This week, we saw the pinnacle of work we have been doing for nearly a decade to protect democracy, and the opening of a door to the fourth wave of democracy that we now have the opportunity to bring about.
The global authoritarian wave reached America’s shores in 2016, and we launched Protect Democracy in response. We built on lessons from around the world: that the answer is a cross-ideological movement that doesn’t back a candidate, party, or set of policies, but defends and strengthens the institutions that make self-government possible. And we knew from the start that this would be a generational struggle, one we remain in despite the outcomes earlier this week. Autocrats suffer setbacks and sometimes come back stronger. Viktor Orbán lost power in Hungary, returned, and dismantled Hungarian democracy for a generation. In 2024, we watched the same pattern play out here with Donald Trump’s return.
When he returned, we sized up the situation this way: He and his authoritarian cause had been dealt a royal flush. He held the presidency, a loyalist Congress, and a Supreme Court inclined to defer to him. Major tech companies, universities, and law firms were bowing to him, and the cultural zeitgeist was at his back. Any competent poker player dealt a royal flush will win that hand unless they do something colossally stupid, like trading in their queen on the draw.
We also knew that, if anyone was going to trade in a queen while holding a royal flush, it was Donald Trump, who has done that his entire adult life since his father gave him a million dollars to start his first business. Sitting across the table with only an ace-high, we knew our job was to spend our time improving it to a pair of aces: build a coalition of left, right, and center, wait for his blunder, and — crucially — keep the rules of the game intact.
Then, once he had blundered away his strong hand, we could show our cards, trusting that with the rules protected, a pair of aces would beat his remaining ace-high.
And that is exactly how it played out. With his Liberation Day rollout of unlawful tariffs he traded in his queen. With his assault on the people of Minnesota he traded in his jack. And by the time he launched a tragic war against Iran, he truly had No Kings.
Meanwhile, we kept the rules intact and helped broaden the pro-democracy coalition. And by the time both hands were shown, it turned out the forces of democracy were holding not two, not three, but four aces.
So how did we do it?