for tools and opportunities focused on congressional accountability throughout the summer and fall.

If you are a scientist (or just someone who believes science should serve the public good) RSVP for the launch here. If you work in science or technical fields specifically, there is a scientist-specific form here.

Over a year ago, the fear was felt at the individual level. A scientist’s grant withdrawn, or their name added to a list; a career built carefully over years at risk of being lost overnight. The administration bet that the fear of thousands of scientists, isolated, weighing the costs of speaking up, would add up to compliance. But the math has changed as the scientific community is proving them wrong by remembering it is one.

The $1.776 billion slush fund to reward those who break the law to aid Trump. The mid-cycle redistricting spree Southern states have embarked on to erase minority representation in the wake of the Supreme Court majority crushing the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The purging of dissent from the Republican Party. A throughline connects three developments dominating our politics this week: None of these moves are popular. None are smart politics. All of them are designed to hold power without winning public support — by overriding free and fair elections.

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Jonathan Last at The Bulwark named it earlier this week: The president seems to have given up on popularity outside a narrow base within the GOP and is instead moving to lock in institutional power before voters can take it from him. And he’s building the architecture to do that, piece by piece.

Creating an illegal slush fund for political loyalty

On Monday, the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who say they were politically targeted by the federal government. The fund was created in a purported settlement of the president’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS.

The slush fund appears blatantly illegal, for a host of reasons: There’s no actual controversy to settle since Trump is on both sides; Congress didn’t authorize funding for it; and the 14th Amendment prohibits payments in aid of insurrection. (Capitol Police officers who defended the building on January 6 have already sued to block it, calling it illegal and a sham.) The design of the fund is beyond alarming: The commissioners who decide who gets paid are appointed by the attorney general and can be fired by the president at will.

And at the same time, Trump has used the deal to declare himself, his family, and his businesses immune from audits by the IRS and off the hook if he didn’t pay his taxes.

The politics of the slush fund are also terrible for the president. It’s bad enough to raid money that belongs to the taxpayers to pay off his friends, family, and political loyalists. Doing it at the same time he gives himself license to avoid paying taxes adds a cherry on top. So it’s no surprise that the slush fund has provoked broad and bipartisan opposition. (Trump’s attorney general may have tried to sell Republican senators on the fund by hinting that they too could receive payoffs from it!)

But for Trump, popularity — or democratic accountability — is beside the point. He’s (for now) got a federal payment program of nearly two billion dollars inside the Trump Justice Department, with eligibility and amounts set by officials the president controls, in the lead-up to a federal election. Here’s why that matters: In 2020, the president called the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and asked them not to certify Michigan’s results, but he had nothing material to offer them in exchange. When he encouraged the January 6 insurrectionists to go to the Capitol, it was only with his megaphone. He has something material to offer them now.

Tilting the field with a little help from Supreme Court allies

On April 29, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, removing the primary federal tool for challenging maps that dilute the political power of Black voters.

Corey Dukes and Alison Hirsh explained the consequences for 2026 earlier this week: Mid-cycle redistricting this close to an election is unprecedented, and partisan gain at the expense of fair minority representation is the point. Louisiana postponed its primary after voting had started. Tennessee and Florida enacted new maps. Alabama is using a 2023 map a federal panel found racially discriminatory. Candidates do not know which districts they are running in. Voters do not know where to cast their ballots.

Read more — This is not gerrymandering as usual

For decades, both parties had supported the Voting Rights Act as a seminal achievement in the history of U.S. democracy. President George W. Bush signed the VRA reauthorization in 2006, after it was enacted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress. The Trump administration, on the other hand, explicitly asked the Court to gut the VRA in Callais. Trump’s allies on the Court did just that. And they did it right in the middle of the midterms in ways that would clearly give the president a partisan advantage. And in the context of the president driving his partisan allies in states across the country to kick off an unprecedented mid-cycle partisan gerrymandering campaign to favor his party.

Our Authoritarian Playbook framework asks three questions to separate normal politics from a democratic threat. There’s a clear answer here.

How far does the action deviate from modern precedent? Gutting the seminal Voting Rights Act, combined with mid-cycle redistricting this close to a federal election is unprecedented.

With what frequency and degree is it happening? Simultaneously, across multiple states, on a calendar set by partisan advantage rather than ordinary process.

Does it present a systemic risk? Combined with Callais, yes again. The floor for fair representation is lower than it has been in 60 years, and the doctrine that previously upheld minority representation and checked the worst map-drawing is gone.

None of this is popular or follows any sort of political mandate. But put it all together and the strategy is clear: Tilt the playing field so that the president’s party can hold onto power, even as his popularity shrinks.

Purging those who have said no

On Tuesday night, after losing his Kentucky primary, Rep. Thomas Massie (a thorn in Trump’s side on various issues) told his supporters: “If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king.” Sen. Bill Cassidy was defeated in Louisiana after Trump sought to end his political career because Cassidy had voted to hold Trump accountable for January 6. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State who refused to “find” 11,780 votes in 2020, lost his primary, too. When Indiana state Senators refused to bend the knee in anti-democratic mid-cycle gerrymandering, Trump decided to use his control over his party to take them out. These Republicans who said no, at moments when saying no mattered, will no longer be in the party’s elected ranks.

The same thing has happened inside the executive branch. Loyal civil servants and professional political appointees at the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and across the intelligence community have been replaced by election deniers and political loyalists. In 2020, the acting attorney general refused to send a fraudulent letter to the state of Georgia. The personnel decisions made in the second Trump administration have been designed to ensure that the person sitting in that chair next time will write the letter.

Trump has also retaliated through his Department of Justice (DOJ). The cases the DOJ has brought against Trump critics, journalists, election officials, and former public servants vary, and some indictments look unlikely to survive. The Justice Department has tried three times to indict Letitia James: once successfully, before a federal judge threw out the indictment, then twice more before grand juries that refused to charge her. And still, new criminal referrals on a different theory followed in March. The investigation into James is one of many. Some end without charges, but with substantial costs absorbed by the target. A very small number result in convictions. The administration does not need to win any particular case to make the cost of resisting high, and discourage the next official who is considering whether to say no.

The president has sufficient power in his party (and controls a substantial enough war chest) that he can pull this off in GOP primaries and within the executive branch he controls. Usually, with an election approaching, a party would seek to broaden its appeal and pull in more people. But democratic legitimacy is not the point; instead, it’s about weaponizing the power of government to limit the chance for democratic accountability.

The endgame

The administration is not trying to win over American voters. Rather, it is trying to make those voters irrelevant. Which federal funds can be grabbed to pay off loyalists, which districts exist and whose votes matter, which voters can register, which officials count the ballots, which agencies investigate the process: the Trump approach is that if these are all beholden to him, then politics doesn’t matter.

Viewed one way, it’s a very dark story. But we’re not writing this to cause despair. The reason the administration is moving openly is that it is losing the contest over public support, and it knows it. We’ve outlined in other parts of this series and the Executive Override report all the ways that courageous people across our country are standing up for the rule of law, for our rights, and for free elections where eligible voters can vote and have their votes counted. Notwithstanding the President’s increasingly desperate efforts, at the end of the day he doesn’t get to control how our elections are conducted — that’s up to state and local officials around the country.

The president’s override strategy depends on officials not following the law. We the people will make sure they do.

This is part of our Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions in this series here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so and you’ll get future ones in your inbox.

The Trump administration is “investigating” the 2020 election

On Fox News Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed without evidence that “there’s a ton of evidence that the 2020 election was rigged” and that the Department of Justice has “multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia, in Fulton County, Georgia” focused on determining whether “the right people voted.” Blanche offered no specific evidence to support the claim, acknowledged that the investigation has taken more than five years because supposed election-riggers are “very good at hiding what they’re doing,” and declined to provide any timeline for results.

No court, audit, or law enforcement investigation — including those conducted by officials appointed by and loyal to the Trump administration — has produced credible evidence that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged. What makes Blanche’s statement distinct from prior disinformation is its source: it is the sitting head of the Department of Justice, using the authority of that office to validate claims the legal system has repeatedly rejected.

The administration has made election denialism official federal policy — using investigative and enforcement powers to manufacture the appearance of fraud and flood the public with disinformation designed to erode confidence in the 2026 midterms. Blanche’s Fox News appearance fits squarely within that strategy. Conspiracy theories and bogus investigations serve not only to deceive voters now, but to lay the groundwork for the administration’s final gambit: contesting or overturning 2026 election results that the administration doesn’t like. Lending the DOJ’s institutional credibility to election disinformation accelerates both goals simultaneously.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Americans hopped in cars, climbed on buses, and boarded planes to converge upon Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. They carried one message: “We will organize, mobilize, and vote.”

The march from Selma to Montgomery — first trod in 1965, retraced again this weekend — was organized in a little more than a week by Black Voters Matter and a coalition of civil rights and voting rights organizations under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South.” The message was clear. The fight that produced the Voting Rights Act, and with it America’s second, imperfect attempt at a real multiracial democracy, must be refought. And the people who know that best are the ones who showed up to say so.

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A sprint to disenfranchise

What is happening in the South right now is not a policy dispute or a legal technicality. It is the opening of a new front in the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy to override the will of the voters and ensure the outcome they want in the 2026 mid-term elections. This is a racist power grab, locking in discriminatory congressional majorities for the foreseeable future — and it is moving fast.

Our colleagues have written extensively on the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy. On Friday we focused on the attempt by the federal government to disrupt the operations of state and local election officials.

But the most visible form of the administration’s “disrupt” strategy right now is the erasure of minority representation through extreme gerrymandering unfolding across the South. The Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, removing any protection against racist gerrymandering, and Republicans across the South sprang into action to redraw legislative maps to erase Black representation.

The Supreme Court didn’t stop there. Last week, the Court — with zero legal explanation from the majority — vacated a lower court order that had kept Alabama from using a 2023 map a federal panel found racially discriminatory, with the state’s primary just over a week away. Louisiana postponed its primary elections after voting had already started. Tennessee and Florida have already enacted new maps; other Southern states are scrambling to follow.

This is not gerrymandering as usual; it is the disrupt strategy at play

Partisan, discriminatory gerrymandering is nothing new, which is one reason why the Voting Rights Act was passed in the first place. So it behooves us to understand why what’s happening now is so different. As laid out in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, states have historically drawn new district lines for Congress and state legislatures every ten years, after the decennial census, not every two years if the party in charge is worried about losing seats.

The rush to disenfranchise voters of color right before an election — and even after an election has already started, in the case of Louisiana — is categorically different from what has come before. The Supreme Court has opened the floodgates for a coordinated and lawless effort to lock in congressional majorities. This effort is already sowing confusion and chaos and is rightly understood as an attempt to manipulate election rules to prevent certain voters from fully participating.

As we’ve explained, modern authoritarians seek to tilt the electoral playing field by both suppressing participation and by manipulating the rules themselves. The redistricting wave is that strategy operating at its most visible, systemic, and consequential scale. The administration did not draw these maps, but it set the conditions for them. The redistricting wars began when Trump publicly urged Texas Republicans to redraw their districts in the summer of 2025.

Opening the door for states to redistrict mid-cycle so close to an election is unprecedented. It is not only clearly racist, it is also clearly intended to bring chaos into the midterms. Candidates don’t know which districts they are running in. Longstanding primary election dates have been changed mid-election. Poll sites are changing mid-cycle, often without time to educate voters on where to go to vote in their primaries. The result is a coordinated, multi-state effort to disenfranchise minority voters and lock in a Republican Congress before a single midterm vote is cast, precisely what the Disrupt strategy is designed to produce.

This is the authoritarian playbook and the white-supremacist playbook, bound together, aimed at one-party rule. The goal is not simply to win the next election. It is to clear the field before the contest begins.

The people will “redeem the soul of America”

This is why Saturday mattered. The people who traveled from Atlanta, Memphis, Jackson, and Nashville to stand in Montgomery were not engaged in nostalgia. They were responding to a present-tense threat with a present-tense act. Led by Cliff Albright, LaTosha Brown, and numerous faith, community, and thought leaders, those who were in Alabama this weekend did what John Lewis told us to: They got into Good Trouble. Necessary Trouble.

The march from Selma in 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act. That act, for 61 years, served as the primary legal check on exactly this kind of map manipulation. Callais has gutted the legal remedy. The organizers of “All Roads Lead to the South” were explicit about this: The march matters, but so do the maps.

It has opened the doors for southern states to redistrict in an attempt to weaken the power of Black voters by ensuring they do not have majority representation anywhere. But as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, “We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.” And we must vote.

Voting rights organizations have established a redistricting intelligence operation that tracks every legislative session in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, in real time, by district, with the specific seats at risk named and documented. As importantly, they are organizing in each of these states to ensure that voters know where their poll sites are, how to cast their vote, and, most crucially, that their vote matters now more than ever.

That kind of organizing is the answer.

So what now?

The legal check on discriminatory maps has been gutted by the Supreme Court. The political check has not. Here is where to direct our energy:

• Follow the map battles in real time. The Black Power War Room’s redistricting tracker covers every state where maps are being redrawn. Know which seats are at risk and who is drawing the lines.

• Contact your state legislators. Redistricting decisions are made in statehouses, not Washington. If you live in a state where new maps are being drawn, your state representative needs to hear from you now — not in October.

• Support the organizations doing this work. The groups that register voters, educate communities, and pursue litigation under what remains of the Voting Rights Act are under sustained pressure. They need resources and solidarity.

• Get out the vote. Talk to your neighbors and friends. Educate yourself and each other. If there isn’t a contested election in your district, join efforts to call, text, and write to voters who may be confused about where and how to vote. Make sure they know that every vote matters.

The battle will not be over in November. Or in 2028. We can be forward-looking and restructure our electoral system to end the constant gerrymandering caused by a winner-takes-all system that benefits the loudest, most extreme voices. Proportional representation would eliminate single-member districts and establish multi-candidate districts in which minority voters would still have representation.

The authoritarians hope that the maps being drawn this month will shape who represents Americans in Congress for the next decade or more. The people who marched on Saturday understand that. They showed up to say that the rules may be manipulated, but in the end, it’s the voters who have the final say. We will see them at the midterms.

This is part of our ongoing Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so.

In April, federal prosecutors served Fulton County, Georgia with a grand jury subpoena. They wanted the names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of as many as 3,000 county employees, poll workers, and volunteers — even the drivers of mobile voting buses — who had worked on the 2020 election.

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This is what it looks like when the federal government turns its investigative power on the people who run elections. It is not an isolated incident — it is just one example of a coordinated campaign that the administration is running through the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and even the Pentagon — aimed at the president’s perceived political opponents, the civil society groups that support democratic participation, and the nonpartisan officials who run our elections.

Perhaps the largest shift between the first and second Trump administrations has been this weaponization of law enforcement. It is a core part of the administration’s strategy to disrupt elections by tilting the electoral playing field — one of the three legs of the “deceive, disrupt, deny” strategy that we describe in our Executive Override report.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

The most visible form of the disrupt strategy right now is the rush to erase minority representation through extreme gerrymandering unfolding across the South (with the aid of the Supreme Court). That story is enormous — stay tuned for more on that soon — but it is not what we’re covering here. This piece is about another part of the disrupt strategy that is (understandably) getting less attention right now, but is also very much ongoing — the use of federal investigative, prosecutorial, and regulatory power to silence and sideline the administration’s perceived opponents. In the context of elections, this aspect of the disrupt strategy has three distinct categories of targets:

1. Political opponents and critics,

2. Civil society organizations that support democratic participation, and

3. The nonpartisan election officials who actually run our elections.

Each category serves a different purpose in the broader strategy — but together, they amount to a coordinated campaign to clear the field before a single vote is cast.

Targeting political opponents and critics

This year, according to NOTUS, the FBI created a unit internally referred to as the “payback squad” to pursue cases against the president’s perceived enemies. The name says the quiet part out loud.

The administration has deployed the Justice Department against political adversaries in ways that have no precedent in modern American history. This goes well beyond the traditional rough-and-tumble of partisan politics. We are talking about the use of federal criminal investigations and prosecutions — the most powerful tools the government possesses — as instruments of political warfare.

Time and again, we have seen the Department of Justice pursue Trump’s perceived enemies, sometimes at the explicit behest of the president. Former FBI Director James Comey is perhaps the most prominent example. After the administration’s first attempt to prosecute Comey was dismissed by a federal judge in November, DOJ concocted even more dubious charges. But Comey is not alone — former CIA Director John Brennan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Minnesota Democratic officials, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and others have been targeted by DOJ.

Another recent example: On May 6, FBI agents executed search warrants at the offices of Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas — the state legislator who led efforts to redraw the state’s congressional map to add as many as four Democratic-leaning seats ahead of the midterms. The FBI says the search relates to an ongoing federal corruption investigation involving a cannabis business Lucas co-owns and that the underlying probe predates the current administration. Whatever its origin, the decision to escalate to a dramatic, public raid and the timing at least raise questions, particularly under an administration that has shown, again and again, that it is willing to use federal law enforcement as a political tool.

The weaponization of law enforcement is not confined to DOJ. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has now twice opened reviews of Sen. Mark Kelly — most recently on May 10, after Kelly publicly raised concerns about depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles. Hegseth has separately attempted to retroactively demote Kelly from his Navy rank over a video in which Kelly and other lawmakers reminded service members of their duty to refuse unlawful orders. A federal court has so far blocked the demotion.

Meanwhile, the administration has used the FCC to pressure broadcasters, imposed novel interpretations of existing rules to silence political commentary, and appeared to favor media mergers that would concentrate ownership among Trump allies. As we explained in detail earlier this year, this isn’t just about controlling the news — it’s about shaping the information environment heading into the midterms.

Read more — Free speech, ICE, and free elections in 2026

As the election approaches, we should expect continued law enforcement action aimed at discrediting prominent candidates, officials, or the Democratic Party as a whole. This could include investigations or indictments timed to coincide with the election cycle — designed not necessarily to secure convictions, but to dominate the news and tar candidates by association.

And of course, at the same time as federal law enforcement targets the president’s perceived enemies, it has protected or even compensated his allies and supporters. The pattern is not subtle: protection for the president’s allies, prosecution for his opponents.

Silencing civil society

The administration’s weaponization of investigative and enforcement authorities extends well beyond high-profile political leaders. It reaches into the civil society organizations — advocacy groups, voter registration organizations, nonpartisan civic engagement efforts — that are part of the fabric of American political life.

The administration began undermining nonprofits just weeks into Trump’s second term, but the assault accelerated sharply in September 2025 after the murder of Charlie Kirk. The president issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which painted organizations on “the Left” as part of a network of dangerous extremists. A subsequent memo from Attorney General Bondi directed DOJ to create and maintain lists of these “domestic terrorism organizations” based on their ideological beliefs — and to map their “nodes,” “cells,” and “funders.”

This infrastructure for ideological targeting is particularly dangerous in an election context.

Nonprofit organizations play a lawful — and significant — role in registering voters, educating them about issues, and supporting get-out-the-vote efforts. The administration has already taken aim at voter-registration groups by barring nonpartisan civic engagement organizations (like the League of Women Voters) from registering new citizens at naturalization ceremonies. A legal challenge to this policy is now pending.

More recently, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — a civil rights organization with a decades-long record of investigating violent extremist groups — on wire fraud and money laundering charges built on a questionable theory that paying informants to infiltrate Klan and neo-Nazi groups amounted to supporting them. SPLC appears to have been singled out for retaliation because it has accused some Trump allies of promoting extremist ideologies. Even Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a former federal prosecutor and senior House Republican, has publicly said that SPLC is “being targeted for obvious reasons.”

But the attack on SPLC should also be understood as a warning to other nonprofit groups, including groups that work to protect the ability of eligible voters to participate in elections. Even if these charges don’t result in convictions, they create a climate of fear that risks deterring groups from participating in lawful voter-education and voter-registration activities.

That’s the point. The goal isn’t necessarily to win in court. It’s to make the cost of democratic participation so high that organizations stop trying.

Intimidating election officials

Perhaps the most dangerous category of targeting is the least visible: the campaign against nonpartisan election officials.

Trump signed an executive order targeting former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Chris Krebs for the crime of defending the integrity of the 2020 election. Then-Attorney General Bondi appointed a U.S. attorney to lead nationwide investigations of election officials — the same prosecutor whose office obtained the search warrant for the FBI’s January raid on the Fulton County elections warehouse. And DOJ has reportedly explored bringing criminal charges against election officials for failing to meet cybersecurity standards that the administration itself defined — based not on evidence of actual security failures, but on assumptions driven by conspiracy theories.

On March 31, President Trump signed an executive order that directs DOJ to “prioritize the investigation and prosecution” of election officials and others who issue federal ballots to anyone not on a new Department of Homeland Security-maintained citizenship list. The eligibility list is to be drawn from federal databases with well-documented accuracy problems. The order — which is the subject of multiple ongoing legal challenges — requires no showing of criminal intent.

Read more — The SAVE tool, explained

And as already mentioned, DOJ is demanding the names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of thousands of individuals who worked on the 2020 election in Fulton County, even in a volunteer capacity. In a motion to quash the subpoena, the county has described it as a campaign “designed to target, harass, and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.”

This playbook of targeting low-level election workers with threats and harassment is not new, but it is now being executed at scale by the federal government itself. And it is happening in multiple states that are central to Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories. The FBI obtained a grand jury subpoena for records related to Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 audit in March, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on May 9 that an FBI agent had interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe about how Wisconsin runs its elections.

The effects are real and measurable. The Brennan Center’s 2025 survey of local election officials found that 59 percent reported fear of political interference in their ability to do their jobs. 46 percent were concerned about politically motivated investigations. In a 2024 survey, 21 percent said they were unlikely to continue serving through the 2026 midterms. The departure of experienced, nonpartisan election administrators is itself a form of election manipulation. It creates vacuums that can be filled by partisan actors more willing to go along with the wishes of election deniers.

And at the same time the administration punishes those officials who follow the law, it rewards allies who break it. In Colorado, Tina Peters — a county clerk convicted of four felonies for giving unauthorized access to voting equipment — was sentenced to nine years in prison. The Trump administration has sought to free her, with DOJ filing a statement of interest supporting her petition and Trump publicly declaring her innocent.

The message to election officials could not be clearer: Those who resist the administration’s agenda risk investigation and prosecution. Those willing to subvert elections in service of the president’s conspiracy theories will be protected and celebrated.

What can be done

The strategy works only if its targets stay quiet and isolated, and the rest of us treat it as business as usual. But neither has to happen. Here’s how targets can refuse to be isolated and how the rest of us can refuse to normalize it.

For civil society organizations: Prepare to fight back and build coalitions now, before the pressure arrives. The SPLC’s decision to plead not guilty and immediately go on offense — challenging false statements by the acting Attorney General and signaling a vindictive-prosecution defense — is the right model for individual responses. And, as we learned from studying how universities and law firms responded to Trump’s attacks, standing together is just as important. Shrinking back doesn’t buy safety; it buys ongoing servitude. For organizations looking to strengthen their own readiness, we have a Nonprofit Toolkit with primers covering government investigations; for organizations looking to strengthen the security and safety of collective action work, our comprehensive guide walks through the operational steps to keep you and your coalition partners focused on your mission.

Read more — A natural experiment in how to survive Trumpism

For election officials: The strategy only works if its targets are isolated. Fulton County’s public motion to quash — filed, deliberately, without seeking a seal — turned an attempted intimidation into a public defense of the rule of law. The multistate lawsuit against the March 31 executive order did the same thing: when 24 attorneys general file together, none of them is the lone target. Both are models to follow. Protect Democracy, the Brennan Center and others have resources and legal support available. You are not alone.

For members of the legal and law enforcement communities: Your professional responsibilities are not abstractions. The Justice Manual, the rules of professional conduct, your own oaths — these were built for moments like this one. Get sharp on what they require, and treat politicized directives with skepticism rather than the presumption of regularity to which DOJ used to be entitled. Hold colleagues accountable when they abuse the power entrusted to them, and support the ones who refuse — like the prosecutors pushed out in the fallout from the Comey prosecution and the other career federal lawyers across the country quietly saying no. They are paying a professional price for the rule of law, and the legal community owes them more than admiration. For those who have paid such a price, organizations like Justice Connection are there to support you. And the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections has resources for members of the law enforcement community who are looking for materials to understand how you can support and protect election workers and voters in this challenging environment.

For all of us: When an election official is threatened for doing their job, that is an attack on your right to vote. When a voter registration organization is sued for registering voters, that is an attack on your democracy. These are not someone else’s fights. We need to show up. The day of action this weekend in response to the attack on minority representation in the South is one place to start.

The disrupt strategy works by making people who run our elections — and the people who support them — feel alone. They aren’t. And the more clearly and loudly we say so, the less their strategy works.

This is part four in our Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions in this series here. If you're not subscribed, make sure to do so and you'll get future ones in your inbox.

The closure of Alligator Alcatraz is a meaningful victory

ICE has now formally set a target of 1 million deportations per year in its congressional budget justification. The pace of deportations reflects that ambition: through the first six months of fiscal year 2026, ICE carried out 234,236 removals — roughly 74% more than at the same point in either of the two prior years.

On May 12, though, news broke that one of the signature detention centers of the second Trump administration, “Alligator Alcatraz,” was set to close after rising costs, reports of inhumane conditions, and legal challenges. “Alligator Alcatraz” was more important for the administration and its supporters symbolically than as an actual detention facility, but that’s precisely what makes its closure so meaningful.

Even as the administration continues to target communities across the country in immigration raids, their state partners are facing the meaningful realities of keeping detention centers up and running amidst backlash from taxpayers wondering where their money is going. One facility closing does not change the overall picture, but it does speak to how unsustainable this aspect of the authoritarian project is.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

46% of American voters now believe the lie that there is widespread fraud in U.S. elections. Nearly half the country. That’s according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, which highlights the dangers of the Deceive component of the administration’s Executive Override playbook. (Reuters appropriately notes alongside reporting those results that extensive audits have repeatedly shown fraud to be exceedingly rare.)

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The recent polling isn’t an accident — it’s the result of a deliberate Trump strategy. In order for the administration to successfully interfere with the election and, ultimately, overturn unfavorable results, they first need to convince a sufficient portion of the public that our election system is unreliable. As Reuters captured it: “President Donald Trump’s years-long campaign to undermine faith in U.S. elections has ​gained broad traction with the American public.”

For years, election denialism was a movement of outsiders — fringe actors, online communities, and hyper-partisan media. Trump was the ringleader, but the machinery had limits, particularly within the federal government. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump and his allies tried to sell the public on their lies, but never got traction. Then, only about 30% of all voters bought Trump’s claims that the election was rigged. That’s a lot of people — far too many — but it wasn’t nearly enough to lay the foundation for a successful legal and political strategy to overthrow the results. (And of course, ever since 2020, Trump has waged an ongoing campaign to erode trust in elections.)

Unlike 2020, today the lies and conspiracies are coming from not just the Oval Office but all across the federal government. Since taking office in January 2025, the second Trump administration has institutionalized election denialism, stocking the executive branch with loyalists — including leading election deniers — who actively promote the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen and that our election system cannot be trusted.

And the administration is not simply repeating its old lies; it is using the investigative, intelligence, and enforcement powers of the executive branch to manufacture the appearance of evidence for those lies.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

The three lies to end democracy

The Administration is not just talking. The president has turned the formal powers of the executive branch into an amplifier for election conspiracy theories — and he’s filled the halls of power with people who are equally committed to the project.

Three false claims are doing the heavy lifting.

Lie One: The 2020 “Big Lie,” rejuvenated. Trump and his appointees continue to insist the 2020 election was stolen. And rather than recognize the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a national tragedy, the White House has sought to lionize the perpetrators — turning violent insurrectionists into heroes, or at least victims. We continue to see fidelity to the 2020 Big Lie being used as a litmus test for Trump’s nominees. For months, his judicial nominees have refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat in 2020 — now the nominee for the Fed Chair (a purportedly independent role) is scared to say Trump lost.

Lie Two: Mail-in voting and voting machines are “rigged.” The administration has repeatedly sought to cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in voting and electronic voting systems. Trump has ordered the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to decertify every voting machine it had previously certified — an order beyond his authority that is now the subject of pending litigation. The Reuters poll found 53% of respondents expressed concern about fraudulent absentee or mail-in ballots. And yet authoritative analyses of this continue to show there is no issue here, which is not surprising given how many controls state officials have in place to prevent this type of fraud. It’s worth noting, as well, that Trump and his family vote by mail. NPR’s headline says it all: “Trump, While Attacking Mail Voting, Casts Mail Ballot Again.”

Lie Three: Noncitizens are stealing elections. This has been the administration’s dominant false narrative. In reality, states have robust systems to prevent noncitizen voting, and it is vanishingly rare. Michigan’s 2024 audit turned up just 15 potential noncitizen votes out of more than 5.7 million cast. Georgia found 20 out of 8.2 million registered voters. The near-nonexistence of noncitizen voting makes sense: States have strong controls over their voter rolls and any noncitizen who tried to cast a ballot would face severe criminal and immigration penalties. Reuters summed it up well: “Years of messaging by Trump and his allies casting doubt on voting have resonated strongly with ⁠Republicans, particularly around claims that non‑citizens vote in significant numbers and that mail‑in ballots are unreliable, despite repeated audits and academic research finding fraud in either case to be exceedingly rare.”

So none of these claims hold up to scrutiny. They have been debunked time and time again. But that hasn’t kept the Administration from taking ever more extreme measures to try to propagate them.

Turning the federal government into a disinformation machine

These lies are dangerous enough on their own, but the administration isn’t just repeating lies. It’s using the federal government's powers to manufacture the appearance of evidence for them, effectively turning law enforcement and intelligence agencies into conduits for partisan disinformation.

Consider four key examples:

1. The FBI’s raid on Fulton County, Georgia. In January 2026, federal agents raided an election office in Fulton County, seizing hundreds of boxes of state election materials. Bizarrely, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was personally present for the raid — despite having no domestic law enforcement authority.

The affidavit used to get a search warrant relied on misleading claims that omitted key findings from prior state reviews. Fulton County’s 2020 ballots were counted three separate times, with results affirmed each time.

The raid is a sign of what’s to come: using federal law enforcement to try to breathe life into repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories. As one Fulton County commissioner put it:

This is just a mechanism to bring 2020 up and say that Fulton County doesn’t run good elections, that they can’t be trusted, so that people in 2026 won’t feel like their vote is accurately counted. It’s just an entire strategy to disrupt the 2026 midterm elections, and we’re not going to let them do it.

And there’s probably more to come: Former Attorney General Bondi appointed the U.S. attorney who obtained the search warrant to lead election-integrity investigations nationwide

2. Seizing state voter rolls — at times, at gunpoint. The administration has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from 48 states and D.C., and sued more than 25 states that refused to comply. After the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the administration demanded that Minnesota provide its voter rolls as a condition of de-escalating the terror unleashed by federal immigration authorities. Read that sentence again. They demanded state voter rolls at the point of a gun.

Federal courts have dismissed multiple DOJ lawsuits seeking data. But confidential memoranda reveal the real plan: DOJ intends to analyze the data and instruct states to remove specific voters — an extraordinary assertion of federal authority over state election administration. DOJ is also sharing voter roll data with DHS, creating a serious risk that eligible naturalized citizens will be wrongly flagged and purged before the 2026 midterms.

3. Manufacturing prosecutions to advance a conspiracy theory. The administration has weaponized the Justice Department’s criminal prosecution power to create a fog of deception around elections. It has sought but failed to find and prosecute noncitizens for voting — not surprising, given the paucity of noncitizen voting. But still, their efforts can generate headlines.

The Administration even turns unrelated retaliatory prosecutions against perceived political opponents into efforts to shore up its election lies. Alongside the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last week, Trump posted on social media: “The Southern Poverty Law Center…has been charged with FRAUD.… If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!” The DOJ allegations against SPLC — the Department’s latest attempt to silence critics, perceived opponents, and those who continue to pursue justice, equality, and the rule of law — have nothing at all to do with the 2020 election. That, of course, doesn’t stop the effort to use vexatious DOJ prosecutions to feed election lies.

4. Seizing voting machines to spread conspiracies about Venezuela. In May 2025, a team supervised by Gabbard seized voting machines and forensic data copies from Puerto Rico, ostensibly to investigate allegations that Venezuela had hacked the territory’s voting systems. Independent experts noted that features Gabbard’s office described as “vulnerabilities” — such as cellular modems transmitting encrypted vote totals — are common, well-understood components of election infrastructure.

The pattern across all four examples is the same: Use the power of the federal government to stage dramatic, high-profile actions that look like they’re indicative of some sort of fraud — even when they’re not.

And so we should be on guard for the administration to use these abuses of power to magically manufacture “evidence” to support its false narratives. Don’t be surprised to see claims of one of the following in the months ahead — and treat it with extreme skepticism.

Silencing the people who fight disinformation

At the same time the administration is abusing power to supercharge election lies, it is systematically dismantling the infrastructure that exists to counter them.

Targeting trusted sources of accurate information. In December 2025, the State Department directed consular officers to deny visas to foreign nationals who have worked in fact-checking, content moderation, trust and safety, or combating misinformation. (Our team has filed a lawsuit challenging this policy.) This directive, coupled with years of political pressure, has already had a chilling effect. Meta eliminated its third-party fact-checking program in January 2025, explicitly citing the political environment. Other platforms have similarly retreated from content moderation.

Gutting federal election security programs. On Attorney General Bondi’s first day in office, she disbanded the FBI task force tracking foreign influence operations from Russia, China, and Iran. Since Trump took office, roughly a third of the workforce of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — approximately 1,000 employees — has departed through firings, forced resignations, and buyouts. In March 2025, CISA halted all election security support for state officials and terminated funding for the cross-state threat-monitoring system. CISA’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget would entirely eliminate the agency’s Election Security Program. And for the first time in years, CISA did not activate its Election Day situation room during the November 2025 elections.

Ramping up censorship of the media. And this week, we saw Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman advance efforts to silence media companies that don’t follow the party line. Alongside Trump’s call (again) to fire Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC issued a highly unusual order threatening ABC broadcast licenses. All part of a long-running campaign to silence or intimidate media that don’t stick to the White House’s preferred narrative.

Put it all together. Election conspiracy theories now face fewer checks — at the precise moment the federal government is working hardest to spread them.

How we can defeat the deception

The White House’s deception strategy only works if it goes unanswered. Here is what defeating it looks like: If you talk about elections — with family, followers, or readers — debunk without amplifying. Instead, lead with the truth, briefly name the lie and why it’s false, then return to the truth — what researchers call the “truth sandwich.” (More good tips on how to prebunk misinformation here.)

If you lead an institution — a company, a university, a church, a civic organization — speak up when the government abuses its power to spread lies. In response to the retaliatory prosecution of SPLC, for example, a broad range of organizations, advocates, and experts have joined a chorus to debunk the Administration’s cooked up claims and stand in solidarity with SPLC. To take another example, Trump’s allies at the FCC have sought to weaponize existing rules to suppress criticism of the administration. This week, we and our partners at TechFreedom asked the federal appeals court in Washington to intervene and stop it. And last week, we described the extensive efforts from our team and many others to stop DOJ from abusing its power to interfere with state voter rolls as part of a campaign of deception.

If you hold public office — at any level — refuse to act on the lies. The election-deception strategy is a pretext to make it plausible for officials to disrupt voting, contest counts, and reject results. The good news is our elections are carried out by state and local officials all around the country, so the administration itself has very little legal authority to interfere in the election. Congress should continue to reject the SAVE Act, which would translate the deception into a federal effort to disrupt voting. State and local officials should continue to administer their elections by the law and facts.

That 46% number in the Reuters poll is alarming. But the administration’s election deception strategy only works if it goes unanswered. It can move the other direction the same way — when the truth is told clearly, when abuses of power are met with resistance, and when the people who run our elections refuse to be intimidated into acting on lies.

Between now and November, that’s the work.

This was part three of our ongoing Executive Override series. All of the pieces in this series will be posted here. Check out the prior ones. And make sure you’re subscribed to get the next ones in your inbox.

Corrupting Elections – Rapidly Escalating

Mid-decade gerrymandering gets a major boost from the Supreme Court

What began in summer 2025, when President Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts to protect the GOP’s narrow House majority, has since grown into one of the largest coordinated attempts to redraw congressional districts in modern American history. As of April 2026, six states — California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah — have new congressional maps, with several more in flux.

On April 21, Virginia voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment to redraw congressional districts in Democrats’ favor, only to see a circuit court judge block certification of the results — a challenge now before the state supreme court. That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared Texas’s redrawn map over a lower court finding of illegal racial gerrymandering. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis then called a special session to consider new maps, since enacted into law, that analysts say could produce a 24–4 Republican advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.

On April 29, the Supreme Court worsened the crisis. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s 6-3 majority effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the last meaningful federal check on racially discriminatory maps. It removes the guardrail that made extreme gerrymandering legally risky, and could undercut the representation of millions of minority voters. Since the decision, the governor of Louisiana has suspended an ongoing Congressional primary by executive order (which has since been challenged in litigation) and state officials in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia are attempting to rush gerrymanders in time to enact racially discriminatory maps that could flip additional majority-minority seats. This impact will unfold even further over time — analysts estimate up to 19 majority-minority seats could be removed as a result of the Callais decision through the 2028 election. What is happening is not normal political competition. It is a coordinated attempt — initiated by a sitting president and now enabled by the Supreme Court — to lock in congressional majorities for a single party through map manipulation.

Quashing Dissent – Rapidly Escalating

The administration is pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel (again)

In the days following a shooting incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the White House is trying to use the episode to renew pressure on ABC and its parent company Disney to dismiss late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. The controversy traces to a Thursday night sketch (days before the assassination attempt) on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which Kimmel performed a mock host’s speech and joked that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.”

Both President Trump and the first lady suggested Kimmel should be fired. But most troublingly, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has also taken action against ABC in the days since Kimmel’s joke aired, formally calling for ABC to defend its license to broadcast. This is not an isolated incident. In September, ABC and two of the country’s largest TV station owners — Nexstar Media and Sinclair — suspended Kimmel’s show after Carr threatened affiliates following comments Kimmel made about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Protect Democracy has been fighting back. Just this week, we filed a legal action in the D.C. Court of Appeals, seeking to force the FCC to respond to a formal petition filed last fall calling on the FCC to rescind the news distortion policy. The policy is one of the enforcement levers that Carr has abused to censor protected speech, and when the petition was filed, Carr responded by tweeting “How about no”. The petitioners behind this action include a bipartisan coalition of former FCC chairs, commissioners, and senior-level staff, joined by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA). The stakes extend beyond one television host. As former Republican FCC Chairman and petitioner Mark Fowler warned, the government has no legitimate role in deciding what speech is acceptable.

Politicizing Independent Institutions – Escalating

The second indictment of James Comey is a further weaponization of the Justice Department

On April 28, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time, on charges of making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce — stemming from a photo of seashells he posted on Instagram.

This is the administration’s second attempt to prosecute Comey. The first indictment, brought in September on charges of lying to Congress, was dismissed late last year by a federal judge who found that the interim U.S. attorney who secured the indictment had been improperly appointed. The pattern of retaliation is not subtle: Trump publicly urged then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against Comey, writing in a public post on Truth Social that “we can’t delay any longer.”

The Justice Department exists to enforce the law impartially, not to prosecute the president’s critics. Twice now, the administration has sought to use federal criminal charges against a man whose primary offense appears to be his public opposition to the president. The first indictment collapsed in court. The independence of the federal judiciary, and the citizens who serve as jurors, remain the last meaningful check on this pattern of abuse.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi did everything President Trump asked her to do with gusto. Trump’s primary objective for his Attorney General (AG) was to use federal law enforcement to punish his perceived enemies and opponents, and Bondi tried hard — and largely failed — to do just that.

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She indicted former FBI Director James Comey, New York AG Letitia James, and a member of Congress conducting ICE oversight. She launched investigations of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, former impeachment prosecutor and now senator Adam Schiff, former CIA Director John Brennan, and Democratic members of Congress who restated the basic principle that military personnel can disobey orders they know are unlawful. The list goes on. After most of these cases were dismissed by federal district court judges, rejected by grand juries in unprecedented numbers, or languished in the investigative phase, Trump fired Bondi, reportedly because he believes she wasn’t strong enough in her resolve to pursue his vendettas or smart enough to win the cases.

It’s hardly surprising that this is Trump’s view of one of the many women he has scapegoated for his failures. But as a factual matter, it’s wrong. Bondi didn’t suffer from reticence or incompetence. She failed thanks to the American people — the grand jurors, trial jurors, and judges who refused to let meritless cases proceed. These are guardrails the president cannot fire, reassign, or intimidate into submission.

Read more — A guide to understanding the federal grand jury

Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal attorney and now Acting Attorney General, will run into the same wall. So will whoever comes next. This is good news for democracy, but it comes under a dark cloud. While Trump’s retribution campaign is failing, a Justice Department that should be protecting ordinary Americans has abandoned that mission in futile pursuit of the president’s vendettas.

Bondi was willing, just unsuccessful

Protect Democracy has documented a sustained pattern by Bondi of investigating and prosecuting Trump’s political opponents and critics. The cases have typically involved public smearing of the subjects in violation of the Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution and Constitutional due process, direct interference from the president and other political appointees in charging decisions, overriding the judgment of career professionals, and an outright lack of evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.

None of this seemingly gave Bondi any pause. And if she ever seriously entertained any of the concerns her DOJ subordinates communicated to her about losing meritless cases in court, she proved herself willing to brush them aside when the president told her she should.

Read more — Tracking retaliatory use of arrests, prosecutions, and investigations by the Trump administration

Bondi was stopped by the legal system’s guardrails, not her own limitations

Of course, Bondi did lose a lot of cases in court. And she lost just as often before she could even get a case started. But a more skillful or aggressive lawyer would not have fared better. The Comey and James cases were both widely criticized as lacking evidence of the commission of any crimes and were dismissed because the district court held that the U.S. Attorney who obtained the indictments was unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department appealed the dismissals and has repeatedly attempted — and failed — to re-indict Ms. James.

This is of a piece with the role grand jurors have played in thwarting the Justice Department’s retaliation agenda by rejecting an unprecedented number of indictments. After years in which grand juries issued no-bills — refusals to approve charges — in single-digit numbers out of more than 150,000 cases pursued, grand juries during the second Trump administration have rejected charges in dozens of cases all over the country. Trial jurors have also been a significant roadblock, acquitting people facing dubious charges arising out of protests against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. In Washington, D.C., for example, a jury acquitted a former federal employee who was charged with misdemeanor assault (downgraded from a felony after a grand jury refused to indict) for throwing a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent. After the trial, one juror told the media that people in the courtroom had a hard time keeping a “straight face” listening to the government’s evidence. “I thought we’d be out of there quickly,” the juror said of deliberations, because “[t]his case had no grounding.”

This reality is starting to sink in with some Trump appointees, who are closing cases and dropping charges rather than continuing to be humiliated in court. To take one recent example, after a grand jury unanimously refused to indict the Democratic members of Congress who spoke out about disobeying unlawful military orders, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro ended the investigation instead of making another attempt to secure an indictment.

That said, the danger isn’t over. Acting AG Blanche has already announced a legally dubious indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center — apparently in retaliation for the organization’s designation of certain Trump allies as “hate groups.” And he followed a few days later by announcing yet another indictment of Comey, this time for allegedly threatening to assassinate Trump via a message communicated in seashells and posted on social media. Legal experts immediately pronounced the indictment deficient on First Amendment grounds.

The hardships these indictments cause to the defendants should not be underestimated. But no AG, however committed or clever, is likely to have much success getting factually empty cases past American juries. And the Trump administration cannot secure indictments and win convictions without the cooperation of the very citizens it’s trying to intimidate and punish. Notably, the government has no right to appeal grand jury no-bills (although it can try again) or trial jury acquittals; here, the people have the last word. The administration of criminal justice is one realm where the American people have significant power over an autocratic president, are using it to great effect, and are showing no sign of changing course.

Bondi seriously damaged the Justice Department’s ability to engage in legitimate law enforcement

Yet, even as ordinary Americans are succeeding in blocking Trump’s illegal retaliation agenda in court, they remain its primary victims outside of it. As she was pursuing — and losing — retaliatory and vindictive prosecutions, Bondi decimated the ranks of competent career professionals in both the Justice Department and the FBI and upended the Department’s legitimate law enforcement mission. During her tenure, more than 16,000 employees, including experienced prosecutors and FBI agents, were fired or resigned. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section — the unit that specialized in public corruption and white-collar prosecutions — has been effectively shut down. The Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, which prosecuted law enforcement misconduct and hate crimes cases, has also been gutted.

This loss of law enforcement expertise and capacity, together with the Trump administration’s focus on its political agenda of immigration crackdowns and political retaliation, has led to a precipitous decline in enforcing drug, white collar, public corruption, and national security crimes, among others. ProPublica reported that the Trump Justice Department “closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months” of the administration, a marked increase over previous administrations. Prosecutions in areas from drug trafficking, government procurement fraud, terrorism, and national security have all declined sharply.

None of this is consistent with keeping the American people safe from violent crime or protecting them from fraud, corruption, and other threats to their financial security and environment. And it is not a recipe for another Attorney General to win more cases of any kind. Instead, by continuing to pursue baseless and retaliatory cases, Trump’s Attorney General will inevitably force out more of the ethical prosecutors who remain. Indeed, that has already happened during Blanche’s tenure, as a top career prosecutor in Miami was removed from overseeing the investigation of former CIA Director John Brennan after she reportedly expressed doubts about its legal viability.

A reason for optimism, and a warning

Whether the next Attorney General remains Todd Blanche or Trump nominates another loyalist to continue pursuing his retribution campaign, the American people and other institutional actors will almost certainly keep blocking the Justice Department’s illegal actions. This should be a point of inspiration and real cause for hope that our democracy can survive — one of the best we have been given in the last two years. But every day that the Justice Department remains an instrument of presidential vengeance, the harder it will be to rebuild an agency worthy of the very people who — throughout this federal dereliction of duty — have done so much themselves to protect justice.