President Trump has sought to deceive the American people into believing that the results of the 2026 midterms cannot be trusted. The president has claimed, again and again, that American elections are “rigged” and that Democrats “cheat like hell.” This deception is a pretext to disrupt the election and deny the results if his favored candidates lose. Deceive, disrupt, deny.

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But what do the voters think about the administration’s midterm deception campaign?

This month, If you can keep it conducted a national poll with YouGov to find out. The poll was fielded between October 9 and October 20 and surveyed 806 voters. The results are weighted to be nationally representative. The margin of error is ±3.8 percent.1

The results are striking.

Donald Trump has failed to convince the country, or even a plurality of Republicans, that the election will be fraudulent or that federal intervention may be justified. To be clear: Election denialism remains a virulent belief among approximately one in five voters. This may push some elected officials to dangerous and extreme places. But these are still minority views. The authoritarian faction’s failure to win over the rest of the electorate is a very positive sign for democracy.

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This week, the Trump administration sent agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a unit within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to raid Representative Ilhan Omar’s house in an attempt to cast doubt on her and her family’s citizenship status.

Rep. Omar has been an American citizen for 26 years. Federal law enforcement has a longstanding practice of not conducting high-profile actions within two months of Election Day. The raid was only 22 days before Election Day.

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For the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security is the weapon of choice when they’re trying to intimidate voters and political opponents. DHS’ budget has ballooned and its ranks have been filled with many who are subservient to the president’s political aims, rather than to their supposed purpose of non-partisan public safety. Meanwhile, the department — and ICE in particular — has become notorious for its willingness to use violence and spread fear.

In this context, the raid on Rep. Omar’s home is a textbook example of a retaliatory and abusive investigation.

To be clear, Trump is unlikely to get what he is hoping for here, either politically or legally. The investigation against Rep. Omar seems to be rooted in the president’s racist conspiracy theories, not credible claims of wrongdoing. And yet, DHS’ latest politically motivated abuse raises a question: If DHS can target a member of Congress on the eve of an election, what stops ICE from showing up at local polling places on Election Day?

A substantial portion of Americans are worried about the possibility.

In a recent poll, over 40% of surveyed Americans said that they expected to see ICE agents at their local polling place. Unsurprisingly, Americans of color feel particularly on edge: 39% of Asian American, 31% of Hispanic, and 24% of Black respondents agreed with the statement “I worry that going to the polls could put me at risk of being questioned by federal immigration officers, despite being a US citizen” — compared to only 9% of White Americans.

But while it’s understandable to worry about what the Trump administration might do, any attempt to deploy ICE or DHS agents to polling places is very likely to fail.

So why does the Trump administration keep hinting that they might try?

The Trump administration wants to scare us

Last weekend, brimming with Halloween spirit, I went to a haunted house. It was terrifying, but most of the illusion — most of the haunt — came from a simple trick: Smoke machines. Each room was blanketed in synthetic fog, which covered up reality and made the horror feel real.

In their way, authoritarians love smoke machines.

They generate a cloud of fear and confusion so thick that it obscures what they can and can’t actually do, making their reach look infinite and overwhelming. When Trump blusters, in response to a question about whether he’d send ICE to the polls, that he’d do “anything necessary,” he’s turning the smoke machine on high, hoping the haze makes us too afraid to show up.

This is classic “Deceive, Disrupt, Deny” — the three-party strategy we keep pestering you about because, well, the administration keeps using it.

But smoke machines have two big weaknesses. First, smoke can’t pass through a solid wall. In our democracy, state and local authority over election administration and strict legal prohibitions against armed agents at the polls are those walls. Second, we as Americans don’t have to sit passively, overwhelmed by the haze — we can clear the air. When we learn our rights, help our neighbors get to the polls, and make an effort to see through the lies, we blow away the smoke.

Clearing the smoke doesn’t mean there’s no threat underneath. But it allows us to see the authoritarian at his actual, human size, and realize that the power to protect this election remains firmly in our hands.

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The law is so freaking clear: Armed agents are prohibited at polling places

Don’t be deceived by the smoke machine; bluster isn’t legal authority.

States run elections. The federal executive branch does not. Full stop. State and local election officials, laws, and regulations govern who is allowed at a polling place, so federal agents can’t simply march in and take over without violating state sovereignty.

Generations of Americans have fought to ensure our legal system protects against such efforts to intimidate voters or interfere with free elections. In response to our country’s dark history of voter suppression against Black Americans and other voters of color, Congress and state legislatures built a robust legal framework specifically designed to keep troops, law enforcement, and private militias far, far away from the ballot box.

Since the end of the Civil War, it has explicitly been a felony to order or keep “armed men” at election sites. Since DHS officers (including ICE agents) are required to be armed on duty and act under executive authority, this means that, by definition, they’d fall under this law. And it’s not just the agents that would be violating the law — the officials who order the agents would be subject to criminal prosecution. A violation of this law carries serious consequences, including imprisonment of up to five years and being barred from holding office again.

Sending ICE even into the general vicinity of polling places, drop boxes, and other election sites could also violate longstanding laws against voter intimidation. For instance, Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act and U.S. criminal code both prohibit any attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce voters. And crucially, it’s the attempt itself that’s unlawful, not the outcome. Regardless of whether ICE agents physically turn away anyone from the polls, their very presence at or near polling sites would likely be considered intimidation of voters and a violation of the law.

Now, if you’re skeptical that the current, nauseatingly politicized Department of Justice would go after violators of these laws, I don’t blame you.

But here’s the legal beauty — even if the current DOJ doesn’t prosecute, the statute of limitations for these criminal prohibitions runs up to five years, meaning that the next administration’s Department of Justice still could. And, in the meantime, states could prosecute violators under their own laws. And nonprofit organizations (including ours) have already brought civil cases to halt ongoing efforts to intimidate voters and interfere with elections.

Together, we can stop DHS interference

Before I get into what to do about it, it’s worth noting the political reality: Actually sending ICE to the polls could very well backfire.

The midterms aren’t just a day, but a period — more than 7 million Americans have already cast their ballots. And Trump’s supporters, not opponents, are more likely to vote on Election Day itself, meaning that any attempt to snarl or disrupt last-minute voting could easily have the opposite effect to what the Trump administration intends. Plus, ICE is extremely unpopular, and any election-related abuses are likely to spur public backlash — which could itself motivate more people to vote.

Maybe that means the Trump administration will back off its threats to send ICE agents directly to the polls. The recent surge of ICE activity in California suggests their strategy may be to use ICE presence in communities generally, rather than at the polls specifically, to terrify voters into staying home. The confusion, intimidation and fear is the point. Trump is attempting to threaten and intimidate Americans, especially naturalized Americans and Americans of color, into not exercising their fundamental right to vote.

It’s an ugly tactic, but it’s hardly new.

The smoke machine is designed to overwhelm us, but together we can clear the haze. We have lots of tools to fight back. To name just a few:

Exercising your rights: Make a plan to vote, if you haven’t yet, and track your ballot if you have. The earlier you vote, the sooner you’ll know your vote has been counted.

Being a breath of fresh air for others: Help reassure and support others in your life who may be afraid. (You can use this handy guide my colleague Ben published last week!)

In doing so, it’s important to recognize the very real basis for this fear — ICE has been menacing communities, using violence, and crossing legal boundaries. The law itself won’t be enough to make people feel protected at the polls, and understandably so. So think about how you can serve as a resource to help those in your community vote safely and freely (Protect Democracy maintains a list of specific ways to do this).

Documenting and reporting: If you do see something that looks amiss at or near an election site, know that there are resources to help. Make sure to document anything worrying that you see — this can be evidence for investigators later on. You can call 866-OUR-VOTE to speak with trained Election Protection volunteers.

The Trump administration is not as powerful as they want us to think they are.

Let’s shut off the smoke machine.

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Authoritarian Action Watch updates

Two events to note in the Authoritarian Action Watch this week.

First, the raid on Rep. Omar’s home is both a sign of a floundering presidency and a blatant attempt to demonize and frighten naturalized citizens. Quashing Dissent is RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

Second, in a related incident, Donald Trump posted a Truth Social post saying: “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back… The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!” Stoking Violence is also RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

See all the updates: Authoritarian Action Watch.

How you can protect democracy #101

Register your community to vote 🗳️ Communicating with your network about when and how to vote — and making sure everyone you know is registered — is one of the most direct ways to strengthen participation in our democracy. Millions of eligible voters aren’t registered, and many registered voters have outdated information that could prevent them from casting a ballot. With registration deadlines for the November 3rd general election approaching in many states, now is the time to check and help others do the same.

What you can do:

• Check your voter registration status to make sure your name and address are current — and check more than once, as voter rolls are updated periodically.

• Register to vote if you haven’t already, and help someone in your life do the same, especially anyone who has recently moved, changed their name, or will be voting for the first time.

• Find your state’s registration deadline and sign up at Vote.org to get reminders of upcoming deadlines.

• Send your contact list accurate information about the upcoming election well before the registration deadline — a simple text or email can make all the difference.

• Use The Civics Center’s guide to plan and run a voter registration drive in your school, community, or workplace. It includes step-by-step guidance, training workshops, and social media templates.

• Download your state’s Voter Registration Drive Guide for state-specific rules, requirements, and guidance for drive organizers.

• Read and share Protect Your Vote: A Citizen’s Guide from the Elections Group — download and print the pocket-sized version to share with people in your community.

• Should anyone have problems with voting, share the Election Protection Hotline numbers: English: 1-866-OUR-VOTE | Spanish: 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA | Asian Languages: 1-888-API-VOTE | Arabic: 1-844-YALLA-US

All of a sudden, it’s everywhere.

Have you noticed it too?

A coworker in the break room, your neighbor at the dog park, your group chat of friends, a random phone call from your mom, a text from your uncle. Each time, the same questions. So many different people in your life are wondering…

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If you caught the Seattle Seahawks vs. Washington Commanders game this weekend, you might have had the misfortune of seeing one of Trump’s propaganda ads.

In one, a chorus of women earnestly sing “love me,” as a strobing array of Trump photos flashes across the screen. A male voice gushes that Trump is “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was gonna stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.” Not exactly subtle.

And at the bottom of the screen, a disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

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The Trump administration has reportedly spent $20 million in taxpayer money on this ad campaign. It claims the ads are “public service announcements,” not political, even though these commercials have been repurposed from actual Trump campaign ads and were hand-selected by Trump himself. The ads have already run more than 2,000 times on broadcast networks.

But this is just the beginning. CNN obtained access to a set of 10 more ads the Trump administration is planning beyond the three currently on air — including one titled “God Made Trump,” and another called “King of the Jungle.” We have every reason to expect this to ramp up as the midterm elections draw nearer.

This is all instinctively upsetting. No matter your political persuasion, it just plain feels wrong for our taxpayer money to go toward glorifying a sitting president. Maybe that’s why several prominent Republican leaders have criticized the Trump administration for this move.

There are several entangled layers of terrible to this story. Today, I want to peel these apart to understand why these ads aren’t just annoying, but deeply dangerous.

Layer one: This is a clear spending abuse

I recently engaged in the time-honored American tradition of being surprised at the amount of federal taxes deducted from my first salaried paycheck. I consoled myself by picturing the manifold ways that the money must be helping society. I definitely don’t like to hear that it was being used for Trump campaign ads.

And indeed, it’s not supposed to be used for that.

Congress has long sought to limit this sort of use of public funds for partisan purposes. The 1939 Hatch Act restricts federal executive branch employees from engaging in partisan political activities in their official capacity. And the Anti-Publicity and Propaganda Rider has, since 1951, explicitly banned the use of public funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.”

Now, I bet you’re wondering, did Congress actually pass a law providing funding for these ads? No, they didn’t. Not even close.

Congress did pass a law providing for billions in funds for Customs and Border Protection, and gave the agency a list of eight things it could use the money for to beef up border security.

Trump campaign ads? Not one of the things. So, which of the eight permitted uses is the administration relying on?

Commemorative events, which the version of the bill originally passed by the House explains are “line-of-Duty death memorials, Department or agency anniversaries, and commendation ceremonies.”

You read that right. Trump is using a provision intended to commemorate fallen officers for ads praising himself. Ugh.

And he is also taking funds away from actual border security efforts — which he claims is a priority of his administration and a promise he campaigned on — to do it.

(As a sidebar: you can see the source of this ad funding through Protect Democracy’s OpenOMB tool, which is a great resource to track the ways in which the Trump administration has been abusing its spending authority. Try it out yourself.)

Congressional appropriators are taking note. Several senior Appropriations Committee members sent a letter to the White House chief of staff expressing their outrage, calling the ads an “egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.” On Thursday, Senator Patty Murray introduced the “Penalties for Propaganda Act of 2026” that would decrease the budget of the Office of Management and Budget by $20 million for each violation of propaganda laws.

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Layer two: Ads like these could be used to attack the midterms

It seems likely that, with these propaganda ads, the Trump administration is testing the waters to see how much they can get away with. If unchecked, they could ramp up their propaganda efforts and potentially use these ads as a powerful tool to spread election disinformation.

According to the White House budget office’s own records, there is around $5.5 billion left in the account that the Trump administration is using to pay for the ads. That’s more than six times what the Harris campaign spent on ads in the whole 2024 election cycle. It’s some serious campaign firepower.

It’s possible, though, that these ads could be meant for something broader than just driving support to Republicans. In the event of a win for the opposition in the 2026 midterms, the Trump administration might use these ads to question the results themselves. Trump could place ads, with the seeming endorsement “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” on news stations and broadcast shows to advance false claims about the election.

We already know that Trump is actively attempting to subvert the 2026 midterms through his Deceive, Disrupt, Deny tactics. He’s consistently cast doubt on election results. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again.

But this time, it’s like we, the taxpayers, would be buying him a giant, multimillion-dollar megaphone to shout his election conspiracies into.

Layer three: This echoes exactly how other autocrats have channeled public resources into propaganda

Finally, to state the obvious: Self-promotional ads glorifying the president are a page ripped directly from the global authoritarian playbook. One of the fundamental tactics of autocrats is “aggrandizing executive power,” which often involves building a cult of personality. Propaganda efforts can be used to shore up support, discourage dissent, and justify the expansion of executive strength.

A clear example is Hungary under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Not only did Orbán structurally expand his executive power through radically rewriting the Hungarian constitution to remove checks and balances, he accompanied this power grab with a concerted propaganda effort. He unleashed regulatory fury against media critics. He directed government advertising money to loyal outlets. And, like Trump, Orbán’s political party used taxpayer money to place pro-regime ads on the air, skirting around a constitutional prohibition against paid political advertising by claiming its ads were public service announcements.

Sound familiar?

In fact, a Hungarian civic watchdog group found that Orbán’s Fidesz-led government spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on propaganda ads which praised Orbán and lashed out at political enemies. An international election observer group found that these ads had a meaningful impact on Hungarian elections, systematically disadvantaging the opposition.

Autocratic leaders have employed similar propaganda ad tactics in Turkey, El Salvador, Serbia, and elsewhere.

If we’re not vigilant, this could be where we’re heading. And this comparison isn’t paranoia — Trump and his allies have explicitly and enthusiastically embraced Orbán as a role model.

That said, the playbook may not be as effective as Trump and his administration hope. Orbán’s propaganda worked only until, eventually, it didn’t. Earlier this year, he and his Fidesz party were swept out of power in a landslide. Among other things, voters were furious at the perception that Orbán was acting corruptly and irresponsibly with government resources.

Trump’s ads are likely illegal and definitely immoral. But the best way to stop this from happening — now or in the future — is if the American people refuse to believe the propaganda, call out what’s happening, and deliver swift political and electoral punishments for the abuse.

Even if our money as taxpayers is buying these ads, it doesn’t mean that we as citizens have to.

Three updates to the Authoritarian Action Watch this week.

First, the president is withholding almost $1 billion in congressionally approved funding, an illegal maneuver known as a pocket rescission (read more about those here). Because of that move, Aggrandizing Executive Power is RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

Second, as covered above, Trump’s ads are both an aggrandizement of his power and an attempt to spread false information. For that reason, Spreading Disinformation is ESCALATING.

And finally, the Supreme Court’s ruling on the use of the SAVE database is an unwelcome development, but not one that should keep you from feeling confident that your vote is safe and secure. Because of the ruling, Corrupting Elections is ESCALATING.

Overall: Authoritarian actions are RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

See all the developments: Authoritarian Action Watch.

How you can protect democracy

Watch this great video from my colleague Anna Dorman on three ways you can secure your vote, and give it a share:

We are now six weeks from the midterms, and I have good news for you.

Democracy is winning.

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From the moment he returned to the White House, Donald Trump has attempted to turn the entire machinery of the federal government — from the FBI to the Postal Service — against the midterm elections. He sought to do this in four ways:

• Supercharge conspiracy theories and lies — especially around voter fraud — from inside the White House.

• Deploy federal power against opponents, organizations, and officials to intimidate the opposition into compliance.

• Use violence to silence Americans and deter voting.

• Manipulate election rules and try to block eligible voters. (Think gerrymandering, mail-in ballot restrictions, voter registration list shenanigans, and so on.)

And, of course, there is a fifth and final strategy still to come:

• If those four fail to produce the results he wants, seek to overturn them.

It was — and continues to be — up to all of us to stop him. (Here’s how.)

American democracy has never faced the federal government arrayed against it like this. And yet we — the big “we”: you, me, and everyone else in this country committed to protecting free and fair elections — we are winning across the board.

This is absolutely not a reason for complacency. Still six weeks until Election Day (and 14 weeks until the next Congress is sworn in). But this win streak should make us all feel more confident, more optimistic, and more hopeful.

Deceive: Trump has mostly failed to manufacture the pretext for disruption and denial

The president has worked tirelessly to try to convince Americans that elections are not to be trusted.

It’s not working.

Trump hosted a prime-time address (that was not carried on major networks). DHS claimed it found a quarter-million “noncitizen registrants” in four states (but when pressed, every name produced — every single one! — was a U.S. citizen and eligible voter). The Census Bureau put out an “unsigned” report on voter fraud (that was immediately slammed by bipartisan experts). He hired election deniers for various federal roles (several of whom, notably Joe diGenova and Ed Martin, have already quit).

And, of course, the president himself posts election conspiracy theories on social media constantly.

By my non-scientific count, the president has posted about election conspiracy theories, voter fraud, or the 2020 election on Truth Social 153 times so far this year. That’s more than every other day.1

He’s obsessed with the Big Lie and the false specter of fraud. He’s still obsessed with the 2020 election. He seems to hope that by talking even more about conspiracy theories, he can do what he failed to do six years ago: sabotage or overturn an election.

But instead of roiling the fever swamps of anger and discontent, the administration’s all-out propaganda push seems to have had the opposite effect.

For most voters, lies about elections are becoming white noise.

In August, a Navigator poll found that 60 percent of the country (including 61 percent of independents, 49 percent of non-MAGA Republicans, and even 21 percent of MAGA Republicans) think Trump spends too much time talking about the 2020 election.

The same poll found 72 percent of Americans are confident that their ballot will be counted correctly and fairly.

Americans’ biggest concerns about the election aren’t voter fraud conspiracy theories (that’s 29 percent very concerned). Instead, they are — in order — ICE at polling locations (37 percent very concerned), legitimate votes not being counted (35 percent), misinformation about results of the election (35 percent), and Republicans trying to rig election laws (35 percent).

Yesterday, a Wall Street Journal investigation of MAGA commentators found that they too seem to be tuning out the president:

Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.

Check it out. White noise:

Disrupt: Federal intimidation efforts sputter while election rules remain broadly unchanged

Donald Trump continues trying to disrupt the election by using federal power to intimidate the opposition, using violence to deter voting, and manipulating the rules to block eligible voters.

None of these, so far, have entirely worked. Yes, he has sown chaos and confusion and made millions of Americans rightfully afraid that our voices will be silenced in November. Yes, he has ripped American democracy at its very seams, pushing us to the brink of disaster. Yes, he has positioned the federal government firmly against the right of the people to select their leaders.

But in the face of that onslaught, we — again, the big collective “we” — have had six major wins that block his disruption.

First, the Department of Justice went 0–25 in the courts trying to seize voter data from states. The latest legal loss came on Tuesday when a federal court rejected the administration’s attempt to force Washington state to hand over voter information. (See all the cases via Democracy Docket.)

Second, Trump failed to coerce Congress into passing the SAVE America Act. Had it passed, it would have been, according to the Brennan Center, “the most restrictive voting bill ever approved.” It did not pass.

Third, his sweeping mail-in voting executive order failed at the Supreme Court. The USPS mess may have been a doomed strategy from the start, but still — it failed. Protect Democracy’s litigation against other parts of the order is pending, but we feel confident courts will prevent the worst harms.

Fourth, five states have passed Universal Constitutional Remedies Acts. These landmark measures — signed into law in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts and awaiting the governor’s signature in California — allow private citizens to sue federal officials for violations of constitutional rights. This provides an important new deterrent for federal officials who might consider impinging on constitutional rights.

Fifth, the president’s proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for election deniers sank like a stone in Congress. Remember that? Election deniers may feel a sense of impunity, but at least they don’t stand to profit from potential disruptions and crimes in the future.

Finally, the extraordinary mid-cycle redistricting wars and post-Callais scramble to dismantle Black representation failed to net the system-tilting advantage Trump was expecting. Currently, the Cook Political Report projects a four-seat gain for Trump’s party relative to 2024, far short of the roughly two dozen he had hoped for. Gerrymandering remains an existential threat to democracy — and to minority representation — but it’s not going to stop this particular election from threatening the president’s hold on power.

(An aside: that modest advantage from rules changes came at a catastrophic cost for our democracy. As our report last week found, one in 10 Americans were moved to a new district entirely, and one in five had their districts significantly transformed. Minority voters in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina saw their representation undermined by new racist gerrymanders. Read more: The hidden casualties of the gerrymandering wars →)

Deny: Trump’s election denial is still to come — but on much weaker footing

All that said, we are winning, but we have not won.

The real challenges will come on Election Day and afterward. During the voting period, the counting of ballots, the certification of results, and potentially even the seating of the new Congress, expect the president to meddle. Think ham-handed attempts to seize ballots, threats to prosecute elections officials, and mass challenges to certain categories of ballots. (Isaac Gilles explained eight of the scenarios we’re most worried about here: What Protect Democracy specifically is doing to protect the midterms.)

While all Trump’s failures above mean that he is dramatically less likely to succeed in those attempts, his losing record to date may also make him more likely to try some of the most extreme and dangerous gambits. (Some of his failures — e.g., the inability to pass the SAVE America Act — will also be used as pretext for what’s to come.)

Desperate people do desperate things.

Donald Trump is getting desperate.

Six weeks to go before Election Day.

Two notable movements in the Authoritarian Action Watch this week.

First, Trump’s decision to try to throw reporters out of the press pool for unflattering coverage is pretty much the textbook definition of quashing dissent. But because the media as a whole — including Fox News — is pushing back forcefully, the threat is unlikely to succeed. Quashing Dissent is ESCALATING.

Second, the latest shooting in Austin is a reminder of an unsustainable status quo. The administration’s violence, directed primarily through ICE, grows ever more serious. Stoking Violence is ESCALATING.

Overall: Authoritarian actions are ESCALATING.

See all the developments: Authoritarian Action Watch.

How you can protect democracy #102

Save the Election Protection Hotline 🗳️— Every voter deserves a safe, accessible experience at the polls, and if something goes wrong, you shouldn’t have to figure it out alone. The Election Protection Hotline, administered by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, connects voters with trained volunteers who can answer questions and help resolve problems on the spot. If someone runs into a problem while voting, they can call or text Election Protection for help in real time.

The coalition is a nonpartisan network of more than 300 local, state, and national partners that operates year-round and is available by phone, text, WhatsApp, and Facebook message. Whether you have questions about your registration, run into problems at the polls, or need help understanding your rights, give them a call.

What you can do:

• Save the Election Protection Hotline to your phone and share it with your community. Call, text, WhatsApp, or Facebook if you have questions about your registration, voting options, ID requirements, or what to do if your name isn’t on the rolls. Their volunteers are trained to help with all of it:

  • English: 1-866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683)

  • Spanish: 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA (888-839-8682)

  • Asian Languages: 1-888-API-VOTE (888-274-8683)

  • Arabic: 1-844-YALLA-US (844-925-5287)

• Find voting information for your state including registration deadlines, absentee and mail ballot rules, and early voting options.

• Download and share their 2026 Black Voter Survival Guide with your community.

• Use their Social Media Toolkit to share reliable voting information and Election Protection resources with your networks.

• Explore their volunteer options to help protect voters’ rights as a poll monitor or hotline volunteer.

Extra Credit: Share the hotline numbers with at least 5 people in your life before Election Day — save them in your contacts, text them to your group chat, or post them on social media so everyone knows where to turn if something goes wrong at the polls.

There’s over 100 other things you can do in our database. Start checking them off: How you can protect democracy.

With less than seven weeks to the midterm elections, a million and a half Missourians spent almost a week not knowing who they would be voting for.

First, the state’s Republican leadership forced through a new, more gerrymandered map that dismantled Kansas City’s district to try to squeeze out another seat. Then the Missouri State Supreme Court struck down the new gerrymander because of a state constitutional requirement allowing a referendum on the change first. Then the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, seemingly preserving the original maps. Then a different federal court ruled in Republicans’ favor on a different issue, allowing them to implement the new gerrymander. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in again and forced Missouri back to the 2024 maps.

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As this partisan legal drama played out, more than 1.4 million Missourians were stuck in the crossfire. Christian Johnson, Drew Penrose, and I looked at the census data, and that’s exactly how many people stood to be moved to a new district under the new maps. That means that not only were they stuck in limbo for any campaigning and organizing, but for months they faced the prospect of picking from entirely new candidates on their ballot.

(In a separate issue, the primaries were held under the new, illegal gerrymander, which means those 1.4 million voters saw different candidates on their primary ballots than they will in the general.)

Many of those voters had been represented by Emanuel Cleaver, a Democratic former mayor of Kansas City, for more than two decades. Untold numbers had relationships with him, campaigned for him, worked with him. And suddenly they weren’t his constituents anymore. And then they were again, and then they weren’t. And then they were again.

Imagine putting up a yard sign for your preferred congressional candidate. Then having to take it down, then put it back up, then take it down again, then back up. All because the gerrymandering wars, kicked off by Donald Trump, had consumed your congressional district.

Talk about whiplash.

In our new paper released on Sept. 17, Christian, Drew, and I find that those 1.4 million Missourians are not alone. Not by a long shot. All told, 34.8 million Americans got booted from one congressional district to another between the 2024 and 2026 elections. Roughly twice that number are now voting in a district that looks little to nothing like the ones they were in two years ago.

Read our paper

If you tabulate all the individual casualties in the gerrymandering wars, it comes out to 1-in-5 Americans. That’s how many people had their representation severed and reassigned as part of the battle to control the maps.

Plus, most disturbing of all, things might only be getting started.

Maximalist, mid-cycle redistricting may be here to stay

When Christian, Drew and I set out to calculate how many people experienced gerrymandering whiplash in the redistricting wars, we also wanted to know why perpetual, mid-decade redistricting is such a real threat — and why it’s so enticing to both parties.

Unfortunately, there’s a grim logic to it. Three dynamics encourage ongoing, mid-decade redistricting:

• Gerrymandering is a time-bound phenomenon. As voter preferences shift over time, the effectiveness of gerrymandered maps will fade. Maps that deliver a clear partisan advantage in one election will not necessarily hold up a decade later. Redrawing maps more regularly will likely be more effective at locking in consistent partisan advantage than gerrymandering once every decade.

• There’s a two-party doom loop to redistricting. Now that both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced gerrymandering as a political strategy, the logic of escalation implies a trend towards maximalist redistricting. Even if regular re-draws may produce diminishing returns, neither party wants to risk being the one that fails to maximize their advantage.

• Partisan gerrymandering has a margin of error. In the past, partisan gerrymanders have usually included a buffer to protect the party in power from elections that swing against them (otherwise, gerrymanders can quickly become “dummymanders”). But if map-makers only need to account for possible election results six months in the future — instead of six years — they can be much more aggressive with their gerrymandering. Redrawing more regularly with greater confidence about likely election results allows for narrower margins.

So are we stuck? With Georgia, Washington, Colorado, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey all hinting at or even openly exploring possible 2028 redraws, is this just our life now? Do we live in the United States of Redistricting where every election we wait for the partisan map makers to tell us who we get to vote for?

Maybe. Unless we change it.

Proportional representation prevents gerrymandering whiplash. Period.

Constant, all-consuming gerrymandering is, to put it bluntly, no way to run a democracy. It is and should be a national embarrassment.

But it’s also not the only way. We can demand something far better. And no, I’m not talking about halfway measures like a ban on mid-cycle redistricting or on partisan gerrymandering beyond certain parameters.

If the United States moved from single-member districts to multi-member districts with proportional representation, essentially no American would ever get whiplashed like this ever again.

Proportional representation prevents gerrymandering — but not just legally. Mathematically.

As Grant Tudor, Farbod Faraji, and Cyrena Kokolis explain in When Maps Don’t Matter, multi-member districts and proportional representation make gerrymandering functionally impossible for two reasons:

1. Proportional systems minimize “wasted votes” — the raw material of gerrymandering. Proportional systems use multi-member districts instead of single-member districts and allocate seats in proportion to votes received. This minimizes the wasted votes that make packing and cracking possible. Votes contribute to representation regardless of where those casting them are geographically concentrated, dramatically impairing the ability of district boundaries — or the party drawing them — to distort electoral outcomes.

2. Manipulating multiparty landscapes is too complex. Proportional representation also tends to foster multiparty competition, since the threshold of support needed to win any one seat is reduced. With more parties contesting elections, would-be gerrymanderers are deprived of the predictable two-party landscape that makes electoral engineering easier.

Here’s a visual explanation:

Compare that to what things look like under proportional representation:

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We should pick our politicians. Not the other way around.

Read Christian, Drew, and my paper on the cost of the gerrymandering wars: Gerrymandering Whiplash.

And read Grant, Farbod, and Cyrena on why proportional representation can’t be gerrymandered: When Maps Don’t Matter.

Were you whiplashed in the redistricting wars? Let me know in the comments. How has it impacted your community?

Three updates this week.

First, the Supreme Court did not allow the Trump administration’s U.S. Postal Service rule affecting mail voting to go into effect, the latest in a chain of losses for them around election interference. For that reason, Corrupting Elections is IMPROVING.

Second, and less positively, the Trump administration continues to target ABC and Jimmy Kimmel in particular, this time over an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. Because of those ongoing attacks, and their apparent effectiveness, Quashing Dissent is ESCALATING.

And finally, the Trump administration has continued to obscure its AI framework from the public, so Aggrandizing Executive Power is RAPIDLY ESCALATING.

See all the updates in the Authoritarian Action Watch here.

How you can protect democracy #102:

Voting rules vary by state, and knowing the details before Election Day keeps you one step ahead. Protect Democracy has put together clear, accessible voting guides for six key states ahead of the midterm elections. Whether you’re voting for the first time or just want to make sure you have the latest information, each guide covers everything you need to know — from registration deadlines and ID requirements to early voting periods and mail ballot rules.

What you can do:

• Find your state’s guide and share it with friends, family, and community members — especially students, first-time voters, and anyone who has recently moved or changed their name:

  • Arizona

  • California

  • Georgia

  • Iowa

  • North Carolina

  • Texas

• Don’t see your state? Use the Fair Elections Center’s interactive map to find your state’s voting guide.

See all of the more than 100 ways you can protect democracy.

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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

Read more — Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect

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

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

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

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

Organize

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

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

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

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

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

Show up

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

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

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

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

Prove

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

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

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

Hold the line

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

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

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

Additional resources

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

• Gen Z Election Defense Toolkit

• Business Election Defense Toolkit

• Faith Communities Election Defense Toolkit

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

Undoing Trump’s golden age of corruption

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

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

Read the full piece

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

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

See The Authoritarian Action Watch.

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

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

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

Read more — Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect

Politicized intelligence is one threat among many

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more — The strategy hiding in plain sight

The override strategy is facing pushback

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

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

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

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

What we can do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The government is now the superspreader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every election lie falls into one of five categories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2000 Mules, with subpoena power

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

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

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

What we’re reading

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

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

Learn more about the book

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

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

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

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

On Saturday, the United States turns 250.

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

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

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

Read more — How you can protect democracy

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

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

Lessons from abroad and our own history

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

Read more — Is Budapest the bellwether?

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

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

Civic life is more than one moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few entry points:

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

• Connect with your neighbors

• Go to a local community meeting

• Support community engagement at your local library

• Help people register to vote

• Reach out to your elected officials

• Prepare for a local budget meeting

• Join or host America’s Potluck on July 5

• Explore the activity library for America’s 250th

• Start a conversation about what comes next for America

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

America is waiting for us

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

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

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

The president now has more control over federal agencies

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

Community resilience in the 2026 elections

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

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

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

Read the full guide

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

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

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

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

The crisis has more than one author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not for the first time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working toward a government where we have a say

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

From there, we can build toward that fuller representation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myth-busting youth disillusionment

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

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

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

(Rational) skepticism vs. apathy

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

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

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

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

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

The path ahead for 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shenanigans at the ODNI could supercharge the deceive strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more — Muzzling America’s workforce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.