Last month, I traveled to Brasília, the capital of Brazil, as part of a delegation of American democracy advocates. We were there to study and learn from the Brazilian lawyers, judges, and activists who participated in the movement to oppose Jair Bolsonaro and reverse Brazil’s turn towards authoritarianism.

Subscribe now

Why Brazil? There are strong points of correspondence between Brazil’s experience with Bolsonarismo and our ongoing struggle with MAGA Trumpism. To name a few:

• Like Trump, Bolsonaro promoted traditional gender roles and conservative religion, and opposed LGBTQ+ rights, affirmative action, and abortion rights.

• Bolsonaro used his time in power to purge the civil service and appoint loyalists to key positions.

• Bolsonaro and his allies spread disinformation about Brazilian voting machines to fuel distrust in the integrity of the election system during the 2022 election.

• After he lost the 2022 election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro attempted to spur a military coup d’etat by instigating his supporters to ransack the Supreme Court, Congress, and the presidential palace in Brasília.

Unsurprisingly, diving deeper into the Brazilian experience complicated the picture. Brazil’s relatively recent experience with military dictatorships and different institutional arrangements stood out as particularly significant to Bolsonaro’s defeat in 2022 and the country’s successful pursuit of accountability for the January 8 attack on democracy.

But despite those differences — or maybe because of them — I think we all left with new ideas, perspectives, and questions to bring to our work on democracy issues here at home.

Here are my three:

One: Democracy seems more valuable when you’ve lived without it

Compared to the U.S., Brazilian democracy is younger and more unstable. The Brazilian monarchy was overthrown and replaced by a constitutional republic (albeit one with highly limited voting rights) in 1889, but the country returned to dictatorship twice more in the next 100 years. The modern Constitution was enacted in 1988, three years after a two-decade military dictatorship was finally overthrown.

When Bolsonaro came to power, he did so in alliance with key factions in the military. He also moved to increase the military’s domestic power. He appointed military officials to major roles in the civilian government, and under the auspices of crime control, he sent federal forces into Rio de Janeiro. (Sound familiar?) And after he lost his reelection campaign in 2022, he collaborated with military leaders to stage a coup and overthrow President Lula. The attacks on the Supreme Court on January 8, 2023 were done in collaboration with some military forces and intended to spur a broader military intervention in the country. (Importantly, the coup plot fell apart because several key military leaders refused to go along.)

All of those developments resonated differently with a population with direct experience with military dictatorship. The movement against Bolsonaro could draw on those experiences in advocating for democracy and the rule of law.

The U.S. doesn’t have a similar recent, universal experience with authoritarianism to draw on. But make no mistake — Jim Crow and segregation were our own form of authoritarianism. And that may explain why Black-led civil rights organizations have been at the forefront of opposition to Trump. Authoritarianism has been overthrown in America in living memory, and that struggle should inform the one we’re living through, even as the Trump administration tries to tell a different story about the past.

Two: Institutional arrangements won’t save democracy on their own

After Brazil’s military dictatorship was overthrown in the 1980s, the drafters of the new Constitution were determined to inoculate it against future attempts to overthrow democracy. Key features of the Constitution were designed with that purpose in mind, and played an important role in slowing authoritarian consolidation during Bolsonaro’s term:

• The Constitution forbids amendments to its key democracy provisions: those establishing the federal structure of the country; direct secret elections; the separation of powers; and individual rights. (Otherwise, Brazil’s Constitution can be amended much more easily than the U.S. Constitution.)

• Questions of constitutional law can be taken directly — and swiftly — to the Brazilian Supreme Court by any active political party. During Bolsonaro’s time in power, the Supreme Court heard hundreds of challenges to Bolsonaro’s executive orders and other actions, and acted as a major check on unlawful actions.

• The Supreme Court has the power to investigate and prosecute attacks on itself as an institution. This enabled the Supreme Court to move aggressively to investigate and prosecute disinformation campaigns against the court during the Bolsonaro regime as well as the attempted coup of 2022-23.

So institutional design was key — and yet Brazilian experts emphasized it was insufficient. The institutions only worked because the people inhabiting those institutions were determined to protect democracy.

That won’t necessarily be true forever. Because appointments to the Brazilian Supreme Court are part of a political process — they work similarly to appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court — its institutions are ultimately also susceptible to political capture. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins the presidential election next month and is able to appoint a few more justices, the Supreme Court may be a much less effective check on future bids for authoritarian consolidation. (And what happens when the Supreme Court tends to be aligned with the authoritarian agenda? Read Justin Florence and Erica Newland on the two-branch doom loop here at home.)

What does that mean for the U.S.? If the elections in 2026 and 2028 create a window to rebuild our democracy, we shouldn’t think that minor institutional reforms alone will be enough to shore up our defenses against another episode of backsliding. Even the most robust checks and balances can fall apart when enough levers of power are controlled by an authoritarian faction.

Rather, permanently closing the door on authoritarianism requires a sweeping program of political, systemic, and democratic change that reorients politics, revitalizes democratic culture, and empowers a new generation of pro-democratic leadership.

Three: A lasting democratic U-turn requires real reform

If there was one essential lesson I took away from the Brazilian experience — and the U.S. one — it’s this: Aspiring authoritarian leaders don’t come out of nowhere. They take advantage of underlying weaknesses in the democratic political system to convince a segment of the population that a different approach is needed. And if we don’t fix those underlying weaknesses, we won’t see a durable return to a fully democratic form of governance (sometimes called a “U-turn”).

Recent research suggests that the vast majority of so-called “U-turns” are relatively short-lived: More than 90% of countries that have bounced back from authoritarian rule have experienced another period of democratic decline within five years.

And it’s unclear whether Brazil will beat that statistic. As of now, President Lula appears to be in a tight race against Flávio Bolsonaro, running on behalf of his father’s far-right party. Even if Lula wins another term this year, our Brazilian colleagues emphasized that 2030 will be another pivotal year. Lula will be term-limited and 84 years old, and he doesn’t have a natural political successor within the Workers’ Party.

In other words, Brazil might be in a situation a bit like the U.S. in summer 2024: With an aging leader unable to run for reelection, few major reforms to the political process completed, and no united pro-democracy coalition ready to block another bid by an authoritarian-minded candidate. And we all know how that ended.

Does that mean we’re doomed?

I don’t think so. But it does mean that if the U.S. successfully makes its own U-turn in 2026 and 2028, there won’t be time to waste: We’ll need to be ready to make meaningful changes, quickly. And that means talking about big reform ideas now, from proportional representation to meaningful court reform. We shouldn’t count on having another chance.

Authoritarian Action Watch updates

Two other Western Hemisphere stories in our Authoritarian Action Watch updates this week.

First, the president’s announcement that the Pentagon now owns a stake in an obscure Venezuelan oil company — without any consultation with Congress — takes us back to an age of imperialism, and then some. Aggrandizing executive power is RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

Second, Haitian deportees are arriving back in Haiti after the end of Temporary Protected Status for many living in the U.S. The stories are heartbreaking. Targeting Vulnerable Communities is RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

See all the updates in the Authoritarian Action Watch here.

How you can protect democracy #48:

Share global success stories: Around the world, autocrats seek to sideline pro-democracy voices to consolidate and hold onto power. These leaders work tirelessly to project a veneer of invincibility and inevitability to convince the public that resistance is futile.

These stories of autocratic consolidation are just part of the story. We must continue to elevate and share positive examples of democratic “comebacks,” where democracy has won out against autocracy through sustained and creative participation. These wins demonstrate political outcomes are not fixed and that continued civic engagement can shape change over time, encouraging democratic resilience and hope.

This year, Hungarians ousted longtime strongman Viktor Orbán at the ballot box, demonstrating that even after 16 years in the wilderness, pro-democracy forces can stand up and stand firm against seemingly entrenched autocrats.

Start the conversation:

• Sharing stories of global democratic resilience — like Hungary’s recent pro-democracy victory — flips the script on the autocrat’s preferred narrative of “invincibility.” These stories are powerful tools to encourage those on the sidelines to get in the fight.

• Talk to friends and family members who feel disillusioned by the current state of U.S. democracy, and remind them how pro-democracy movements around the world have stood up to corrupt, entrenched leaders — and won.

Check out these resources:

• Is Budapest the bellwether?: A closer look at Hungary’s recent election and what it may suggest about changes in democratic trends, along with context on what the results could mean for the future of democracy.

• How democracy survives around the world: A broader look at how democracies persist and recover under pressure, drawing on examples from different countries. It highlights patterns, strategies, and conditions that have helped democratic movements remain resilient over time.

• The Hope for Democratic Resilience: A data-driven global analysis showing that democratic decline is not always permanent, highlighting cases where countries have reversed backsliding and moved toward more democratic governance with sustained effort.

• Stories of Democratic Resilience: A collection of real-world stories showing how communities around the world, from Ukraine to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, have strengthened democracy at the local level, even in challenging conditions. It highlights how participation, collaboration, and local action can help democratic systems endure over time.

There are over 100 more ways to help: How you can protect democracy.

In Franz Kafka’s classic The Trial, the protagonist is arrested, tried, and imprisoned for an unspoken crime.

The conceit of the novel — and of its alienating bureaucratic absurdity for which Kafkaesque is now shorthand — is that neither the reader nor the main character ever knows what law was ostensibly broken. The entire process of judgement and punishment happens within a black box.

Subscribe now

Of all the rules in America today, the ones governing artificial intelligence may be the most important and consequential. While we can anticipate some of the possible risks of this new technology, it’s not an exaggeration to say that no one knows for sure what tail risks AI may bring.

In this context, the Trump administration claims to have set up a system of processes to evaluate new AI models and either approve or quarantine them. But here’s the Kafkaesque twist: No one outside the White House — and possibly a small group of AI companies — knows what these rules and processes are.

It may be the most important rule in America today. And it’s a black box.

Are their criteria sufficient to seriously evaluate and prevent the worst risks of AI? Is Donald Trump making these decisions personally or are there, you know, real AI experts involved? Are they taking into account risks of things like mass surveillance, job displacement, and propaganda? (We can probably guess on that one.) Do specific rules or criteria even exist — or is the White House just winging it?

I don’t know. Almost no one does.

And, somehow, it gets worse than that. Because not only was this secret purported regulatory process set up without any legislation or specified legal authority, but it also presents a world-historic opportunity for abuse and corruption.

The biggest technology power grab in American history

Over the summer, the Trump administration rolled out an ostensibly “voluntary” framework to review certain AI models before they are released to the public. So far, the administration has described the framework only in general terms and has not disclosed any details.

But is this process really voluntary?

Short answer, as Deana El-Mallawany and Justin Florence explained last month, is no.

On June 2, 2026, the White House issued Executive Order 14409, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” which claimed to create a “voluntary” pre-release review program for frontier models. In reality, it established what Dean Ball, former Trump administration AI policy advisor now leading frontier AI policy at OpenAI, described as “a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime.” And one that operates behind closed doors pursuant to undisclosed terms and murky legal authority.

The administration’s subsequent actions pursuant to the EO proved this to be true.

On June 12, 2026, the Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to suspend worldwide access to two of its AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, within ninety minutes, citing export-control authority in an unprecedented context. The Commerce Department later restored access to Mythos 5 for only a select list of undisclosed “trusted partner” organizations, before lifting the export controls entirely on June 30, 2026.

Then, on July 14, 2026, the White House, Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon jointly launched “GOLD EAGLE,” a standing industry-government coordination body with undisclosed power “to collectively identify risks, prioritize action, and strengthen the resilience” of AI systems, resting on no new statutory authority. Separately, OpenAI has agreed, through informal negotiation rather than any public order, to limit distribution of its own forthcoming models to government-vetted partners.

[O]n August 1, 2026, the White House stated that it had finalized a “voluntary” framework for reviewing advanced AI models before their release, while declining to disclose the framework’s contents, which companies have agreed to participate, or when the process will take effect.

[Read their whole piece: Autocratic capture comes for AI.]

Paying the mafia for protection is voluntary — you can absolutely choose not to, but there will be consequences.

Plus, this black box was set up without any public legislative or rulemaking process. Congress didn’t pass a law, no court ruled, there wasn’t even an administrative process. The president has simply asserted the right to approve new models, in secret, if submitted for review — or to block them if not.

Perhaps this outside-the-law secret rule is a good faith effort to manage fast-moving AI risks and a reasonable negotiated settlement between government and technology companies. Perhaps it isn’t. Without transparency, it’s impossible for us to know.

There are, however, very real risks that this black box could be easily abused:

• The White House could use the secret process to exert enormous leverage over decisionmaking by AI companies, including over decisions like autonomous weapons and mass surveillance that were the subject of previous clashes.

• The president could personally extort certain investors and employees for political and financial support — or punish others for perceived political opposition.

• The administration could force AI companies to incorporate politicized stances into models, as Elon Musk’s apparent “white genocide” Grok manipulations famously demonstrated. As Amanda Carpenter put it: “They’re gonna ‘Truth Social’ AI.”

Yesterday, my colleagues filed suit to try to force the White House to open the black box. We’re asking the courts to force the administration to turn over basic information about their process and participants. Read more about the lawsuit here: Uncovering the Trump administration’s secret rules for AI model release.

To get a sense of the importance of the case, check out the declarations from various tech luminaries and policymakers.

Maybe there’s nothing in the box. But I doubt it. That’s not how Kafkaesque tends to go…

Share

The broad appeal of proportional representation

Most people think about electoral reform as a path to systemic change — and I think it is — but in America as it is today, there’s also a strong case for proportional representation from a basic governance point of view. Proportional representation could provide small-c conservatives and others with alternatives to the status quo, with surprising benefits.

I loved how Jen Dresden, one of Protect Democracy’s resident political scientists, explained the appeal on Linda Chavez’s podcast this week:

Three notable shifts in the watch this week.

Considering everything above about AI, we rate Aggrandizing Executive Power as RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

In Quashing Dissent, Donald Trump’s attempt to send the FCC after Meet the Press host Kristen Welker — after she suggested on air that the president has a mixed endorsement record in Republican primaries — was one of the more egregious instances of press censorship yet. We rate it ESCALATING.

Corrupting Elections is also ESCALATING as DHS attempts to build a massive database of all “citizens” for the purpose of disrupting the midterms. (Read more: Trump’s master database of “citizens”)

See all the ratings on the Authoritarian Action Watch.

How you can protect democracy #81

Understand how AI affects our democracy: Artificial intelligence is changing nearly every part of daily life, including how we get information, how governments make decisions, and how democratic institutions function. Most people encounter AI through chatbots, search results, or social media feeds — but AI is also quietly reshaping the conditions that make democracy work.

AI makes it easier to create and spread convincing fake content, like fabricated videos or AI-generated news stories, that can mislead voters and erode public trust. It can also be used to surveil and target communities in ways that chill free expression, and justify replacing the human oversight and institutional checks that keep power in balance. But AI also holds genuine promise by helping people identify false information faster, strengthening election security, and making it easier for citizens to engage with their government.

The question is not whether AI will shape our democracy. It already is. Protect Democracy’s AI for Democracy Action Lab works to defend against AI’s risks while finding ways to put it to work for civic good — and there are concrete steps everyday people can take to stay informed and engaged.

What you can do:

• Read our article, Democracy in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, for a look at how AI is already affecting democratic life, with real examples from the U.S. and around the world.

• Review the Brennan Center’s explainer on how to spot AI-generated election misinformation while reading news online.

• Explore our AI for Democracy Action Lab to see the work underway to hold AI accountable in the public interest.

• Share what you learn with people in your life — understanding AI’s role in democracy is something everyone has a stake in.

Extra Credit: Want to go deeper? Explore our Shortlist: Generative AI Platform Recommendations to see what guardrails AI platforms should have in place to protect elections.

There are dozens more ways to help: How you can protect democracy.

With nine weeks until the midterms, here’s the bottom line from our team at Protect Democracy: everyone can and should participate in our democracy this fall with confidence.

That’s not to ignore how acute and alarming the dangers are. But we have an extensive toolkit, a track record to back it up, and our ecosystem is prepared and well-coordinated. We’ve survived assaults on our elections before and we’re going to do it again.

Subscribe now

When read individually, the eight threats below can feel overwhelming. But when we understand them as part of the Deceive, Disrupt, Deny playbook, we can channel our energy into deploying a stronger playbook of our own. That’s why our team is partnering with organizations across the ideological spectrum and key sectors — labor, faith, business, public health, Gen Z, national security — to prepare their members to respond to each of the threats below. We’re also utilizing our own communications strategy for reaching and educating voters, including on the digital platforms where most Americans now get their news, so that all of us recognize the election interference playbook and understand how we can respond.

Read on for a closer look at the scenarios we’re preparing for and why we’re confident that our movement will rise to the challenge. Of course, this isn’t everything that our 125+ experts are working on — and it’s a tiny portion of what all of us, the pro-democracy majority in this country, are doing together.

Threat one: The Justice Department may attempt to seize ballots and voting machines

Starting in January, when the FBI relied on baseless claims of fraud in 2020 to raid an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, the Trump administration has laid the groundwork to try to disrupt the election by seizing materials or otherwise messing with election administration.

We’ve seen equally worrisome investigative actions in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and California. As our friends at Just Security put it: “For the first time, the country faces the possibility that the DOJ may attempt to take over polling places, seize ballots during an election, or threaten to prosecute voters or election officials to interfere in the administration of an election.”

How we’re responding: Since an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, Protect Democracy and our peers are producing materials for the judges who evaluate these seizure warrants to raise the odds that they reject deficient and politically motivated applications.

And if seizures do happen, we’re making sure election officials have the protocols and resources in place to minimize harm to election operations and vote counting. With the Brennan Center, we’ve published and widely distributed guidance on lining up counsel before the pressure hits, maintaining redundancies of records, documenting everything if federal officers show up, and being prepared to file for emergency relief. This includes state-specific guides we’re producing to help officials create personalized plans of action.

We’re also coordinating with national peers as well as state and local organizations to ensure that, if election officials or other actors need to file emergency litigation to halt blatantly illegal attempts to seize election materials or interfere with election administration, they have the support to do so rapidly and forcefully.

Threat two: The president is actively seeking to seize state voter files and impose barriers to the ballot

The president is pursuing a sweeping campaign to try to seize control of who gets to vote and how. Trump has issued executive orders requiring documentary proof of citizenship on federal registration forms and directing DHS to dictate to USPS which voters can receive a mail ballot. The Justice Department has demanded that every state hand over its complete voter rolls — data which could be used to force purges based on bad matches and manufacture doubt about results. DHS and FEMA are attempting to condition billions in counterterrorism funding on states turning over that same data. DHS is also invading the privacy of millions of Americans to assemble and compile a massive, inaccurate master “citizen list” which it now plans to pressure election officials to compare against state voter rolls. And the administration has renewed its push for the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship nationwide (but which fortunately does not have the votes to pass the Senate).

How we’re responding: Our ecosystem is making good progress already. First, pro-democracy actors have blocked core provisions of both of Trump’s anti-voting executive orders (and as we explained here, the Supreme Court USPS ruling is almost certainly noise, not substance). Second, the Justice Department is 0-23 in its lawsuits against states that have refused to hand over their voter rolls; Protect Democracy also filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department with co-counsel at the ACLU, ACLU-D.C., Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School to block the Justice Department’s illegal attempts to compile a national voter database. Third, a coalition of state Attorneys General sued to block DHS and FEMA from conditioning counterterrorism funding on states adopting federally dictated election administration conditions; and with the Jacobson Lawyers Group, Brennan Center, and Public Rights Project, Protect Democracy just filed a related lawsuit against DHS to ensure the relief applies to as many jurisdictions as possible. Fourth, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and The Electronic Privacy Information Center, Protect Democracy just filed a lawsuit to prevent the administration from pressuring states to make last-minute changes to their voter rolls based on DHS’ erroneous master “citizen list.”

Threat three: ICE/DHS deployments may seek to intimidate or suppress voters

Administration actors and allies have long hinted at DHS/ICE presence during the midterms. Steve Bannon called ICE deployment to airports a “test run.” Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she “can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November,” and Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly asked, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?”

Blanche later refused to explicitly rule out deployments at poll sites. Meanwhile, when the DNC sued for records of any plans to deploy agents to polls, ICE told a judge no records exist — and then reversed course and admitted to having more than 11,000 potentially relevant pages; CBP found nearly 117,000. Bottom line, we have to prepare for ICE/DHS to be used as a tool for election interference, whether through deployment at polling places, or more likely, through surges of federal presence in competitive districts under the pretext of routine immigration enforcement.

How we’re responding: Here, both litigation and legislation are potentially effective.

On the legal front, we’re preparing for emergency litigation if federal agents are deployed in ways that intimidate voters or suppress participation. We are ready to seek emergency relief and can build on our work in Arizona in 2022, when we persuaded a Trump-appointed judge to strictly limit armed vigilantes’ behavior at ballot drop boxes.

Meanwhile, on the legislative front, five states have passed legislation based on a model bill that our team crafted to let people sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights — with California the most recent to cross the finish line on August 27th. Once the California bill is signed by the Governor, more than 70 million Americans will live in a state with this kind of legal protection. As voting begins, these laws can be used to challenge actions that deprive people of the right to vote, including intimidation and violence at poll sites. Agents who know their actions carry personal liability are also less likely to commit abuses.

Threat four: Surveillance and policing by ICE and DHS may put a chill on First Amendment activity

Surveillance, intimidation, and overzealous law enforcement have the potential to chill Americans’ exercise of their rights to protest and observe government action.

Consider a growing trend: an investigation by ProPublica and PBS identified more than 300 people arrested at anti-ICE protests and charged with crimes like assaulting or interfering with federal agents — and found that more than a third of those cases have collapsed, either through acquittals or dropped charges once officers’ claims didn’t hold up.

Our team spoke to NPR in a similar piece about the free speech and First Amendment implications of how the Justice Department is weaponizing criminal conspiracy charges against protesters. In addition, The Wall Street Journal has reported on how ICE has built a $258 million surveillance operation scanning over 200 websites for critical speech and issuing hundreds of subpoenas to de-anonymize posters.

How we’re responding: We’re working to rein in the government’s surveillance and intimidation tactics through litigation and legal advocacy.

In February, we sued DHS on behalf of Maine residents who were told they were being added to “domestic terrorist” watchlists for lawfully filming ICE operations.

At a March hearing, the government’s lawyer couldn’t tell the judge what the government is doing with our clients’ personal information, including where it’s being kept and how it’s being used. As Time Magazine wrote, the case gets at a question “never supposed to be this difficult to answer: how is the government treating ordinary citizens with whom it disagrees?”

Meanwhile, we just filed a brief from prominent First Amendment and rule of law organizations — including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Society for the Rule of Law, and the Cato Institute — in a criminal conspiracy case against Minnesota activists. The brief urges the court to order the government to turn over documents that could demonstrate political motivation behind the prosecution; it also criticizes the government’s surveillance tactics and argues that the scale of this assault on free expression has “not been seen since the Second Red Scare.”

As the government’s data-gathering against critics and observers expands, this work can help keep it in check. And in addition to the privacy of our data, we’re also working to uphold the privacy and sanctity of our homes. In April, we brought a lawsuit against DHS to strike down the agency’s warrantless home entry policy, under which armed, masked agents are entering and searching homes without a judge’s permission.

In each of these cases, we can build precedent to constrain lawless behavior and deter similar election-related overreach.

Threat five: Government sources are working to corrupt the information ecosystem and seed propaganda

This is two threats in one. Our colleague Rachel Goodman summed up the first:

Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr has wielded “public interest” to threaten and investigate broadcasters for speech as core to the First Amendment as editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris; reporting on local ICE operations; covering the Iran war in ways that the President dislikes; and continuing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s comedy in the face of White House opposition… And Carr’s threats run not only to broadcast licensees, but to the media companies that own and operate them…

The second threat centers on whether the federal government has used public money to produce and distribute favorable content about its own immigration operations, and whether it has granted access to commentators who cover it favorably while excluding independent journalists. For instance, in Portland, Oregon, the government has not disputed deploying chemical munitions in a way connected to creating content, including staged video, to support a false narrative about the city. Elsewhere, agencies have invited favorable commentators on immigration ride-alongs and into facilities while turning away reporters who requested the same access.

How we’re responding: On the first front, in July, we brought a filing from a bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials opposing FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s latest effort to revoke the licenses of broadcasters whose speech the Trump administration dislikes — in this case, ABC. We brought a similar filing in 2025 in connection with the FCC’s highly unusual proceedings against CBS. Our latest filing received widespread coverage, including from unlikely validators like Newsmax.

We also recently won a preliminary injunction in our lawsuit against a Trump administration immigration policy that targets tech researchers, content moderators, and trust-and-safety professionals whose work counters election misinformation.

On the second front, we’re working to force the release of the information we need to know whether the federal government used public money or special access to create favorable coverage of its immigration operations. As our colleague Katie Schwartzmann put it:

“Americans have a right to know whether our tax dollars are funding a propaganda effort — one that distorts the news, pumps out flattering coverage, and freezes out reporters who would scrutinize the Administration’s narratives.”

In response, Protect Democracy filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking relevant records from ICE, CBP, and DHS. The government failed to comply with our requests by the deadline set by law, so we brought a lawsuit asking a court to compel disclosure of the requested records.

Threat six: State officials are likely to face pressure to subvert the certification process

Election certification is a mandatory duty for the officials involved — and one that they have no option to refuse. But local and state officials are increasingly facing intense pressure to withhold their signatures until conspiracy theories are “investigated” or results are overturned.

There’s the infamous example from 2020, when President Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” Days earlier, Trump had personally pressured two Wayne County, Michigan canvassers not to certify results showing he’d lost the county. By our count, at least 21 counties in eight states have seen attempts to refuse to certify since 2020; we know that the certification process is a likely target, especially since many of the officials who have upheld their oath in prior cycles have been replaced with more pliable actors.

How we’re responding: We’ve built and refined an effective certification protection strategy in past cycles. Our in-state advocates have built strong bipartisan working relationships with election officials in key states, which allow us to share resources like these explainers with these actors to reaffirm their constitutional requirements.

Recognizing that these officials are facing tremendous pressure, we’ve also mobilized public and private support — for instance, by running radio and TV campaigns in their districts explaining that certification is mandatory, and by organizing outreach from influential community members like business executives and faith leaders to provide them with direct encouragement to hold the line.

Lastly, if needed, we can apply counterpressure, for instance by ensuring that state officials are prepared to seek court orders to force local bodies to certify, and by contributing to media coverage that deters officials from abuses by reminding them that they could face criminal liability for failing to follow the process.

Threat seven: Litigation may seek to change the rules of the game and/or flip the results

Election deniers have developed a specific playbook for this: the “zombie lawsuit.”

These are cases filed prior to the election, not with the goal of winning beforehand, but instead with the intention of planting a complaint that “rises from the dead” so that a court or Congress has a pretext to overturn results if the litigants’ preferred candidate loses.

In 2024, we tracked dozens of these across swing states, including suits attempting to disqualify military and overseas voters’ ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina, and challenges to routine voter list maintenance in Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin. All of them failed, but we can nevertheless expect to see these kinds of claims rise from the dead (again) this fall.

How we’re responding: The good news is that we’ve defeated this threat before. Consider the most serious of the post-2024 zombie lawsuits: in North Carolina, Justice Alison Riggs won her Supreme Court race against Judge Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes, which was confirmed by two recounts. Griffin then tried to throw out roughly 65,000 votes and the state Supreme Court initially sided with him.

We used a broad toolkit in response. Our in-house data experts helped identify voters who lawfully cast their ballots and were at risk, including many who voted for Griffin. We worked with partner organizations to place these voters’ stories in coverage across the state. We also helped organize a rebuke from 200+ former Republican elected officials and conservative members of the bench and bar. Lastly, after the state Supreme Court issued its opinion in Griffin’s favor, we filed a class-action lawsuit of impacted voters in federal court.

In May 2025, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the state Board of Elections to certify the actual result. Griffin then conceded the race. We’re prepared for this kind of post-election litigation in key states this cycle, building on what we learned from this win.

Threat eight: Members of Congress could try to refuse to seat the duly elected winners in January

As Molly Roberts and Lawfare explained here, the process for seating members of Congress could become a target for bad actors seeking to override the rightful results.

It’s a remote possibility, but the stakes are high, so we have been preparing for scenarios where duly elected candidates could be denied their seats. This could play out in a number of ways: bad actors trying to manipulate the roll of members allowed onto the floor during the seating process; members-elect exploiting a tradition that allows any member to object to another’s swearing-in; and state-level certification delays or false certificates that muddy who the “rightful” winner is. As an example, Senator Tommy Tuberville has already previewed the kind of baseless claims that could fuel these tactics, saying without evidence that “We probably have four or five senators that didn’t legally win. They shouldn’t be up here.”

How we’re responding: It’s first worth noting how exceptionally difficult it would be for bad actors to pull this off. As Prof. Derek Muller explains on the Election Law Blog:

In short, most scenarios get basic facts or law wrong, and the most complicated scenarios require a unique convergence of factors that have never existed, a unique level of coordination that seems very unlikely, docile political opposition, and a judiciary willing to acquiesce to all these moves–and all working simultaneously. Even then, most of these scenarios could, at most, delay some organization of the House by a matter of hours or days.

That said, there are congressional, legal, and public readiness strategies we’re deploying. We’re in the weeds of the state-by-state and procedural vulnerabilities and solutions, including working with right-of-center partners to ensure that enough House Republicans are ready and willing to oppose any attempt to manipulate seating.

We’re also working with partners to train congressional staff on vulnerabilities and procedural steps for resolving election disputes. And, as reported by NPR, Politico, and The Guardian, we’re helping key members, including Democratic leadership, prepare decisive responses to various potential crises well before any of them could play out.

Lastly, on the public readiness front, we’re helping assemble the broad, cross-sector relationships to mobilize a rapid response should there be a credible attempt to overturn the results.

Bonus threat: President Trump could invoke emergency powers, the Insurrection Act, or some other pretext to interfere with voting and election administration

Trump has several tools he could reach for — he could declare a national emergency, which unlocks a sprawling set of statutory powers; he could invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows military deployment for domestic law enforcement; or he could try to federalize the National Guard through other statutory authority. Even a legally doomed attempt at using any of these could do damage before a court steps in, by creating chaos and confusion, intimidating voters, and handing Trump a story to tell about how he tried to secure elections and the courts undermined him.

How we’re responding: The good news is that as scary as they sound, these scenarios are a bit of a red herring.

None of these paths actually get Trump what he would need to interfere with voting and election administration. Congress gave control of elections to the states, and no emergency declaration or statutory invocation changes that — or converts otherwise illegal actions into legitimate ones.

We’ve already seen how this plays out in practice: throughout 2025 and into 2026, courts blocked Trump’s attempts to federalize and deploy the National Guard into several cities. (Protect Democracy filed briefs repeatedly on behalf of former senior military leaders explaining that these deployments are dangerous and illegal.) In short, this is mostly about optics and political theater; in 2025, Trump declared more national emergencies in his first 100 days than any president managed in a full year, but this hasn’t changed who actually runs elections or how courts have ruled when he’s tried to stretch these authorities past their limits.

Combine that with his public unpopularity and polling data that shows domestic deployments are deeply unpopular, and any attempt along these lines seems more likely to backfire than to provide him any meaningful gains.

So what does this all mean for November?

The threats are real and alarming, but we should be confident in our collective ability to participate freely and fairly in our democracy this fall.

That word — participate — is the key one. Collective action is the only way out. Thousands, if not millions, of Americans are hard at work in ways big and small to defend the midterms.

We all have a role to play in upholding the foundations of our democracy.

If you’re wondering how to get involved, what more you can be doing personally, and which actions you can encourage your friends and families to take, we’ve got you covered. This playbook is updated weekly: How you can protect democracy.

We all need to do our part — not just by taking all the actions on this page, but also by sharing them with our communities.

Together, we can ensure that our movement for freedom and democracy prevails.

A short, mid-week explainer of an important lawsuit my colleagues filed today.

Beyond the USPS mess (which I wrote about last Thursday), there’s another part of the March executive order on elections that’s arguably just as important: The federal government is now attempting to build and distribute a massive database of personal information on hundreds of millions of Americans.

Subscribe now

As I write this, the Department of Homeland Security, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Social Security Administration, and the State Department are working to compile all of our information into one massive federal database that they plan to distribute back to states. All of our information — including potentially sensitive data, like Social Security numbers — would be consolidated in one place.

The goal, of course, is to create election chaos. How?

The Trump administration plans to send all this compiled data to election officials in all 50 states in the form of “State Citizenship Lists” and attempt to have them use those lists for the November election. “Not on the list? Well, sorry. Take it up with DHS.”

Like with USPS, it’s a delusional plan and extremely unlikely to work (for one, it’s very illegal — see below). But you can probably see all the different ways even a good-faith version of this database would be a disaster:

• Election chaos like you can’t imagine: Coordinating individual data across all 50 states is a herculean effort. It took about 20 years for state and federal governments to roll out REAL ID. And here the Trump administration wants states to implement a completely new voter roll process — “here, review, edit, and implement this list of eligible voters based on our garbage data” — barely 60 days before Election Day. It would make the DOGE chaos look like a well-oiled machine in comparison.

• Errors! Errors! Horrifyingly, DHS has admitted that the data that it intends to use is full of inaccuracies that could wrongly flag eligible voters as ineligible to vote. Google your own name, right now. How many other people have the same first and last name as you? What if one of them isn’t an eligible voter and DHS gets the two of you mixed up? (This sort of record-keeping is much harder than it seems.) Or did you get married in recent years? Move addresses? Are you a recently naturalized citizen? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways data errors in this database could lead to lawful citizens losing their constitutional right to vote.

• A whole-country data privacy vulnerability: There are something like 240 million citizens over 18 in the United States. I don’t think it needs to be said that putting all of our information — including potentially Social Security numbers — into one big database and then distributing that information to the more than 10,000 election jurisdictions across the whole country is a very, very, very bad idea.

• Federal control over elections: This database would give the federal government unprecedented power over elections. A list of eligible citizens may seem like a simple thing — after all, noncitizen voting is already illegal and, by every credible measure, basically nonexistent — but the list itself would be a powerful tool that could be weaponized against states. What happens if the administration attempts to overrule state voting rights restorations and exclude whole categories of voters? Or what if this list becomes a vector for the ongoing quest to overturn birthright citizenship? Control of voter lists is control over elections, period.

• A powerful vector to attack election officials: The scariest part of this plan may be what happens if the federal database says you’re not eligible (beyond just you potentially being disenfranchised). DHS has threatened to investigate and prosecute states and election officials who “issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote.” If the lists disagree — if state data says you’re eligible to vote but DHS says you’re not — they may try to put your election officials in jail for it.1 In other words, this whole plan may end up being a trojan horse to directly attack the people who run free and fair elections.

Last week, DHS claimed it found 15,903 noncitizens on the Nevada voter rolls. Asked for the list, it produced just 185 names — with no explanation of its supposed 15,718 others.2

This plan would not go well.

The master database is as illegal as it would be disastrous

Today, on behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Protect Democracy and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Trump administration over this master database.

Said John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at EPIC:

In the United States, we have limits on how government agencies can collect and use sensitive personal data—limits this administration is blatantly ignoring… Building a database containing the identities, social security numbers, addresses, and citizenship information of every U.S. citizen is an extraordinary illegal overreach by the federal government. This is precisely the nightmare ‘Big Brother’ scenario that the Privacy Act exists to prevent. We hope the court will block this effort immediately and protect every American’s fundamental right to privacy.

The lawsuit argues that this plan is illegal in three different ways:

1. It’s an unconstitutional power grab. The Constitution is clear: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” You don’t need a law degree to see how there’s nothing in there about the president having any say over who can and can’t vote.

2. This plan violates federal privacy laws. To make these lists, the administration wants to pool Americans’ sensitive personal data — your sensitive personal data, my sensitive personal data — without notice, without consent, and without any way for us to correct errors. Federal privacy laws, including the Privacy Act, were written explicitly to prevent this kind of unauthorized data consolidation and disclosure. The government simply can’t play fast and loose with data like this.

3. This scheme threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters and sow chaos ahead of the midterms. Finally, most practically, it’s illegal in its likely effects. The government has admitted the data behind these lists is riddled with errors. The same flawed data has already led to eligible voters being wrongly flagged as ineligible. With state officials pressured to use these lists just weeks before Election Day, the result could be widespread confusion, wrongful purges, and eligible Americans turned away from the polls. Illegal, illegal, illegal.

Read more about the case here.

Would love help spreading the word. Send this to people in your life who care about privacy. And/or give us a re-post? 👇

You probably heard at least something this week about Donald Trump, the US Postal Service, and the Supreme Court. It probably did not make a lot of sense.

This saga has been remarkably confusing. Trump’s mail-in voting executive order is not an existential threat to free and fair elections — at least not yet. If you plan to vote by mail, you’re almost certainly fine doing so. (Just do it as early as you can.) But this is all still a big deal. The administration is purposefully trying to create chaos around the elections in a destructive but ultimately half-baked, throw-out-everything-they-can-find strategy to deceive, disrupt, and deny.

Subscribe now

To summarize: There is an order from the White House instructing the USPS to create what’s called a “rule” to subvert mail-in voting.

• First, the order: In March, the president signed an absolutely bananas executive order attempting to assert broad authority over voter lists and voting by mail in the United States. Among other crazy things, it instructs USPS to make a rule to refuse to deliver ballots to anyone not pre-registered with the federal government by state officials. A bunch of people, including many states, sued, and U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani effectively blocked the order with two different rulings. The administration asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals to stay one of the rulings, which the appellate court denied. For weeks, the Supreme Court sat on the administration’s pleas to intervene.

• Second, the rule: In early June, after months of likely internal back and forth that we may never know about, USPS leadership apparently bowed to pressure from the White House and proposed a version of the rule that would kind-of, sort-of implement parts of the order. Then the USPS moved to finalize that rule last Friday, despite tens of thousands of negative comments from the public and stakeholders. The final rule was published on Wednesday.

• Third, the order again: On Monday, the Supreme Court suddenly woke up and stepped in on procedural grounds, essentially saying one of Judge Talwani’s two rulings against the order had been premature because the rule didn’t exist when the lawsuits were filed.

• Fourth, back to the rule: On Tuesday, Judge Talwani found that the USPS had violated the other district court ruling against the order (the one SCOTUS didn’t block) by issuing the final rule in the first place, and on Wednesday she vacated that district court ruling in light of the Supreme Court’s stay in the states’ case. Meanwhile, 25 states and others have now sued to block the USPS rule. So now the litigation process restarts, with the USPS’s final rule front and center. You should expect it to likely be back on hold within a day or two.

Confused? Me too.

By the way, there are 68 days until Election Day. The USPS is apparently unable to say when its “portal” will even be active. The first mail ballots go out in just days in some states.

Tick tock.

What you need to know: This is almost certainly noise — just vote early

Even with the Supreme Court’s shenanigans this week, it’s very unlikely that the Trump administration is able to meaningfully interfere with mail ballots this election.

As the Supreme Court itself said:

The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the [Executive] Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.

Meanwhile, voting by mail remains overwhelmingly safe, secure, and protected by law. The states control election rules, not the president. As the Constitution says: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” subject to congressional override.

In 2024, roughly 48 million people voted by mail — a similar number will likely vote that way this year. Mail voting is a convenient and accessible option, especially for seniors, military voters, people in rural areas, and people with disabilities. Even Donald Trump thinks it’s great: He again voted by mail in Florida two weeks ago.

If you had previously planned to vote by mail, you should vote by mail.

More importantly, regardless of whether you vote by mail or in person, consider voting as early as possible. 48 states (sorry, Missouri and Wyoming) have online ballot tracking tools where you can see if your ballot was accepted. Even if something truly insane were to happen with any of this, voting early means there’s plenty of time to remedy it.

Plus, voting early — whether in person or by mail — is extremely helpful to election officials. The sooner you vote, the sooner your vote can be counted and the sooner we’re likely to have results on election night.

What you should know: The USPS mess is a window into Trump’s election strategy

All this chaos and confusion, it’s not really accidental. It’s also not just the byproduct of complex legal processes. It’s an intentional goal by Donald Trump and the people around him.

His strategy — to deceive, to disrupt, and to deny — is hardly surgical. You shouldn’t think of it as a finely tuned set of steps. He isn’t playing six-dimensional chess. (I think people often overreact to or misinterpret individual events because they assume, on some level, that there is a secret chess game.)

Instead, you should think of this whole deceive, disrupt, deny playbook as the equivalent of picking up the chess pieces and hurling them at the other side of the board.

It’s chaotic, it’s messy, it’s improvised, and it’s ham-handed. But it’s also incredibly destructive. And it’s not guaranteed to fail.

Even if Donald Trump falls short in his ostensible goal — to blow up mail-in voting in a way that systematically disenfranchises enough Democratic-leaning voters to rig the midterms1 — he has likely already succeeded in spreading confusion, doubt, uncertainty, and fear.

In the end, that’s his aim: to get all of us to doubt the security and reliability of our elections. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough cover to deny and overturn the results.

So what can we do about it?

Instead of feeling afraid, get angry. Every American should feel indignant that the person who is supposed to be chief protector of our democracy is using that position to try to tear it apart, consequences be damned.

Then take that anger and channel it. Promise yourself that you’ll vote no matter what, no matter what chaos this administration causes. Register other people to vote too. Take this training about how to protect voters in your community. Consider becoming an election observer. Protect the process that he’s so maliciously and incompetently trying to destroy.

Or better yet? Sign up to be a poll worker:

How you can protect democracy #28

Become a poll worker: One of the most direct ways to protect our elections is by serving as a poll worker, helping ensure voting locations run smoothly and voters are supported throughout Election Day.

Poll workers are trained election staff who prepare polling stations, check in voters, manage the voting process, and address questions as they arise — committing to nonpartisan professionalism regardless of their own political beliefs. These roles are essential to keeping elections fair, accessible, and well-run.

Election administrators across the country are already recruiting poll workers for 2026 elections. Without enough poll workers, polling places close and voters may not have an accessible place to cast their ballot.

What you can do:

• Sign up to be a poll worker through Power the Polls, a nonpartisan initiative that has connected over one million people with local poll worker opportunities since 2020.

• Explore the EAC’s poll worker resources for training materials, recruitment guides, and state-by-state information on poll worker requirements.

• Familiarize yourself with common Election Day challenges so you can address them calmly and effectively as they arise.

• Share Election Protection resources with voters in your community so they know where to turn if they encounter issues on Election Day.

Extra Credit: Download the EAC’s customizable social media toolkit and share it with your networks to help recruit poll workers in your community.

The How you can protect democracy playbook currently has 99 actions. (I loved the Civil Superpowers Quiz, just added this week — I’m a “Defender.”)

Two notable movements in the Authoritarian Action Watch this week.

First, the USPS mess (above) tips Corrupting Elections up to ESCALATING.

Second, the trade war with Canada. Most of the attention is on the economic impacts, but don’t forget — Trump’s tariffs remain one of the largest and most consequential power grabs away from Congress. (See: Arbitrary and unpredictable taxes are, quite literally, what the Founders rebelled against). As the Constitution says: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” In other words: Tariffs are Congress’ job. That’s not what’s happening. Aggrandizing Executive Power is RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

See the rest of the updates.

Final hits: The Department of Homeland Security weaponized NSPM-7 to surveil core First Amendment activity. Read Mona Charen: It’s not the time to panic; it’s the time to get ready. Watch Ian Bassin on how Trump has learned from history to abuse presidential powers. And three more election interference stories to watch this week here.

See you in September.

Subscribe now

The question before us is what we build when we get there — after we navigate the immediate threats facing the midterm elections.

Experts discussed the administration’s threats to the November elections, lessons learned from other countries that have experienced democratic crises, and how structural reforms like proportional representation could renew our democracy and end the gerrymandering wars.

Amanda Carpenter summed up what everyone needs to know about the midterms:

“If Donald Trump doesn’t accept the results, so what? He is not in charge of calling the results. We have a wonderful system in our country where... the elections are run by the states and our localities... they are not run by the federal government.”

And as for what needs to happen next? It starts with something Zack Beauchamp said:

“No country has an electoral system like the American one. It's really weird.”

See if you agree. Let us know what you think in the comments.

This event follows Vox’s series, America after Trump: How democracies fall — and how they can come back. Articles, video explainers, and podcasts highlighting big ideas for shaping the democracy of tomorrow.

Read the whole series

Earlier this week, Nashville, TN; Columbus, OH; El Paso County, TX; and Harris County, TX sued the Department of Homeland Security with a devastating accusation.

The federal government is withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in unrelated terrorism prevention funds unless state and local governments significantly change their election procedures. The only way to get the money released is to show “proof of compliance.” The criteria are vague. The threat is not.

Subscribe now

This is a dark but predictable escalation in the administration’s deceive, disrupt, deny strategy against the elections. Foiled so far in Congress and the courts, Trump is reaching for any lever he can find to try to block the possibility of the opposition winning in the midterms. (If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, you get it.)

Said Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein:

“Holding cities hostage by threatening anti-terrorism funding if they don’t go along with the president’s absurd election manipulation is as dangerous as it is illegal.”

(These cities and counties are represented by Protect Democracy along with the Brennan Center for Justice, Public Rights Project, and the Jacobson Lawyers Group. Read more about the lawsuit here.)

There’s so much legally and practically wrong here. We’re 75 days from the election. Trump is trying to coerce massive, last-minute changes to election procedures. He’s deliberately undermining trust in our elections. It’s going to affect both red and blue states. The timeline is so short and criteria so unclear that capitulation may not even be possible. He’s flagrantly threatening to hold back funds used to keep people safe. This money isn’t even his to withhold — Congress appropriated these funds. He’s trampling on both states’ constitutional authority over elections and Congress’ power of the purse.

And yet none of that is the worst part.

The first iteration of these grants was established in the months after September 11. Lawmakers sought to use federal funds to help state and local governments shore up vulnerabilities to terrorism and other threats. Over the last two and a half decades, tens of billions in grants have played a key role in helping prevent another attack.

In his desperate rush to try to break the midterms, Trump is carelessly picking up and throwing everything he can find. Now that even includes public safety.

Donald Trump has a pattern of weaponizing aid and disaster prevention

This is not the first time that the administration has weaponized disaster aid and prevention.

The following might be the most scandalous graph from Donald Trump’s presidency. It comes from this reporting by POLITICO:

Before last year, whether it was wildfires in blue states or hurricanes in red ones, presidents of both parties fairly and consistently evaluated requests from states for disaster aid. We may fight over policy, but when people’s lives and homes are on the line, past leaders kept partisanship out of it.

And then Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Suddenly, a pattern emerged. When disaster aid requests came from Republican governors, they were almost always approved. But if a blue state was asking?

First, the White House took twice as long — an average of 80 days — to act. Then over three-quarters of requests were denied. 23 percent approval for Democratic-led states vs. 89 percent for Republican-led ones. These rejections, POLITICO’s reporting found, directly overruled Trump’s own FEMA staff’s assessments.

(Since POLITICO first published its reporting, perhaps because of it, Trump has approved a few more requests from Democratic states — but the disparity is still striking.)

Naked weaponization of national security is not just wrong and illegal — it’s also bad politics

It’s worth asking why no modern president before Trump did anything like this. Why were certain things at least publicly off limits?

I don’t think it was just the law and morality. I think it was also, fundamentally, about politics.

There’s a classic economics paper from 2003 that found a political pattern in FEMA disaster aid approvals even back then — but it wasn’t against anyone. Rather, decisions tended to go in favor of swing states and districts represented by powerful members of Congress, regardless of party. Politics may have always been part of it, just not the retribution.

The real difference was that no leader before Donald Trump would have wanted to go anywhere close to deliberately weaponizing public safety against certain states or cities. They rightly understood that some levers are not to be pulled. They knew an elected leader didn’t want to be seen playing brazen political games with disaster victims or with national security.

That’s why I believe Trump’s attempts to weaponize anti-terrorism funding, like so many of his administration’s worst abuses, will backfire. (If you read my piece last week, apologies for hammering on this.) It’s not just illegal and immoral; it’s also terrible politics.

Why do I think that?

Look at how even Republicans in Congress are responding to Trump’s weaponization. POLITICO, again, two days ago:

Republicans and Democrats may have a bipartisan recipe for disaster aid.

In a rare push, congressional lawmakers from both parties are wrangling legislation that aims to take politics out of federal cash for devastating storms, wildfires and other natural catastrophes, as Andres Picon writes. They are working to include the proposal in the Senate’s forthcoming defense policy bill.

[Read the whole story.]

Maybe some things really can be off limits again.

Three notable updates in our Authoritarian Action Watch this week.

First, everything above about DHS grant funding: This weaponization is abhorrent, but also represents a growing sense of desperation in the administration’s strategy against the midterms. They keep losing in courts and Congress — and now cities like Nashville and Columbus are pushing back. Because of that, we rate Corrupting Elections as IMPROVING.

Second, two conflicting stories in Quashing Dissent. In a positive direction, one of the FCC’s most prominent and powerful targets, ABC and it’s parent company, Disney, hit back this week. Very big news. (If you missed my colleague Rachel’s article earlier this week on how Congress can stop this from happening again, it’s worth your time.) But in the other direction, new disclosures reveal DHS started an expansive surveillance program at the height of ICE protests in Minnesota last year. Those net out at NO CHANGE.

Finally, the administration’s attacks don’t get as much press these days, but the Targeting of Vulnerable Communities is still RAPIDLY ESCALATING. Read why.

Overall: ESCALATING.

Read more about the Authoritarian Action Watch and see all the ratings here.

How you can protect democracy #92

Know the voting rules in your state: Knowing the rules where you live is one of the most practical things you can do to prepare for an upcoming election. Registration deadlines, ID requirements, mail ballot rules, and early voting periods are all determined at the state level and vary — and getting these details wrong can mean missing your chance to vote.

The Fair Elections Center is a nonpartisan voting rights organization that has developed free, state-specific voting guides covering everything you need to know ahead of an election, from registration and mail ballot deadlines to how and where to register, including answers to common questions for students and first-time voters.

What you can do:

• Find your state’s voting guide on the Fair Elections Center’s interactive map and save the key dates and deadlines for the general election.

• Check whether you need to register for the first time, update your address, or request a mail ballot — and do it before deadlines sneak up!

  • It’s also worth checking your registration more than once, as voter rolls are updated periodically and confirming your status closer to Election Day takes just a minute.

• Share your state’s guide with friends, family, or community members who want to make sure they’re prepared, especially students and first-time voters.

Extra Credit: Download your state’s Voter Registration Drive Guide to learn how you can help others register in your community.

Our how you can protect democracy playbook has four new concrete actions added this week. They range from a few minutes to a few hours. See them all here.

Final things: Protect Democracy is suing DHS for failing to release records on whether taxpayer dollars and special access were used to manufacture favorable coverage (while shutting out independent reporters). Some interesting follow the money hits here via OpenOMB.org. Lutnick’s 2020 election report is junk data science.

Stay safe. See you next week.

The FCC’s broad power to require broadcast media to operate in “the public interest, convenience, and necessity” has long been a loaded gun available for abuse, and it has lately been used to justify a shocking rise in government speech suppression. The next Congress must pass legislation to narrow and define it.

Subscribe now

Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr has wielded “public interest” to threaten and investigate broadcasters for speech as core to the First Amendment as editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris; reporting on local ICE operations; covering the Iran war in ways that the President dislikes; and continuing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s comedy in the face of White House opposition. Carr recently “reminded” broadcasters of their public interest obligations, in a document that consigns the statutory prohibition on FCC censorship to a footnote and mentions the First Amendment only to discuss the ways in which it arguably does not apply to broadcasters. And Carr’s threats run not only to broadcast licensees, but to the media companies that own and operate them; thus, he has weaponized the public interest authority to leverage licenses of ABC’s owned and operated stations to attack the speech of Jimmy Kimmel and the corporate practices of the Disney corporation.

It comes as no surprise that the second Trump administration has transformed the FCC into a regulatory cudgel aimed at both suppressing opposition speech and rewarding administration-friendly speech; this weaponization of regulatory authority is how modern authoritarians capture journalism. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán ran this playbook perhaps most effectively, establishing a Media Council that wielded its licensing and merger review authority to successfully undermine independent media and ensure that his allies controlled all major media outlets.

The public interest standard governs the awarding, renewal, and transfer of licenses (that is, merger approval). The broad authority that it provides the agency over licensees leaves both broadcasters and their corporate parents exposed to government jawboning. The language dates to 1927, when scarcity of radio frequency was a major problem and the modern conception of free speech had not yet coalesced in the Supreme Court or the public imagination. Today, multivocality exists far beyond the airwaves, and the vestigial public interest standard has been transmuted into a tool of abuse. And, while the recent volume and frequency of abuse is unprecedented, Democrats have not been immune to the temptation to use the authority to suppress speech.

Meanwhile, there’s a growing consensus on the libertarian right that the FCC should be eliminated entirely, in part based on these abuses. But the specific problem that Carr’s term has highlighted is the breadth of the FCC’s content regulation authorities. The Supreme Court could take a major step toward solving this problem by updating its jurisprudence on First Amendment rights in the broadcast context to account for these developments — its 1969 decision in Red Lion is its most recent decision directly on point — but it is Congress that is best situated to solve the problem by trimming the relevant statutory authority.

Congress must replace the FCC’s current broad and vague public interest authority with a definition explicitly enumerating permitted areas of regulation — and with respect to content regulation authorities those should be exceedingly narrow. Reform legislation must make clear that there is no residual, unenumerated FCC power to regulate speech. This specific definition should foreclose the FCC from, for example, sua sponte determining that “partisanship” violates the public interest standard and imposing license consequences based on its assessment of a station’s partisan content.

It is imperative that legislation explicitly repeal the “news distortion” policy, an uncodified authority to which the FCC has laid claim for decades and which has been a key vector of recent abuse. A bipartisan coalition of former FCC commissioners and chairs (which my organization represents) have united behind the need to repeal the policy in order to protect speech. As the Supreme Court recently put it in Moody v. NetChoice, “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.”

Congress should also consider whether other content regulations, such as children’s television requirements and indecency and obscenity rules, still make sense in today’s media environment — with an eye to the fact that in the context of broadcast licensing, all regulatory requirements risk becoming vectors for government suppression of speech. Current statutes also give the FCC election-related content regulation authorities — the separately codified equal opportunities and lowest unit charge requirements. These each have played crucial roles in the election information ecosystem, and have shaped Americans’ expectations about it, such that removing them abruptly would create real confusion. But they also create opportunities for abuse, and more thinking about long-term reforms is needed.

Simultaneously, Congress should strengthen section 326 of the Communications Act, the anti-censorship provision. That language makes clear that the FCC lacks any “power of censorship… and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech”. But the FCC and the Supreme Court have suggested the provision mostly concerns prior restraints, and it has not prevented the FCC from imposing license consequences for content after the fact. Reform legislation should clarify that the FCC may never impose a regulation or condition, including any license consequences, for licensee speech beyond the enumerated speech authorities — and any action at all that constitutes viewpoint discrimination or retaliation.

Congress should further strengthen the ban on censorship by including a private right of action along the lines of the one described in the recently introduced JAWBONE Act — so that the burden is on the agency to demonstrate that its action does not violate the statute or the First Amendment.

Finding solutions to protect speech has never been more urgent; the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter has called into question the status of the FCC as an independent agency — and Chair Carr has disclaimed any independence. While this shift may necessitate deeper structural changes to the agency going forward, legislative amendments to curtail the public interest authority are the most narrowly tailored solution to the speech suppression problem lately posed by the FCC.

This article was originally published by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

I spent this week wondering why I wasn’t more upset about Todd Blanche.

The confirmation of a sycophantic, obsequious, toadying, every-English-major-insult-applies myrmidon as attorney general should be a red alert for our democracy. The country’s top lawyer is now a “thank you very much, I love you sir” yes-man. He has the job purely out of willingness to protect Donald Trump and prosecute his enemies. Republicans in the Senate knew this and confirmed him anyway. Norms, laws, consequences, the Constitution — all of them be damned. At least Pam Bondi seemed a little bit uncomfortable acting as the president’s chief enforcer.

Subscribe now

And yet… I just can’t get myself that worked up over him.

“Is this,” I asked myself, “the inevitable frog-in-boiling-water desensitization that authoritarianism brings?”

Then I read this piece in Just Security by Alison Hirsh and Justin Florence (which we’ll talk about more in a moment), and it clicked. Yes, Todd Blanche is Donald Trump’s dream attorney general. He’s a ruthless political operator who will gleefully wield the powers of federal law enforcement against both political opponents and the electoral process.

But everyone knows he’s Donald Trump’s dream attorney general. There’s not even a passing sense of deniability about his loyalties. Every serious reporter, litigator, judge, elections official, state or local prosecutor, commentator, and politics-watcher understands that Blanche sees himself as a presidential consigliere. Even some of the Republican Senators who confirmed him seem to know what they voted for.

That should become a problem for Todd Blanche.

In our system, the attorney general does have an enormous amount of power — but much of it relies on persuasion. To persuade a judge on a legal question. To persuade a jury or grand jury about the veracity of an allegation. To persuade a journalist about the truth behind an assertion. To persuade the public that revelations uncovered in an investigation are accurate. All of those are going to be much more difficult for a man whose entire reputation rests on political loyalty to Trump. Even when he succeeds at some of those things (which, to be clear, he probably will), it’s more likely that all the other checks and counterbalances in our system will react.

In short, the very thing that got Todd Blanche his job — a demonstrated willingness to go to whatever lengths to keep Donald Trump happy — could become the biggest obstacle to successfully executing the consolidation and weaponization of power that Donald Trump so desires.

Call it Blanche-22.

DOJ’s credibility is already gone

A partial list of the ways that Todd Blanche’s department has already failed to persuade:

• All of the high-profile prosecutions of political enemies have fallen apart in almost comic fashion. James Comey, Sen. Mark Kelly, Letitia James, David Huerta, and others. Said one former federal judge on the Comey case: “If it weren’t made in the context of seeking to deprive a man of his liberty, it would be laughable.”

• DOJ has lost in court 22 straight times as it attempts to seize voter data from states.

• Other absurd, lower-level prosecutions against symbolic targets — D.C.’s “sandwich guy,” the reflecting pool Olympian — have predictably failed, including a tortured back-and-forth as prosecutors tried and failed to reconcile clear legal realities with Trump’s impossible demands.

• The Department of Justice’s bungled, bumbling coverup of the Epstein files angered a supermajority of voters. After Blanche met with Epstein survivors, they described him as “abrasive, condescending and intentionally noncommittal.”

• The administration’s crusade against corporate law firms also collapsed in court (with another embarrassing reversal), and arguably backfired as firms that did capitulate continue to pay the price.

• Federal judges have started treating the department’s leadership as a credibility problem. A judge dismissed the Abrego Garcia case as a vindictive prosecution, citing Blanche’s own statements, and another judge referred Blanche to state bars over the collusive Trump-IRS deal.

• Judges are also increasingly throwing out the “presumption of regularity,” the legal principle that the government is behaving as it should. According to Just Security’s presumption of regularity tracker, courts have raised concerns over noncompliance in at least 34 cases, distrusted government information and representations in at least 90 cases, and found “arbitrary and capricious” administrative action in at least 91 cases.

• The department has failed to persuade its own workforce to stay. More than 16,000 DOJ employees have left, including roughly a quarter of the department’s attorneys. Career prosecutors like Western District of Virginia U.S. Attorney Todd Gilbert have resigned rather than pursue evidence-free investigations.

[For a much longer list of DOJ’s failures, see this helpful fact sheet from The Justice Connection: Todd Blanche’s devastating leadership at the Justice Department.]

None of this is cause for complacency. Blanche will continue to use the Department of Justice to extremely destructive ends. Most importantly, he will be the tip of the spear attacking the midterm elections. (Jessica Marsden wrote about how here.)

Three big risks there that shouldn’t be underestimated:

1. Even when illegal, politicized, and ultimately doomed, weaponized prosecutions and investigations can impose awful pain on the victims along the way. It’s terrifying and expensive for even well-resourced targets to face down the federal government. And it can seriously chill speech or distract organizations and political actors from their work. To counter this, courts must act swiftly to quash these abuses and impose sanctions on the DOJ as a deterrent.

2. The DOJ can try to change the facts on the ground by moving fast, before the legal system or public opinion can catch up. Think arrests or seizures. Especially in the thick of election season, those can be extremely dangerous. If the DOJ tries to illegally arrest a political opponent in August, that’s a harm that can be remedied over time. But if it tries to seize voting machines during vote counting? There’s a much higher risk that it can succeed in doing permanent damage to the election process. Magistrates, grand jurors, and state and local law enforcement need to look very skeptically at any fast-moving or election-related actions by the DOJ and move quickly to insist on regular process.

3. Blanche can try to coordinate directly with partisan, authoritarian-aligned judges to try to break the legal process. The DOJ on its own cannot overwhelm the rule of law. But there are a small but growing number of federal judges who share Blanche’s aims. As if to demonstrate, Blanche was sworn in as attorney general by Judge Emil Bove, the former Trump apparatchik most famous for encouraging defiance of court orders and reportedly saying the administration needed to tell the courts “f*ck you.”

Here’s Blanche’s swearing-in:

Nearly as importantly, Blanche will also continue to act as the president’s defense attorney. He — and by extension the Justice Department — will spend enormous amounts of time and resources defending a world-historic corruption scheme (i.e., everything I wrote about last week). Blanche’s IRS “deal” granting Trump immunity from tax scrutiny will just be the start. Expect more outlandish moves to run interference for fraud, graft, abuse, and self-enrichment.

Here too, though, the principle of Blanche-22 applies. Which gets us back to the article that inspired this idea.

Blanche’s corruption will be so outrageous that other actors will feel compelled to step up

Alison Hirsh (Protect Democracy’s chief impact officer) and Justin Florence (one of our co-founders) wrote a piece for Just Security this week about the reverberating consequences of DOJ switching sides from anti- to pro-corruption: Four things state and local prosecutors can do to combat federal corruption.

I highly recommend you read the piece in full (and, if you personally know any state or local prosecutors, please send it to them), but here’s the nut:

For generations, the federal government and DOJ have been a key bulwark against state-level corruption and civil rights violations. So defenders of the rule of law across the United States — state law enforcement included — had perhaps grown a little too complacent with law enforcement that was tilted toward the federal end of our federal system. But now we are in a different era, where the federal government poses more danger than defense to upholding the law. So it is critical to keep in mind that the federal government has never had a monopoly over the rule of law. And indeed, states have always had a responsibility to check and counterbalance the federal government when it overreaches.

The two of us spent decades working in local and federal government — Alison in New York City and State, Justin in federal government — and we saw the virtues of this productive tension firsthand. Law enforcement works best not when it’s a mandate from on high, from the U.S. Attorney General downwards, but rather when it’s a push and pull between local, state, and federal actors. Competition, tension, and collaboration between various levels has helped our legal system overcome some of its historic shortcomings, such as federal interventions downward on corruption and enforcement of civil rights laws, or state prosecutions upwards on financial crimes.

This is, after all, what the founders intended. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 28: “Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress.”

State and local governments have long upheld the rule of law separate and independent from the federal government. It’s time for them to prove that, when required, they can do so even against the federal government.

I believe everything that Justin and Alison call on state and local actors to do is going to happen. (It’s already starting — in fits and starts, at least.)

Why? Because that rivalry, the “check” that Hamilton wrote about — it doesn’t happen automatically. There’s no magic dial on the wall in judges’ chambers or the offices of state attorneys general that says “federal usurpation rising, reaction needed.” (Although I’d encourage them to follow our Authoritarian Action Watch.) The checks in our system are not self-balancing.

Systemic counteractions need to be provoked.

We don’t know exactly how Todd Blanche is going to weaponize the Department of Justice against the midterms. (We have predictions.) We don’t know exactly what brazen corruption schemes he’s going to enable, what absurd orders he’s going to dutifully follow, or what new ethical depths he will plumb.

But I am very certain he is not going to be subtle about it. He will provoke. He will stir the outrage and court the backlash.

And that, just like his boss, could be his downfall.

Watch Amanda on The Bulwark Podcast

Corruption, sweeping court losses, threats to the midterms, catering carts, and “astonishing weakness.” I loved Amanda’s appearance on Tim Miller’s podcast this week. It covers a lot. Give it a watch.

Two notable updates in the Authoritarian Action Watch this week — one, obviously, everything above. Todd Blanche’s confirmation tips Politicizing Independent Investigations into RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

But the other is more of a slow-burn. Over the last week or two, Trump has had some of his more alarming “yeah, I’m just going to do it anyway” moves. Tariffs, birthright citizenship, trying to fire Lisa Cook. Even the Kennedy Center, which both doesn’t really matter and absolutely matters.

It’s definitely a pattern. Aggrandizing Executive Power is ESCALATING.

Read the whole Authoritarian Action Watch.

How you can protect democracy #83

Get election news you can trust: Keeping up with elections requires more than following the news. Rules change, court decisions reshape ballots overnight, and state and local developments often get missed entirely. Having reliable, election-specific sources is one of the most practical ways to stay informed heading into November.

Votebeat is a news outlet dedicated entirely to reporting on voting access and election administration, with a national newsletter and state-specific editions for Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Bolts covers power and political change from the local up, with a focus on voting rights and the elections that often fly under the radar. Their What’s on the Ballot resource is a guide to races across all 50 states.

What you can do:

• Sign up for Votebeat’s national newsletter for weekly election and voting news delivered every Saturday, or subscribe to a state edition if you live in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Wisconsin.

• Sign up for Bolts’ newsletter for weekly coverage of local elections and voting rights.

• Share these resources with people in your life who want reliable election news.

Our new and improved How you can protect democracy playbook has 80+ concrete actions and counting. Sortable by time, type, and sector. See them all here.

How you can protect democracy

Some last hits: Reminder to register for our American Democracy After Trump webinar with Vox on August 19. Check out this poll on support for proportional representation (6 in 10 Trump voters!). And while you’re at it, read this striking op-ed from Ruth Greenwood, one of the 500+ letter signatories mentioned in that story (and one of the litigators of the Supreme Court gerrymandering case): Gerrymandering won. It’s time to change the rules.

Change is possible.

Talk to you next week.

We’re going to talk about how we get the money back. It’s a big idea. One that’s resistant to pardons and presidential “immunity” and IRS “deals.” It could well be a cornerstone of post-Trumpism.

Before we get there, though, an explanation of why we can’t separate Trump’s authoritarianism from his corruption. We’re going to cover a lot — billions of dollars and IRS immunity and crypto and AI and pay-for-play schemes and more — but I promise, the payoff is worth it.

If you want to jump right to what the big idea is, click here. Otherwise, get your calculators out and do some math with me first.

Subscribe now

Last year, Donald Trump reportedly made $2.24 billion in (and from) the Oval Office.

Numbers that start with “b” are hard to get your head around, so let’s break that down: That’s not far from the GDP of Cape Verde. If we start the clock at January 20, 2025, that’s just over $6 million every single day, weekends included. $266,000 per hour, every single hour. If those numbers are accurate, every 60 minutes, he takes home substantially more than the median net worth of American households. More than the average home sale price in Iowa or Ohio.

In the 20 or so seconds it took you to read that last paragraph, Donald Trump likely made about $1,500 from being president. The average American earns less than that in a week.

Plus, that $2.24 billion figure — which mostly just includes crypto and real estate deals — is hardly the whole story. Hundreds of millions more in corporate money is being donated to pet projects and causes such as the White House ballroom, the Trump Presidential Library, and politically aligned organizations.

(Highly recommend the WSJ’s exposé of Trump’s corporate shakedown fundraising operation: “The boss wants this money.”)

Meanwhile, one of the most shockingly corrupt acts in American history — the “deal” between Donald Trump the president and Donald Trump the taxpayer/business owner for permanent IRS immunity — was allowed to stand as Senate Republicans yet again caved. That means, for all we know, $2.24 billion could just be the tip of the iceberg. Without IRS scrutiny, his finances are a black box. At the very least, the deal will likely save Trump $100 million in taxes owed.1

We’ve had an ongoing office debate about how to understand the administration’s ever-more-brazen corruption.

Is it an ominous sign of a late-stage authoritarian project that no longer cares about political backlash? Or is it a frenzied smash and grab trying to get ahead of voter outrage? Does the grift contribute to the consolidation of power, or is it simply enabled by it? In technical terms, are we looking at “enriching” or “entrenching” corruption? (If you’re curious, I wrote about the difference between these two types of corruption last October.)

In short, is corruption the means to Trump’s autocracy? Or is his authoritarianism the means to corruption?

You probably know where I’m going here.

I think it’s both.

The best way to understand the corruption of this administration is all-of-the-above. It’s the how and the why. It’s the skeleton key that unlocks his particular autocratic model of politics.

Trump’s corruption is a closed circuit of money and power. Government power is leveraged for private benefit, which in turn helps consolidate power over the government.

A massive corruption scandal in plain sight?

What does this cycle look like in practice?

The obvious example is cryptocurrencies:

1. Government power and resources — As president, broad authority over aspects of crypto, and he’s used that power in a series of aggressively pro-crypto moves.

2. Enrichment — The president and his family own a crypto firm (World Liberty Financial) and a cryptocurrency ($TRUMP) that benefited both directly from crypto deregulation and indirectly via favorable deals with the rest of the industry.

3. Private benefits — Last year, the president made $1.44 billion from crypto.

4. Entrenchment — The crypto industry alone represents about 40% of corporate election spending this year.

Crypto, however, may pale in comparison to a much bigger corruption cycle that may be happening with artificial intelligence. The Trump administration has seized for itself sweeping powers over AI, creating one of the largest corruption risks in years.

On June 12, the Commerce Department gave Anthropic 90 minutes to cut off worldwide access to its two newest AI models. The only way Anthropic could comply was to shut the models down entirely.

Eventually, the Commerce Department gave approximately 100 government-selected organizations access to one model before restoring broader access to both. Then, four federal agencies launched a new AI regulatory body known as GOLD EAGLE. On August 1, the White House announced it had a framework for reviewing and approving AI models before release. It did not disclose any details of the framework, including to whom it applies or when it takes effect.

None of this — absolutely none — was done with permission from Congress or any other public regulatory process. No new laws were passed; there wasn’t even public debate. It was a lawless power grab over the most important (and potentially dangerous) industry in the world.

Government power and resources? Check.

The American people know almost nothing about how the Trump administration plans to wield this enormous power over AI companies. And yet we can imagine countless vectors for abuse.

Most obviously, it could simply extort one of the wealthiest industries in the history of the planet for donations and financial support. OpenAI’s president gave $25 million to Trump’s super PAC.

Enrichment? Private benefits? Check. Check.

But the cycle doesn’t end there. Way more than crypto, AI is uniquely vulnerable to entrenchment risks.

The administration could demand certain capabilities, like autonomous weapons and mass surveillance (as it already did earlier this year).

Or it could push for politicization of the models themselves (millions of Americans are already using AI to get news).

We don’t know exactly how far this particular cycle of corruption has spun. That’s by design; they don’t want us to know. But we need to find out.

Today, my Protect Democracy colleagues filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with four agencies — the Departments of Commerce and Treasury, the Office of the National Cyber Director, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy — about what could be one of the defining corruption vectors of the second Trump administration.

Read about why this matters so much for the future of our democracy. Deana El-Mallawany & Justin Florence explain: Autocratic capture comes for AI.

One big idea to break the cycle of corruption

The corruption cycle is an extremely daunting problem. There’s a reason why, once countries fall into this trap, they tend to get stuck.

But we’re not actually stuck yet.

Elections are the ultimate check on corruption, and ours are still mostly intact. If future elections remain free and fair, then there’s still a possibility of a future where the federal government again seeks to combat corruption. (Read what you can do to help protect those elections.)

And in that future, we don’t have to accept past corruption as fait accompli. And no, I’m not just talking about criminal prosecutions. While those too are likely merited, they’re going to be vulnerable to both the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision and abuses of the pardon power.

So here’s the big idea: We use existing laws — laws that are already on the books — to simply get the corrupt money back.

Specifically, two types of legal remedies, disgorgement (government seizure of fraudulent gains) and civil asset forfeiture (seizure of property connected to criminal activity), are uniquely suited to breaking up corruption, retroactively.2

Justin Florence and Justin Vail explained in MS Now:

Disgorgement has deep roots in moral tradition and American law. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s disgorgement authority, at issue in the Supreme Court this term, lets the government recover the money that fraudsters make through securities fraud (which could include crypto or prediction market scams). The issue before the court is whether the government needs to prove that the wrongdoer hurt specific people. The administration said no, arguing: “Disgorgement is a remedy designed to strip ill-gotten profits from wrongdoers,” so “SEC disgorgement under current law is not conditioned on a showing of pecuniary harm to victims.” In short: Those who profited through fraud have to give up the money, and it goes to the American people. …

[Plus,] civil asset forfeiture is uniquely resistant to pardons, presidential immunity claims and other defenses that could consume criminal proceedings. The asset forfeiture framework also allows the government to follow money wherever it goes. So government can recover proceeds from third parties, such as family members or shell companies, that received the fruits of corruption without a legitimate claim to them, even if those parties did not participate in the illegal actions. And the government doesn’t need to prove its case by the criminal law standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”; it simply must show that the preponderance of the evidence supports recovery.

[Read their whole piece.]

Amanda Carpenter has a similarly great article in The Bulwark that gets into more of the politics and practicalities, touching on parallels to Hungary’s ongoing attempts to turn the page from Orbán: Undoing Trump’s golden age of corruption.

All just one, big, extremely American idea:

You can’t keep what you stole.

Join us August 19 — American democracy after Trump

Speaking of getting out of this mess: Earlier this year, we worked with Vox to support their remarkable America After Trump series on how democracies fall and how they come back. I think it’s the best thing yet written on the hardest question in American democracy.

We’re continuing that conversation live, together, with all of us.

Join Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and Protect Democracy’s Amanda Carpenter, Farbod Faraji, and Alicia Menendez-Brennan to talk about the threats facing the midterms, the structural reforms that could renew our democracy, and how proportional representation could end the gerrymandering wars for good. Bring your ideas and questions.

Save your spot.

ICE has expanded its surveillance operation from immigrants to U.S. citizens who criticize the agency online, with identified users facing the threat of criminal charges and home visits from DHS agents. DOJ has also ramped up criminal charges of conspiracy and assault against those protesting immigration enforcement. With a high percentage of those charges falling apart under legal scrutiny, it is clear that criminal charges are meant to spread fear among critics, not punish serious wrongdoing.

The administration’s weaponization of government power against shared truth and history continues. A recent executive order directs the National Museum of American History to post warnings of potential “inaccuracies” and steer visitors toward “alternative resources.” The order follows a report by the Domestic Policy Council that decried the Smithsonian as a tool of “extreme political activism” and “anti-white activism.”

See more recent developments in The Authoritarian Action Watch.

This week, the White House announced that it has finalized one of the more important documents in the country right now.

It’s supposedly a new framework for the Trump administration to review advanced AI models and decide whether and under what conditions to allow those models to be released to consumers and the public.

Subscribe now

Except for a high-level description, though, it did not announce what’s in the document. The administration has privately shared the new framework with a handful of frontier AI companies for their input — but beyond that, the most consequential federal regulatory framework to date in the United States for the most significant technology in the world remains secret.

We don’t know who developed this frontier AI evaluation framework, who influenced it, and how. We don’t know what it contains, how it will be applied, or by whom. And we don’t know the legal authority that purportedly undergirds it. We do know Congress had no role.

This is not how laws are supposed to be made in a democracy. And it’s especially fraught given this administration’s penchant for aggrandizing and abusing its own power to enrich itself, reward its loyalists, and punish those who don’t go along.

So we are investigating.

We just submitted public records demands to the Department of Commerce, Treasury, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. We asked for records on an expedited basis identifying the framework’s terms and criteria, the participating companies, and the legal authority for establishing and operating it. You can read our FOIA requests here.

The White House’s recent actions on AI models

Before we get into why we’re so concerned about this, a bit of background.

There has been extensive debate in Congress and in state legislatures on the many reasons that our government might regulate AI. These include protecting our kids, guarding against disinformation, safeguarding privacy, ensuring economic fairness, strengthening cybersecurity, guarding against catastrophic risk, and beyond. Some states have enacted AI regulatory legislation on these types of issues. In our view, it’s vital for Congress to legislate in ways that maintain democratic control over how AI is developed, deployed, and affects our society. As of now, however, the U.S. Congress has not done so — nor has it authorized the White House to enact its own legal regime governing AI.

Nonetheless, the White House suddenly has sought to exercise extensive regulatory control over aspects of the industry.

After initially taking a hands-off approach to frontier AI in the name of winning the race against China, the Trump administration made a dramatic shift toward pre-release review when the progress of frontier AI began to manifest some of the security risks experts had predicted. On June 2, 2026, the White House issued Executive Order 14409, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” which claimed to create a “voluntary” pre-release review program for frontier models. In reality, it established what Dean Ball, former Trump administration AI policy advisor now leading frontier AI policy at OpenAI, described as “a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime.” And one that operates behind closed doors pursuant to undisclosed terms and murky legal authority. The administration’s subsequent actions pursuant to the EO proved this to be true.

On June 12, 2026, the Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to suspend worldwide access to two of its AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, within ninety minutes, citing export-control authority in an unprecedented context. The Commerce Department later restored access to Mythos 5 for only a select list of undisclosed “trusted partner” organizations, before lifting the export controls entirely on June 30, 2026.

Then, on July 14, 2026, the White House, Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon jointly launched “GOLD EAGLE,” a standing industry-government coordination body with undisclosed power “to collectively identify risks, prioritize action, and strengthen the resilience” of AI systems, resting on no new statutory authority. Separately, OpenAI has agreed, through informal negotiation rather than any public order, to limit distribution of its own forthcoming models to government-vetted partners.

And this week, on August 1, 2026, the White House stated that it had finalized a “voluntary” framework for reviewing advanced AI models before their release, while declining to disclose the framework’s contents, which companies have agreed to participate, or when the process will take effect.

As the Justice Department’s former head of antitrust policy, David Lawrence, put it:

President Trump is planning product releases and choosing customers of a key industry in our ostensibly free-market economy.

Share

What the public needs to know — and why

The White House bypassing Congress to create its own secret AI regulatory regime could raise concerns in any context. It’s particularly worrisome in an era of authoritarian governance. There are three reasons why:

Autocratic capture. A common move from autocrats is to use the power of the state to capture key nodes of private industry to coerce them to do the bidding of those in power. Protect Democracy’s executive director and co-founder, Ian Bassin, termed this autocratic capture. It’s an inverse of regulatory capture where the regulated industry captures the state. We’ve seen extensive efforts from the Trump administration to capture the media so that it adheres to the administration’s party line.

The new regulatory framework gives the White House existential power over the AI companies — a critical component of the information landscape — and with that, immense leverage to engage in autocratic capture of this industry. We need to know what safeguards are in place to prevent the White House from using that sword-of-Damocles leverage in order to coerce the AI companies to do its bidding on any number of topics, from the use of deepfakes to how chatbots describe election results. As we’re already seeing, to implement the White House’s EO banning “woke” AI, the administration is ready to enforce its view of historical truth and neutrality as well as leverage federal procurement rules to decommission and punish contractors using models that display what the administration deems “partisan bias.”

Turning public office into self-enrichment. This administration has also gone to extraordinary lengths to convert its public office into personal self-enrichment for the president, his family, and those around him. Claiming unilateral control over one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing industries provides enormous opportunities for officials with conflicts of interest to act for their own financial benefit, not the public interest.

Already, there appears to be at least some degree of entanglement between the president and his family and parts of the AI industry. Recent reporting about Trump’s personal fundraising efforts raises serious questions about the financial relationships between AI companies and private entities in which the president has a financial stake, including Trump Media & Technology Group and MAGA Inc. As a Wall Street Journal analyst has described it, “we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.”

We need to know what safeguards are in place to avoid conflicts of interest in regulatory decisions — including what the applicable criteria are; who is applying them; and how we can know that they are operating without a personal stake in the companies they are regulating.

Coercive crony capitalism. Relatedly, this administration has demanded payoffs to support its pet and political causes — from the White House ballroom to the president’s political action committees. It is able to obtain these payouts because of its willingness to weaponize the power of government to reward friends and punish opponents. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal has indicated that President Trump has taken a close personal interest in how much companies are donating to his political interests, and “companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies.”

That reporting includes AI companies and their customers.

The new framework gives the White House more leverage to demand money from AI companies, investors, executives, and employees. (And as we know, this is an industry that right now has a lot of money.)

Conversely, the secret executive regulatory regime also gives industry participants an opportunity to use undue influence to secure regulatory action that benefits them at the expense of their competitors — a classic crony capitalism dynamic.

A proper regulatory regime should have ample guardrails to mitigate the risk of regulatory power being leveraged for private political fundraising, or political contributions being deployed to pick winners and losers. The public needs to know if any such safeguards are in place here. Or, lacking those safeguards, in what sort of ways the president is seeking to solicit money from this industry — or parts of the industry are using undue influence and access for competitive advantage.

Whatever the public’s views on how artificial intelligence models should be regulated, we should all be concerned about a secret executive branch legal regime, especially from an administration that has exercised its power for political and personal gain. Much can go wrong when the executive branch bestows upon itself the power to decide, through undisclosed criteria and without congressional authorization, which companies succeed and which customers gain access to a general-purpose technology reshaping the economy. With an administration in office that wields its authority to entrench its power, enrich itself, and reward its friends, those concerns are greatly magnified.

A starting point to mitigating these concerns is to make public how this new legal regime works, who is involved in decisions, with what criteria, and how to avoid corruption and improper influence.

We’ll keep you posted on what our investigation turns up.

Next week marks one year since President Trump deployed National Guard troops to the streets of Washington, D.C. What began under the thin pretext of a “crime emergency” has devolved into a long-term — and unprecedented — military deployment in the nation’s capital.

In recent months, the deployment has ballooned to roughly 5,000 troops from D.C. and nearly two dozen states operating under Joint Task Force-District of Columbia. It’s been one dubious justification after another: the “crime emergency”; beautification of the Mall and other landmarks; security for high-profile events like the UFC fight at the White House. Abandoning the facade of exigent necessity, the Pentagon just confirmed that the D.C. mission will, at the very least, continue through January 2029 — when the next President is sworn into office.

Subscribe now

Roving patrols of armed military personnel have been a familiar sight in Moscow, Cairo, Havana, and other capital cities around the world going back decades. But in the United States, law and tradition have long excluded the armed forces from domestic policing, ensuring the military could focus on its actual mission: national security.

Yet armed Guardsmen are now a routine sight throughout the District, rarely prompting headlines or national outcry — apart from exasperated D.C. residents who condemn the “occupation” of their neighborhoods. As fresh outrages have taken over the headlines, the prolonged deployment normalizes the day-to-day presence of uniformed troops policing civilian life. Compounding this problem was the decision by several Democratic governors to — after previously arguing in court that the mission was dangerous and illegal — accept the administration’s questionable public safety claims and deploy hundreds of their Guardsmen to D.C. during this summer’s Freedom250 programming.

The ripple effects of an indefinite, overtly political deployment extend far outside of the District, undermining civil-military relations, weakening the military’s nonpartisan ethos, and inviting future authoritarian abuses. Notwithstanding the integrity and discipline of our men and women in uniform, these risks are amplified by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s comprehensive efforts to politicize the armed forces — from staging tank parades for the president’s birthday, to staging political rallies on military bases, to forcing senior officers into early retirement for exercising independent judgment, to corrupting the promotions process with a discriminatory political ideology.

These emerging dangers explain why separating military operations from domestic law enforcement has been a core tenet of the U.S. constitutional order, pre-dating the Revolution with hard-earned lessons from life under British military rule. Two hundred fifty years of self-governance have reaffirmed the wisdom of this principle. So have countless other episodes around the world.

We recently published a report — The Dangers of Military Intervention in Civilian Law Enforcement — on military interventions in domestic policing across history. We found that, time and time again, they produce three dynamics that are dangerous to civil society, the rule of law, and the military itself: escalation, disillusionment, and politicization.

One year in, and all three trends are clearly visible in D.C.

Read our report

The deployment hasn’t reduced violent crime, but it has raised the risk of escalation

One recent analysis by the Center for American Progress finds that the National Guard’s D.C. deployment has had no measurable impact on the reduction in violent crime that started in earnest back in 2024. The Niskanen Center reached a similar conclusion, characterizing the deployment as “an expensive tool deployed in the wrong places for the wrong types of crime” with “no measurable effect” on violent crime in the District.

The fact that, for much of the past year, Guard patrols have predominately targeted the Mall and other high-traffic tourist areas rather than neighborhoods facing the highest crime rates underscores the White House’s prioritization of optics over genuine efforts to improve public safety.

Meanwhile, the escalatory risks to troops and civilians alike have grown. In November 2025, a targeted attack on two West Virginia National Guard members tragically killed Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and critically injured Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe. At the start of the deployment, military commanders had already contemplated the heightened risk of placing Guard members in harm’s way with their highly-visible D.C. patrols. After the attack, one D.C. Guardsman reflected: “Those poor kids just came to the city, and they didn’t want to be here … The whole thing is … senseless … I gave up trying to understand it.”

Tensions between D.C. residents opposed to the deployment and the Guard have continued to escalate in recent months. Though the Guard lacks law enforcement authority, the U.S. Marshals Service has deputized troops as special police, allowing them to carry firearms and detain individuals until police officers make any formal arrest.

In May, Guard personnel reportedly held down and detained Amy King, an Army combat veteran, outside of her D.C. home. When D.C. police arrived at the scene, an officer reported that King was involved in a prior confrontation — an allegation that King categorically denies. Though the full picture isn’t entirely clear yet, King filed a legal claim to challenge the Guardsmen’s apparently excessive force. This episode again emphasizes the fundamental mismatch between the Guard’s training and the de-escalation skills required during civilian confrontations — a gap that makes even routine encounters between troops and civilians more likely to escalate.

The costly deployment has a mandate far beyond the Guard’s core mission, breeding disillusionment

Polling consistently shows that the D.C. deployment is unpopular among residents (and Americans nationwide), fueling disillusionment inside and outside the ranks as troops take on duties well beyond the scope of their traditional mission.

The deployment’s substantial focus on groundskeeping, sanitation, and other “beautification” efforts around the District bears little resemblance to the troops’ specialized training and operational expertise. Reflecting that mission creep, a congressional report notes that the D.C. Guard has more specified metrics for measuring its beautification efforts than for measuring the deployment’s impact on public safety. Even Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the mission through these efforts, telling a crowd of Guard personnel they should measure their success “[N]ot just [in] the reduction in crime, but the beautification of the city … [and] the cleanliness of the city.”

And the price tag only keeps growing. The deployment is already on track to cost more than the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) entire annual operating budget, and could total between $2.5 billion and $3.4 billion by January 2029. The Pentagon’s own more conservative estimate, which assumes a troop drawdown from current levels, still puts the total well over $1 billion. The administration seems unfazed by the mounting costs, and officials recently signed a $292 million contract to house Guard personnel in what the National Guard Bureau called “the largest interagency lodging acquisition” in the Guard’s history — for a deployment that most local residents neither asked for nor want to continue.

The costs of the prolonged deployment extend to the Guard’s readiness. D.C. Guard leadership reportedly expressed “significant concerns” that the deployment has already degraded — and will continue to degrade — operational readiness, particularly “in the event of a foreign conflict,” hardly a far-fetched risk as hostilities with Iran continue. The deployment has also strained the MPD’s own force readiness, pulling dozens of police officers off their beats to deploy alongside the D.C. Guard in lieu of their full-time law enforcement duties.

The administration has politicized the deployment

In the early weeks of the deployment last year, internal National Guard documents warned of growing perceptions that the mission would drive a “wedge between citizens and the military,” pointing out the predictable byproduct of a deployment tied to the administration’s power grabs. Whatever the Guard’s efforts to remain above the fray, domestic deployments driven by politics rather than genuine security needs often perpetuate a cycle of politicization. As the D.C. deployment has become more embedded over the past year, reports of Guard personnel veering into politically fraught territory have also increased.

Ahead of the D.C. primary elections in June, footage showed Guard personnel patrolling around a ballot drop box, immediately raising concerns about potential voter intimidation. The fact that troops apparently received no clear instructions before voting started to avoid areas around polling sites or drop boxes shows how prolonged deployments have the potential to create downstream political risks.

Another video that was posted to the Guard’s website — before it was removed following public backlash — showed departing Arkansas Guard members signing a “Free D.C.” flag as if it were a trophy or souvenir from battle. Whatever the intent, the optics alone show how the continued deployment of out-of-state troops fuels further politicization that ultimately undermines the Guard’s apolitical tradition.

Earlier this summer, Guard personnel were roped into President Trump’s Reflecting Pool saga, patrolling the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial alongside U.S. Park Police in search of alleged vandals and threatening to detain anyone suspected of touching the water. And in July, hundreds of Guard members served as the staged audience for a political stunt by Secretary Hegseth and Stephen Miller, placing troops squarely in the middle of the administration’s politicized rhetoric aimed at D.C. residents and those opposed to the deployment.

Taken together, these developments demonstrate how the deployment’s continuation normalizes the Guard’s presence on America’s streets — accelerating the potential for more overt politicization down the line — in D.C. and elsewhere. Normalization invites mission creep, and an ever-expanding mandate will inevitably serve political ends. This is already happening: the Tennessee Guard has been deployed for months in Memphis as part of a federal task force focused principally on advancing the administration’s domestic immigration agenda.

When the military is used for political purposes, public trust, operational readiness, and civil-military boundaries all erode. And a military tapped to carry out a partisan agenda on behalf of whoever holds power threatens the very constitutional order it is meant to protect.

There are still opportunities to change course

With the administration’s continued extension and expansion of the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C., it’s increasingly clear that normalizing the presence of armed troops patrolling the nation’s capital is a feature, not a bug, of the mission. But we need not acquiesce and march down this troubling path. There are steps we can all take to ensure that the past year in D.C. does not become the new normal.

• Tell your governor to keep the Guard at home. Roughly 90% of the Guard personnel currently in D.C. come from states around the country — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming — and governors can freely decline participation or recall deployed troops at their discretion. Indeed, roughly half of sitting governors — of both parties — have refused. Others have brought troops home early after learning more about the situation on the ground. Deployments to D.C. take employees out of their full-time jobs, parents away from their families, and undermine the mission readiness of Guard units for core functions at home and abroad. The risk of serious political backlash can help governors muster the necessary courage to resist or draw down existing deployments.

• Tell your Members of Congress to demand accountability. One of the few must-pass bills every year authorizes our national defense policy, providing lawmakers the opportunity to rein in the administration with provisions limiting domestic military deployments and demanding transparency from administration officials. Provisions tackling other areas of executive branch overreach have already drawn bipartisan support this cycle, and the legislative door for reform remains open not just this year but in the years ahead.

• Distinguish between honorable troops and dishonorable policy. The overwhelming majority of Guardsmen deployed to D.C. have followed the law and treated civilians with respect. Many themselves have misgivings about the mission and are doing their best to navigate difficult and unpleasant circumstances. The public absolutely should demand accountability for individual incidents involving excessive force or other unlawful conduct. But advocacy and rhetoric should be careful to avoid alienating law-abiding troops and their families, when it is civilian leaders who bear ultimate responsibility for this unnecessary and improper deployment.

• Veterans and retired national security leaders can speak out. These voices carry unique credibility on the threat that improper domestic deployments pose to healthy civil-military relations, and many have used their platforms to inform and persuade. Many joined a legal brief explaining the dangers of the D.C. mission to the health and strength of the military. Others have spoken up in support of the governors who declined to send troops this summer.

This piece was originally published by The UnPopulist.

At LibCon2026’s “Checking the Imperial Presidency” panel two weeks ago, the panelists reacted vociferously to a question about expanding the Supreme Court. Supporters of court expansion see it as a suitable response to the court’s anti-democratic rulings; the panelists unanimously insisted that expansion would put the nail in our democracy’s coffin by triggering a tit-for-tat downward spiral. (The UnPopulist’s Andy Craig has offered a proposal for a court expansion that would repudiate the current court’s majority while offering an off-ramp of a constitutional amendment.)

And just like that, what could have been a serious conversation about the Supreme Court’s role in democratic backsliding and how to respond got buried in an internecine dispute.

Subscribe now

That’s not to blame the panelists: If anyone’s to blame, it’s the moderator. Which is to say, we should look in the mirror. One of us (Justin) moderated that panel; the other (Erica) helped prep for it. And in hindsight, here’s what we wish we could have injected into the conversation:

This panel’s name — Checking the Imperial Presidency — elides an important partner in Trump’s project to transform our democracy into a more authoritarian form of government: the Supreme Court, which under John Roberts has acted as Trump’s consigliere. Through parallel abuses of power, Trump and the court have launched a two-branch doom loop, with mutually reinforcing moves to enhance their own power, render themselves unaccountable, entrench an imperial presidency and uncheckable court, and sideline the people’s representatives in Congress.

We cannot rebuild our democracy and the rule-of-law — including constraining the imperial presidency — without solving the problem of the Roberts Court.

But how to do that?

As at the panel, the conversation often jumps straight to court expansion, whose perils and promises have been extensively debated. So too with term limits, which are a somewhat less controversial idea.

But those reforms need not be the only options on the table.

There is a range of reforms that Congress can enact to take back power from the Supreme Court (and the presidency). And indeed, the problem of the Supreme Court in our democracy extends beyond which justices control the court. The system of checks and balances does not exempt the Supreme Court, and Congress has the tools to check the court just as the court has tools to check Congress.

But first, let’s examine the stakes: why it’s not enough to talk about the imperial presidency anymore. We need to talk about the two-branch doom loop and the mutually reinforcing, self-aggrandizing moves from Trump and the court.

The Trump presidency and the Roberts Court: A vicious cycle for democratic backsliding

Trump’s arsenal of power-grabbing moves is well known, the Supreme Court’s less so. Often those who claim that the court’s record is not facilitating democratic backsliding point to its pushback on particularly egregious — and obvious — Trump excesses such as abusing emergency powers to impose tariffs. But it is worth taking a more comprehensive look at its record, including at some of its lesser-known rulings, to get a fuller picture. The court does not have to be the president’s “puppet” for their commitments to align and facilitate a destructive cycle.

1. Like Trump, the court has operated in secrecy and stonewalled oversight, treating transparency to Congress and the American people as a threat to be neutralized. The court has shielded itself from transparency, through refusing to explain the basic reasoning of its momentous rulings on the emergency shadow docket. It has stonewalled congressional oversight on matters ranging from cybersecurity practices to corruption among the justices. And it has reinforced the secrecy of the Trump administration, making it harder for Congress to investigate Trump and protecting him from the oversight associated with criminal prosecution.

2. Like Trump, the court has declared that laws preventing corruption don’t apply to it. Supreme Court justices have flouted the ethical constraints that bind every other federal judge, accepting millions in undisclosed gifts and travel from parties with interests before the court, refusing to recuse in the face of clear conflicts of interest, and resisting for years the adoption of any binding ethics code. In so doing, they appear to have violated federal laws — all while suggesting that Congress cannot regulate to prevent their corruption. And the court’s decisions gutting corruption laws, creating presidential immunity, and curtailing congressional oversight of the White House have enabled the Trump administration’s corruption.

3. Like Trump, the court has exploited emergency authorities to expand its power. The Roberts Court has weaponized its emergency or “shadow docket,” granting last-minute stays that effectively decide major policy questions about how our government works and the scope of people’s rights without full briefing, argument, or reasoned opinion. This has made it difficult for lower courts to even know what rule they are supposed to follow when a case is sent back down, to the open frustration of judges. The Roberts Court’s decision not to pause the Trump “emergency” tariffs demonstrates its use of its emergency authorities to reinforce the president’s emergency authorities, even when it ultimately holds the presidential acts unconstitutional.

4. Like Trump, the Supreme Court has consolidated complete power over its own branch. The Roberts Court has reserved to itself the power to issue universal injunctions, while — at the behest of the Trump administration — moving aggressively to curtail the power of federal district courts to do so. That, combined with its enthusiasm for the shadow docket, further consolidates power in this single court, rather than the federal judiciary as a whole. And the court has blessed the Trump administration’s strong unitary executive view that the president is the executive branch (l’état c’est moi) in order to claim control over the DOJ, gut independent agencies, fire inspectors general, and purge the civil service.

5. Like Trump, the court has manufactured false “facts” to enable it to achieve its desired outcomes. The court has consistently made up “facts” of its own. Even those less perturbed by the outcome of some rulings should be troubled by the court’s methods, which violate the principle that the court is supposed to be deciding legal questions, not doing its own fact-finding. In Dobbs, it “misrepresent[ed]” history. In Shelby County, it overrode the findings of more than 20 congressional hearings and 15,000 pages of documents with its own vibes-based assessment of racial discrimination in covered jurisdictions. And in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (the football team prayer case), the court hallucinated its own record. The Roberts Court, at the same time, has often ratified the Trump administration’s objectively false claims.

6. Like Trump, the court has manipulated the rules of democratic participation to entrench partisan power and avoid democratic accountability. The Roberts Court has consistently acted to entrench the power of the Republican Party. It has, for example, gamed the “Purcell principle” for maximum partisan advantage (this is the general rule that federal courts should refrain from altering election rules on the eve of an election to avoid confusing voters and burdening administrators); gutted the Voting Rights Act to the advantage of its partisan allies; and protected the Republican presidential candidate from laws enacted by Congress. In the presidential immunity case, the court deployed the rhetoric of presidential maximalism while denying the sitting Democratic administration the very authorities, conclusive and preclusive power to make prosecutorial decisions, that it insisted President Trump had every right to claim.

7. Like Trump, the court has dispensed with (ignored) laws it dislikes, rather than faithfully executing or applying them. Under the cover of “constitutional avoidance,” the Roberts Court has repeatedly rewritten statutes to achieve its preferred policy outcomes. Its approach to statutory interpretation appears inconsistent and hypocritical. The court’s amorphous “we know it when we see it” standard resembles its own policymaking more than a court announcing legal rules. For example, the court held that a decision by the Department of Education to cancel student loans presented a “major question” that only Congress could weigh in on but that dismantling the entire department did not.

8. Like Trump, the court has arrogated to itself the power to set the national policy agenda. The Roberts Court has used its agenda-setting power to facilitate many of Trump’s executive power grabs and separately to upset congressional compromises on health care, consumer protection, agency structure, voting rights, civil service protection, and campaign finance.

9. Like Trump, the court has sought to have the last word, so no democratic response can dislodge them. The court has structured its most consequential decisions to foreclose response: striking down campaign finance laws, statutes structuring government agencies, and voting rights protections on grounds that make legislative correction practically impossible. For example, its decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County was followed immediately by a wave of restrictive state voting laws, entrenching political power before Congress could respond. Cases that are nominally about statutory interpretation and thus deference to Congress often operate in the political reality that congressional response is unlikely and can take many years if it comes at all.

The Trump administration and the Supreme Court have thus each used the other to ratify, reinforce, and accelerate its assaults on our republican form of government and Congress’s authority.

In one variation of this cycle, Trump has been the first mover, embracing a radical approach to his own power; the court has then validated, extended, and constitutionalized these moves, and Trump has taken the new runway and pushed even further. For example, in Trump v. United States, Trump made an unprecedented claim to absolute immunity from federal criminal prosecution for many official actions; the court granted the immunity and called it constitutional law, in part basing this immunity on presidential control over the DOJ and thus the president’s need to be free from any interference in his commands to subordinates. Then, the second Trump administration took advantage of the court’s blessing to fully weaponize the DOJ and engage in extreme abuses of power.

Other times, the court moves first, imposing its own partisan-entrenching policy preferences. Trump then pushes to further Republicans’ partisan advantage, and the court ratifies the move. The attack on voting protections has followed this model: Shelby County and Rucho closed off protections for voting rights and against gerrymandering. Trump then pushed for mid-cycle extreme gerrymandering and for gutting the rest of the VRA, and the court granted this wish and wrote it into law.

Taken together, these power-aggrandizing moves from Trump and the Roberts Court create a doom loop that is on the precipice of enshrining authoritarianism into our Constitution.

Congress can check the Court just like it can check the presidency

The conventional wisdom about Supreme Court reform is stuck in a rut. Most reform advocates focus either on ethics or on changing the court’s composition through term limits or expansion. But the problem is not just who sits on the court, or whose money they take in their extracurricular activities. It is how much power the court exercises, with how little accountability, over how wide a range of questions. Without structural constraints on what any court can do, any reform will just be a band-aid.

What follows is a different approach: a menu of possible reforms aimed at disempowering the Supreme Court as an institution — constraining how it acts, requiring it to show its work, forcing it to share power with the rest of the federal judiciary, and giving Congress meaningful tools to respond. None of these reforms is exotic or unprecedented. (Professors Daphna Renan and Niko Bowie’s forthcoming book gives numerous examples of when Congress has turned to these types of solutions in American history.) Most have analogues in the tools Congress should use to check the executive branch. Readers may find some more compelling than others. They do not all need to be adopted. But some combination of them would restore the court to its proper role as one participant in constitutional governance rather than its unelected sovereign. Enacting these reforms without more will not be the end of the process. The Supreme Court will surely try to fight back by ignoring or invalidating them, at least to some extent. And Congress will need to use the full scope of its authorities in response.

But they’re a necessary starting point to escape the two-branch doom loop.

Reform the shadow docket. The Roberts Court has remade vast areas of American law — abortion access, immigration enforcement, environmental regulation, election rules — not through the deliberate process of full briefing, argument, and reasoned opinion, but through unsigned emergency orders issued in the middle of the night with no explanation and no accountability. These orders are analogous to executive rulemaking, but unlike agency rules they require no notice, no comment, no reasoning, and no disclosure of who voted for what. Congress should require written opinions for any stay of lower court proceedings, signed by at least five justices; impose mandatory waiting periods before emergency orders take effect other than in true emergency situations (such as an immediately pending execution of capital punishment); and mandate public disclosure of how each justice voted. This is not a radical constraint on judicial power—it is the same transparency and procedural discipline Congress has long required of executive agencies under the Administrative Procedure Act. If agencies must explain their emergency actions, so must the court. Alexander Hamilton’s famous observation that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” branch was premised on a court’s need to explain its reasoning, which goes out the window when the court simply refuses to do so.

Require evidence-based adversarial fact-finding. One of the Roberts Court’s most insidious practices is making up facts. In case after case, these are not legal conclusions — they are factual claims about the world, and they are being made by the institution with the least procedural accountability of any factfinder in the legal system. The court does this even though, outside of rare original jurisdiction cases, the court’s appellate function is supposed to be deciding questions of law. Developing the factual record is supposed to happen at the trial court level, and the Supreme Court’s contortions to get around this are increasingly strained. Congress should require that any factual proposition — case specific, social-scientific, economic, or historical — that is material to striking down a statute be developed through adversarial proceedings at the district court level, with expert witnesses subject to scrutiny and cross-examination, and reviewed by the Supreme Court only for the traditional standard of a facially obvious “clear error.” The same Congress that requires agencies to base major rules on substantial evidence developed through open adversarial processes can require the same of the court.

Require the court to show its legal work. When a federal agency acts, it must identify its legal authority, explain why it chose the action it took, and address contrary evidence in the record — or a court will reverse it. This is the Chenery principle, one of administrative law’s foundational constraints on executive power, and the Roberts Court has applied it enthusiastically when it suits its desired outcomes. It does not apply this to itself. The court routinely invalidates or rewrites statutes without explaining why no narrower reading was available, which constitutional provision it is applying, or how its interpretation squares with the historical evidence it claims to rely on. Congress should require, as a condition of invalidating federal legislation, that the court’s opinion do each of these things. This reform does not tell the court how to rule — it tells the court to explain its rulings with the same rigor it demands of every other government actor.

Hold justices to the professional employment standards that govern modern workplaces. In addition to deciding cases, Supreme Court justices are bosses. But unlike most other attorneys and government officials, they supervise employees free of the constraints of employment laws, and they run hiring processes that are notorious for identifying politically aligned and politically engaged law clerks who serve for one year and then are dependent on “their” justice as they embark on their careers. Whatever arguments support ideologically aligned hiring for some jobs in Congress and the executive branch wilt at the courthouse doors. If justices are to be something other than politicians in robes, the workplaces they run need to reflect that. Options for regularizing the workplace include making Supreme Court clerks the equivalent of short-term Schedule A executive branch employees (the line-level attorneys at the Solicitor General’s Office, Civil Appellate, and the Office of Legal Counsel are typically Schedule A), with associated rights against workplace discrimination; creating a pool of clerks that rotate through the different justices’ chambers (analogous in some ways to the Supreme Court’s cert pool); or reducing the number of clerks that each justice can hire while bulking up the staff attorney pool at the court. Congress could also potentially require the hiring clerks to be conducted more at the court-wide level, under a standardized process, and less by individual justices.

End the corruption and make ethics rules enforceable. Supreme Court justices have accepted millions in undisclosed gifts and travel from parties with interests before the court, refused to recuse in the face of clear conflicts of interest, and for years resisted any binding ethics code — all while justices have suggested that Congress cannot regulate to prevent their corruption. Every other federal judge is subject to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges and enforceable recusal standards. The Supreme Court’s exemption from those norms is not required by the Constitution or by any serious theory of judicial independence. It is an anomaly the justices created for themselves. Congress should establish mandatory recusal standards enforceable by a panel of senior circuit judges, require financial disclosure at parity with lower federal court judges, and create a formal mechanism for parties to seek recusal with written rulings. The same Ethics in Government Act logic that applies to executive branch officials applies here. The court is not above the law it administers. Even if justices aren’t literally selling their votes in individual cases, the purpose of recusal and binding ethics codes is to protect public confidence by avoiding improper influence or even the appearance of conflicts of interest. Flouting these standards has seriously undermined the court’s credibility.

Require broader consensus before the court can erase an Act of Congress. Right now, a bare five-justice majority can permanently nullify legislation enacted by overwhelming democratic majorities — the Voting Rights Act, the Affordable Care Act, campaign finance law. It can also effectively amend the Constitution by declaring new constitutional rules that it then applies to laws Congress has previously enacted. The Constitution already recognizes that some actions are too consequential for bare majorities: two-thirds of the Senate must ratify a treaty, two-thirds of both chambers must override a veto, two-thirds must convict an impeached official. And amending the Constitution requires ratification by three-quarters of the states. The same logic applies to judicial amendment of the Constitution or nullification of democratically enacted law. Congress should require a super-majority of six or seven justices to agree before it invalidates a federal statute.

Channel cases to appropriate courts. Congress could direct that certain categories of high-stakes constitutional litigation — challenges to the structure, spending, and staffing of the federal government; suits seeking to invalidate an Act of Congress; and disputes over voting and elections — be heard in the first instance by specialized three-judge panels rather than single district judges. This is not a novel mechanism: Congress has long required three-judge district courts for redistricting and other voting-rights cases, most recently in the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, precisely because of their importance and time sensitivity. That existing framework could be extended to cases challenging the basic architecture of federal governance. As for the path beyond the three-judge panel, Congress retains the choice: it could preserve the Supreme Court’s ultimate appellate jurisdiction over these channeled cases, or it could instead make the panel’s judgment final for a defined category of claims, exercising its Article III, Section 2 authority to except certain classes of cases from the court’s appellate jurisdiction altogether. This is the “jurisdiction-stripping” approach'; Congress has done it before, and the court has affirmed this congressional power. Another approach would be to set a narrow time window within which courts can review the constitutionality of legislation, so that if the court strikes it down Congress can quickly respond.

Give Congress a meaningful voice in constitutional interpretation. The Roberts Court has structured its most consequential decisions to foreclose democratic response — striking down voting rights protections, campaign finance laws, and agency structures on grounds that make legislative correction practically impossible, then watching as the political beneficiaries of those rulings consolidated power before Congress could act. A partial solution is fast-track voting procedures for Congress to respond to statutory decisions by the court and clarify what it meant the statute to do. But even on constitutional decisions to invalidate statutes, Congress could have a real opportunity. One approach would provide that if consecutive Congresses re-enact a statute the court has struck down, with an intervening election, that re-enactment is protected from judicial review. That would ensure there is a sustained majority backing Congress’s constitutional view, and limit situations where Congress has the last word in a moment of political passions. (This could be modeled after the law for, e.g., amending the Virginia Constitution.) Another variation, modeled on the Canadian “Notwithstanding Clause,” would allow a super-majority of Congress to re-enact a statute the court has struck down. Judicial review would remain a genuine check — the court’s ruling would stand unless Congress mounted a demanding supermajority response. In either variation, constitutional meaning would become a dialogue rather than a judicial monologue, and Congress would recover the ability to respond to constitutional decisions about the laws it enacts.

None of these reforms eliminates judicial review entirely. None eliminates judicial independence. None engages in partisan power plays. None threatens the ability of individuals to vindicate their rights in court. None requires a constitutional amendment. What they share is a recognition that the Roberts Court’s power is not self-executing or constitutionally required at its current scale — it is a product of choices the Roberts Court itself has made and that the Constitution leaves to Congress to revise. The solution to a court that has accumulated too much power is the same as the solution to a presidency that does the same: Congress, doing its constitutional job.

This piece was originally published by The UnPopulist.

I’m back from paternity leave! I missed you all.

I spent the last 100 or so days trying hard not to think about elections and democracy. My first day back was 100 days until the midterms. From now until the next Congress is sworn in, it will be hard to pay attention to anything else. (For more on what Protect Democracy is looking out for, read: Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect.)

And yet, those last 100 days have radically changed how I’m thinking about the next 100.

Subscribe now

Not to get too personal, but — as any of you with kids know — parenthood is a universe-reorienting experience. My son will cast his first ballot in 2044. His generation won’t be able to run for the House of Representatives until 2052. The Senate in 2056. Realistically, they won’t take power until the 2060s or 70s.

I have no idea what the United States will look like in mid-century. I feel pretty confident that our democracy will exist, at least in some form. But that’s about all I am sure of. The future is very long and even more uncertain.

When was the last time you thought about our democracy on that timeline?

Authoritarianism’s short-termism trap

Living through democratic backsliding does something pernicious to the timeline on which we think and act. Because the threat is so acute, so immediate, authoritarianism consumes all our attention. Inevitably, the window of discourse shrinks until we’re living one step at a time. Vote-by-vote, EO-by-EO, decision-by-decision, election-by-election.

This isn’t to downplay the immediacy of the threat. People are in danger right now, as I type. And the midterms are absolutely an endgame moment; they’re Trump’s second-to-last opportunity to seize ultimate power away from the voters. If that’s not focusing, I don’t know what is.

There is, however, a real downside to this tunnel vision. When we only pay attention to the immediate, we end up in a sort of defensive crouch, one that it’s hard to get out of. Our only agenda becomes thwarting harm. It’s hard to imagine the day after because there may not be a day after.

We stop planning, designing, and fighting for the future. We’re too busy holding on to the present.

It’s like the soccer team that only plays to stop the other team from scoring. Yes, it’s the best way to defend the goal. But sooner or later, the ball will likely get through. Without a counterattack, playing only defense means you lose. As any coach will tell you, offense is the best defense.

So what can we do — even as we work to protect the critical junctures in front of us — to lift our gaze beyond the midterms? How do we look past the immediate threat to our democracy to the democracy our kids will someday inherit?

Every endpoint is a beginning

Here’s the mindset flip I keep coming back to as I watch my kid learn about the world: Defending a free and fair election doesn’t just defeat authoritarianism, it holds the door open for what comes next.

Action now makes future accountability possible. Defending the results creates an opportunity to fix the system so it can’t be so easily broken. We can build a democracy that Americans aren’t so willing to cast aside out of anger, hatred, and frustration.

If you missed it last week, I highly recommend Grant Tudor, Cyrena Kokolis, and Farbod Faraji’s piece: How to end the redistricting wars for good.

This is — in my opinion — the single most important and aspirational vision for American democracy right now. One simple reform, proportional representation, would end gerrymandering and unlock a new era of radically accountable, responsive government.

Last week, more than 500 scholars and election experts signed an open letter to Congress: End the Redistricting Wars by Adopting Proportional Representation.

If you watched PBS News Hour last night, you saw that the letter was covered extensively. Check it out:

At its core, proportional representation is very simple. Instead of electing House members using lots of small, single-member districts, we would use larger, multi-member districts to pick representatives in proportion to how many votes they receive.

It’s not that big a change, but the impact would be astounding. Almost like magic, proportional representation can’t be gerrymandered. Except it’s not magic. It’s math.

Look at these two eight-member districts. Regardless of how you draw the line between them, the outcome always reflects who the voters voted for. Except on the margins, the lines essentially don’t matter.1

Read the whole report: When Maps Don’t Matter.

That’s just one example of a future-oriented reform agenda that hinges on a free and fair midterm election this fall. I’m sure there are other possibilities that you’re excited about.

Let me know in the comments what your vision for a better democracy, starting next year, could look like.

And as you’re thinking about that better future, re-read Anna Dorman and Aaron Baird’s list of the practical ways you can help defend the midterms: Our strategy to win.

Do you feel more motivated to do all those things? I do.

Every endpoint is a beginning.

Bipartisan pushback to FCC abuses

The FCC is conducting an “early renewal review” of ABC’s licenses, a move that’s just as censorious and threatening as you can guess.

A bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials is pushing back against what they call “an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process.”

Read about it in USA Today: Former FCC leaders slam agency probe into ABC.

Share

As the administration rescinds the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Haitians, ICE is expected to surge deportation activity among communities the president has scapegoated since the 2024 campaign. This comes just weeks after several ICE-involved shootings made national headlines, raising urgent questions about oversight and accountability as the agency prepares to expand its operations. The human cost is already visible: families are living in fear, with children afraid to go to school for fear of coming home to find a parent gone.

At the same time, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has announced plans to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of nonprofits the administration deems politically disfavored — many of which provide critical services to exactly the kinds of vulnerable communities being targeted. Together, these moves reflect a documented pattern of retaliating against people and organizations not for breaking the law, but for standing up to the government.

See The Authoritarian Action Watch.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Sign up to learn more

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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?

Subscribe now

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