Trump, in his own words

Plus, battling election denialism in Nevada

There’s lots of talk about Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 to present a more sanitized platform for the Republican National Convention next week (which is…sponsored by the architects of Project 2025). But Trump has promoted an authoritarian agenda for his second term since the very moment he launched his campaign in November 2022. When he announced his run in Waco, Texas, he literally said the words “I am your retribution.” The 90-minute speech focused almost entirely on punishing his political enemies — a move right out of the Authoritarian Playbook. 

But there’s no need to go all the way back to 2022 for signs of his autocratic intentions. 

Trump, in his own words

At his rally in Doral, Florida on Tuesday, Trump’s speech ran the Authoritarian Playbook gamut. 

• He promised to punish dissenters, saying that certain “woke generals up top” will be “gone so fast your head will spin.”

• The majority of the words that left Trump’s mouth scapegoated vulnerable communities. Trump described an “invasion coming through our southern border” of immigrants who are nothing more than “criminals and prisoners” who perpetuate the “plunder, rape, [and] slaughter of American suburbs.” He warned his audience that if millions of these immigrants “became citizens, Medicare and Social Security would be gone.” 

• Trump repeated what has become a signature promise to aggrandize executive power and politicize independent institutions by signing “a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.” Trump also promised to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” (More here on the autocratic impulse to abuse the regulatory and spending power of the government to control speech and bodies, and to undercut disfavored public institutions.)

• No need to read Project 2025’s 900 page roadmap to know Trump constantly peddles disinformation in service of corrupting elections. According to Trump, “[r]adical left democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020,” which means he and his allies are “not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024.” He took the Big Lie a step further by asserting that if the election hadn’t been “stolen,” then “Russia/Ukraine would’ve never happened, the October 7th attack on Israel would’ve never happened, inflation would've never happened…Think where we’d be if they didn’t rig that election. We’re not going to let it happen again because our country won’t exist.” 

• The speech was steeped in violence. Trump described the U.S. as “a nation where large packs of sadistic criminals and thieves are allowed to go into stores and openly rob them, beat up and kill their workers and customers, and leave with armloads of goods with no retribution.” Trump also warned that other countries are “sending blood thirsty terrorists, savage gang members, and child predators into the United States to prey on our people, to prey on you, to prey on everybody. They’re coming from South America…Asia, Africa.” The relationship between Trump’s racist fear-mongering and increased levels of hateful attacks have been documented time and time again.

Trump is clear about his intentions. Whatever he says about Project 2025, we know he’s speaking straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook. 

Election denialism in Washoe County, Nevada 

Whether in local races or the upcoming presidential one, we’re in for a wave of election denialism this fall. A preview of what’s to come is playing out in Washoe County, Nevada, where a local election denier and businessman funded recounts after two of his preferred candidates lost local June primaries. He coughed up $150,000 for the recounts and demanded each be done by hand. State law, however, requires that recounts be conducted in the same manner as initial counts, which were not done by hand. The recounts were therefore tabulated normally and, lo and behold, the outcomes of both elections were the same. Running out of options, supporters of efforts to subvert the elections showed up at a County Commissioner meeting on Tuesday and demanded the commissioners refuse to certify the results. (Never mind that state law also prohibits a second round of recounts.) 

Still, the election denialists were initially able to convince three out five commissioners to vote against certification. Certification, which is a small step in the administrative process of finalizing election results — and not a discretionary one — has become needlessly and unhelpfully politicized in the wake of Trump’s Big Lie. The trend is a thorn in the side of elections administrators, but one that can be addressed forcefully and effectively. In this case, the media was watching Washoe, and the refusal to certify was immediately identified for the illegal ploy it was. The Nevada Secretary of State and Attorney General swiftly stepped in, asking the state Supreme Court to intervene and ensure the results are certified. And one of the commissioners who voted not to certify the results backtracked within 24 hours, requesting a vote to reconsider the decision.  

The Washoe certification challenge offers two critical insights:

• The election subversion threat has metastasized since 2020, and county election processes are particular targets. In 2020, we saw one instance of this: officials in Wayne County, Michigan, threatened to refuse to certify election results, but quickly backtracked. This year alone, we’ve seen threats to certification in essentially all of the swing states, and even some others.

• The system seems to be holding in Washoe because pro-democracy advocates were prepared to contest illegal and undemocratic challenges. We need to make sure the same is true across the country, and feel confident that where it is, we’ll be ready to meet the threat.

Some systems fare better than others

All that being said, we have to think beyond November. Satisfaction with democracy is at a record low among adults in the U.S. An endless cycle of existential elections has left voters fatigued and disillusioned. The exhaustion is based on the very real vulnerabilities of our winner-take-all electoral system, which flattens our politics and breeds cynicism. 

We live in an ideologically diverse, multiracial democracy of over 160 million registered voters. But our current system – not our Constitution, but the laws that structure our elections – only allows for two viable political parties. The lack of choice is further escalated by the fact that where you live determines the outcome of plenty of elections before any votes are even cast. Whether that’s because you live in a state that will definitely vote Democrat in a presidential election or in a congressional district that will definitely elect a Republican representative, the problem is the same. In the 2018 midterm elections, 44 House races were true toss-ups (defined as fewer than five percentage points separating the winner and loser); that number slipped to 36 in 2022, and is projected to drop even further this year. FairVote estimates that 85% of House seats in 2024 will be “safe” for one party. 

It’s not shocking that this flattening doesn’t result in a very representative democracy. Say a third of a state’s population votes Republican but the rest mostly votes Democratic and are distributed throughout the state, like in Massachusetts. Under our current system, it’s not only possible but virtually guaranteed that Democrats will control every single congressional seat, locking out a third of the state’s population from representation. It’s not just ideological minorities, the same holds true for racial and gender minorities too. In far too many states, significant minority populations are flattened out of the equation.

Voters are so fatigued with this system that it’s distressingly easy for an autocrat to take over. Just capture one of two parties or be one of two viable candidates and there you have it: an existential threat. 

The vast, breathtaking expanse of ideological and racial diversity in the United States demands a democracy that fosters competition and allows for pluralism in our politics. Unfortunately, at the moment, our electoral system does the opposite. As I wrote on Tuesday about the lessons we can learn from the recent elections in the U.K. and France:

Some electoral systems are better than others at doing what representative democracy is supposed to do: accurately capturing the will of the voters, and allowing groups of like-minded people to work together to achieve common goals. Like, for example, the preservation of democracy. 

A lot is up in the air for U.S. democracy right now. It’s hard to feel certain of anything. But two things are very clear: 1) defeating seismic threats requires seismic unity — coalitions that place shared principles over partisan politics; and 2) unity is not enough without electoral systems that facilitate it. If our democracy is to have a fighting chance, we need to move towards a system that better captures voter preferences, incentivizes cooperation and coalitions, fosters faith rather than cynicism, and is representative of our ideologically and racially diverse electorate. 

For better or for worse, our system got us this far. But we have to think beyond November if we want democracy to stand a fighting chance.

What else we’re tracking: 

• More than 100 leading scholars released an open letter recommending the re-legalization of fusion voting “to reinvigorate our democracy by improving representation and accountability while strengthening voters’ rights.”  

• I’m late to this piece, but Melissa Gira Grant had an excellent reflection in The New Republic on the connection between anti-LGBTQ political violence and broader political developments in the country. 

• An update on the fight to challenge book bans by Florida’s Escambia County School Board: the Board is attempting to depose a seven year old student to ask whether she really wants to check out certain banned books, while at the same time arguing none of the Board members who made the decision to remove certain books should be deposed. Thankfully, as that dispute plays out, a federal judge is considering a motion to return some of the removed books to library shelves.

• Eight military and defense leaders, including two former National Guard Bureau chiefs, released a Statement of Principles to offer guidance on the appropriate and non-politicized deployment of the National Guard. Worth a read to better understand attempts to politicize its use. 

• Lots to discuss in Bright Line Watch’s June 2024 survey results. Americans are split along partisan lines in their belief of whether Trump is actually guilty of his hush money conviction; a strong majority of Republicans think the next Republican president should bring criminal charges against Joe Biden in response to the indictments of Donald Trump; and a Republican supermajority continues to reject the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 election. Oof.

• For NPR, Hansi Lo Wang on the tricky calculus facing voting rights litigators under the current Supreme Court.