Imagine it’s back in November 2020: With the winner of the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden still uncertain, the Department of Justice (DOJ) writes to election officials in Michigan to request “all ballots (including absentee and provisional), ballot receipts, and ballot envelopes.” If local election officials don’t comply, DOJ threatens to go to court to get the records. What would have happened?

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We avoided this question in 2020 — but only because DOJ refused Trump’s demands to seize election materials. There was no credible evidence of fraud, and partisan Trump loyalists had not fully consolidated control over the department.

Last week, more than five years after the 2020 election was certified, current DOJ officials delivered this exact request to election officials in Wayne County, home to Detroit.

And that’s a perfect illustration of why, when we look ahead to the 2026 election, we don’t expect it to play out just like 2020.

On the surface, the threat to the 2020 and 2026 elections looks similar: A would-be autocrat in the White House, facing the prospect of a sharp rebuke at the ballot box, laying the groundwork to try to overturn an unfavorable election.

But there’s a big difference between 2020 and 2026: This time, the entire apparatus of the federal government will be turned towards the goal of aiding Trump’s election interference. Even as the threat is more dangerous, though, we don’t need to let it succeed.

A fully weaponized executive branch

Although Trump was president in 2020, he hadn’t yet consolidated full control of the executive branch. As a result, in the 2020 election, the campaign to undermine and eventually overturn the result was run narrowly out of the White House, the president’s reelection campaign, and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

The core team was the president and a relatively small handful of acolytes, like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

Not only did the rest of the federal government not participate in this attack on our democracy, but most of its critical functions continued working to follow the law and protect free and fair elections. The 2020 effort was attempted from inside the government and failed because of institutional resistance.

For instance:

• The Department of Homeland Security, especially the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, was at the forefront of both cybersecurity and efforts to combat disinformation about the election.

• The FBI worked closely with local election officials and law enforcement across the country to help secure the electoral process and respond to threats.

• DOJ, famously, resisted the White House’s pressure to seize voting machines and worked in most cases to enforce the law and the Constitution.

2026 will be different.

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

As ProPublica documented in a crucial report this month, most of the people who worked within the federal government to protect the 2020 election are now gone, replaced with around two dozen election deniers. CISA has been gutted. Parts of the federal government that used to serve the public interest are now narrowly focused on protecting the president’s hold on power at all costs.

The Department of Justice is Exhibit A in the transformation of the federal government. In the weeks since Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi’s firing, we’ve seen DOJ officials engage in an Apprentice-style competition to be Trump’s AG (with Acting AG Todd Blanche and Harmeet Dillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, in starring roles) and make desperate moves just to hang onto their jobs (FBI Director Kash Patel). Over the past week:

• Dhillon has doubled down on illegal and unprecedented demands that states turn over their confidential voter data (more on that later);

• Blanche has declared that Trump has a “right” to prosecute his enemies, while allowing Trump’s former personal attorney Joseph DeGenova to take a leading role in a purported prosecution of former CIA director John Brennan; and

• Patel has promised new “evidence” that the 2020 election was rigged.

That’s why I expect nearly every available lever of executive power will be deployed as part of this campaign to deceive the electorate about the security of their elections, to disrupt the electoral process, and to deny the results.

The groundwork is already being laid for this whole-of-government election subversion strategy.

Seizing voter data: A case study in weaponized government

How does control of government translate into election subversion? The administration’s dangerous and illegal effort to gain access to states’ confidential voter rolls offers a case study.

Let’s start with a refresher on how elections should work: In the U.S., states — not the federal government — are responsible for running elections. They register voters, maintain voter lists, and have processes for verifying the eligibility of every voter. Over the years, in order to promote the right to vote, Congress has taken steps to ensure that states maintain accurate voter rolls and certain uniform standards for voting eligibility. However, Congress has never authorized the federal government to take over responsibility for vetting voter rolls. And, although the Constitution gives Congress the power to make laws involving election administration, under our Constitution and laws, the president has zero role in state election administration — including voter registration.

Despite this, heeding the president’s command to “nationalize elections,” the DOJ Civil Rights Division has contacted nearly every state and the District of Columbia over the past year to demand their complete voter files, which are filled with sensitive personal information for every voter, such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and political party affiliation. During the same period, DOGE worked (unlawfully) to integrate Social Security data into an existing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database used by a handful of states to check voters’ citizenship status.

The Trump Administration says they want all this data to stop ineligible voters from registering and casting a ballot. But election fraud of any type is extremely rare, in no small part because states already have checks in place to ensure that only eligible voters register, and state and federal laws (including immigration law) impose heavy penalties for illegal voting.

So what is the data grab really about? As my colleagues Izzy Gray and Sara Chimene-Weiss explained earlier this year:

There’s a common phrase in the research world: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” In short, with enough manipulation, you can make a dataset say whatever you like.

This is exactly what the Trump administration wants to do: accumulate enough voter data that it can torture this data into confessing the predetermined conclusion that, should the president’s preferred candidates lose, it will have been because of fraudulent votes from ineligible voters.

They will do this by mixing and matching the states’ voter data to other federal databases, including the expanded SAVE database, in ways that are almost certain to result in false allegations of voter fraud. For example, they will try to match the state voter data to names of alleged noncitizens in the inherently flawed SAVE database. But we know that SAVE data is often out-of-date — for instance, continuing to identify Americans as non-citizens long after they have obtained their citizenship.

But even false voter fraud allegations will serve the administration’s purposes: baselessly creating doubt and confusion about election security; disenfranchising eligible voters; and creating a false narrative to justify further election power grabs. Each lays the groundwork in service of their ultimate goal: to prevent or overturn the results of future elections that do not go the administration’s way.

The good news? Most states didn’t go along with this scheme: Only 12 states voluntarily complied with DOJ’s request for voter data.

That’s when the federal government turned the heat up on this effort. In January, at the height of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, then-AG Bondi attempted to leverage the violence being wrought by DHS agents to blackmail Minnesota officials into turning over their voter rolls. That effort was also unsuccessful — Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon stood strong.

But DOJ isn’t backing down — to date, DOJ has sued a total of 30 states in a quest to force them to hand over confidential voter information.

How we can resist an elections takeover attempt

I don’t say any of this to be alarmist: Even though President Trump has consolidated power in the executive branch to an unprecedented extent, the institutions of our election system can survive this assault. But it will require all of us to take action to defend them.

The ongoing efforts to thwart DOJ’s voter-data crusade illustrates how it can be done.

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First, we all — including the news media — need to tell the truth about what the administration is doing. There is no meaningful amount of fraud in our electoral system, and the voter-data grabs aren’t a serious attempt to find it. Instead, the true purpose is to confuse voters about the trustworthiness of our electoral system, kick eligible voters off the rolls, and cast doubt on election results that don’t go the administration’s way.

Second, officials need to stand up to the federal government and provide the checks and balances the framers intended. The bipartisan resistance to voter-data grabs is a model: In addition to uniform resistance from Democratic leaders, red-state officials like Utah Lt. Gov. Deirdre Henderson have vocally objected to the administration’s efforts to insert themselves into state election processes. And career civil servants who specialize in privacy-protection have resigned from government over this and other data grabs.

Third, voters need to stand up for their own rights when state officials fall down on the job. That’s why five voters from states that turned over their data to DOJ, along with Common Cause, filed suit this week to stop and undo DOJ’s efforts to create a national voter database. Plaintiffs — represented by my colleagues at Protect Democracy, along with our co-counsel at Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, the American Civil Liberties Union and its DC affiliate, and Harvard’s Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic — lay out a compelling claim that our Constitutional delegation of powers over elections, as well as laws protecting individual privacy (among other provisions), bar DOJ from creating a national voter registration database.

Fourth, courts must hold the line against federal intrusion into state elections. So far, they are doing so — all of the five district courts that have ruled so far have held that the federal government lacked the right to confidential voter data.

That’s a lot of work, by a lot of people, to fend off just one of the ways the administration is weaponizing the federal government against our elections. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to dive deep into every aspect of the threat — and then, more importantly, get into how you can help. Because while it’s true that the threats aimed at our elections are greater than they’ve ever been, together we can and will prevent them from succeeding.

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

The investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell hits a dead end

The Department of Justice announced that it was dropping its investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, privately acknowledging that they had no evidence Powell committed any crimes. This news comes as President Trump’s nominee, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, vowed that monetary policy would remain “strictly independent” and that Trump never asked him to pre-commit to lower rates during his confirmation hearing. Dropping this investigation clears the way for Warsh to be confirmed as the new chair.

Because of Warsh’s nomination, though, democracy advocates should continue to monitor the independence of the Fed in the months to come. The Iran war has driven energy prices higher, pushing inflation to its fastest pace in nearly two years, which only makes the independence of the Fed more important.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Last Sunday, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat. 16 years of authoritarian rule in Hungary ended with a phone call to the man who beat him.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won 138 out of 199 seats — a two-thirds supermajority — on nearly 80 percent turnout, the highest in Hungary’s post-communist history. Orbán called the result “painful” but “clear.”

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What makes Sunday’s result so important is not just that the opposition won. It’s how they won — and what they did to prepare for the possibility that they wouldn’t be allowed to.

Hungary’s elections are mostly free, but not fair. Orbán’s party had redrawn every district to maximize its advantage. In 2022, Fidesz won a two-thirds supermajority with just 54 percent of the vote. The opposition needed to clear roughly a five-point structural handicap just to win a bare majority. Orbán controlled nearly all broadcast media. His allies owned hundreds of private outlets. Russian intelligence operatives were actively working to tip the scales. This all built on a long-term effort to change the rules, eliminate meaningful electoral competition, and consolidate power in ways MAGA saw as a model for what they could do here.

The Hungarian opposition didn’t respond to any of this by being quiet about it. They did the opposite. Magyar accused Orbán of “treason” for inviting Russian agents to interfere. He called the government the “Orbán mafia.” He told voters that the election was “a choice between East or West, propaganda or honest public discourse, corruption or clean public life.”

And then they prepared — openly, systematically, and relentlessly — to defend the vote.

Tisza deployed a remarkable 50,000 election monitors to vote-counting committees in polling stations across the country. In a country of 9.5 million people, that’s about one out of every 200 Hungarians. For the U.S. to do the same, per capita, it would take about 1.7 million observers.

Tisza also built its own fraud-reporting system so voters could flag irregularities in real time. Transparency International Hungary convened organizations from across the region to share best practices for detecting manipulation. And six opposition parties withdrew from the race entirely, clearing the field so the contest would be a straight two-way fight that gave Tisza a chance to overcome the system’s built-in handicaps. The Socialists said explicitly that an electoral system amounting to “legalized cheating” could only be overcome by uniting behind a single candidate.

Hungarians named the threats, they built the infrastructure to counter them, and people showed up to do their part.

It’s time for the United States to do the same.

2026 isn’t like 2020

Back in 2020, anyone paying attention could predict that the sitting president might not go quietly into the night. One might have been able to hypothesize the myriad ways the administration might try to interfere in the election, but no one knew how far they would take things.

This time around, it’s different.

As those who have been following this newsletter or read our Executive Override report know, there is no doubt that the Trump administration is preparing to use every tool in its toolbox to try to maintain its lock on power. There’s no one left inside the White House to check that impulse. And the experience of recent elections has made clear to the public the extent to which Trump will go to cling to power and the range of ways he may do so. There’s no downplaying the threat anymore.

Read our report on the 2026 elections

To be clear: None of that means Trump’s attacks on the midterms will succeed. The administration’s strategy requires inducing many collaborators to break the law, keep eligible Americans from voting, and throw out lawfully cast votes. Their transparently malicious approach may have — in tipping their hand to the American people — already doomed them from the start. But it does focus our strategy not just on careful preparation but also on loud, open defiance.

They’re not being subtle about their intentions, so we shouldn’t be subtle about them either.

Why the midterms matter so much

To appreciate the nature of the threat, it helps to understand why Donald Trump even cares about the midterms. After all, in 2018, he didn’t do much to help Republican congressional candidates politically, let alone consider breaking the law and the Constitution to try to keep them in office against the will of their voters.

Unfortunately, Trump learned from that experience.

For the first two years of his first term, the Republican-controlled Congress enabled Trump: They confirmed his nominees, funded his priorities, and ignored his corruption. But when Democrats regained the House in 2018, they reclaimed the power of oversight — and they used it. Many of the most significant abuses of his first term, such as attempting to coerce Ukraine into making up political dirt about Joe Biden, were exposed and stymied by an opposition Congress.

Turns out that, if you want to build an autocracy in America, you need a legislature that’s willing to sacrifice its own power for you to do so. That’s much more likely when your copartisans are in control. Congress should be one of the greatest bulwarks against tyranny. In 2020, that system worked as designed.

And that’s why Trump is so focused on the midterms now: If he manages to rig, overturn, or otherwise mess with the midterm elections such that he decides the next Congress, not the voters, he won’t just have protected his ability to set policy; he will have essentially removed the Constitution’s most important check on his power going forward.

That also explains why the key question this November is not just which party controls Congress, but whether the voters actually get to choose. Yes, if the president’s party retains power in Congress because that’s what the voters choose, it will bolster his efforts to cement himself in power. But Congress as an institution will still exist, and still theoretically be capable of pushing back. The status quo, in effect, will stay the same.

But if the president effectively overrides the congressional elections, picking control of Congress over the objections of the voters, then Congress will cease to be an independent branch of government.

How to explain the dangers

In the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections, talking about threats to fair elections was a difficult balancing act. On one hand, we knew the threats were coming; on the other, the scope was uncertain and the risks of speaking too loudly were real. You don’t want to hand an authoritarian a roadmap. You don’t want to undermine responsible actors inside the system who are doing their best to hold the line. You don’t want to deter people from participating. And you don’t want to cry wolf so loudly that the public tunes you out.

None of those considerations apply anymore.

The administration isn’t working from a hidden playbook. It’s broadcasting its intentions from every available platform. The president has publicly demanded to “nationalize the voting” in states he doesn’t control. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued more than 20 states for refusing to hand over voter data. The FBI has raided election offices. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — which once helped local officials defend against foreign election interference — has been gutted, with roughly 1,000 staff gone in a year.

As our Executive Override report details, this isn’t a collection of unrelated provocations. It’s a strategy — and it has three parts: deceive, disrupt, and deny.

Deceive the public by manufacturing the appearance of fraud where none exists. Use federal task forces and investigations to produce “findings” that cast doubt on election integrity. Flood the zone with so much noise that ordinary voters don’t know what to believe.

Disrupt the mechanics of voting itself. Use executive orders to try to sow chaos and mess with voter registration systems. Deploy federal agents — or threaten to deploy them — near polling places, creating the conditions for voter intimidation even if no one is formally turned away. Drive experienced election officials out of their jobs through harassment and the threat of politically motivated prosecution.

Deny the results if, despite all of the above, the voters still deliver an outcome the administration doesn’t like. Use the conspiracy theories and the manufactured “evidence” as a pretext to contest, delay, or overturn results through litigation, certification refusals, or outright defiance.

If everyone does their part, we can defeat the strategy

Still, even with all that, America’s election system has an enormous structural advantage. Elections in this country are run not by the federal government but by officials across all 50 states, more than 3,000 counties, and roughly 175,000 individual precincts. That radical decentralization, under normal circumstances, can be a headache. But under these circumstances, it’s an incredible source of strength.

No executive order can take over all of those precincts. No single DOJ investigation can intimidate every county clerk in every state. The president can tweet — or Truth — whatever he wants; he still can’t count the ballots. The Constitution makes that clear, and so far the courts have largely agreed.

Many of those advantages are things the Hungarian people did not have last week. But still, just like in Hungary, our elections need people willing to defend them.

That means state election officials who refuse to hand over voter data to corrupt fishing expeditions. It means local clerks — Republicans and Democrats alike — who follow the law even when the pressure to bend comes from the most powerful office in the world. It means state legislators who protect their states’ electoral processes rather than caving to White House demands. It means judges who continue to apply the law, as they’ve mostly done throughout this administration (with some notable exceptions). It means civil society organizations and litigators prepared to swiftly respond to abuses as soon as they happen. It means protestors prepared to take to the streets at key moments to defend their right to representation.

In short, it means all of us.

We can only be prepared if we’re honest about what’s coming. And then, together, we can Defeat the Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy.

Next week, we’re going to get into what we expect — starting with all the ways this election will be different from 2020. But before then, we want to hear from you. Drop in the comments or shoot us an email with what you’re most worried about or what you’re doing to protect elections where eligible voters can cast their ballots and have them counted.

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Authoritarian Action Watch updates

Trump is facing court resistance in his effort to corrupt elections

Since President Trump signed an executive order in March that purports to create federal voting lists that can be used to control who receives a mail-in ballot, the order has been challenged in court multiple times. Those challenges, when taken with the news that the administration’s attempts to consolidate state voter files are facing roadblocks in court, are a reminder that the courts still play a robust role in defending our right to vote.

Trump’s attempts to tilt our elections are far-reaching, however, and not all of them need to succeed to undermine voters’ confidence in the system. Between the mail-in executive order, the demands for state voter file data, and Trump’s declining approval rating, the administration seems to be gearing up to attack the safety of our elections on multiple fronts.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

This Sunday, Hungary heads to the polls for a showdown between Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an elected strongman, and Péter Magyar, a former government insider turned opposition leader. The results will have implications not just for Hungary, but for the global fight against authoritarianism.

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On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Orbán. Behind the seal of the vice presidency, Vance implored Hungarians not to oust their leader for the sake of “western civilization.”

Orbán is a primary architect of the modern playbook for dismantling democracy from within. Since 2010, his ruling Fidesz party has rewritten the constitution, stacked the judiciary, gutted civil society, attacked universities, and co-opted independent media to consolidate power.

After 16 years, these power grabs have left Hungary poorer than most of its neighbors, its standards of living degraded by state-sponsored corruption. Hungary is both the model for the autocracy that Donald Trump aspires to build and the cautionary tale for what our country could look like if he succeeds.

And yet, despite his work to entrench himself in power, Orbán seems likely to lose this election.

For well over a year, public polling has consistently shown the main opposition party, Tisza, leading Fidesz. Right now, polls put Tisza 10 points up — an unprecedented lead for the opposition in the Orbán era. Reports indicate some in Trump’s orbit are already nervous about what an Orbán defeat would mean for their own political futures.

This Sunday’s election, then, is a bellwether for the United States. In the best case scenario, it may show how the voters can dislodge even entrenched authoritarian leaders. More ominously, though, it may instead preview what efforts to deny election results and cling to power could look like here.

Two outcomes to watch for.

Scenario one: The end of the Orbán era

The last truly free and fair election in Hungary was back in 2010.

Since then, Orbán and Fidesz have repeatedly tweaked election laws and doled out government favors to protect their parliamentary supermajority. The opposition and its supporters are under no illusion this weekend will be a fair contest.

But here’s the thing: Those built-in advantages can only take an unpopular leader so far.

Our contacts in Hungary describe the mood on the ground as somewhere between “intense” and “excited.” For the first time in a long time, the opposition has a real shot. Many Hungarians, especially young people, are tuning into politics for the first time — hopeful, but also clear-eyed about what the government might do next to retain its grip on power.

With Péter Magyar at the helm, Tisza has managed to break through the government’s propaganda machine and electoral chicanery. Unlike Orbán’s flailing campaign — bogged down by government corruption and a weak economy — Magyar has barnstormed the country, pulling even disillusioned Fidesz supporters into the Tisza tent. He’s refused to engage in Orbán’s divisive tit-for-tat culture wars, focusing instead on building a grassroots anti-corruption movement that has caught the government off guard and galvanized youth support. Polls show just one in five young people now back Orbán.

This momentum among the youth has sent Fidesz (ironically, a Hungarian acronym for “the Alliance of Young Democrats”) scrambling to respond. Not only are they calling in favors from Vance and Trump, but also from other global far-right figures like France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.

As Laszlo Gendler writes in The Unpopulist:

Orbán has been reduced to pleading with parents on the campaign trail to drive home the stakes to their adult children. Fidesz is no longer in any meaningful sense an “Alliance of Young Democrats” — and hasn’t been in a long time. In fact, it has become the very political machine it was originally created to dismantle.

[Read Gendler’s whole piece: If Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen]

If polls — and Orbán’s desperation — are any indication, Magyar has a very real chance of not just winning, but of turning the page in Hungarian politics to a new era. If that happens, Hungary will join Poland and Brazil as a template for democratic revival.

For the United States, this suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:

1. Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.

2. Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.

3. Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.

Scenario two: Hungarian autocracy refuses to go quietly

There are already signs, however, that Fidesz has no plans to lose gracefully.

Last weekend, Orbán claimed that explosives were found near a pipeline carrying Russian natural gas through Serbia into Hungary, alluding to Ukraine’s alleged involvement. In response, Magyar criticized the government for fomenting a “false flag” intended to incite paranoia ahead of the election. Orbán has already deployed the military to energy facilities he baselessly claims are under Ukrainian threat, with additional domestic deployments or even an “emergency” election declaration still possible. On election day, voter intimidation, vote buying, and other irregularities are all plausible as Fidesz throws everything at the wall.

(Any of that sound familiar?)

Plus, as Americans have learned all too well in recent elections, the race isn’t likely to be over on election night.

If the results are neck-and-neck, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots could determine the final results, and Tisza is likely to gain when those ballots are counted. But absentee ballots won’t be counted until later next week — opening a window for the government to preemptively declare victory or cry fraud, setting off a legal battle that could drag on for months.

Any protracted legal fight will only benefit the Orbán government, which wields the resources and institutional power of the state. In any event, Tisza probably needs to lead by at least 5% nationwide to win a simple parliamentary majority and overcome the government’s extreme gerrymandering. And even then, winning a narrow majority of seats would likely not be enough for Tisza to form a stable government.

Or Fidesz may attempt other ploys to hold onto power beyond what we can foresee. It’s a long time between now and May 11, when a new parliament must legally be seated (though, in the event of contested results, this new parliament might initially include only those whose elections have been finalized).

If Orbán attempts to deny and overturn a loss at the ballot box, Hungary may instead offer a preview of threats to come in our own elections.

Watch closely for: How government power and emergency declarations can be weaponized against vote counting processes; how Orbán may seek to get allies in the judiciary to disqualify opposition voters; and the role of state-sponsored disinformation about election results.

Also watch the degree to which the United States government is willing to endorse an attempt by Fidesz to steal the election. If Donald Trump and JD Vance throw their weight behind an effort to overturn Hungary’s election results, it would place the U.S. on the same side as the Kremlin and reaffirm Trump’s general antipathy to democracy — both at home and abroad.

For more on what the administration might have planned heading into our own November midterms, read our report: Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it.

Hungary’s most important lesson: Resilience

To be clear: The U.S. isn’t Hungary.

Yes, Trump and his allies will be watching Sunday’s results to see what they might be able to bring stateside, and so we should do the same. But in the United States, democracy still has several key advantages that Hungarian democracy lacks.

Here, courts and laws regularly check the executive branch. Here, our elections are run by the states, not directed by the federal government. Here, our media remains (for the most part) free and independent from the White House. Here, Donald Trump has had less than two years to entrench himself in power, not 16 like Orbán.

On Sunday, the Hungarian people face a far more daunting task than we do in the United States this November (or even in 2028). And yet they remain unbroken. That resilience may be the most important lesson as we look to Budapest as a bellwether.

Hungary has survived autocracy before.

In 2024, after Trump was re-elected, journalist Kati Martin wrote an essay in The New York Times reflecting on the hope that the United States once symbolized for her parents as journalists imprisoned in Soviet-era Budapest.

In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.

Locked up in Soviet-occupied Hungary’s notorious Fo Street fortress, my father was blessedly still unaware that his wife — my mother, a reporter for United Press International — ­occupied a nearby cell. Nor did he know that his two small children, myself and my older sister, were living with strangers paid to look after them by the American wire services, my parents’ employer. Their crime was reporting on the show trials and jailing of priests, nuns and dissidents that Stalinist satellites of the postwar era used to clamp down on dissent.

The whole essay is marvelous and sobering. Gift link here: Why I’m not giving up on American democracy.

Now it is our turn, in the United States, to look to the Hungarian people as an example. This Sunday, look to Budapest for hope and for solace. And, above all, for resilience.

A party- and candidate-centered approach to proportional representation

As any electoral system nerd knows, there’s an inherent tradeoff between systems that focus on political parties and those that focus on individual candidates. At Protect Democracy, we tend to believe that a lot of the problems in our system come from weaknesses in political parties — but it’s true most Americans are more comfortable with candidate-centric elections.

A new primer by FairVote and Protect Democracy examines one of the electoral systems that bridges the two: Party Preferential Voting.

It’s what Australia calls “above the line” voting, and it’s yet another option for jurisdictions looking for ways to significantly improve our system for translating votes into seats.

Check out the rest of Protect Democracy’s work on proportional representation here.

“On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the soul of the American military.”

Worth a read: David French’s essay on why Trump’s threatening to command the armed forces to commit crimes against humanity is devastating to the institution of the military.

The instant I read Trump’s post, my thoughts turned to a very different quote: “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”

Who do you think said those words? A chaplain? A pope? A woke professor who doesn’t appreciate Pete Hegseth’s constant evocation of “lethality?”

No, they come from one of America’s fiercest warriors, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, speaking after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945.

…

Trump’s post was a declaration by an American president that he intended to commit war crimes so grave that they could, if fully carried out, constitute a crime against humanity. As terrible as that is, Trump’s putative orders also threatened to break the moral backbone of the American military and trigger one of the most serious constitutional crises in American history.

Read the whole thing.

Authoritarian Action Watch updates

The president’s threat to commit war crimes in Iran represents an aggrandizement of his own authority, and is testing the bounds of civil-military relations. Alongside his move to circumvent Congress in paying DHS employees, and Secretary Hegseth’s interference with military appointments, this is a perilous moment for the balance of power in the federal government.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

In February, Ansley Skipper and Ben Berwick wrote about a “three-headed monster heading for our elections.”

The combined forces of the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are shaping up to be the Trump administration’s election subversion Chimera (that’s the fire-breathing lion-snake-goat hybrid creature from Greek mythology) in 2026.

Ben and Ansley’s argument was, essentially, those three agencies represent the apex of the administration’s powers over law, violence, and propaganda. And so they form a powerful wedge that can — and will — be directed at the midterms.

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In the two months since, two of the three heads of those agencies have been fired.

Kristi Noem was ousted from Homeland Security on March 5 and Pam Bondi was fired as Attorney General effective yesterday. The third head, Tulsi Gabbard at ODNI, is on the rocks as Trump polls his advisors on replacing her, The Guardian reports.

There are three ways to read this turnover in the Chimera triumvirate:

1. This is a positive development because it shows how badly Donald Trump’s efforts to entrench himself in power are floundering. In desperation, he is firing the people who were tasked with punishing his perceived enemies and protecting his party from future accountability at the ballot box.

2. This is a dangerous development because the president will now hand the Chimera to new leaders even more willing to abuse power, people like Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who was Trump’s personal lawyer and point person for retaliatory prosecutions.

3. This is a sideshow — it matters much less who is in charge of the Chimera than whether our system can stop it. Bondi and Noem’s shortcomings weren’t that they were insufficiently zealous (by all accounts, both were willing to go to whatever lengths to please the White House). They came up short because the legal system and the American people successfully pushed back on their abuse. None of that changes with new leadership who will now face the same substantial obstacles.

What does it mean when an autocrat fires his enforcers?

As usual, it’s hard to know if Trump’s setbacks are truly victories for democracy.

Yes, it’s good news that Noem and Bondi (and potentially Gabbard next) failed in the task the president set out for them: to bring vengeance to his enemies.

But Bondi and Noem were failing to translate the weaponization of their departments into the revenge Trump was hoping for. That’s not a bad thing. And now they’re gone. If the White House is able to install new leadership even more willing to break the law, then they may be able to get their entrenchment agenda back on track.

Or it may not matter either way. The question of who leads the Chimera may be immaterial to whether it succeeds.

When the authoritarian fires his enforcers, should we celebrate? Should we be worried? Should we even care?

The truth is: It’s kind of all three. All of those interpretations are true. Bondi’s firing, like Noem’s before her, is a clear indicator that authoritarianism is losing. At the same time, new leadership may find new ways to succeed. And most of all, the functionaries in charge of the effort to undermine elections aren’t as important as what the rest of our democracy does in response.1

Bondi and Noem didn’t simply fail. They were defeated by a legal and political system that refused to allow them to politicize justice, weaponize law enforcement, and corrupt elections. The pushback is working! But just as there is no superhuman autocratic henchman who can magically entrench the president in power through force of will, there’s also no silver bullet to prevent that entrenchment from happening.

All of us, collectively, need to be even more on guard to protect the election from the three-headed Chimera — especially now that it’s going to have new leaders.

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

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How to protect the midterms from the Chimera

So how do we stop the new-look DOJ, DHS, and maybe ODNI (as well as the rest of the federal government) from successfully meddling in the midterms?

Same strategy as before. Everyone in the United States who believes in free and fair elections needs to be committed to these four things.

First, fight the Chimera at every step. Legal, political, communications, and protest strategies need to push back against every abuse. (For instance, as Barb McQuade writes, the Senate now gets a do-over confirming an Attorney General who will uphold the rule of law.)

Second, make the midterm elections the loudest celebration of democracy in American history. Federal agencies like DOJ, DHS, and ODNI can only corrupt the election on the margins; they’re likely powerless against overwhelming turnout.

Third, defend the integrity of the results. Together, we can make them unquestionable and widely accepted.

Fourth, enforce a peaceful transfer of power from this Congress to the next one.

For more recommendations on how different groups — from local officials to civil society to citizens and voters — can do all those things, read Executive Override, our 2026 election report.

Push back against DOJ overreach, today

The Department of Justice published a proposed rule that would allow the Attorney General to intercept and indefinitely delay state bar investigations of current and former DOJ attorneys. This would effectively place an entire class of government lawyers above the disciplinary framework that governs every other member of the bar.

Some of our partners have developed a template for anyone interested in submitting their own public comment opposing this dangerous proposed rule. (Also see: Protect Democracy’s guidance on what makes an effective public comment.)

Individual, personalized comments carry significant legal weight — agencies must respond to every substantive comment, and the record created now will shape any future litigation. The deadline to submit comments is April 6, 2026.

Submit a comment

Protect Democracy sues DHS over warrantless home entry memo

One example of fighting the Chimera: Yesterday, Protect Democracy and partners sued DHS — on behalf of immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minnesota whose homes were searched — over a secret internal memo directing ICE agents to enter and search homes without a warrant.

Read about the lawsuit in The New York Times here and read our statement here.

Said Kristy Parker in the Times:

The Constitution creates a system where we don’t give law enforcement officers — just because they wear badges — unbridled power to seize people on the street or go in their houses… They do have power when they have proper cause to do it, but the Constitution requires them to go outside of the executive branch to another branch of government to have their case assessed, so that there’s some sort of reasoned, neutral inquiry.

This constitutional requirement is especially robust when it comes to the government entering people’s homes. Doing so has long required government agents to get a judicial warrant. That’s not what DHS has been doing. And so our clients are suing.

Is it safe to use Signal?

Sharing information is key to collective action, and in the modern fight against authoritarianism, that usually means communicating online.

Signal has become a critical messaging platform for protesters in Minneapolis and other coalitions across the country. Following reports of groups being infiltrated, though, it’s also fair to wonder whether Signal is safe to use.

In a new piece for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Adam Goldstein shares guidance on whether Signal is a safe tool. Thankfully, Signal is quite safe, even if it’s not foolproof. As he puts it:

Don’t commit crimes, because you’ll get caught. That’s got nothing to do with Signal though. Signal’s fine.

Read the full piece →

For more on how coalitions can operate safely and securely, read Protect Democracy’s guide →

A time of Major Questions

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could fundamentally change how citizenship works in the United States. Regardless of the outcome, it’s a startling reminder both of how much power the Court claims to wield and of the fragility of the Court’s legitimacy as it weighs how much to empower an autocratic White House.

The Court does not have to be this way. This week, friend of Protect Democracy Jesse Wegman (a former member of the New York Times editorial board) launched a new Substack with the Brennan Center all about the Supreme Court. Major Questions will analyze everything from major decisions to ways reformers can reestablish the Supreme Court’s independent role in our democracy (as well as its standing with the American public). It’s immediately a must-read for me.

Subscribe to Major Questions.

How you can help:

Protect Democracy advisor Rachel Kleinfeld has a wonderful new piece on the concrete way every American can fight for democracy between elections. The big takeaway? It’s all about eroding institutional support for authoritarianism:

The number one thing regular people can do is figure out where they are in relation to a pillar of support [for authoritarianism] — think businesses, professions, religious groups, or community organizations and start doing things that might persuade those people or organizations to step away.

As Kleinfeld writes, this is an exercise in empathy, and often a difficult one. But it’s also among the most effective ways to break up authoritarian consolidation.

Read the full piece →

Explore Protect Democracy’s database of ways to help →

The White House is pressuring Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, the omnibus voter suppression bill that aims to swing the midterms by mass-disenfranchising voters.

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To say Trump is obsessed with this bill is perhaps an understatement. Just this week, the White House has fomented airport chaos by blocking TSA funding as leverage to try to jam the SAVE America Act through, told senators to skip Easter to pass it “for Jesus,” and argued “we won’t have a Country any longer” if it fails. (All while voting by mail himself in Tuesday’s special elections in Florida.)

The SAVE America Act is going to fail. It doesn’t have anywhere close to 60 votes to clear the filibuster. So why is the president pushing so hard?

Trump is obsessed because, at its core, the SAVE America Act is not just an election subversion strategy in itself. It is also part of a pretext for a much broader strategy to undermine the midterms.

Today, Protect Democracy released Executive Override, a new publication documenting how the Trump administration is deploying the full machinery of the federal government against the 2026 midterm elections. The report describes a coordinated strategy already underway to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories; tilt the electoral playing field and manipulate election outcomes; and, if necessary, try to overturn unfavorable results.

Read the report

This strategy does not require Congress to pass any laws. In fact, the central goal is for the White House to override Congress and states. To do so, the administration plans to use the lies promoted by the SAVE America Act: that elections are rife with fraud and that harsh anti-voter measures by the federal government are a necessary response. As my colleague Alexandra Chandler puts it:

“You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

In other words, Trump is pushing the SAVE America Act not just on a distant hope of disenfranchising some voters. He is, much more immediately, hoping to use its failure to override the electoral process entirely.

The three prongs of the White House’s Executive Override strategy

Over the coming months, we should expect the federal government to attack the midterms in a variety of ways. It’s a three-part plan to try to ensure that the president effectively picks the next Congress, not the voters.

First, deceive: The administration has institutionalized election denialism as official federal policy, using law enforcement and intelligence powers to manufacture the appearance of fraud — including a Jan. 2026 FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election office and the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico — while dismantling the agencies that protect elections from real threats.

Second, disrupt: Federal investigative and prosecutorial power is being used to target political opponents, civil society organizations, and nonpartisan election officials. The administration has also created conditions for voter intimidation through the possibility of deployment of ICE agents near polling locations and the use of force against protesters.

Third, if necessary, deny: The administration is positioning itself to contest, delay, or overturn results it doesn’t like through post-election law enforcement action, pressure on certification officials, bad-faith litigation, and potential defiance of court orders.

We don’t know exactly how this strategy will manifest in the months ahead (I suspect Trump and his allies don’t either — they’re going to improvise a lot) but just for example, here are three news stories just from this week that clearly fit into the plan:

• In California, one of the president’s allies — a sheriff who just so happens to be running for governor — seized more than 650,000 ballots from last year’s redistricting election based on an “audit” from a group of citizens. (Not clear yet if the federal government is involved, but it’s a textbook example of casting doubt on elections.)

• In Washington, D.C., Trump’s allies on the Supreme Court expressed extreme skepticism towards mail-in voting, hinting at unfounded conspiracy theories about security and integrity.

• In Oklahoma, the state government handed over its voter rolls — including sensitive personal information — to the DOJ as part of the administration’s demands for data on all voters.

That’s just recent days. Expect stories like this every week between now and when the next Congress is sworn in next January. All of them will fit into this overarching strategy — and they aim at the same goal: overturning elections if the president’s allies lose.

What can we all do about it?

The good news is that this strategy, while genuinely dangerous, faces enormous obstacles. And we are far from powerless.

The Executive Override report identifies five major roadblocks standing in the administration’s way. These are the pillars of American democracy that make it much harder to corrupt and steal legislative elections in the United States than it was in Russia, Hungary, or Venezuela.

None of them are invincible — but together, they’re formidable.

Our elections are decentralized. There is no federal election system. Elections are run entirely at the state and local level, with very little role for the federal government. That means Trump and his allies aren’t seizing control of the machinery from the inside. Even from the White House, they’re attacking it from the outside-in. That’s a much harder thing to do. Still, state and local election officials need to have a clear understanding of the likely threats before the pressure arrives, making concrete plans for how to respond when it does, and building solidarity with counterparts across their states and communities so that no one faces that pressure alone. [Read more here →]

Civil society is ready. Far more so than even in 2020, a wide range of nonpartisan organizations, civic groups, and private sector leaders are prepared to defend free and fair elections. The pro-democracy coalition is bigger and more organized than it has ever been — but it only works if it stays active. All of us need to speak out, organize, and act, using whatever credibility and reach we have to protect civic participation and make clear that attacks on our elections will not go unanswered. And yes: Be prepared to attend large protests if a critical moment demands it. [Read more here →]

The justice system remains a real check — for now. Courts have been one of the most effective counterweights to the administration’s power grabs, and that resilience extends to election law. But “fairly resilient” is not the same as invulnerable, and the legal community as a whole needs to be ready — from grand jurors who scrutinize the evidence to magistrates who decline to rubber-stamp deficient warrants to judges who apply the law rigorously when election subversion moves fast. The judiciary doesn’t defend itself. The legal profession has to defend it. [Read more here →]

The media can connect the dots. Independent journalism — including social and new media — remains capable of covering this story honestly. That matters enormously. The administration’s strategy depends on individual abuses of power being seen as isolated incidents rather than parts of a coordinated whole. Journalists, influencers, and creators need to be prepared to connect those dots: establishing clear protocols for covering government disinformation, linking specific actions to the broader strategy, and shedding light, not spreading fear. [Read more here →]

And finally: We the People. At its core, the Executive Override strategy seeks to rob all of us of our ability to elect our own legislators. That is not something the vast majority of Americans are going to accept quietly.

But we’re going to have to show up. Counter disinformation. Vote. Help others vote. Strengthen community connections. Volunteer as poll workers. Be prepared to mobilize peacefully if a critical moment demands it. (If you want practice, the next No Kings protest is this Saturday.)

Democracy only survives if we’re active participants in it — that’s always been true, and it’s never been more urgent than right now.

Read the report

Want to learn more? Join us on March 31st at 1 pm ET / 10 AM PT to dive deeper into this critical analysis and how we prevail together

Protect Democracy’s acting chief impact officer Ben Berwick and All Voting is Local co-founder and chief executive officer Hannah Fried will dig in to the report, the systems and strategies in place in key races across the country, and why we must face these threats together.

Register here

ICE is not legally allowed to backfill TSA

The administration claims to have found an end-run around the partial government shutdown: sending ICE agents to airports to do crowd control.

This is, of course, as stupid as it sounds (ICE agents have no training on airport security). But just as importantly, it’s against the law. Congress didn’t fund ICE to do airport security — and unlawful spending abuses like these set a dangerous precedent for the future.

Protect Democracy has a new explainer of why: DHS funding is no blank check — and doesn’t permit ICE to backfill TSA

The use of ICE for crowd control at airports — a role that has nothing to do with its authorized immigration enforcement mission — is an alarming and drastic repurposing of federal agents to create a standing security force seemingly deployed at the whim of the President.

The Constitution recognizes the danger of having a “standing army” answerable only to the executive and unaccountable to the Congress. That’s why it limits funding for the Army to no more than two years. While this limit has been largely ignored for the last century, recent questions have been raised about whether Congress should once again take up this important check against executive branch abuses of authority.

President Trump has already shown his eagerness to deploy uniformed military forces for domestic policing operations. Now that those efforts have largely been rejected by courts, it is troubling to see him turn to ICE — newly equipped with military-grade equipment — as an all-purpose civilian law enforcement force.

Read the whole thing →

FCC Chair Brendan Carr has ordered the American media to rally around the flag of war.

Citing Donald Trump’s anger over Iran War media coverage, Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses unless broadcasters “correct course before their license renewals come up.” He did not specify which outlets the FCC is threatening, directing his aim at the media generally.

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This threat is as outrageous — and un-American — as it sounds. So much so that Republican former FCC commissioners, chairs, and senior staff called on Congress to step in and stop Carr’s abuses. Here is the full statement from former FCC Chairs Mark Fowler (a Reagan appointee) and Alfred Sikes (an H.W. Bush appointee), and former FCC Commissioner Rachelle Chong (a Clinton appointee), along with former FCC Chief of Staff Jerald Fritz:

While this weekend’s threats by Chair Carr weren’t his first, they represent a notable escalation of attacks against news media, which are especially concerning in an election year.

In a democracy, the government does not get to decide what is news and how to cover it. Chairman Carr knows better. In 2019 he rejected the idea that the FCC could police speech in the name of the “public interest.” The Constitution as well as the Communications Act forbid it. We filed a formal petition last fall with the FCC explaining why the First Amendment forbids the use of the news distortion policy — or any FCC power for that matter — to correct alleged bias in the news. Chairman Carr has failed to take any action on that petition. Instead he has continued his unconstitutional pattern of threatening to strip broadcast licenses from stations whose news outlets report news in a way he or the President doesn’t like.

Because Chairman Carr has shown he is uninterested in following the Constitution, Congress should act. Congress should investigate the FCC’s interactions with media companies and legislate to remove or narrow the regulatory powers Carr is abusing — including the oft-cited news distortion policy. The recent oversight hearings held by the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee were good starts. But there is much more to be investigated, including the details of how the Chairman’s abusive regulatory coercion has affected media companies seeking to merge. Or, as the Chairman has shown himself to be constitutionally unfit to hold the office, Congress could consider more serious remedies. It is past time to stand up to this intimidation. The future of free speech and the free press in this country are at risk.

The emphasis is mine, but the indignation is clearly theirs.

It’s hard to overstate how far over the line of the First Amendment you have to be before former FCC chairs and commissioners, traditionally some of the most careful and staid voices in Washington, start calling you “constitutionally unfit to hold the office.”

They also aren’t the only Republicans criticizing Carr. Conservatives like Sen. Ron Johnson and even Marjorie Taylor Greene are also raising alarm, including with worries about the censorship precedent he could be setting for future administrations.

If anything, though, Carr’s behavior is even more dangerous than it looks.

Carr and Trump aren’t just aiming for censorship (although they are hoping for that too); they’re also trying to use the threat of censorship to destroy the robust tradition of independent, fact-based American journalism altogether.

Direct censorship through the FCC is extremely difficult

If you go to the FCC’s website, you’ll find a helpful explainer page (which, unlike other FCC pages, does not appear to have been tampered with under the current administration).

On that page, the FCC itself is clear: “The FCC is barred by law from trying to prevent the broadcast of any point of view.”

What Brendan Carr is doing is illegal. It is illegal for the FCC to even threaten to use its regulatory power to coerce or censor speech.

Specifically, the Communications Act — as the FCC’s web explainer helpfully cites — states that:

[Nothing in the law] shall be understood or construed to give the Commission the power of censorship over the [broadcast] communications or signals transmitted by any [broadcast] station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of [over-the-air] broadcast communication.

If Carr were to follow through on his threats and attempt to strip licenses for disfavored coverage, there are many technical, legal, and practical barriers.1 But most of them boil down to this: Such transparent censorship would almost certainly be reversed by the courts. Immediately.

Here’s the Supreme Court’s position as of 2024, as summarized by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC:

[O]n the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.

Read more: The FCC’s News Distortion Policy should be rescinded.

So why is Carr threatening censorship when doing so is so plainly illegal?

The broader goals are intimidation, self-censorship, and a drift towards media capture

Like anyone who makes similar threats, Carr clearly hopes he will never have to try to follow through.

Instead, the goal is to get media outlets to engage in what’s called “anticipatory obedience” — to obey in advance.

This is a vicious cycle. The more editors, producers, executives, and owners feel threatened by administration officials, the more they will be inclined to check their own coverage.

Brendan Carr doesn’t just want to censor specific outlets or stories. He wants every outlet and every journalist to worry about how the FCC is going to react to every word they write or say. He wants to be in the back of every reporter’s head. To have them temper every headline just to make it “more defensible.” To hold back on controversial stories for more sourcing. To scrap some altogether. To promote pro-administration voices in the name of “balance.”

To think first of politics, not of truth.

The more outlets check their coverage, the more the administration becomes unchecked. And the greater its power to threaten others.

On and on the cycle spins. Over time, as the media drifts from bias to outright capture, eventually the once-free press looks anything but.

As my colleague Rachel Goodman told a congressional spotlight hearing last month:

[The ultimate goal is the] “Hungary model” of media capture, in which a nominally independent media regulator, who in fact is completely aligned with the president or the ruling party, exerts financial and administrative pressure on independent media in an effort to destabilize their business and, ultimately, eliminate the independent media company. In Hungary, when Fidesz achieved its supermajority in 2010, one of the first laws it passed was a media law, justified as a needed “corrective” to left wing bias in the press. Like the FCC, Hungary’s new media authority is authorized to revoke broadcasting licenses and approve or prohibit mergers, and it has used these powers to penalize media critical of the government and encourage the expansion and consolidation of pro-government media. The Hungary model has been deployed in de-democratizing societies around the world; when Poland’s Law and Justice party held the government from 2015 to 2023, it similarly deployed regulatory power to weaken critical media through antitrust investigations, licensing decisions, and retroactive taxation.

We’re already seeing what this looks like at CBS, at the Washington Post, at the Los Angeles Times. CNN may be next if Trump-friendly Paramount succeeds in buying Warner Bros. Discovery. (Note: Carr has openly praised the deal and pledged to swiftly approve it; state regulators have a different view.)

Elections are the target — but remember: Carr’s power is illusory

All of this, like everything else the administration does, should be understood as aimed squarely at future elections.

Importantly, the goal is not just to distort the news that voters are hearing before elections so that they are more inclined to vote for the president’s political allies (although it certainly is that too). The scarier implication is what a captured media could mean if and when the autocratic faction attempts to undermine or overturn future election results.

Instead of headlines like these?

Carr and others in the administration would want you to instead see ones like this.

Here is the good news: The United States is not Hungary. Brendan Carr’s power may be easily abused, but — at least when it comes to censorship — it is also largely illusory. Every single outlet can, indeed they must, respond to Carr’s threats with something that echoes that statement at the top from former FCC leaders:

That the FCC has absolutely no business censoring speech.

That Carr’s abusive threats make him constitutionally unfit for the office he holds.

And that the free press in this country will continue to put facts above politics long after Carr is gone from the FCC.

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The SAVE America Act strategy, explained

This week, the Senate has been ensnared by Trump’s efforts to ram through the SAVE America Act, a Frankenstein’s monster of deliberate voter suppression and disenfranchisement measures that would wreak havoc on America’s elections process. It would, among other things, require a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, impose highly restrictive ID requirements on in-person and mail voting, target elections officials with steep criminal penalties, and potentially disenfranchise the 69 million married women who have changed their last names.

The law is and has always been doomed to failure. So what’s the big deal?

The Atlantic’s Russell Berman and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez explain (with an assist from my colleague Alexandra):

The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail…

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

The whole article is a must-read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill (gift link)

What else we’re tracking:

• “What if we make the House bigger?” Highly recommend this conversation on Highway to Hill with Aubrey Wilson and Anne Meeker of POPVOX Foundation on House expansion and proportional representation in practice.

• Sweden’s Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, one of the most prestigious academic institutions studying democracy, has an alarming new report on the United States: “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”

• Similarly, Freedom House is out with their Freedom in the World 2026 report. Global freedom declined for the 25th straight year (the U.S. is now less free than Poland, Mongolia, and Romania). Still, they write, “even in this especially challenging moment, there are reasons for optimism.”

• Appointing JAGs to prosecute regular civilian cases undermines military and violates law — Admiral James McPherson and Protect Democracy’s Zach West explain the troubling new trend for Law.com.

• I highly recommend this essay from Protect Democracy advisor Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on Donald Trump’s increasingly irrational foreign policy: Everyone but Trump understands what he’s done.

On January 23, Colleen Fagan stood in a parking lot in Maine and watched federal agents conduct an immigration operation. Fagan, who would tell you with great pride that she is a “lifelong Mainer,” didn’t interfere. She didn’t block anyone. She recorded what she saw — something Americans have an unambiguous constitutional right to do.

A masked man started recording her back. She asked why.

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“Cause we have a nice little database,” he sneered. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Two days earlier, Elinor Hilton was observing ICE agents outside of a Home Depot when agents similarly started filming her.

“He said ‘We’re putting you on a domestic terrorist watch list, and if you keep coming to things like this, we’re going to come to your house later and arrest you,’” Hilton recounted in an interview.

Protect Democracy is suing on behalf of Hilton, Fagan, and other Mainers who have faced similar intimidation attempts. (Read more: Hilton v. Noem et al.)

The same tactics have also been documented in Oregon and Minnesota. Federal agents in multiple cities have surveilled and intimidated community members who observed immigration enforcement operations. The coordination is too consistent to be coincidental.

We don’t know exactly how and to what extent the Trump administration is already surveilling American citizens as the president seeks to intimidate and retaliate against critics. We do, however, know that many in our government are hell-bent on developing unprecedented tools, systems, and databases to keep watch on those they see as “enemies from within.”

The surveillance we’re already seeing in places like Maine may just be the beginning.

If the president gets his way in the months ahead — especially in his administration’s ongoing campaign to control the AI industry — we could be entering a new and Orwellian era for domestic surveillance.

The Anthropic fight is over the future of surveillance and democracy

Earlier this week, AI company Anthropic filed suit against the Defense Department for designating the company a security threat.

On the surface, the dispute concerns the Trump administration’s attempt to essentially take over the company “by force and coerce them into maintaining a product for uses they fundamentally oppose,” as Ian Bassin and Nicole Schneidman explained last week: A steel mill the president might not be able to seize.

In a larger sense, though, this fight is over the future of artificial intelligence in our democracy. The Defense Department attempted to force Anthropic to provide AI technology without agreeing that it would not use the technology for two use cases:

• Mass domestic surveillance.

• Lethal autonomous weapons without a human operator.

Anthropic refused to provide its technology without the Defense Department agreeing to these limitations. And so the federal government is attempting, in retaliation, to destroy Anthropic.

Shortly after Anthropic filed their lawsuit, a group of 37 AI scientists and researchers at competitors OpenAI and Google — including Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of Google’s AI division — filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s position. (Disclosure: My colleagues at Protect Democracy are counsel for the brief.)

Remember, these are people who work for Anthropic’s competitors in the most intense corporate arms race in modern history. And they stood up to defend Anthropic and the red lines that it has drawn against the federal government.

The entire brief is worth your time, but I especially recommend the section on surveillance. Here are the most important parts:

At its core, AI-enabled mass surveillance means the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on the behavior of an entire population continuously and in real time. The devices and data streams required to do this already exist. As of 2018, there were approximately 70 million surveillance cameras operating in the United States across airports, subway stations, parking lots, storefronts, and street corners. Every smartphone continuously broadcasts location data to carriers and dozens of applications. Credit and debit cards generate a timestamped record of nearly every commercial transaction Americans make. Social media platforms log not just what people post, but what they read, how long they browse, and what they posted before deleting it. Employers, insurers, and data brokers have assembled behavioral profiles on most American adults that are already, in many cases, available for government purchase without a warrant. What does not yet exist is the AI layer that transforms this sprawling, fragmented data landscape into a unified, real-time surveillance apparatus. Today, these streams are siloed, inconsistent, and require significant human effort to connect. From our vantage point at frontier AI labs, we understand that an AI system used for mass surveillance could dissolve those silos, correlating face recognition data with location history, transaction records, social graphs, and behavioral patterns across hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

The mere existence of such a capability in government hands — even if never activated against a specific individual — changes the character of public life in a democracy. Behavioral scientists and legal scholars have long documented what is sometimes called the “panopticon effect”: when people believe they may be observed, they modify their behavior as if they are always being observed, regardless of whether anyone is actually watching. The journalist thinks twice before calling a source inside the military, knowing the call could be logged and crossreferenced. The activist softens her public messaging, calculating that visibility now carries risk it didn’t carry before. The academic researcher avoids certain search terms — not because the research is wrong, but because she doesn’t want to surface in a database. None of these people have been targeted. None have been punished. But their behavior has already been constrained, and with it the democratic functions they serve — a free press, political organizing, open intellectual inquiry — have been quietly degraded. These chilling effects require no abuse, only the awareness that the capability exists.

History offers ample warning. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which ran from 1956 to 1971 and was exposed years later, demonstrated how domestic intelligence powers justified by security concerns were systematically turned against civil rights leaders, journalists, and political dissidents. The program did not merely surveil its targets. It fabricated evidence, sent anonymous letters designed to destroy marriages and careers, tipped off employers, and worked to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It operated for fifteen years before Congress learned of its existence. AI does not merely replicate those dangers — it multiplies them by orders of magnitude, automating at national scale what previously required hundreds of human operatives.

Further enhancing the risk terrain for AI’s deployment in this context, the Pentagon operates under a legal framework oriented toward external threats and warfighting, not domestic civil life. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 in direct response to the use of federal troops to police American civilians during Reconstruction, reflects a constitutional tradition of keeping military power categorically separate from domestic governance.6 When the Pentagon acts domestically, it is operating in legal territory it was not designed for, with oversight structures that were not built to catch domestic abuses. That is in part why the bulk data collection programs by the Pentagon’s own National Security Agency (NSA), revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, were so shocking and produced measurable chilling effects on lawful speech and inquiry. A study published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found statistically significant drops in traffic to Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics following the Snowden revelations, likely as ordinary people adjusted their online behavior in response to awareness that their searches were potentially being monitored.

The harms from building this infrastructure are not easily undone, as we understand in our field. Data collected on a population does not expire. A database of location records, behavioral profiles, and social graphs built today will still exist years from now, accessible to whoever controls it under whatever political conditions prevail then. That data would feed into an AI-powered surveillance infrastructure that, once constructed, tends to expand rather than contract. Agencies find new uses for existing capabilities, authorities get quietly reinterpreted, and the political cost of dismantling something already built is almost always higher than the cost of letting it continue and grow.
…

We do not suggest that the Defendants intend to misuse such capabilities. We suggest that the question of intent is the wrong question. Democratic governance does not rest on the good intentions of those in power. It rests on structural constraints that make abuse difficult regardless of intent. AI-enabled mass domestic surveillance, deployed without transparent legal constraints and independent oversight, removes those structural protections in ways that no amount of good faith can replace.

[Read the whole brief.]

Six ways to keep the genie of AI-powered mass surveillance in the bottle

Despite what the masked agent told Colleen Fagan, Trump has probably not yet managed to weaponize domestic surveillance to its maximum potential.

The main legal safeguards that protect you from surveillance — the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Privacy Act — are all still relatively intact. But none of these were designed with the immense surveillance capabilities of AI in mind.

Here are six strategies that can help ensure further dangerous lines do not get crossed:

First, legal vigilance — Courts and litigators must firmly stand up for First and Fourth Amendment rights, not just in cases like these where surveillance is directly at issue, but across all of the federal government’s ongoing attempts to intimidate and retaliate against critics. And the courts must uphold the industry guardrails that shore up vulnerabilities in the law when it comes to constraining AI-powered surveillance capabilities. Plus, the government’s targets — like Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton, like Anthropic — must refuse to be intimidated and instead have the courage to take their government to court to stand up for their own rights, including in the case of private companies’ right to self-imposed guardrails that on the technology they are developing.

The Temporary Restraining Order hearing for Hilton v. Noem et al., the Maine ICE lawsuit, is scheduled for March 16. Read the full complaint and motion here.

Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War et al. will likely be heard in the coming weeks.

Second, solidarity and collective action — As with Anthropic, the Trump administration will continue to use a divide-and-conquer strategy to build surveillance capacity. Instead of targeting everyone at once, they will continue to pick out individual targets — whether it’s a company or a person — and try to intimidate them.

When someone is targeted, either by intimidation or surveillance, all of us must rush to their defense.

That’s exactly what the senior researchers at OpenAI and Google did when their competitors came under attack. We must all be ready to do the same.

Third, democratic oversight — While courts can protect individuals from the effects of surveillance and intimidation, our democratically elected representatives are the ones who must provide oversight and accountability to ensure that the federal government is staying within the law.

Last week, an impressive list of 35 national security, business, civil society, and technology leaders wrote to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees urging them to uphold their oversight responsibilities as well as to “establish clear statutory policy governing the use of artificial intelligence” on autonomous weapons and surveillance.

Until Congress acts, our freedoms will never be safe. Read their whole letter here.

Fourth, security — If you’re someone that the Trump administration might consider to be a political enemy (and really, even if you’re not), now is the time to review your digital and information security practices. How easy would it be for a malicious government actor to get their hands on your private information?

For tips on how to keep your digital house in order, I recommend Protect Democracy’s new operational security best practices (this document is for coalitions specifically, but it’s useful for everyone).

Fifth, data protections — Surveillance is only as good as the data it has access to, and data access breaches can be catastrophic (for instance, the former DOGE-er who allegedly stole Social Security info on a thumb drive to take to his next job). By focusing on data weak points, we can protect against some of the worst abuses.

Last month, Nicole Schneidman and Edison Forman wrote about how to weaken ICE’s surveillance apparatus by protecting DMV data and interrogating companies that share automated license plate recognition (ALPR) data with ICE.

Read more: When ICE’s surveillance machine comes for Americans.

Sixth, public outcry — All of the above are important and effective, but they pale in comparison to the effect of widespread public outcry. If the American people firmly and loudly reject mass government surveillance, if they protest and confront their elected officials and even vote them out if necessary, then I feel confident that we will never have to live under mass domestic surveillance regime.

But if we shrug our shoulders, perhaps thinking there’s nothing we can do? Then I’m not so sure.

Did that video at the top of the agent talking about a “nice little database” of domestic terrorists make you angry?

If so — don’t keep it to yourself.

A week ago, the president unilaterally launched a full-scale war to kill Iran’s leadership and overturn the Iranian regime.

Our country’s founders would be horrified. The Constitution was designed to prevent an unchecked, imperial leader from dragging the country to war on a whim. Congress was supposed to share warmaking powers with the president to prevent exactly this scenario. (Read about why: The founders gave the first branch war powers for a reason.)

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Our constitutional system of checks and balances over warmaking is functionally dead. With Congress abdicating on Iran, the president is unbound and acting like it. Donald Trump wants you to believe he is already an imperial ruler able to shape the world to his whim.

So are we — and our democracy — already screwed?

No.

The president’s projection of strength, his bravado in starting this war, is not just hubris. It is an illusion. In truth, this administration is currently weaker than it has ever been. And many of the most critical guardrails in our democracy — especially those around elections — are still (relatively) intact. Instead of the hard work to continue consolidating power, Trump instead just gambled his presidency on a quagmire in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the authoritarian project, which had been stalling since last summer, is suddenly facing the most pronounced string of losses yet (for my whole list, read to the end).

We are still so far from safety. It’s still going to take all of us to ensure that democracy endures over the next three years. But, big picture, authoritarianism is losing.

The spectrum of hard and soft guardrails

How can Trump be so unchecked abroad and still not have consolidated autocratic power at home? It’s because not all limits on presidential power are the same.

Our democracy, like any democracy, has a whole bunch of guardrails. Some are hard and some are soft.

I think of soft guardrails as the things that a president “must not,” “traditionally does not,” and “legally isn’t allowed to” do. We often say a president “can’t” go to war without Congressional approval, unilaterally shutter agencies, or usurp the power of the purse — but really we mean he’s not allowed to do those things. They are against norms, against the law, or even against the Constitution. But unless there’s someone to stop him, semantically speaking, he can do them; the president can violate the Constitution.

Soft guardrails matter, but they’re the first thing to go on the slide to dictatorship.

Hard guardrails are actual barriers, not just rules. In order to abuse power, a president needs to literally have the manpower, resources, and capacity to carry out the abuse.

Or, alternatively, hard guardrails can be countervailing actors in a system able to firmly push back. The courts, the civil service, Congress when it does its job. States passing laws to protect their citizens. Protestors expressing their First Amendment rights who refuse to be intimidated.

Think of it as a series of defensive barriers that get increasingly less permeable as you go from “he’s not allowed to do that” to “no, he actually can’t do that.” An authoritarian obstacle course.

How far an autocrat is able to go from left to right, how far he’s able to get through the increasingly hard barriers, is ultimately up to all of us.

In the United States, we’re still only maybe halfway through the spectrum. Many of the most important hard guardrails are — as of March 2026 — still at least somewhat intact.

There are still many practical barriers to Trump interfering in elections

Consider the many hard guardrails that prevent a president from interfering in elections.

First, the federal government — which is the only thing the president has direct control over — has a very limited role in election processes. Elections are, per the Constitution, run at the state and local level.

Donald Trump cannot order your local elections officials to do anything because your local elections officials do not work for him. He cannot force them to break the law and he cannot fire them if they refuse. If the president tries to issue an order instructing local officials to interfere in an election, they will be legally required to ignore that order — same as you would be if the president tried to issue an order telling you to interfere in the election. And if they break the law, they could face criminal charges under state law (the consequences of which the president, who can only grant pardons for federal crimes, has no power to shield them from).

Yes, there are some areas where the federal government, by law, plays a role in elections. But it’s mostly defining baselines on security, setting standards on voting rights, and providing funding. Practically speaking, the president cannot nationalize, cancel, or otherwise upend an election because there is simply no pathway to him doing so.

To be clear, the White House may (and almost certainly will) still abuse the power that it does have to try to meddle in the elections process. Trump may try to do outlandish things, like unilaterally ban mail-in voting or mass-disenfranchise voters. He might even succeed in some of them. But it’s still a long, uphill battle for him to tilt or rig the elections against the opposition.

It is possible for an autocrat to overcome hard guardrails. It’s just… well, hard.

And if he does, I believe we can collectively ensure that other actors and institutions — the courts, the press, the business community, law enforcement, and yes, even Congress — push back. It’s one thing for the president to abuse his power to topple a foreign dictator, it’s quite another for him to attempt to end representative government in the United States. I’m not saying courts and Congress would never go along with election subversion schemes (after all, 147 members of Congress violated their oaths in voting to overturn the 2020 election), but it’s far less of a done deal than it is with something like war powers.

It’s not a done deal because of the last and hardest guardrail:

All of us.

In an autocratizing country (like ours), the last and hardest guardrail is convincing the public to go along.

That may sound contradictory — isn’t the point of authoritarianism that public opinion no longer matters? Yes, that’s true to a degree, but only after an autocrat has consolidated power. Before, it’s the opposite. Until it’s too late to turn back, modern competitive authoritarians desperately need to convince the populace to accept their authoritarian project.

It is still not too late for the United States. And Donald Trump is losing public opinion. Here is FiftyPlusOne’s tracker:

The White House is losing everywhere

Perhaps because of this deteriorating political standing, the White House lost across the board this week:

• Under mounting public pressure and outrage, Trump was forced to fire one of his key officials: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

• In the face of the Defense Department’s efforts to weaponize AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous weaponry, leading artificial intelligence company Anthropic told the administration to pound sand — and was promptly rewarded by becoming the top-downloaded app.

• Faced with the growing reality that the unconstitutional campaign against law firms had failed, the DOJ raised the legal white flag (then, in an even more loser-like move, tried to backtrack on surrendering — presumably after the White House got mad).

• Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Bondi as part of the growing Epstein Files inquiry.

• We learned that the Justice Department also tried and failed to — incredibly — indict Joe Biden for using an autopen.

• Lindsey Halligan, the loyalist lawyer who has become the face of Trump’s efforts to bring criminal cases against his enemies, is under investigation by the Florida Bar and could lose her license to practice law.

• On the heels of the White House’s devastating tariff loss at the Supreme Court, a federal judge ruled that companies are entitled to tariff refunds.

• Tuesday’s primary elections, far from showing a demoralized or cowed opposition, saw Democratic voters swamping their Republican counterparts almost everywhere. In Texas, significantly more people voted in the Democratic primaries than the Republican one, including in most of the districts that were targeted by the new gerrymander.

• The effort in Florida to declare CAIR, one of the largest Muslim advocacy groups, a terrorist organization — one of those classic authoritarian tactics to target civil society — crashed headlong into the First Amendment.

And that’s all before the potential consequences of another disastrous war in the Middle East set in.

None of us know exactly where any of this is going. Likely it ends in some pretty dark places.

But this is not what consolidated autocracy looks like.

Welcome Checks & Balances to Substack!

Our friends at the Society for the Rule of Law have a new must-read newsletter. They’re an essential voice for principled conservatives, libertarians, and those without a clear ideological bent — all standing up for democracy.

Read Checks & Balances here.

What else we’re tracking:

• Read my colleague Jennifer Dresden’s letter to the editor of The New York Times on the real reason why gerrymandering, widespread in the U.S., is so rare in other countries. (Hint: it all comes down to the electoral system.)

• A group of 30 defense and policy experts are calling on Congress to investigate the “dangerous precedent” of abusing the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation to blacklist one of America’s leading AI companies.

• Read this excellent article from The Upshot on how the White House has abused spending power hundreds of times: Trump keeps finding new ways to withhold money even after 198 lawsuits.

• The Supreme Court appears to be questioning some of the bedrock principles of the Voting Rights Act, the law that protects minority representation in the United States. Michael Later, Alicia Menendez-Brennan, and Farbod Faraji explain what needs to happen if the justices take such a damaging step: The Supreme Court questions the future of the Voting Rights Act — Proportional representation should be our answer. (You should also read the Brennan Center’s Jesse Wegman on how we got here: Chief Justice Roberts’s vendetta against the Voting Rights Act.)

How you can help:

Security is one of American civil society’s greatest weaknesses. Basic shortcomings — from failures to safeguard internal communications to lax device security — could leave a significant portion of American advocacy coalitions vulnerable to politicized retaliation or attacks by autocratic actors.

Protect Democracy’s new guide to operational security for coalitions summarizes basic security best practices for all advocacy coalitions and groups. It also includes key resources for understanding and responding to government investigations.

Please: Send this resource to anyone you know who works in advocacy or civil society. They may not think — or know — that they need these. Send it just in case.

See all of Protect Democracy’s toolkits for civil society facing government attacks here.

We are living through the most significant and consequential democratic backsliding episode in world history.

The United States is the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, and most established democracy ever to be seriously threatened by autocracy. Our current backsliding has been much steeper than any other recent example. This is all, quite literally, unprecedented.

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Still, the United States is not exceptional, and so many of the threats facing our system of government directly mirror those faced by other democratic systems. Would-be autocrats may speak different languages and channel different politics, but their playbook tends to look remarkably similar. As such, we at Protect Democracy rely heavily on the writers and thinkers who have studied not just what authoritarianism looks like but also what it takes to survive an autocratic assault.

More often than not, that means we find ourselves reading Vox, whose journalists, writers, and editors have been on the threats-to-democracy beat since long before most publications even dared print “the A-word.” Some months ago, we started talking with their editors about the most important question right now: “How does the United States escape the threat of permanent authoritarianism after a second Trump administration?”

Eventually, those conversations led to Vox’s remarkable new series, published over the last two weeks: America after Trump: How democracies fall — and how they can come back.

As Swati Sharma, Vox’s editor-in-chief, writes in the introduction to the project:

This package takes as its starting point that global democracy is in a bad way — but that the diagnosis, while serious, isn’t terminal. America can learn from the example of other democracies that have also faltered, but ultimately succeeded. It can learn from its own past, which tells us that democratic reform not only is possible but inevitable. And it can learn from ideas given new life by our predicament, as we search for a path out of this anti-democratic cul-de-sac.

To be clear: Protect Democracy helped support this project with a charitable grant, but Vox had full discretion over the content of the reporting. They took this high-stakes question and sent their reporters around the world in search of answers, wherever they might lead.

The big thing we asked in return is to be able to share gift links to everything they found with all of you. Those links are below.

This may be one of the more important journalistic projects of the decade. Please do take the time to read, listen to, and watch the entire series — and share widely.

How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks

By Zack Beauchamp

For this article, Zack Beauchamp traveled to Brazil to understand why that country’s experience with a Trump-like autocrat turned out so differently and what the United States can learn. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro looks and acts a lot like Trump. But Brazil’s Supreme Court and Congress effectively constrained Bolsonaro, preventing an effective takeover by the would-be dictator. Zack finds the important difference was that, in Brazil, public officials faced radically different incentives. Most relevant for the U.S., a multiparty system “prevented the emergence of US-style extreme partisanship — producing a legislature and judiciary primed to protect their powers against an aggressive executive.”

As he writes:

This gives us some real insight about how to fix American democracy going forward: to pass reforms that alter the incentives for legislators in particular, giving them good self-interested reasons to prefer systemic stability over partisan loyalty.

Read the whole piece.

The Brazilian playbook for defending democracy

By Jolie Myers

This episode of Today, Explained explores the fall of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and what it proves about Trump-style authoritarians.

What American democracy can learn from 1930s Finland

By Nate Krieger

In this video, Nate Krieger explores the remarkable story of a radical, far-right authoritarian movement that failed to secure power. It’s a story of how early and collective action won out against violence and extremism — and of the importance of unelected officials to manage the guardrails of democracy, the nonpartisan structures that maintain a healthy democratic system.

The House of Representatives is too small

By Dolly Li and Jordan Winters

In this video, Dolly Li and Jordan Winters explain why the U.S. House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats for more than a century — and how the growing imbalance between the size of the country and the size of our legislature may explain why many Americans feel Congress doesn’t represent them.

If you’ve ever wondered how we could actually accommodate a bigger House, Protect Democracy answered this question with actual architectural renderings. See what the House of tomorrow would actually look like.

Read more: Where will they all sit?

How to stop a dictator

By Zack Beauchamp

In this article, Zack Beauchamp looks at lessons from Brazil, South Korea, Venezuela, Colombia, Poland, and more and finds that the answer is remarkably simple: “People with political influence and platforms need to work to make the threat to democracy more legible to more people.”

Key takeaways:

• Democratic survival in the face of threats like Trump is determined in large part by how obvious the threat to democracy is. The more people recognize that an elected leader is trying to destroy democracy from within, the less likely it is that said leader will succeed.

• Evidence from Brazil, South Korea, and Poland — all democracies that defeated a would-be authoritarian government — show that the legibility of threat to key segments of society was critical in mobilizing the pushback that decided democracy’s survival.

• This has important implications for the United States going forward. Instead of sidelining the issue of democracy, as some political pollsters suggest, those concerned about the issue should foreground it — working hard to illustrate how Trump’s behaviors threaten core freedoms people cherish.

Read the whole article.

You got your democracy back. Now what?

By Jolie Myers and Noel King

For Today, Explained, Jolie Myers and Noel King traveled to Poland to understand what happened when that country voted in an authoritarian government a decade ago. In the first episode, they look at Poland’s struggle against an authoritarian party and how, “against considerable odds, they booted out the authoritarians and got their democracy back.”

Then, in the second episode, they look at the challenges facing Poland’s current pro-democracy government as it seeks to unwind a significant backsliding event. They find that, after a period of democratic backsliding, governments that want to restore democratic rule face an “illiberal trilemma” wherein they seek to unwind authoritarian rule legally, quickly, and effectively — but it’s very difficult to achieve all three.

Listen to both episodes.

Did the Constitution doom American democracy?

A conversation with Zack Beauchamp and Matt Yglesias

In this interview, Zack Beauchamp talks with Matt Yglesias about Matt’s 2015 article, American democracy is doomed. That essay effectively predicted much of what has happened over the following decade. The crux of the argument: “Presidential systems, the late political scientist Juan Linz found, had a tendency to break down, the strict separation of powers breeding irresolvable conflict between the executive and legislative branches that tended to end in coups, or something like them.”

It’s a fascinating conversation about some of the structural challenges at the core of our crisis which — paradoxically — offer some hope for renewal. If, that is, we can change some of those structures.

Read the whole interview.

US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again.

By Lee Drutman

Finally — the hope. In this essay, political scientist Lee Drutman takes a contrarian but fundamentally convincing position:

The question is not whether reform is coming. It’s what kind of reform… Gridlock may look like stability; it is actually brittleness. Eventually, it will crack. In some places, it already has. A new generation will pick up the pieces and build something new. In some places, they already are.

By changing how the parties work, Lee argues, the coming era can be more than a rebound. It may be a quintessentially American era of rebirth and renewal.

Key takeaways:

• American democracy has been dramatically remade roughly every 60 years: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s. Each time, reform came when ambitious insiders recognized the old order was dying and switched sides before it collapsed on them.

• Today’s dysfunction matches the historical preconditions almost exactly: Institutional trust near historic lows, and both parties fighting the last war while new pressures accumulate with no political home.

• The question is not whether reform is coming but what kind. Previous eras tried to work around parties and got hollow institutions captured by whoever was already organized. The next reform needs to change how parties themselves work.

Read the whole essay.

Last week, a grand jury in Washington, D.C. (reportedly by a unanimous vote) declined to indict six Democratic members of Congress on charges of interfering with military loyalty. Their alleged crime: posting a 90-second video reminding service members of their long-settled duty to refuse patently illegal orders.

Ordinary citizens — not judges, not politicians, not legal scholars — looked at the evidence the Trump administration’s prosecutors put in front of them and concluded it didn’t meet the threshold to bring charges.

They were right. And their judgment holds an important lesson for the rest of the legal system.

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The amendments you probably don’t think about enough

If you remember high school civics class — or if you’ve watched enough Law & Order — you know the basics. The Fourth Amendment requires the government to get a warrant before searching your home or seizing your property. The Fifth Amendment requires the government to get a grand jury indictment before prosecuting you for a felony.

Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about these provisions. They sound procedural. Bureaucratic. The kinds of things you memorize for an exam and then forget.

But they exist for a reason. The Founders understood that government power, unchecked, bends toward abuse. They built these requirements — warrants reviewed by independent judges, indictments reviewed by independent grand juries — as structural safeguards. Not paperwork. Checkpoints. Places where someone outside the government’s chain of command looks at the government’s claims and says, “Prove it.”

When an autocrat in the White House appears intent on weaponizing every element of the federal government to entrench himself in power, these procedural checkpoints are more important than they’ve ever been.

Grand juries that wouldn’t rubber-stamp

When the grand jury refused to indict the members of Congress, they looked at the evidence the government provided with a healthy skepticism and spirit of objectivity and saw through the meritless, political prosecution.

Read more: Is it law enforcement or is it retribution?

While one of the most notable, this is just one example of a growing trend: The increasingly politicized Department of Justice is struggling to find grand juries willing to indict, including in cases against ordinary Americans.

There’s an old saying that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. But these “no bills,” or grand jury refusals to indict, are becoming increasingly common and proving to be a crucial guardrail against an authoritarian-captured Justice Department. In case after case, the abuses of power are so patently obvious: selective charges relying upon dubious interpretations of the law, targeting individuals for little more than exercising their constitutional rights to oppose administration policy. Ordinary citizens are refusing to go along.

Read more: Constitutional gatekeepers: The history and role of grand juries.

The growing trend of “no bills” proves that when everyday citizens exercise their independent judgment, they successfully prevent the law from being weaponized against the American people.

The Fulton County warrant that should alarm every judge

And then there’s the search warrant that was approved — and shouldn’t have been.

On Jan. 29, the FBI executed a search warrant at a Fulton County elections office, seizing all physical ballots from the 2020 election — absentee, provisional, in-person, emergency — along with tabulator tapes, ballot images, and voter rolls.

The recently unsealed affidavit reveals that the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, a “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity” and a figure with deep ties to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Read more: Trump’s elections Chimera.

The critical thing to understand about warrants is that in order to get one, you have to explain to a judge why you have “probable cause” to believe that a crime has been committed. In this application, the FBI claims to be investigating two crimes — a record keeping violation and a provision making it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” deprive the citizenry of a “free and impartially conducted election” by aiding in the registration of ineligible voters or casting or tabulating fraudulent ballots. Both crimes require evidence of intentional wrongdoing — something numerous independent investigations have ruled out and which the affidavit presents no evidence of. Consequently, the affidavit does not even come close to demonstrating probable cause for either alleged crime. (Former prosecutor Joyce Vance explains in greater detail here.)

In Georgia, federal officers seeking a warrant may not mislead the court by intentionally failing to represent contrary evidence which would undermine probable cause. Not only does the affidavit fail to mention the detailed investigations, hearings, litigation, reporting disproving these debunked conspiracies, it misrepresents the conclusions of sources cited in the affidavit itself, all of whom concluded there was no reason to believe there was any intentional wrongdoing in Fulton County and that the 2020 election was free and fair.

But a judge signed off on that warrant anyway. And in doing so, gave federal agents the power to seize an entire county’s election records based on the recycled claims of election deniers.

Grand juries have set the example for the rest of our legal system

In case after case, grand juries — panels of ordinary Americans with no special legal training — have been doing their jobs. They’ve looked at the Trump administration’s cases and seen them for what they are: baseless, politically motivated, and unworthy of prosecution.

Judges have to hold the line, too. So far, federal district court judges around the country have called out the government’s untrustworthiness and untruthfulness in court and blocked many of the administration’s unlawful abuses of power. But every judge has the same obligation to the Constitution, from the magistrate who granted the Fulton County warrant to the Supreme Court justices who serve as our democracy’s ultimate judicial authority.

Every judge reviewing a warrant application — or really considering any evidence or witness testimony — from this administration should approach it with the same healthy skepticism that grand juries have been applying. Not cynicism. Not partisanship. Just the baseline constitutional duty to honestly evaluate whether the government has actually met its burden.

The Fulton County warrant is what happens when that skepticism is absent. The grand jury “no bills” are what happens when it’s present.

The pulled Colbert interview shows that Trump’s media takeover is working

The late-night interview dominating the headlines this week is one that didn’t actually get broadcast on TV.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico was set to appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Monday night. The interview was already recorded. And then, according to Colbert, CBS blocked it, citing concerns that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could find that airing it violated their “equal opportunities” policy.

Unlike the last time the FCC targeted a late-night show, it didn’t require a threat “right out of Goodfellas” from FCC Chair Brendan Carr to achieve the outcome the administration presumably wanted. There was no “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” because the administration is now reaping the benefits of a more subtle one-two punch strategy straight out of the Orbán playbook. By design, CBS chose the easy way and in doing so, supplied the administration with plausible deniability.

Read more: The FCC vs. the Constitution.

Here’s how the administration employed Orbán’s media takeover playbook.

Step 1: Because the FCC must approve the transfer of broadcast licenses, the administration had significant leverage over Paramount (CBS’ parent company) and Skydance when reviewing their proposed merger last year. The FCC used that leverage to impose significant policy changes, including commitments to make CBS’ coverage more “diverse” (i.e., friendlier to the administration) and install an ombudsman to monitor CBS for “bias.” Once the merger was approved, new owner David Ellison, a Trump ally and son of Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, installed Bari Weiss, a Trump-friendly journalist and political commentator, as CBS’ editor-in-chief — a hire that the president himself praised.

Step 2: Having extracted regime-friendly commitments from CBS, the administration continues flexing its regulatory muscles, indicating the FCC’s willingness to weaponize its authority against perceived critics of the president. Carr has often invoked the previously-seldom-used “news distortion” policy to intimidate broadcasters, including in his threats to ABC about Jimmy Kimmel last year. Carr now seems poised to use the FCC’s “equal opportunities” rule in much the same way. Earlier this month, he initiated an “equal opportunities” investigation of ABC’s The View based on its interview of Talarico, which CNN media reporter Brian Stelter cites as influencing CBS’ decision to preemptively pull Colbert’s interview of Talarico.

Read more: It’s time to take away Brendan Carr’s secret weapon.

CBS’ willingness to alter its coverage without being subject to any enforcement action (or even a threat of one) showcases the benefits for the administration of helping allies secure control of media companies and demanding more “balanced” coverage in return.

Another merger coming around the bend could put CNN under the same compliant ownership as CBS. CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) seemed likely to accept Netflix’s bid to buy them until this week, when Netflix agreed to allow WBD to entertain negotiations with Paramount Skydance, the CBS parent company owned by the Trump-supporting Ellison family. On his Substack, Jonathan Alter reported that, according to his sources, the administration is planning to block Netflix from buying WBD, which could open the door for the Ellisons. If their bid succeeds, it would put CNN under the same leadership as CBS and further expand the Trump administration’s control over legacy media.

What else we’re tracking

• Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down the president’s unilaterally imposed tariffs regime — a big win for the rule of law. In its 6-3 decision, the Court rejected the president’s claim imposing tariffs was a lawful exercise of his emergency powers. In case you missed it, when the Court heard arguments in the case, Ben spoke with Protect Democracy’s Ori Lev and Integrity Matters’ Audrey Roofeh to break down the law and the real world impacts of the tariffs.

• This week, Vox is rolling out a new feature series on American democracy after Trump. (Full disclosure: This series is supported by a Protect Democracy grant.) In the coming weeks, they’ll be publishing long-form pieces, uploading videos, and linking to podcasts here, drawing from lessons from abroad and charting a course to a more representative and resilient democracy.

• In The Bulwark, Nicholas Grossman makes “The case for being vigilant without panicking” as we confront threats to the upcoming Congressional elections: Trump can’t steal the midterms.

You’ve probably read or heard the words “immigration enforcement” hundreds of times in the last several months, used reflexively to describe the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE and Border Patrol to wage an assault on American communities.

When faced with an authoritarian takeover of a democratic society, the specific words we use to describe the authoritarian’s actions matter. Whether you’re a journalist for a national news organization or a concerned citizen with a social media account, there are other Americans who listen to you, and you have the power to help them reckon with the threat we face.

The power we all have in a democracy comes with a responsibility to choose our words carefully and ensure we are not carrying any water for the authoritarian coalition.

At this pivotal moment, we all have a responsibility to stop calling the Trump administration’s deployments of DHS forces to American cities “immigration enforcement” operations when they’re really violent crackdowns.

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It’s not (just) about immigration

While immigrants and Black and brown communities have been primarily impacted by aggressive and unlawful DHS tactics, we know these DHS deployments are not strictly about immigration, and immigrants are not the only ones who’ve been subject to brutal violence and harassment by government forces.

All the way back in October, a ProPublica investigation found that DHS forces had already detained more than 170 American citizens. And throughout last fall, numerous stories emerged about immigrants who were taken into custody while attending regular check-in meetings with immigration officials in an effort to stay on the right side of the law.

Read more: Arrested for following the law.

Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric about focusing the administration’s deportation efforts on the “worst of the worst” immigrants who had convictions for violent or drug-related crimes, according to an internal DHS record, less than 14% of those deported in the first year of the second Trump administration had violent criminal backgrounds.

Numerous bystander videos (many highlighted in court rulings) show DHS agents pushing, shoving, tackling, and using chemical weapons against protesters and legal observers, from Chicago to Charlotte to Minneapolis.

Pair the actions of DHS officials with the words they use to describe their mission, and it becomes clear that the deployments are about intimidating and punishing certain communities, imposing extraordinary suffering on immigrants (many of whom have legal status) and U.S. citizens alike.

• In a video of DHS agents staging their terror campaign in Los Angeles, former Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino described the “orders all the way to the top”: “Everybody f—ing gets it if they touch you.” After telling the assembled agents that he was procuring “tractor trailers full” of nonlethal weapons like tear gas and rubber bullets, he added, when prompted by an officer, “This is our f—ing city!”

• In Chicago, Kristi Noem gave a “pep talk” to DHS agents before they attacked a peaceful protest outside the ICE facility in Broadview: “Today, when we leave here, we’re gonna go hard. We’re gonna hammer these guys.”

• In Minneapolis, DHS agents have threatened observers that they will suffer the same fate as Renee Good, who was shot and killed by DHS agents. Similarly, in Chicago, an agent drove by a combat veteran who was standing on the sidewalk observing a protest, pointed his handgun at him, and said, “Bang bang. You’re dead, liberal.”

These deployments are also operating in an intentionally theatrical way. Officials have reportedly been instructed to capture video footage for DHS social media posts, and groups of DHS agents have posed for photo shoots in cities where they’ve carried out these crackdowns. The administration is seeking to disseminate images that project DHS power and strike fear in everyday Americans. Serious immigration enforcement doesn’t require a massive investment in a propaganda apparatus, but intimidation does.

If there were any doubt remaining, the shooting deaths of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by DHS agents and the administration’s escalatory response confirmed that the intimidation and the suppression are the point.

Read more: Free speech, ICE, and free elections in 2026.

The administration attempted to justify the killings of the two Minnesota protestors by smearing them (and their fellow protesters) as “brainwashed,” part of a network of radicals, domestic terrorists, “agitators,” and “rioters,” intent on “doing maximum damage.” All simultaneously serving to form more pretext to come down harder on future dissenters.

And it all goes back to the upcoming midterm elections. Amanda Carpenter explains:

The attempts to brand dissent into “domestic terrorism” and make observers into “conspirators” are strategic smears to intimidate and silence those who challenge the president’s overreaches and ultimately, compete against those policies in future elections.

Those who wish to protect our elections must be firm: Free speech is the prerequisite for a free election. The Trump administration sees a dual purpose in deploying federal agents in such massive numbers to blue states and cities. Trump’s immigration crackdowns have morphed into free speech crackdowns, too.

And it’s definitely not enforcing the law

That brings us to “enforcement.”

When we say “enforcement,” that implies it’s about upholding our laws, when in fact this administration, including and especially ICE and Border Patrol, are acting lawlessly and expressing outright contempt for the law.

Last year, Ben Raderstorf wrote about the administration’s anti-legalism:

Anti-legalism is one of those trends that once you see, you can’t unsee it.

It’s a pattern that ties together almost all the Trump administration’s disparate actions — from the destruction of the East Wing and the apparent graft and bribery scandals, to the spending abuses and censorship campaigns, to the attempts to politicize previously apolitical institutions, like the Department of Justice and the military.

It’s not just that Trump and his administration routinely break the law. It’s that they seem to delight in doing so. That they are openly contemptuous of any suggestion of limits, guardrails, or rules. And when challenged on the law — by courts, by Congress, by civil servants, by national security leaders — they lash out with undisguised fury.

Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, the president’s top advisor, have both wrongly asserted that DHS officials have “absolute immunity,” seemingly assuring agents that they can violate the law with impunity.

The administration’s anti-legalism is particularly on display in their hostility toward the judiciary and noncompliance with court orders.

In a new report for Politico, Kyle Cheney showed that:

[T]he Trump administration has slow-walked or outright defied judges’ orders demanding the release of people scooped up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at an increasingly rapid clip.

Last month, the George W. Bush-appointed chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, found that ICE alone had violated nearly 100 court orders.

In addition to noncompliance with rulings, the president and members of his administration have called judges “rogue” and “deranged,” investigated and threatened to prosecute them, and even characterized the executive branch’s relationship with the judiciary as a “war.”

Then there’s the president and his allies’ penchant for untruthfulness — even in court. Last fall, Protect Democracy and our partners brought litigation against DHS officials on behalf of journalists, clergy, and protestors who had been brutalized by DHS agents in Chicago for exercising their First Amendment rights. In her ruling, Judge Sara Ellis laid bare the overwhelming untrustworthiness and dishonesty of the Trump administration. Judge Ellis found that the government and its agents (including former Border Patrol chief Bovino) lied repeatedly in their testimony and filings before the Court.

Likewise, a new report from The New York Times reveals that prior to the DHS killings of Good and Pretti, four criminal prosecutions of people who were shot by DHS agents “fizzled after evidence emerged that contradicted the administration’s initial description of events. The charges were either dismissed or prosecutors dropped the case.” Numerous other criminal cases against protesters and observers have been dismissed by federal prosecutors or have ended in acquittal because of faulty evidence.

Of course, the excessive violence of DHS agents alone proves that their efforts are not legitimate attempts to enforce the law.

Telling agents they can violate the law with impunity, bucking court orders, threatening judges, lying in court, and the widespread use of violence against law-abiding members of the public are not the actions of a good faith effort to obey the law — let alone enforce it.

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Here’s how to talk about it

The term “immigration enforcement” is not only inaccurate, but it also enables the administration’s authoritarian abuses by helping insulate them from public backlash.

Referring to DHS deployments this way gives the casual observer the false impression that what’s happening is normal and a legitimate exercise of federal law enforcement to execute the administration’s immigration policy agenda. It inadvertently suggests that the essence of what DHS officers are doing is the hum-drum, routine business of administering the law and that the stories the public is hearing in the news about violence and intimidation are rare exceptions to the general rule. Yet we know the inverse is the reality. This phrasing falsely minimizes and marginalizes the brutality DHS is inflicting by implying that these efforts are principally focused on immigrants, or as the White House has characterized them, “criminal aliens,” — not law-abiding residents and citizens.

Euphemism doesn’t do us any good in this moment: We need clarity and specificity.

DHS isn’t doing “immigration enforcement.” These are DHS deployments to American neighborhoods. They are carrying out violent crackdowns.

Describe discrete DHS actions as what they are — unjustified uses of force, physical assaults, reckless violence against Americans peacefully exercising their rights, violations of court orders and long-standing protections for peaceful protest and assembly. Then, connect the dots. Expose the larger strategy: The goal is to intimidate Americans into silence, to prevent us from exercising our core First Amendment rights and participating fully in our democracy and to drive immigrants out of the country, whether or not they have legal status. To keep us from resisting the administration’s attempt to entrench itself in power, particularly during the upcoming midterm elections.

Here’s the good news: Public visibility into DHS’ conduct has shifted public opinion, which suggests that the American people are in fact open to changing their views about the legitimacy of DHS conduct when they’re presented with the truth.

The one thing all of us can do, starting right now, is refuse to lend even our words to the service of an authoritarian government. No permission structures. No sane-washing. No “immigration enforcement.”

Is Congress now back in the oversight business?

The early months of Trump’s return to power were marked by a complacent Congress: His nominees were almost all confirmed, there was little meaningful oversight, and virtually no effort by the opposition party to use its limited leverage to check him. It seems the tides may be turning.

As we’re seeing play out with ICE and Border Patrol, an unaccountable, unconstrained pseudo-military force is ripe for weaponization. That’s why it’s crucial, particularly ahead of the midterms, that Congress curb DHS abuses. And encouragingly, Democrats are unified in their pursuit to secure key constraints in exchange for funding ICE and Border Patrol.

But this is just one example of a newly reinvigorated legislative branch. Last night, six House Republicans voted with Democrats to block the president’s Canada tariffs, part of his signature economic policy. An increasingly skeptical Congress will have a chance to vote to repeal more of the administration’s unilaterally imposed tariffs in the coming weeks.

Congressional committees in both chambers have held tough oversight hearings this week to question key Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi on the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on his ties to Epstein, and top DHS officials on their violent crackdowns in American communities.

Too many members of the president’s party continue to ignore their institutional responsibilities out of loyalty (or fear) toward him. But this week brought encouraging signs of a key check starting to wake up and do its job — perhaps inspired by the public’s growing rejection of autocratic abuses. We’ll need much more of that as the president works to further entrench himself in power.

What else we’re tracking

• Momentum continues to grow for state-level accountability measures for federal agents who violate citizens’ rights. This week, Protect Democracy’s Jane Bentrott testified in favor of Maryland’s version of a universal constitutional remedies law (UCRA), which Governor Wes Moore seemingly touted in his state of the state address. Also this week, Massachusetts lawmakers introduced their own version of the UCRA.

• Read Irina D. Manta for The UnPopulist on Czechoslovakia’s lesson for America: Lawyers are key to peacefully defeating authoritarianism.

• Grand juries are also key to defeating the retaliatory prosecutions that authoritarians use to intimidate and punish opponents. Former Minnesota prosecutors explain why in The Minnesota Star-Tribune. For more, check out our educational resource: Constitutional gatekeepers: The history and role of grand juries.

• And we’ve seen the importance of grand juries this week as the DOJ tried — but failed — to indict members of Congress for speaking out on national security issues. Likewise, a judge ruled in favor of Senator Mark Kelly, blocking DOD’s attempt to punish him for this protected speech. As we explained in our amicus brief on behalf of dozens of retired senior national security leaders, Judge Leon recognized that allowing DOD to punish veterans for exercising their First Amendment rights would “impoverish public debate on critical issues relating to our military and its role in domestic and foreign affairs.”

• A powerful story in The New York Times this week features a few of our plaintiffs in our challenge to ICE’s unlawful, widespread use of tear gas and pepper balls to quell protests in Portland, Oregon. Our plaintiffs offer courageous personal testimony, detailing the horrific physical and mental health harms of being repeatedly subjected to chemical weapons in their homes, which are directly across the street from an ICE facility.

There’s a three-headed monster heading for our elections.

The combined forces of the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are shaping up to be the Trump administration’s election subversion Chimera (that’s the fire-breathing lion-snake-goat hybrid creature from Greek mythology) in 2026. While the administration has flagrantly abused the federal government’s law enforcement powers from day one, in the past couple of weeks those abuses have become more explicitly about laying the groundwork for undermining elections.

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Think about it. In just the last two weeks:

• The attorney general of the United States told Minnesotans that the federal government would only withdraw DHS agents from their communities if the state turned over sensitive voter data to the DOJ.

• The director of national intelligence (DNI) and the FBI served a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office with a warrant for their voting equipment and records.

• The attorney general, DHS secretary, and DNI planned to appear before a gathering of secretaries of state in Washington, D.C. — likely to claim before the nation’s top election officials that our elections are rife with fraud — before backing out at the last minute.

• The president himself, building upon prior musings about “canceling” elections, twice openly expressed his desire to “take over” and “nationalize” elections, contra the Constitution.

The administration is showing its hand. We should pay attention. The 2026 midterms are already underway.

Weaponizing DOJ and DHS is all about elections

Here at If you can keep it, we’ve been warning since the start of President Trump’s second term about the increasing politicization and weaponization of federal law enforcement, exemplified by retaliatory prosecutions and lawless crackdowns in American cities.

Both are corrosive to the rule of law and liberal democracy in and of themselves, it’s true. But what has become increasingly clear is that these escalations are crucial components of the Trump administration’s effort to entrench itself in power ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Everything is about the elections.

The New York Times’ David French hypothesized how these entrenchment strategies may play out in his column this week:

Now, in October [2026], Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which rapidly expanded throughout the year, is running large-scale operations in Democratic-controlled cities. Hundreds if not thousands more American citizens have been caught in the dragnet. So have thousands of lawful residents.

…

As a result, nonwhite citizens are reluctant to go anywhere near ICE, and rumors of ICE conducting operations near polling stations spread like wildfire. Thousands upon thousands of citizens choose to stay home rather than risk arrest to vote.

During early voting, reports of citizens discovering they’re no longer on the voting rolls have multiplied. Most of them have Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names. The voters named Smith or Jones have had no problems. But if you’re a Gonzalez or a Diallo, then you’ve been purged.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has raided several election offices in blue cities in swing states. Lawmakers in red states have moved to take over election administration in certain blue cities, citing the president’s raids and indictments as justification.

(Read the whole thing.)

These are not the paranoid fears of frequent Trump critics. The president’s long time adviser Steve Bannon said on his podcast Tuesday, “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.”

And Republican Senator Thom Tillis cautioned that stationing federal law enforcement at voting locations could “have a chilling effect on even U.S. citizens going to the polls because they don’t want to be detained and have to prove citizenship.”

The president and his allies are clearly setting up what will be the Next Big Lie: There is widespread non-citizen voting corrupting our elections. This will be the justification for DHS presence at the polls and baseless DOJ investigations that churn up “evidence” that will be used as a pretext to attempt to invalidate election results. Indeed, Bob Bauer warned yesterday, “[T]he DOJ may be quietly preparing to adjust its law enforcement guidelines to more closely align with Trump’s view that ‘nationalization’ is required to address widespread fraud.”

Along the way, the administration will seek at every turn to use law enforcement intimidation to attempt to scare protestors, journalists, and ultimately voters into silence. As we get closer to Election Day, the DOJ’s use of weaponized political prosecutions is likely to focus more and more on individuals and organizations who are involved in electoral politics and are viewed as political opponents.

Election deniers are in charge

Top administration officials are ready to use their agencies’ authorities to propagate the Next Big Lie, starting by bolstering the president’s false claims about the 2020 election.

Reportedly, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is the administration’s chief 2020 conspiracy investigator, which involved accompanying the FBI on their Fulton County raid at the president’s request, a government source told The New York Times. (The president is now claiming that Gabbard actually went at Attorney General Bondi’s “insistence.”) According to the Times’ reporting, Gabbard also played go-between between the president and the FBI agents that conducted the raid, arranging a phone call in which the president asked the agents questions and praised their work. 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. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer put it:

[Gabbard] is tasked with producing a report that could presumably be used to justify federal restrictions on this year’s midterm elections. Her mere presence there suggests that this “investigation” is headed in the maximally crazy direction.

There’s little doubt that this renewed push to prove the 2020 election was stolen serves primarily to further undermine Americans’ faith in our elections.

Having the power of DOJ, DHS, and ODNI at the tip of the spear is particularly dangerous because they’re charged with upholding the law and keeping all Americans safe. Whereas other agencies are limited to enacting regulations, levying civil fines, and withholding grants, the Chimera agencies can arrest people, prosecute them, spy on them, detain them, or otherwise muster government capabilities against Americans. When agencies are that powerful, it’s particularly essential that they operate in a way that adheres to law and builds trust. But what we’re seeing is the exact opposite of that. That’s all to say that there’s a reason these agencies make up Trump’s three-headed elections monster and not, say, the EPA, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Education.

The election denier-in-chief himself isn’t slowing down. As part of his unconstitutional calls for “nationalizing” elections, the president suggested that there are 15 states in particular that the administration views as the worst offenders and whose election administration the federal government should take over. It’s not hard to imagine that the president might be thinking about the states with the most competitive Congressional races in November, which also conveniently include some of the president’s favorite blue state foils.

So while the DOJ-DHS-ODNI Chimera is emerging as the tip of the spear of the White House’s midterm subversion efforts, make no mistake: The orders come from the very top. And the administration will use every possible mechanism at its disposal to hold onto power. The past two weeks have made that clear.

How we push back

To be clear, much of what the administration is planning to do is already explicitly illegal. Courts have already ruled against many of the administration’s efforts to abuse power, and there will continue to be robust legal pushback against attempts to use federal law enforcement to interfere with the election. But litigation, while necessary, is unlikely to be sufficient.

It’s vital that state and local officials understand the ways in which the federal government might try to abuse power to interfere with the election and be prepared to refuse to cooperate and resist where they can. One example: As our colleagues Izzy Gray and Sara Chimene-Weiss wrote a couple of weeks ago, states should hold firm and refuse to comply with the federal government’s attempts to strongarm them into giving up their citizens’ private data. States must resist the administration’s efforts to gin up “evidence” in support of their election conspiracies.

Also at the state level, legislatures should pass universal constitutional remedies laws that give citizens more tools to pursue accountability when their rights are violated by federal agents, a solution that is gaining steam as bills have been introduced in nine states.

Giving people more tools to defend their rights can help neutralize the culture of fear and intimidation that the administration is seeking to create and keep the pro-democracy coalition on the field in 2026.

Congress must exercise its oversight powers and the power of the purse to reign in DHS abuses, including insisting that federal law enforcement not be used to interfere in elections. Progress is being made on this front too: Democrats have included restrictions on law enforcement presence near sensitive locations like polling places in their list of demands to fund DHS.

And of course, ordinary Americans can continue to use their voices to make it clear that we will not accept the administration’s attempt to rig our elections and take away our votes.

We know the administration will try to interfere with the 2026 elections by any means necessary. They’ve already put their plans in motion. But their success is by no means inevitable. Just like the mythological monster, so too can Trump’s elections Chimera be defeated.

The Washington Post falls victim to the Orbán playbook

This week, The Washington Post laid off 300 employees, a third of its staff. Shuttered or gutted are the Post’s tech, local, international, books, and sports beats. The cuts have left many media critics calling time of death on the once-revered institution.

Ultimately, the Post’s fate is the expected outcome of autocratic capture and the Orbán model of co-opting or sidelining independent media.

As our co-founder Ian Bassin wrote back in 2023,

[Autocratic capture is] a term we started using a few years ago to describe the phenomenon of authoritarian leaders trying to use the regulatory powers of the state to force private actors to toe a political line. If “state capture” or “regulatory capture” is the process of moneyed interests buying improper influence over government, “autocratic capture” is the opposite: government using its power to coerce political loyalty from moneyed interests.

In the Post’s case, owner Jeff Bezos has significant business interests beyond the paper toward which he wants favorable regulatory treatment from the Trump administration. Thus, his makeover of the editorial page to a more Trump-friendly point of view, ending political endorsements (because they would very likely have been of candidates who oppose Trump), and now gutting the newsroom can all be framed as shrewd (necessary, even) business decisions rather than ideologically-motivated surrender to authoritarianism.

Ben Raderstorf warned us about the coming threat to independent media before the 2024 election:

Democracy and autocracy are locked in an existential struggle in this country. By extension, that means the same is true of independent journalism and authoritarianism.

In the end, only one of the two will survive.

While The Washington Post has clearly fallen victim, that doesn’t mean the rest of our media (or our democracy) has to. What happened this week is a reminder that it’s more important than ever to support independent journalism.

What else we’re tracking

• Republican former election official (and former Protect Democracy client) Stephen Richer debunks the Next Big Lie about non-citizen voting: What’s really driving these bogus claims of voter fraud.

• “We call on people of faith to stand by your values and act as your conscience demands”: Read Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde and 153 Episcopal bishops on the moral crisis our country faces and how faith communities should respond.

• The New York Times editorial board has begun tracking 12 markers of democratic erosion in the U.S. As we warned in the Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, the Times finds this week that with the brutal DHS crackdowns against protestors in Minnesota, Trump’s stifling of dissent reaches a new level. In case you missed it, Amanda Carpenter wrote about this last month.

• Let’s not sportswash Trump’s authoritarianism: Protect Democracy’s Jon Steinman and Michael Angeloni for The Bulwark ahead of tonight’s opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics.

Exactly what — if anything — will change in Minnesota following the Trump administration’s supposed (partial) retreat earlier this week isn’t yet clear. What is clear is that Minnesotans have shown that collective action isn’t just a slogan. From the powerful neighborism of ordinary people to leadership from across the labor movement, faith communities, and clergy, Minnesotans are building a model for effective resistance. And while big brands have largely stayed on the sidelines, small business owners have been in the arena.

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One of the key lessons from Minnesota is that small businesses are a critical part of the effort to defend democracy because they are directly impacted, ideally situated to develop and drive key components of a successful pro-democracy movement, and are trusted messengers.

Small businesses are in the eye of the storm

The past year has been harrowing for many small businesses struggling under the weight of huge tariff bills (imposed not by Congress but by executive fiat), broken contracts with federal agencies, cancelled grants, and policy whiplash from an administration governed by social media post.

Federal deployments of law enforcement to American cities are bad for business — depressing employment in key industries including agriculture, caregiving and childcare, hospitality, and construction. Small businesses — particularly businesses in diverse communities — continue to suffer from consumer fears with more than 44% of Hispanic households reporting avoiding public places. Overall, businesses in Minnesota have reported 30% drops in sales in recent weeks, and hospitality businesses in Minneapolis are reporting up to 80% declines in revenue.

We can expect the economic toll of lawless immigration enforcement to become increasingly clear and dramatic as economists have time to gather and process the data. Following the federal immigration enforcement crackdown in California last year, businesses in Orange County alone lost nearly $59 million in just 8 weeks. This was due to an 80% drop in foot traffic, substantially decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, and plummeting employee morale.

Then there are direct attacks against those businesses that have spoken up. Mischief Toy Store in St. Paul donated thousands of whistles to alert community members to the presence of DHS agents. Mischief co-owner Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall spoke to ABC News about their community protection efforts and hours later received an audit notice from the Department of Homeland Security regarding their I-9 employment forms. Retaliatory audits are a classic authoritarian tactic, common in authoritarian states like Russia. But the Marshalls, like many small business owners, are not easily intimidated. As co-owner Dan Marshall said, “This is an attempt to silence us, and it’s going to do the opposite.”

Small businesses drive key elements of a successful pro-democracy movement

Despite the difficult environment, small business owners have been actively resisting federal overreach across the country from Los Angeles to Chicago and New Orleans. But last Friday we saw something new: More than 800 businesses across the Twin Cities — game stores, yarn shops, record stores, tattoo parlors, bakeries, bookshops, restaurants, and coffee shops — closed their doors as part of a day of protest and activism across the state. (It’s worth scanning the complete list for a full sense of the scale of this action).

Other businesses stayed open but donated proceeds to community nonprofits, provided discounts, or free food for community members. Still others deployed creative strategies including serving as community hubs for mutual aid, food distribution, and fundraising efforts. Dozens made their spaces available for the community to make signs or attend training. Amanda Baumann, owner of Tandem Vintage, organized a diaper drive explaining that, “people need community right now, and that’s part of what our small businesses provide to folks: safe spaces to be together.”

Small business leadership on boycotts is key — and Minnesota’s leadership is already galvanizing national innovation. Protests, vigils, boycotts, and walkouts are planned in all 50 states today, including business closures from Portland, Maine, to Denver, Los Angeles, and Omaha.

And boycotts are just one tool in a powerful and creative arsenal. Small business owners are resourceful, nimble, and adaptable problem solvers — that’s what it takes to run a business. That’s also what it takes to build a movement. Small businesses are deeply embedded in our communities. They are what make our neighborhoods unique; they transform a block into a community. As nearly 100 Minnesota women small business owners and community leaders wrote this week, “Minnesota’s small businesses are more than storefronts; they are cultural anchors, community builders, and economic engines.”

All of these actions required immense bravery and dedication. Almost every business owner interviewed by local media explained that the decision to close their business was a difficult one. Many expressed concern about the impact on their employees, particularly hourly workers who depend on each paycheck. As a business reporter who spent the week talking to business owners explained, businesses were “facing the prospect of either closing and having no income on what is one of their busiest days of the week or sort of being externally denounced in the community as being a traitor to a larger cause.”

Fears of retaliation are widespread. One Minneapolis restaurant owner, who spoke to Twin Cities Business Magazine anonymously, explained that “by coming out there and saying we’re closing Friday, [it] does open us up to some risk, to be targeted. That’s scary.”

Yet for these small businesses, many of them brick and mortar stores, the relationships with their community members outweighed the risks. As Yoom Nguyen, owner of The Lotus Restaurant shared, “This is not about money for us. . . . We’ve been here since 1984. This community embraced our family when we were going through tough times, and [we] feel it’s our turn to return that favor, bring some hope and some joy and some warmth to people.”

The actions of hundreds of businesses in Minnesota last week and countless more across the country today represent key developments in the U.S. pro-democracy movement. As Maria Stephan, renowned scholar of non-violent social movements has written, sustained mass participation by diverse groups and sectors across society, tactical innovations across the movement, defections from key pillars supporting the authoritarian regime, including businesses, and resilience and discipline in the face of rising repression are the four key features of successful pro-democracy campaigns. Small business boycotts and activism display all four of these key elements.

Small businesses are some of our most powerful messengers

Small businesses are some of the most trusted institutions in the U.S. Per recent Pew Research Center data, an astounding 86% of Americans believe small businesses have a positive effect on the direction of the country. Confidence in small businesses is one of the few things Americans can agree on — with 68% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans reporting that they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in small businesses. There’s no other institution that even approaches that level of cross-ideological support.

This combination of factors — the relationships we all have with our local businesses, our cross-society trust in the small business community, and small business owners’ unique skillsets — make small business leadership in our movement critical. The courage of small business owners living their values is infectious.

Many of the biggest and most powerful institutions may not be in the fight yet, but we are still strong. The pro-democracy movement — like small businesses in towns and cities across the country — is resourceful, resilient, creative, and flexible. That is why we are going to win.

But we need to act now. These deployments of federal law enforcement develop chaotically and quickly — just ask businesses in New Orleans and Portland, Maine, that were overrun in a matter of days. Minnesota was uniquely prepared for this surge, but at this point every community needs to get ready. Now is the time to make plans, build community, and organize.

So, what should you do with this information? Here are some suggestions:

1. If you are a small business owner, join Integrity Matters to connect with other business owners organizing in defense of the rule of law.

2. If you have a small business owner in your life, give them a hug and encourage them to join Integrity Matters!

3. Support small businesses in your community, especially ones who are taking a stand.

4. If you’re organizing in your community, make sure you are engaging local businesses.

We all know why the Trump administration is still lying about the 2020 election

On Wednesday night, the FBI seized 2020 election records from Fulton County, GA – including physical ballots, tabulator tapes, images from the vote count, and voter rolls.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Nothing they find in Georgia will change that fact. And while the president and his allies are still fixated on 2020, this unprecedented move is all part of an effort to lay the groundwork to subvert the 2026 elections by raising doubts about our election process. They are trying to convince the public that a problem exists where it does not. Trump and his election conspiracy theory allies are using the same playbook from previous years — deceive the public and disrupt the process to lay the groundwork to deny the results — but this time their efforts are supercharged by the power of the federal government.

An unexpected figure accompanying the FBI in Fulton County was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who had also planned today to appear at a national conference of election officials before pulling out at the last minute. Although the intelligence community does perform some election-related analyses, particularly around foreign interference, the coordinator of those activities is the elections threat executive, not the DNI. Nor does she have any role in executing a search warrant. It’s just not her job. There is little doubt that had Gabbard actually shown at the conference, her appearance would have been more of the same peddling of debunked election conspiracies, not a good faith effort to improve the integrity of elections. It’s noteworthy that the DNI was even considering such an embarrassing attempt to curry favor with her boss (who remains obsessed with his 2020 loss) and to attempt to intimidate election officials into cooperating with the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert future elections. Just another troubling sign that the administration will abuse its power to attack perceived political opponents and interfere with the election.

— Ansley Skipper

What else we’re tracking

• More on the collective action front: The Union of Concerned Scientists has “Five ways you can stand up to authoritarianism today.” For more on how the scientific community can get involved in the fight to defend democracy, read Protect Democracy’s Allie Cashel: Courage is (mildly) contagious.

• Similarly, college and university leaders have a place in the fight, writes Wesleyan University President Michael Roth.

• Former federal prosecutors for The Minnesota Star Tribune on the Justice Department’s baseless, politically motivated investigations of Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey.

• The Justice Department’s arrests of Don Lemon and a local Minnesota journalist for their reporting on a protest are clearly an attempt to intimidate independent media into compliance. Good analysis from Greg Sargent in The New Republic and Jonathan V. Last in today’s Triad.

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The Trump administration is in the middle of a massive, unprecedented, and unlawful effort to accumulate your private voter data in advance of the midterms. Since last May, the Justice Department has demanded access to nearly every state’s full, unredacted voter file in an effort to create a central federal database of voter information.

Why does the DOJ want this mountain of data on virtually every voter in the country? It has all the markings of a deliberate effort to manipulate, misconstrue, and even manufacture evidence of supposed election “fraud” — the same playbook President Trump and his allies used to sow doubt about election results in 2016 and 2020.

There’s a common phrase1 in the research world: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” In short, with enough manipulation, you can make a dataset say whatever you like.

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This is exactly what the Trump administration wants to do: accumulate enough voter data that it can torture this data into confessing the predetermined conclusion that, should the president’s preferred candidates lose, it will have been because of fraudulent votes from ineligible voters.

So what would this look like in practice? Reports indicate that the administration is planning to review states’ voter files using a Department of Homeland Security citizenship verification tool: the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or “SAVE” system. The goal is to match voting records with lists of non-citizens to “prove” the repeatedly debunked claim that widespread non-citizen voting is threatening the integrity of American elections.

But there are inherent challenges in matching datasets that were collected at different points in time for different purposes. And while it is extremely unlikely that this method will produce legitimate evidence of widespread fraud, it very well could result in false matches that disenfranchise eligible voters and create unwarranted doubt about the integrity of American elections ahead of the midterms.

It ultimately does not matter to the administration what the data actually says — Trump and his allies have shown time and time again that no amount of evidence will convince them to drop their election denying conspiracies. With enough data “torture,” they will almost certainly find the “confession” they’re after.

With election deniers now in top roles at the Justice Department, the same people who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election now have far more tools at their disposal to fuel their efforts to access and manipulate state voter data, making it all the more important that states continue to protect their voters’ personal information from being used as a tool for election subversion.

Your voter registration data could fuel election subversion

If you’re registered to vote in the United States, your sensitive information is likely implicated in the Trump administration’s plans to sow doubt about the integrity of future elections.

Election officials in every state collect and maintain a trove of information on their registered voters. This could include your full name, home address, date of birth, social security number, driver’s license number, and a record of your participation in previous elections. You likely shared this information to register to vote, and election officials rely on it to verify your eligibility and determine your polling place.

Some of this information is available to members of the public, including political candidates, campaigns, and get-out-the-vote initiatives. But states go to great lengths to keep the most sensitive information (such as social security numbers and driver’s license numbers) private — and for good reason. Given this administration’s track record of poor cybersecurity practices, the federal government’s effort to access and centralize this data raises serious privacy and security concerns. Just last week, the DOJ admitted in a court filing that DOGE staffers at the Social Security Administration illegally accessed and shared sensitive social security data with an outside advocacy group trying to “overturn election results” as part of an effort to match that data to state voter data.

States, rather than the federal government, have long maintained the highly personal information contained in voter rolls as part of their constitutional authority to administer elections. As our colleagues Emily Rodriguez and Justin Florence explained last week:

In our federal system, elections are decentralized. They are run at the state and local level, which makes them much harder for an authoritarian president to corrupt.

Centralizing voter data at the federal level not only makes it easier for authoritarians to manipulate this information to deny election results, but it also leaves the data vulnerable to hackers and cybersecurity threats, making our elections less secure and our personal information less private.

The DOJ claims that it needs access to this data to make sure states are complying with federal voting laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1960, but this logic doesn’t add up. The agency doesn’t need the sensitive information in the full, unredacted voter files to evaluate states’ compliance with voter roll maintenance requirements. The information supplied in states’ publicly available voter files is more than enough — in fact, our colleagues at VoteShield have used this public information to track voter database changes since 2017. So what else could be going on?

The DOJ is likely planning to use the sensitive personally identifiable information in states’ full, unredacted voter files to match these records with federal data sources, a process that sounds innocuous enough but is almost certain to result in false accusations of fraud in voter rolls and spread doubt about the integrity of American elections.

Here’s an example: Someone may register to vote in their state after becoming a naturalized citizen, but federal datasets that were collected prior to that person’s naturalization may not capture the change. If the federal datasets are matched and relied on to identify purportedly ineligible voters, this naturalized citizen would be flagged and potentially disenfranchised.

Read more: How Federal Efforts to Access Voter Data Affect Our Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Democracy.

To be clear, despite the administration’s bluster, there is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting in American elections. Experts consistently find that voting by non-citizens is exceedingly rare. Trump and his allies are looking for patterns in voter data that they know don’t exist to repeat their playbook for election subversion.

The SAVE system is supercharging an old narrative

The DOJ’s efforts to access state voter files and investigate widely disproven fraud narratives will likely be supercharged by a newly expanded DHS tool for verifying voter eligibility: the SAVE system.

Last year, DHS unveiled the first ever searchable national citizenship data system, a massive expansion of the SAVE system, an existing DHS tool previously used to verify the eligibility of non-citizens for certain government benefits. DHS worked with DOGE to rapidly integrate personal data held by the Social Security Administration into the SAVE system, transforming it from a modest tool for looking up immigration status of foreign-born citizens and non-citizens into a system that can comb through entire voter lists.

The result is a tool that effectively functions as a national citizenship database, which has never previously existed or been sanctioned by Congress. In fact, Congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974 in part to prevent the creation of an official or de facto national data bank, recognizing that such a database would erode Americans’ privacy rights.

While ensuring that only American citizens can vote is important, the Trump administration’s expansion of the SAVE system as a voter verification tool is unnecessary, unreliable, and dangerous. State election officials already have reliable processes to verify the citizenship of voter registrants. (Like we mentioned earlier, broadly speaking, non-citizens aren’t voting in American elections.)

Then there are the system’s significant flaws. Experts, including our VoteShield colleagues, have raised serious concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the data the SAVE system relies on and potential data matching issues created during the rapid expansion of the system. These underlying data issues could lead to false accusations of voter fraud, potentially disenfranchising eligible voters and perpetuating misleading claims about widespread non-citizen voting and unreliable election results.

Read more: The ‘SAVE’ Tool Could Disenfranchise U.S. Citizens.

Despite these concerns, the Trump administration has encouraged states to use the SAVE system to verify the eligibility of every voter on their voter rolls. And there is already evidence that the SAVE system is returning errors.

In October, election officials in Texas, one of 26 states that have reportedly signed on to use the SAVE system for voter verification, sent notices to thousands of voters who have been flagged by the SAVE system as “potential” non-citizen registered voters. Early reports indicate a high error rate, with numerous eligible voters being wrongfully identified as non-citizens and given thirty days to re-prove their citizenship status or face cancellation of their registrations.

This is about election subversion

Taken together, the two efforts set the stage for those in power to throw out the results of the midterm elections — torturing the data until they can use it to overturn the will of the voters and pick a winner of their choosing.

As the nation’s top law enforcement arm, the DOJ (which, again, is run by election deniers) can exert massive pressure on states when it is conducting investigations, regardless of their merit, and has broad powers that come with its obligations to ensure that states are not violating civil rights and voting rights statutes. However, the current DOJ is now seeking to use those civil rights authorities to commandeer sensitive voter data and make it harder for eligible voters to vote — the exact opposite of the laws’ intended purpose. Without any meaningful way for the public to check their work, the Trump administration could claim that running this data through the SAVE system has produced evidence of widespread non-citizen voting that casts doubt on the integrity of the midterms, paving the way for it to question and overturn unfavorable results.

The DOJ’s quest for voter data will likely only intensify in 2026. Just last month, the DOJ escalated its demands, pressuring more than a dozen states to sign a memorandum of understanding that would give the agency the power to hand-pick voters to be removed from the rolls without any clear criteria for doing so. This interference undermines states’ constitutional authority to run their own elections and could allow for hyper-targeted election subversion down to individual races of interest.

States are fighting back

States can and should continue to push back against these egregious and unconstitutional attempts to interfere with their authority over elections processes.

Since the DOJ began its campaign to access state voter registration data last May, state officials from across the political spectrum have challenged the legality of these requests and taken steps to keep their voters’ sensitive personal information out of the DOJ’s hands.

Of the 44 states that have received demands for copies of their statewide voter registration files, only 11 have provided or said they will provide their full, unredacted statewide voter registration data. Instead, most states have only provided the publicly available version of their voter file or not provided the file at all.

All evidence points to the administration gearing up to contest midterm results it doesn’t like, so it remains more important than ever that state leaders, election officials, and advocates stand up to protect their voters’ data from weaponization and approach allegations of widespread voter fraud with skepticism. Because if the administration succeeds in its quest, there’s little doubt it will find a way to “torture” your data into a false confession and use it as a pretext to overturn your vote.

Free elections require free speech, including for veterans

Yesterday, our colleague Amanda Carpenter wrote about another election threat on the horizon:

We are witnessing the Trump administration attempt to force dissenters into a repressive spiral, a dynamic where the state treats dissent not as a signal for dialogue but as a security threat that justifies even more aggressive force. Those who wish to protect our elections must be firm: Free speech is the prerequisite for a free election.

One group currently being targeted by the administration for exercising their freedom of speech is the cohort of veterans and former intelligence officers currently serving in Congress who have been vocal with their concerns around the administration’s national security policies. One of them, Senator Mark Kelly, has sued Secretary Pete Hegseth for illegally retaliating against him with a formal Department of Defense punishment.

We filed an amicus brief on behalf of more than 40 former defense and military leaders in support of Kelly. The stakes here are clear: “To chill the speech of retired military service members would not only infringe on their individual First Amendment rights, but also impoverish public debate on critical issues relating to our military and its role in domestic and foreign affairs.”

Read the whole brief here. It’s worth your time.

What else we’re tracking

• This week marked one year since President Trump was sworn in for his second term. Protect Democracy’s Genevieve Nadeau and Ellinor Heywood kicked off our new civic column at Nonprofit Quarterly with a retrospective of the first year of the administration’s attempts to constrain civil society and the lessons we’ll carry into year two.

• For more perspectives on where we stand a year in, we recommend Quinta Jurecic for The Atlantic, Jacob Grier for The UnPopulist, and The New York Times editorial board on how much money Trump has made off the presidency.

• Cameron Kistler and Ben Raderstorf wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle about the need for California to pass a universal constitutional remedies law to counter federal overreach: California can use these three words in the Constitution to push back against Trump. More on these kinds of laws and how your state can push back against unlawful abuses here and here.

• “Fixing the rules so no one can abuse power again”: The Renovator’s Danielle Allen is thinking about how laws like the one in California and the No Political Enemies Act introduced in Congress last week represent one part of a larger movement, which she calls the loyal opposition.

• In Minnesota today, the faith and labor communities are leading a day of action and general strike to call attention to the brutality of DHS agents there. Per The New Republic’s Grace Segars, The Minneapolis faith community is showing how to fight ICE.

“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

That’s what President Trump told Reuters’ James Oliphant in an Oval Office interview Wednesday when confronted with the prospect of Republican losses in this year’s midterm elections.

The president is obsessed with the midterms for one simple reason: They are the main and most important institution holding up our democracy. Between now and the swearing in of the next Congress a year from now, everything the administration does, every news story and every development, should be seen through this lens. The authoritarian movement is consolidating power and cracking down on the opposition in order to position themselves to corrupt the election — so they can stay in power and repeat the cycle indefinitely.

Everything rests on the midterms.

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As he promised he would, Trump spent his first year attempting to dismantle institutional checks and balances, to varying degrees of success. Congress has become a shell of itself, unwilling to check the president except in rare cases. The Supreme Court has significantly expanded presidential power, even granting Donald Trump in particular immunity for criminal deeds while in office. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has become nakedly partisan, pushing questionable — even trumped-up — prosecutions of the administration’s adversaries while brazenly running legal interference for the president. Independent institutions, above all the Federal Reserve, are under assault. And federal law enforcement, especially under the Department of Homeland Security, is acting increasingly like a private presidential paramilitary force. Meanwhile, many non-governmental institutions essential to a functioning democracy — from the media to business to universities to social media platforms — have capitulated to various degrees.

Still, the infrastructure of elections — how they are run and how we vote — is, as of right now,1 notably unscathed by Trump

The reason why is simple: In our federal system, elections are decentralized. They are run at the state and local level, which makes them much harder for an authoritarian president to corrupt.

Harder… but not impossible.

Read more: Deceive, disrupt, deny.

The next Congress will be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027. Over the next 12 months, expect the Trump administration to use every tool at its disposal to try to sow doubt about and interfere with the midterms.

Here are some of the things that we can expect the federal government to attempt this year:

• Continue pushing allies in state governments to gerrymander even more aggressively before the 2026 maps are final (especially if the Supreme Court gives them an assist by further eviscerating the Voting Rights Act in a bad Louisiana v. Callais decision).

• Use unprecedented executive orders that have no legal basis to do things like “ban” voting machines or mail-in voting, which would not succeed,2 but could still sow chaos and confusion.

• Deploy federal law enforcement (e.g., ICE) or military forces to highly contested congressional districts in an attempt to create upheaval, intimidate voters, illegally interfere with counting and certification, and even violently disrupt any part of the process. (This could include invoking the Insurrection Act — see below).

• Use the DOJ to try to intimidate and meddle with local election officials (such as attempting to “seize the voting machines”), instead of performing the federal government’s traditional role of supporting local election officials and combatting foreign interference.

• Misinterpret or misrepresent the voter data they’ve demanded from states as a way to remove eligible voters, suppress votes, and manufacture “evidence” of fraud.

• Otherwise spread lies about the election — e.g., “that noncitizens are voting” — to try to discredit the opposition and create a pretext to reject the results.

• Use “zombie lawsuits” to try to get partisan judges to overturn results that they don’t like after the fact.

• Coerce state and local election officials into tampering with or falsifying election results (à la “I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes” in Georgia).

• Finally, if all of those fail: brazenly ignore the will of the voters and try to install a Potemkin Congress by fiat instead of seating the people’s representatives.

(And that’s just what we can easily see coming. They will surely do other outlandish things beyond what we can reasonably predict.)

Impending chaos, however, is neither cause for despair nor complacency. The power of the federal government is vast, but ours remains intact. So let’s use it. Pushing back will require all of society — from protesters and grassroots organizers, to lawyers and judges, to faith leaders and business leaders, to veterans and state and local law enforcement, to journalists and storytellers — coming together with one voice to defend free and fair elections.

Here are some of the things we all can do, starting now:

1. Discredit, discredit, discredit. Nothing this administration does on elections can be given a presumption of legitimacy. A drumbeat of outrage, in advance, describing their goal clearly and in unstilted terms — “they want to corrupt the midterms so they can stay in power” — is key to inoculating our elections system against efforts to undo it.

2. Show up and participate. None of us can stay on the sidelines and no one role looks exactly the same. We are each uniquely positioned to do our own part to support — and to enable our neighbors, communities, and fellow Americans to take part in — the electoral process. Whether that’s by attending a rally, holding a sign, making a campaign donation, volunteering as a poll worker, observing the election, or showing up to vote. But more importantly than any partisan activity, mass nonviolent protests and other grassroots mobilization to support the principle of free, fair, and nonpartisan elections will almost certainly be necessary.

3. Focus on your sphere of control. When there are concrete things you have the power to do, do them. We’ve all got different roles and opportunities. If you have a media platform, share reliable information. If you have some sort of official authority, exercise it wisely. Organize a community or constituency. Get to know your elected officials. Become the person in your group chat who can explain what’s going on. Show up for a rally. Double check the voting rules in your state and cast a vote that would be nearly impossible to challenge. All of these things contribute to a vibrant democracy.

4. Stay confident. The coming attack on the 2026 midterms may end up being more outrageous and audacious than our imaginations can currently conjure. They are attempting to do what should be unthinkable, and they are doing it in plain sight. That should make you very angry — but it should also make you feel very confident that this is a winnable struggle. Everything is on our side: our history, the Constitution, morality, the law, reality, and basic facts. It will not be easy, but with the strength and courage each one of us has, we can and will win.

The American people do not want a dictatorship. The vast majority of our fellow citizens, even those who plan to vote for the president’s preferred candidates, do not want their vote to be ignored.

Trump threatens to invoke Insurrection Act

The president is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act as he continues to escalate and stoke tensions in Minnesota.

Here is everything you need to know about the law and what would happen next: Demystifying the most ominous law in America.

According to our colleague Rebecca Lullo:

The Insurrection Act is not the blank check for escalation that the president portrays it as. There are serious legal questions and courts could block yet another politicized deployment. Invocation wouldn’t suspend the Constitution, impose martial law, or otherwise exempt the military from applicable state and federal laws.

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Do federal officers have “absolute immunity”?

In the wake of Renee Good’s killing, the White House has loudly (and ominously) insisted that ICE and CBP officers have “absolute immunity” for their violent attacks on the people of Minneapolis and other American cities.

This is wrong. States can prosecute them and, under the right circumstances, achieve convictions. Protect Democracy’s explainer on why and how: Why federal officers don’t have absolute immunity.

The contours of the governing law are messy but the question of immunity likely turns on whether the prosecuted officer had a reasonable belief that federal law authorized or required the acts for which he is being prosecuted. It’s ultimately up to the discretion of a judge — or on appeal, multiple judges or justices — to determine whether the officer can be shielded from charges.

What else we’re tracking:

• Kristy Parker and Samantha Trepel write in The Guardian about how cities and states must hold ICE accountable for violence. “As former federal prosecutors, we know an incident like the Minneapolis shooting must be followed by a credible inquiry.”

• The Times’ Jim Rutenberg has a must-read feature on how the FCC has used obscure regulatory powers to crack down on networks: The MAGA plan to take over TV Is just beginning.

• A number of important legislative proposals moved forward this week, including Sen. Murphy and Rep. Crow’s NOPE Act and several states’ Universal Constitutional Remedies Acts advancing in California, Maryland, and New York. Ben Raderstorf explains their significance: A grand unified strategy to uphold the Constitution.

• Colorado Governor Jared Polis is reportedly considering clemency for Tina Peters, the election denier former County Clerk serving a nine-year sentence, after a sustained pressure campaign by Trump. Our colleagues Max Potter and Beau Tremitiere explain why that’s such a bad idea in The Denver Post: Clemency for Tina Peters endangers us all. (While you’re at it, read this similar argument from Stephen Richer, former Republican Maricopa County elections chief in The Bulwark.)

Yesterday, the House of Representatives did something strange.

Even though the chamber is currently controlled by a Republican majority, they passed a substantial bill — extending health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act — supported mostly by Democrats. 213 Democrats and 17 Republicans voted for the bill.

The vote was only possible because of a little-known congressional procedure, albeit one that has recently been getting more attention: the discharge petition. This formerly rare procedure has been used successfully a number of times this Congress to allow votes on bills that the speaker of the House otherwise refused to advance. Examples include Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s parental proxy voting plan, the Epstein files bill, and now the ACA subsidies bill (which was voted on yesterday).

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Discharge petitions are often described as a procedural “safety valve” — a method by which a majority of the House (typically bipartisan) can bypass the speaker and bring legislation directly to the floor. The increased use of discharge petitions has therefore fueled speculation that Speaker Mike Johnson is losing control of the House. But we believe that’s not really the right way to think about the issue.

Power has been increasingly concentrated in the speaker’s office, but the use of that power to severely limit what legislation gets a vote has frustrated what may be a growing number of “hidden majorities.” The increase in use of the discharge petition has allowed only a handful of those majorities to have their say.

Put differently: The speaker may not be losing his power; the members may be struggling to regain some of theirs.

For the House to truly represent the American people, majorities must be able to act, even if — and perhaps especially if — those majorities are bipartisan, and even tilted towards members of the minority party (in today’s example, the Democrats, but equally true when Republicans are in the minority). The increased use of discharge petitions is a positive development. It signals a willingness of members to engage in bipartisan legislating, even at the cost of defying their party leaders.

But make no mistake: Congressional partisanship and gridlock are still at levels once considered extreme. We should not just encourage the use of existing tools to overcome gridlock; we should be looking for ways to streamline and strengthen the discharge petition process. And we need to consider new procedural tools for identifying dormant majorities in Congress and empowering them to act.

For more on what those tools can look like, read: The counterintuitive way to fix Congress.

Congress may have many hidden majorities

There may be any number of bills that could get a majority if put on the floor for a vote, but only a select few ever get that opportunity. That’s because one of the key procedural powers in the House is the ability to call a bill up for a vote — a power that rests primarily with the leader of the majority party, the speaker of the House.

Use of the discharge petition “safety valve” is becoming more and more common precisely because speakers of the House have accumulated increasing power over the agenda and have exercised that power to refuse consideration of bills that cross party lines — despite having increasingly narrow majorities. In earlier periods of congressional history, control over the agenda was more decentralized. But in today’s House, the speaker chooses the majority members of the Rules Committee, and the Rules Committee has almost unlimited authority to bring bills to the floor in any form. The speaker further possesses sole authority to recognize members to bring up bills by suspending the rules. Furthermore, there is an informal understanding that the speaker is expected to block legislation without clear support from a majority of their party even if those bills are supported by the majority of the House — effectively shutting out many potentially bipartisan proposals.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act revealed a massive hidden majority

The story of the bill to release the Epstein files is illustrative of the dynamic that exists between the gatekeepers and the hidden majorities that they are shutting out.

Last summer, the Epstein bill seemed to be going nowhere. The committee of jurisdiction didn’t take it up, the Rules Committee refused to bring the bill to the floor, and the speaker himself declared his opposition. With the usual gates all closed, supporters of the bill turned to the method of last resort: the discharge petition.

The discharge petition requires an outright majority of the House (218 members) to sign the petition in order to force a floor vote on the underlying legislation. And for a long time, it seemed that a majority of the House did not want to consider the bill. In September, the petition received its 217th signature. Any member could have signed at that point to bring the bill to the floor. None did.

That changed when Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva was sworn in on Nov. 12. She immediately signed the discharge petition, thus confirming for the first time that a majority of the House did at least want to consider the bill. Once that point was reached, opposition to the bill seemed to melt away. When the final vote was tallied, the bill passed not only with a sizable majority, but almost unanimously, 427-1 (with five members not voting). Evidently, there was a hidden majority in favor all along.

With almost total unanimity on the substantive question, why was it so difficult to achieve a majority on the procedural question of taking up the bill at all? Part of the answer is that a scheduled vote is a powerful thing — it forces members to actually consider their position on an issue in a setting where they may be held accountable to their constituents. As long as party leaders have a near-monopoly on the agenda, many issues will go unaddressed.

With increasing partisanship and narrow majorities, there are some signs that the current concentration of power in the office of the speaker is becoming untenable. Speakers have lost votes on special orders from the Rules Committee. They have had to hold votes open, sometimes for hours, in order to twist arms and make whatever concessions they need to secure a majority. When majority party leadership doesn’t have the votes, it simply cancels planned legislative activity.

With the committee system all but defunct and the speaker increasingly losing control of the majority caucus, it is no wonder that members have been turning to the discharge petition as an outlet for their legislative ambitions. But the House cannot run on discharge petitions alone. The procedures are too cumbersome and it is not, fundamentally, the most effective process for finding hidden majorities — because it requires proactively assembling a majority before the process can even begin.

Hidden majorities point to a path to overcoming gridlock

What the House needs are new procedural mechanisms that allow different sub-majorities to test the will of the House and discover which bills can garner a majority and which cannot. Committees no longer perform this function and the rationales for limiting floor access to the speaker alone are no longer persuasive. Partisan speakers routinely stifle bipartisan bills that would easily get majorities if allowed on the floor.

A more decentralized system for floor access would engender a healthy competition among the various factions in the House (Blue Dogs, Freedom Caucus, Progressive Caucus, etc.) to see which policies can attract majorities. Members would have more agency to pursue their legislative goals, and voters would have a more robust legislative record with which to assess their representatives.

The key to such a system would be to give these groups (which we’ve called “sub-parties”) some formal mechanism to get legitimate proposals on the legislative agenda. We are currently working to develop a variety of options for how a portion of the agenda could be set aside for sub-party proposals (proposals that may surface hidden majorities). In doing so, we take inspiration from the fact that there are many examples of legislatures that operate much differently than the current U.S. House.

Consider that:

• Many state legislatures have used a process whereby any bill that passes through a committee is automatically scheduled for a vote by the full legislature.

• Each session, the Canadian parliament allows some individual members, by lottery, to offer one piece of legislation for a vote. An hour is set aside each day for such votes.

• Even the U.S. House itself was once far more decentralized and has experimented with a number of ways to provide additional access to the agenda. For example, a now-defunct process set aside time on Wednesdays (“Calendar Wednesdays”) for committee chairs to bring legislation up for vote.

The point here is not that we should directly copy any of these suggestions but rather that there are a variety of ways to restore the legislative process. For too long, most members of Congress have been sidelined from their legislative duties, instead deferring heavily to their leaders in the hope that that will help them win all-or-nothing battles with the other party. The result has been gridlock, dysfunction, and an ever-increasing public disapproval of Congress.

Members need to open up the process, remove the partisan gatekeepers, and allow more hidden majorities an opportunity to act.

If the system requires months of effort to bring bills to the floor — bills that are ultimately supported by overwhelming majorities — that’s a clear sign that the system needs to change.

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Senate grows more assertive on war powers

In another example of a hidden majority, Congress’ efforts to rein in the White House’s abuse of war powers are gaining steam. POLITICO reports:

The Senate on Thursday voted to advance legislation that would force President Donald Trump to seek congressional approval before taking any new military action in Venezuela, a stunning rebuke for the White House in the first big test of GOP unity since the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro.

GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Todd Young of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri backed the measure to check Trump in a 52-47 vote.

Read more: The founders gave the first branch war powers for a reason.

Momentum grows to close legal loophole that protects ICE agents from accountability

As Ben Raderstorf wrote this week, the behavior of ICE officers — in Minnesota and elsewhere — is partially explained by a quirk in our legal system: Federal officers are much harder to sue for violating constitutional rights than state and local ones:

This loophole in federal law, where victims or their families can sue local police, but not federal officers, for violating their constitutional rights is one of those frustrating legal realities of our system.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And it also wouldn’t take federal legislation to close the loophole. Minnesota could, on its own, pass a law giving Minnesotans a cause of action to sue any and all government officials for violating their constitutional rights. This fix, generally known as a “universal constitutional remedies act” or a “converse-1983” cause of action is widely believed to be both effective and legal. It simply would close the loophole, through state law, and subject federal officers, including ICE, to the same standard legal liability that the vast majority of law enforcement in the United States currently operates under.

[Read the full piece.]

State governments are moving quickly to close this loophole.

Yesterday, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she will propose a Universal Constitutional Remedies Act in New York. In California, Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to do the same is advancing in the state legislature.

For more, read: The Universal Constitutional Remedies Act, explained.

One year into the second Trump administration, we see reasons for hope amidst the rubble. As Isaac Gilles and Ian Bassin wrote:

[Trump] is losing the race against time and has failed to sufficiently consolidate power before becoming deeply unpopular, which was the recipe we knew would be necessary to prevent a full-on collapse into autocracy.

So while extreme danger still exists for our democracy, and many communities in our country still live in daily terror from the regime’s abuses, we can now see a path to defeating the autocratic assault and turning this crisis into opportunity.

The outcome of this race against time was not preordained. The advantage has shifted back and forth between the forces of autocracy and those of democracy. Here are some of the most important moments from this year — challenges, setbacks, and successes — in 11 pieces that are worth re-reading before we turn to 2026.

Despite opposition in his own party and from voters, on his first day in office, the president pardoned over 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 rioters, including Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

From day one of his presidency, aided by chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Trump took aim at the civil service. The authors of our Dear Civil Servant series saw through Trump’s strategy from the beginning.

Over the summer, a new front opened in America’s forever redistricting wars when the president directed the Texas legislature to carry out an aggressive, unusual mid-decade redraw and gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. While this was an escalation, the only way to stop endless gerrymandering battles is to do away with our winner-take-all system, once and for all.

Another dominant story of the year was, of course, the Epstein files. In the political upheaval over the release of the files, Ben Raderstorf saw the bigger picture: The ongoing crisis and potential coverup at the DOJ was a near-inevitable outcome of politicizing law enforcement.

In July, President Trump sent Marines to Los Angeles. In August, he deployed the National Guard to “fight crime” in Washington, D.C. In September, he set his sights on Memphis. By the fall, he was openly attempting to occupy American cities, with Chicago drawing particular (and particularly violent) attention.

But Americans across the country pushed back. Learning key lessons from Chicago and other cities, they showed how principled, patriotic, and non-violent mobilization can defend our democracy.

In September, activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at a college campus. Predictably, the president and his allies attempted to weaponize that tragedy to escalate their efforts to clamp down on dissent. But we learned an important lesson about collective action when FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s efforts to jawbone ABC into canceling Jimmy Kimmel Live! failed.

Fall of 2025 saw the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. But the real story behind the shutdown far preceded Congress’ failure to pass an appropriations bill. The administration’s unlawful attempts to withhold congressionally appropriated funding for vital programs started all the way back in January.

In October, President Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for a gilded, Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom — without congressional approval. The image was a stark contrast to the massive No Kings Day protests on Oct. 18, which were the largest protests in American history.

Perhaps most importantly, the 2025 elections were free and fair (not to mention, significant political losses for the authoritarian movement). Still, the administration attempted to lay the groundwork for future election subversion efforts.

Throughout the year, President Trump has weaponized the DOJ to go after his perceived political opponents — from Letitia James to James Comey to Adam Schiff. (Our Retaliatory Actions Tracker is the best place to go for up-to-date information on these efforts.) In doing so, Trump is committing one of the oldest abuses in human government.

Needless to say, it’s been a long year — with plenty of trials and tribulations that will each serve as lessons for the years ahead. We’ll be back in January with some of what we expect to see next year.

Things may get worse before they get better, and it will take all of us working together to defend our democracy.

With our partners at Interfaith Alliance, Protect Democracy is launching a national campaign celebrating the many religious leaders and communities actively mobilizing against DHS’s authoritarian and dehumanizing tactics.

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Yesterday, this ad started running in digital, broadcast television, and streaming media markets across the country (including West Palm Beach, FL). The spot will run between now and Christmas — please do let us know if you see it in the wild.

We would love your help sending it to anyone in your life who considers themselves a person of faith, whatever form that might take. This ad is about Christmas, but the message of grace and love, not hate or cruelty, is universal.

Add your name and help spread the message at: LoveNotICE.org

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Speaking candidly about religion and democracy may feel like unfamiliar territory. (At least it is for me — speaking as a Catholic by upbringing but not practice.) A not insignificant part of what we are all working to protect is our freedom to disagree about what, if anything, is sacred.

Yet while separation of church and state has always been a critical part of the American experiment, our communities of faith and religious leaders, from Quaker abolitionists to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, have always been critical moral voices in our civic conversation.

That same moral clarity and leadership is proving to be critical in our current struggle for democracy. (For just one example, watch this remarkable video from the Catholic Conference of Bishops.)

There are three reasons why this religious mobilization is so important — and is having such a profound impact. One is moral, one practical, and one historical.

Reason one: Democracy is a moral cause

First, democracy is not just some soulless, technical thing. The struggle to maintain, and ultimately improve, our systems of self-government is a profoundly moral quest.

All the values that democracy represents — grace, selflessness, humility, cooperation, compassion, human dignity, love — intersect with those of essentially every faith. Contemporary religious movements and faith communities can help give democratic values endurance and meaning. They ground shared values in community life and practice democratic principles day to day.

As Ian Bassin and Rev. Paul Raushenbush, Interfaith Alliance’s CEO, wrote today in The Bulwark: Toward a new Great Awakening.

The turn toward the holidays feels more difficult this year. All around us we’re confronted with tragedies deeply at odds with the spirit of the season: a college student on her way home to surprise her parents deported instead by our government to a country she left when she was 7; students forced to cower in fear under the desks on which they should be taking their final exams; a head of state responding with mockery and derision to the brutal murder of a loving couple.

It feels as if we are in a moment in which the moral ground beneath us is shifting. Compassion is in retreat and hatred is on the rise. Alienation is ascendant and community harder to find. Our public life is fractured, our discourse coarsened, and our confidence in one another eroded. Unmoored and anxious, the temptation for many is to retreat into tribes or despair. Or both.

Yet history whispers that such times are not only moments of danger. They are also invitations.

America has been here before.

Again and again, when the nation has faced spiritual exhaustion or moral confusion, waves of renewal have risen—not imposed from above, but kindled in hearts, congregations, and communities. We have called these movements “Great Awakenings,” moments in which we collectively re-find our purpose, conscience, and responsibility to one another in response to a feeling of having lost those things.

Read their whole article here. It’s wonderful and there’s no paywall.

When we speak of democracy only as a mechanical thing — as process and systems, not soul and values — I think we miss a large part of the point. Democracy is nothing short of a profound expression of love and faith in each other. The notion of human dignity of all individuals, as embedded in almost all faith traditions, forms a bedrock of individual rights and the rule of law.

Reason two: Religion is already caught in the struggle between autocracy and democracy

Second, the practical reason. Like it or not, religion is already central to the conflict between authoritarianism and democracy in the United States.

Just as faith has been a powerful motivator for democracy and freedom, so too has it been used as a justification for repression, abuse, and autocracy across history. From the Taliban in Afghanistan to Tsarist Russia to modern competitive authoritarians in Poland and Hungary, dictators have often claimed the mantle of protecting faith.

Since he first arose on the national scene, Donald Trump and those around him have sought to hijack and misappropriate religion in pursuit of oppression and power. While there is little evidence that Donald Trump himself is religious in any real way, his rhetoric often verges on messianic. (As Michael Kruse wrote earlier this year: Does Trump actually think he’s God?)

Almost every corner of this administration is infused with a particularly radicalized (and racialized) vision of Christian nationalism.

Against this backdrop, religious leaders and communities across traditions are speaking out, signaling that many within faith communities see this moment as one that demands moral attention and public response.

Reason three: The immense historical power of religious mobilization

The final reason religious mobilization is so important?

Simple practicality: When religious communities line up on the side of democracy, democracy tends to win. Around the world, religious leaders have often been early, front-line, and disproportionately effective pro-democracy leaders.

(Shortly after Trump was elected, my former colleague Chris Crawford was asked who is going to be the first to stand up to the president. “I think it’s going to be the nuns,” he said. He was more-or-less right.)

If you look across history, the catalytic role religious actors often play is, honestly, striking. Not only have almost all pro-democracy movements included people of faith as at least one part of the coalition, but in many cases, they play an early and tone-setting role:

• Martin Luther King Jr.’s Baptist ministry formed a moral bedrock of the Civil Rights Movement, as did other religious leaders like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

• Mahatma Gandhi’s inclusive Hinduism was arguably a founding creed of Indian democracy.

• Lech Wałęsa and other devout Catholics forged Solidarity — a broad coalition with labor and civil society — that overcame autocracy and built a lasting democracy in Poland.

• Bishop Desmond Tutu was the voice and heart of the movement against Apartheid in South Africa (and chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).

• The Arab Spring, at its most aspirational, was infused with pluralistic visions of Islam, such as that of Tunisia’s Rached Ghannouchi.

• Corazón Aquino, a devout Catholic backed by the Philippine Church, led the People Power Revolution to topple dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a nonviolent revolution.

• Archbishop Oscar Romero’s leadership, and subsequent assassination, were critical factors in El Salvador’s struggle for democracy.

(I told you. Striking!)

So how can religious communities in the United States today play a similarly catalytic role?

I recommend starting with our The Faithful Fight series, developed with the Horizons Project.

The Faithful Fight draws upon the experience and expertise of religious leaders from across denominations and across the country, bringing practical skills and uplifting stories to help religious communities take action in ways that align with their values and their skills. It includes lessons on everything from building bridges across difference to organizing and training for collective action.

Explore all the toolkits here:

The Faithful Fight

Most important, though, is for all of us, whether we consider ourselves religious or not, to vigorously engage in our democracy with love and faith in each other.

As Ian and Rev. Raushenbush conclude in The Bulwark:

The task before us is not to win arguments, but to begin to heal a moral ecology. To cultivate the virtues without which no free society can endure: honesty, courage, patience, generosity, empathy, and hope. Hope, especially — not as naïve optimism, but as disciplined commitment to the common good.

In troubled times, the question is not whether history will judge us. It will. The question is whether we will rise to the moment we have been given.

May we have the courage to awaken again.

Whatever your faith tradition holds, may you have a restorative holiday season that inspires action, courage, and awakening.

Let’s start with the bottom line: We are going to win.

That was far from clear in January. An autocrat had just been re-elected with what he viewed as a mandate to dismantle American democracy. His shock-and-awe-filled first few months were maximally destructive and sowed fear — intentionally — across the land.

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But he was met with a counterforce: millions of Americans and organizations like Protect Democracy and our peers, determined to activate our system of checks and balances. He has repeatedly tried to override those checks, and has damaged them materially. But just as our flag was still there after the British bombing of Fort McHenry — as Francis Scott Key memorialized in our national anthem — so too is our democracy still there.

And what’s more, he is losing the race against time and has failed to sufficiently consolidate power before becoming deeply unpopular, which was the recipe we knew would be necessary to prevent a full-on collapse into autocracy.

So while extreme danger still exists for our democracy, and many communities in our country still live in daily terror from the regime’s abuses, we can now see a path to defeating the autocratic assault and turning this crisis into opportunity.

That is only possible because of communities like this one. Because of what we’ve all shown ourselves capable of doing, we are confident that democracy and freedom will prevail.

The race against time — and why 2025 was so pivotal

Donald Trump still has three years left in office. But it is possible that none of them will be as dangerous as 2025. If that turns out to be true, it will be because of a fundamental feature of authoritarian consolidation: Extinguishing democracy is a race against time, a sprint to seize enough power before political discontent and backlash constrain the autocrat from entrenching power.

In practice, this struggle tends to play out between two countervailing cycles: the authoritarian strategy and a pro-democracy response.

We saw this cycle clearly in the first part of this year. The administration’s attacks on perceived opponents or vulnerable groups created a climate of fear, leading those who populate institutions designed to check executive abuses (legislatures, courts, media, other civic institutions) to step back. With checking institutions frozen or in retreat, abuses grew and power was further consolidated.

To respond, our strategy has always been to reverse that cycle by challenging abuses of power. Courage, in a word, is contagious.

Here are some of the things we accomplished together this year to check abuses of power:

• We won an injunction in Chicago severely limiting federal agents from using violent force to suppress peaceful First Amendment activity. (Here are some lessons we learned about how we can all effectively resist the next waves of federal deployment.)

• We forced the Office of Management and Budget to stop hiding information about how the executive branch is using congressionally appropriated funding. (More here about why public — and congressional — access to this information is so vital.)

• We blunted some of the worst attacks on the federal workforce through litigation that temporarily blocked efforts to dismantle 20+ federal agencies, which bought enough time for the administration to lose interest. (Read Erica Newland, Jules Torti, and Ellinor Heywood on why this dismantling of the federal bureaucracy is so alarming: What the RIF just happened?)

• We filed suit on behalf of the Federal Trade Commissioners the president attempted to fire and we argued the case before the Supreme Court this week. (Read an explainer here about why it’s essential to have independent federal agencies.)

• We pressured USDA into backtracking on efforts to seize sensitive SNAP data from state agencies and remain in court to stop their renewed efforts. (Learn more: DOGE’s data “panopticon” pales compared to what’s next.)

• We helped prevent a North Carolina election from being subverted after the fact by a losing candidate who tried to disenfranchise thousands of voters. This is a key precedent we can use to defend elections in 2026 and beyond. (More about this election: Stealing an election by disenfranchising service members? And more about the danger of “zombie lawsuits”: How to steal an election in America.)

• We’ve drafted and/or testified on behalf of a raft of bills that are moving through legislatures in Wisconsin, California, Georgia, Oregon, New York and elsewhere to shore up election vulnerabilities and protect constitutional rights from federal overreach. (Read more: One quiet bipartisan way state legislatures are making election administration stronger.)

• We are on the brink of restoring voting rights to thousands of people in our litigation against Virginia’s racially-motivated felony disenfranchisement law. (Read a summary of why the legal strategy here is promising — and more importantly, of the real human costs that make this case important.)

• And we launched the AI for Democracy Action Lab to ensure that we limit the risk that AI poses to democracy — and seize its potential for self-government. (Some more thoughts here: Democracy in the time of artificial intelligence.)

These interventions are just a tiny fraction of the millions of acts of courage, defiance, and patriotism that have slowed the authoritarian cycle and accelerated the pro-democracy one.

Almost every day now, authoritarianism is losing momentum while democracy and accountability are picking up steam.

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If given the opportunity, the American people are poised to decisively reject autocracy

As Lakshya Jain writes in The Argument this week, all electoral signs increasingly point to a historic political rebuke that, to many, seemed almost implausible earlier this year: The unraveling of Trump’s 2024 coalition.

“Every data point we’ve seen in 2025,” Jain writes, “consistently points to one reality: A blue wave is coming. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that 2026 may be the best year for Democrats since 2018.”

Another data point from just yesterday: A new AP-NORC poll found record lows, with 31 percent approving of Trump’s handling of the economy (down from 40 percent in March) and 38 percent on immigration (down from 49 percent in March).

As our strategy predicted, once the autocrat becomes politically unpopular, it is hard for them to get others to help consolidate power and tilt the playing field. Institutions tend to lean into performing their checking functions. To wit, just this week:

• Indiana Republicans rejected Trump’s attempts to coerce them into redistricting, bravely weathering even violent threats against their homes to do so. (Read the incredibly inspiring words of democratic patriotism from Indiana State Sen. Greg Walker in doing so here.)

• After a truly Kafka-esque maze of legal persecution by the regime, Kilmar Abrego García was released from custody.

• Alina Habba, Trump’s personal lawyer who the White House unlawfully installed as U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, resigned.

• Another grand jury refused to indict one of Trump’s political adversaries.

• After almost unanimously bucking the President on the release of the Epstein files, Republicans in Congress this week held oversight hearings on the president’s unlawful boat strikes in the Caribbean and on his deployment of military forces to American cities. Republicans also crossed the president in the House in voting to overturn the president’s executive order stripping bargaining rights from public sector unions.

For more on the signs that Trump’s efforts at authoritarian consolidation are failing, read this summary from Garrett Graff.

This sort of broad political rebuke of an authoritarian before they have successfully entrenched themselves in power is rare. Nothing like this happened in Russia or Hungary or Turkey or Venezuela. It looks more like what happened in South Korea, where president Yoon Suk Yeol found out that it’s very hard to consolidate power when less than 20% of the population approves of the job you’re doing.

Which is to say, what we’re seeing here is what you tend to see in countries that survive attempted authoritarian takeovers.

Protect Democracy’s strategy for 2026

But the danger has far from passed. To consolidate our gains against an autocratic takeover and set us on a path of democratic renewal is going to mean stepping on the gas in 2026. Our strategy for doing so reflects the trends above: that the majority of the people don’t want what the authoritarians in power are offering.

Which means that, at root, our task is simply to protect the people’s ability and freedom to choose their leaders and then to render a verdict on the performance of those leaders in regular elections. That process is not a given. We know that modern authoritarianism consolidates power not by eliminating elections, but by holding them on a playing field that is tilted in myriad ways to prevent true self-government.

We are therefore focused on two core pillars of work:

One, protecting the electoral process. The American people must have the ability to have their voices heard next November. We must protect electoral infrastructure and processes from interference in 2026 and look ahead toward protecting those processes for 2028. We are working to ensure that voters can cast their ballots, that the votes will be counted according to the rules, and that the outcomes will be respected and the rightful winners — regardless of who they are — will take power in a peaceful process.

Read our colleagues Alexandra Chandler and Emily Rodriguez on some of what we expect to see next year: What the 2025 election means for 2026.

Two, protecting electoral competition. At the same time, we are working to ensure that the 2026 and 2028 elections are open to meaningful competition. It’s not enough to just protect the voting process and transfer of power; we also have to uphold all of the predicate steps in the lead up to an election that make it a genuine and fair contest for power. Our focus is on protecting an open civic landscape in which all Americans can dissent, organize, share and receive accurate information, make arguments for and against political platforms, express and provide support for political candidates, and compete for power free of intimidation and censorship.

Read about some of the key dynamics: weaponization of the justice system, abuses by DHS agents, censorship by the FCC, abuse of the pardon power, the Insurrection Act, corruption, and violence.

In addition to this “north star” focus on protecting the integrity of future elections and electoral competition, we are also advancing a vision for democratic transformation and renewal. We will never truly escape the autocratic threat if our democracy remains so fragile that every election is an existential battle between democracy and authoritarianism. We must therefore advance an additional set of work to build a more resilient democracy for the future. This stems from a recognition that, as we saw in 2024, people around the country and around the world are hungry for seismic changes to the status quo, changes that recognize and respond to an era of enormous disruption.

Read about why proportional representation could come sooner than you think, how fusion voting offers a practical path to multipartyism, how Congress can fix itself by embracing internal divisions, and our new AI for Democracy Action Lab.

Again, none of this is cause for complacency. This is ambitious, challenging, and high-stakes work. Our republic remains in significant danger, as are so many of our neighbors who are being actively terrorized by this administration.

For the first time in years, however, the pro-democracy side is the one with momentum. All of us have worked to make that happen. All of us should feel confident and empowered going into next year.

We — the forces of freedom and democracy — are going to win.

In meteorology, there’s an atmospheric effect called a “temperature inversion.” It’s when a layer of cold air gets stuck below a blanket of warmer air aloft.

Generally, the results aren’t healthy. Air pollution can be trapped in the cold air, leading to hazardous air quality. Or whole areas can get bogged down in foggy, cold weather. (This happened where I live last week, and trust me, it was gross.)

A similar phenomenon is happening in Washington, D.C. — but not with weather. With law enforcement.

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In an ideal world, justice should follow a natural gradient of accountability. More severe crimes at the top should face harsher punishments, with less severe sanctions for more minor crimes at the bottom. Kingpins are supposed to face steeper consequences than their underlings. Most importantly, everyday people who haven’t done anything wrong are supposed to be protected above all.

Obviously, we do not live in an ideal world. Smaller-scale accountability inversions (think Marc Rich) dot our history. And we’ve never truly succeeded in delivering accountability for some of the most consequential wrongdoings (think Vietnam, Iraq, or the 2008 financial crisis).

Still, the Trump administration has flipped this gradient of justice to an unprecedented degree. We have open impunity for the powerful, regardless of their crimes; harsh punishment for the disfavored and unconnected; and, for some, brutality without any due process.

This inversion is happening through many different vectors, like pardon abuses, politicization of the DOJ and the military, and unconstitutional actions by federal agents.

Like trapped air pollution, this accountability inversion is poisoning our democracy.

The story of Juan Orlando Hernández and Alejandro Carranza

Consider the fate of two Latin American men at the hands of the Trump administration.

Juan Orlando Hernández is a powerful man. He was president of his country, Honduras, for eight years. He once accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo. According to the DOJ, he sought to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”

Hernández was arrested in 2022. Over the course of a three-week trial in New York City, extensive evidence proved that Hernández played a key leadership role in a conspiracy that successfully transported more than half a million kilograms of cocaine through Honduras to the United States.

That’s not all. Per the Department of Justice:

As a congressman, then President of the Honduran National Congress, and finally the two-term President of Honduras, Hernández was allegedly paid millions of dollars in cocaine proceeds which he used to enrich himself, finance his political campaigns, and commit voter fraud while the people of Honduras endured conditions of poverty and rampant violence.

For context, 500,000 kilograms is approximately the cargo capacity of seven Air Force C-17 Globemaster planes.

At the conclusion of the trial, a jury found Hernández guilty. A judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison. Throughout the process, he had extensive legal representation. He had every opportunity to present evidence and witnesses to the jury. Even after conviction, Hernández retained a number of powerful friends — including Donald Trump’s longtime associate, Roger Stone, who continued to advocate on Hernández’s behalf.

That advocacy worked. On Tuesday, Donald Trump issued “a Full and Complete Pardon,” releasing Hernández from prison four decades early.

Alejandro Carranza, in contrast, was not a powerful man. Public reporting indicates he was simply a fisherman in the Colombian seaside city of Santa Marta. He was married and had four children.

We have no idea whether or not Carranza was secretly a drug trafficker (or even connected to illegal activity), but his wife insists “he had no ties to drug trafficking, and his daily activity was fishing.”

On Sept. 15, Carranza told his father he was heading to a spot “with good fish.” A friend said, “He went offshore to catch sierra, tuna, and snapper, which are found far out at this time of year.”

He was nowhere near U.S. territorial waters, but the Trump administration claims it suspected Carranza’s fishing boat was carrying drugs eventually bound here. Unlike Hernández, though, Carranza did not see a trial. Or even arrest. He had no opportunity to try to dispute the allegation.

He was executed by an airstrike as part of a campaign ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Fouling the principles of justice from top to bottom

This pattern of inversion — where low-level suspects face cruel and unusual treatment while powerful criminals get practically pampered — is happening up and down the federal government.

This week, in addition to Hernández, Trump also pardoned former Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar, who took over half a million dollars in bribes from Azerbaijan. He also commuted the sentence of David Gentile, a private equity executive convicted of a $1.7 billion “Ponzi-like” scheme.

So far in his second term, Trump has pardoned over 1,600 people, including former congressman and fraudster George Santos; crypto executive Changpeng Zhao; Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht; tax cheat nursing home executive Paul Walczak; and a long list of other investors, supporters, and business associates. (And, of course, Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security prison.)

Why is Trump inverting justice?

Mostly, it seems to be corruption, politics, and personal gain. Giving powerful people special treatment is a core entrenchment strategy of all competitive authoritarians.1 Plus, Trump also clearly maintains a deep sense of resentment over efforts to hold him accountable for potential wrongdoing in the past. As he said this week:

Well, [Hernández] was the president, and they had some drugs being sold in their country, and because he was the president, they went after him — that was a Biden horrible witch hunt.

Meanwhile, the White House has directed much of the federal government to take a draconian approach towards many everyday people suspected of crimes, even beyond the summary executions for suspected drug trafficking.

Reporting yesterday from The New York Times found the government’s own data shows most immigrants arrested in city crackdowns have no criminal record.

As Ansley Skipper wrote last month, federal law enforcement is even targeting people who are specifically following the rules — attending immigration check-ins, applying for asylum, and so on.

Just to illustrate what this all looks like in practice, watch this video of a woman detained in the Florida Keys this week under suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant (she was later released).

The point is not whether any specific person was or was not guilty of whatever crime the administration suspects them of.

Again, we don’t know for sure whether Alejandro Carranza was involved in the drug trade in any capacity. Same for the at least 86 others who have been killed in extrajudicial strikes ordered by Defense Secretary Hegseth.2

The point is precisely that we didn’t know. Yet every day, people of various nationalities who have not been convicted of any wrongdoing are being treated by the U.S. government with unconscionable brutality. At the same time, powerful people who have been proven to have committed crimes — like Juan Orlando Hernández, Henry Cuellar, George Santos, and Changpeng Zhao — are getting remarkably special treatment.

It’s all inverted. Everything’s upside down… for now.

How an inversion collapses

I cannot tell you exactly how this all ends, but here is a hypothesis.

A temperature inversion ends when sunlight heats the ground below, eventually warming enough air that it pierces the lid of cold air. Suddenly, the whole unstable equilibrium collapses and everything mixes back together until a normal gradient is restored.

I suspect the key to overcoming the accountability inversion is similar. Enough metaphorical sunlight — enough transparency, accountability, public pressure — and suddenly the weight of the injustice will collapse in on itself.

Don’t look now, but this may already be starting to happen (at least with the boat strikes, the rest of the inversion may admittedly take longer).

Republican lawmakers sound ever more angry at Defense Secretary Hegseth. Here’s GOP Rep. Mike Turner:

This activity that’s happening in the Caribbean where they are hitting these boats -- these individuals if they were captured and tried and convicted, they would be guilty, if they were found guilty, of criminal activity for which they’re not subject to capital punishment. They would be put in jail… These people are being killed.

Sen. Rand Paul said of Hegseth: “Either he was lying to us on Sunday, or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board is calling for Congressional oversight. Even Newsmax’s legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, said Hegseth “should be prosecuted for a war crime.”

The outrage is building. Keep letting the sunlight in. Sooner or later, accountability and justice will prevail.

Independent agencies go before SCOTUS Monday

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Slaughter v. Trump. Protect Democracy’s Amit Agarwal — the former solicitor general of Florida and one-time clerk to now-Justices Kavanaugh and Alito — will argue on behalf of former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. You should be able to listen to oral arguments here.

This case has three main potential upshots:

1. The further expansion and consolidation of executive power at a time of already rampant executive abuses.

2. Whether billionaires and political cronies will control and corrupt federal agencies.

3. The integrity of federal agencies that serve vital roles in American society, including regulating the economy, protecting Americans from corporate exploitation, and making sure consumer products are safe to use.

If SCOTUS rules in Trump’s favor, it would grant the president unbridled power to fire independent economic regulators without cause, threatening the American economy and enabling political corruption.

Spread the word about what's at stake

What else we’re tracking:

• My Protect Democracy colleagues who work on defending civic space have a new piece for Nonprofit Quarterly: This giving season, nonprofits should address the chill in the air. (Keep an eye out for their forthcoming regular column in the magazine, which will launch in January.)

• And, speaking of resources for civil society organizations, we also have a new primer in the Nonprofit Toolkit series: What if … your organization is concerned about asset freezes and forfeiture?

• Last week, Protect Democracy (represented by American Oversight) sued for records on reported Trump administration efforts to investigate and target nonprofits. Said JoAnna Suriani: “Americans deserve to know whether the government is using its vast law enforcement and financial surveillance powers to investigate nonprofits simply because the president disagrees with their views.”

• Federal forces moved on to their latest target city: New Orleans. Read my colleagues’ advice from Chicago’s success in pushing back: A playbook for the federal immigration surge in New Orleans.

• 34 retired admirals, generals, and service secretaries are warning about the dangers of politicized domestic deployments, as the Trump admin appeals a judge’s ruling that the National Guard deployment to DC is illegal. Read their brief to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals here.