When things are “fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote”

Venezuela is trapped, Stop WOKE is blocked, and Evan is free

Aug 02, 2024

This week, Donald Trump told his supporters: “You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

And then, when repeatedly invited by a friendly Fox News host to clean up the remark, he instead doubled down:

Here’s the thing: we actually don’t need to parse Trump’s doublespeak on this kind of thing. We know exactly what he would do when removed from power against his will. In 2020, the voters kicked him out in a free and fair election. He did everything he could to stay in office.

Even so, a surprising number of people — in politics, in the media, in public life — are hesitant to take him at his word. Or many think his intentions don’t really matter. There’s a persistent belief that “democracy will be just fine” and “American institutions are strong enough to contain whatever designs Mr. Trump has.”

Let’s talk about what it looks like if that assumption is wrong.

No way out in Venezuela

Last Sunday, Venezuelans voted in the most consequential election in a generation.

According to polls and the reliable election data available, the opposition seems to have won with about 60 percent of the vote, even with an electoral playing field stacked heavily against them.

So what did Nicolás Maduro do? Apparently he instructed the National Electoral Council to fix it. After a delay, they declared him the winner with 51%.

It shouldn’t surprise you that one of the world’s most notorious autocrats falsified a presidential election to stay in power. This is far from the first “fixed” election in Venezuela. And I want to be clear that this election is just the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle between Venezuela’s authoritarian government and its democratic opposition. Diplomats around the hemisphere are, right now, working to apply pressure against the Venezuelan regime in response. And protestors in the streets of Caracas and other cities are attempting to take their country’s fate into their own hands.

Every one of those groups knew this was exactly how things were likely to go. Everyone was prepared. This is a disappointing — even heartbreaking — outcome. But it was not unexpected.

Fixed elections can be very hard to overcome

I bring up Venezuela’s torment to illustrate just how hard it can be to remove an autocrat once they have cemented themselves in power.

Consider just some of the things that have happened in Venezuela since Maduro took power in 2013:

Per capita GDP collapsed by over 75 percent.
The extreme poverty rate grew from roughly 10 percent to about 70 percent of the population.
Inflation peaked at 65,000 percent (yes, sixty-five thousand percent!)
Almost 8 million people, roughly a fifth of the population, have fled the country.

Yet after all of that suffering, still Maduro holds a firm grip on Venezuela.

Think about that.

Quality of life in Venezuela is pretty much bad as it can get — and yet the democratic opposition (and indeed the international community) has remarkably little leverage and power against the brazenness of the autocrat willing to corrupt elections and use them as a smokescreen.

I don’t raise Venezuela’s suffering to imply that the U.S. would necessarily share the same material fate if autocracy took hold — in many ways Venezuela is among the most extreme modern examples of what authoritarianism can look like. (Plus the country started from a much weaker institutional and economic position compared to the United States.)

Rather, I think Venezuela — just like Russia and Turkey and Hungary — helps demonstrate just how hard it can be to “unfix” elections once they’ve been “fixed.” The suffering the Venezuelan people have had to bear only underscores how much autocrats have the upper hand once they have control, how they can survive even severely deteriorated economic and social conditions. They can stay in office through events that would oust any democratically elected leader.

In other words, the key lesson from Venezuela is not how bad things can be under authoritarianism. It’s how hard it is to dislodge authoritarianism regardless of how bad things get.

Ok but seriously, what about our checks and balances?

Returning to that assumption that “the guardrails would hold.” In a new piece this week, Amanda Carpenter looks at four key checks and balances — the courts, Congress, the civil service, and elections — and concludes they’re each a lot shakier than we might hope.

Really, you should read the whole piece: Why the second time will be worse.

But you don’t have time, I’ll summarize:

On the courts:

No one is supposed to be above the law in our country, but in his quest to shield himself from any accountability for his actions on January 6, Trump asked the Supreme Court for absolute immunity from criminal liability and a majority of justices bowed to Trump’s request. They invented a new rule of immunity for “official” acts — a vague, sweeping term that remains largely undefined. What this means is that the courts can no longer be expected to hold a future President Trump accountable for violating our laws.

Not a great sign.

On Congress;

Elected Republicans have proven that, as a party, they are unwilling to exercise any meaningful checks on Trump’s executive powers, either through investigation or impeachment. Those who have attempted to do so have been ridiculed and purged from the ranks. So long as that remains their posture, impeachment is not a realistic check on Trump’s future abuses of power.

Ok, that’s less than ideal.

On the civil service:

Trump has readied plans to gut independent agencies and replace career staff with loyalists, through a Day One executive order known as Schedule F. Doing so will allow Trump to then deploy federal regulatory powers to punish his perceived opponents and reward those he favors.

Well, yikes.

On future elections:

Given Trump’s track record, his repeated flirtations about staying in office beyond a second term and recent remarks to supporters about how they “won’t have to vote anymore” if he’s elected should not be taken lightly. Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate is another important and new factor to add to the ledger. Whereas Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence refused to go along with schemes to stop or delay the certification of Biden’s presidency through the use of false electors, Vance has stated otherwise.

Yep, there it is.

To be clear, this isn’t conjecture. These are all things that Trump has promised, in his own words. See our new video:

(Do us a favor and share it with your networks if you’re willing.)

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My advice to any country where a presidential candidate is pledging to “fix” elections would be the same: take them at their word.

“You’re not going to have to vote” is just another way of saying “it won’t matter if you do.”

Evan is free!

After almost 500 days as Vladimir Putin’s hostage, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is free. Fittingly, the Journal has the titanic, 8,000-word story of how it happened: Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich.

A remarkable detail:

The Russian Federation had a few final items of protocol to tick through with the man who had become its most famous prisoner. One, he would be allowed to leave with the papers he’d penned in detention, the letters he’d scrawled out and the makings of a book he’d labored over. But first, they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency. The text, moreover, should be addressed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prisoner could fill out if desired, or simply, as expected, leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the Journal’s Russia correspondent filled the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?

And not just Evan.

In a complex, six country swap, the White House secured the release of 16 people from Russian custody, including opposition politician Ilya Yashin and writer and dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who many feared would face the same fate as Alexey Navalny.

Read about Kara-Murza’s imprisonment here.

Stop WOKE permanently blocked

This week our litigation team in Florida had a notable win. A federal judge permanently blocked the so-called Stop WOKE Act’s attempt to ban race-related workplace training as a violation of “free speech rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.”

Read more about this development in CNN here.

I asked Shalini Goel Agarwal, the lead counsel in the case, about what this means and what’s next. Her thoughts:

This is an important victory for free speech. Not only did the judge make his injunction permanent (which the State of Florida did not oppose), he also made sure that the ruling applied to all Floridians, not just our plaintiffs.
This should be a powerful warning to all elected officials around the country that speech codes have no place under our system. Politicians using the law to censor speech they don’t like or agree with — in the workplace or elsewhere — is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. The First Amendment is an important bulwark against such censorship efforts.

Stay hopeful. Democracy and freedom can win the day.

What else we’re tracking:

In an attempt to throw the Heritage Foundation under the bus in the face of increasing blowback, the Trump campaign celebrated the “demise” of Project 2025.
Speaking of Heritage. The New Republic got its hands on an early copy of JD Vance’s foreword of Kevin Roberts’ — the president and architect of Project 2025 — new book. The language is strikingly violent: “it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
At least 70 swing state election officials seem to be election deniers, reports Rolling Stone.
AP’s Justin Spike has a long, detailed story on what it’s like when an autocrat gains control of a country’s independent media: How Hungary’s Orbán uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark.
Yesterday was national poll worker recruitment day. Want to join the legions of ordinary people who make sure every election runs smoothly and everyone's vote is counted? Sign up today.
Curious what would be like to be a poll worker? Chris Crawford interviewed Vet the Vote’s Lorén Westerfield on what it’s like to help run our elections.