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Viktor Orbán’s brand of corruption, cronyism and running what a former Hungarian education minister has called a “post-communist mafia state,” finally caught up with him. But that was not the only factor in his stunning landslide loss to Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party, which won a two-thirds majority in Sunday’s parliamentary election.

Orbán got hoisted by his own petard, as they say, which is an old expression muttered by Hamlet describing a situation in which one’s own actions backfire and cause you harm. Orbán was able to rule as an illiberal prime minister for 16 years because of his clever ability to manipulate the rules of democracy as a vehicle for strangling democracy itself. Yet it was those very rules and manipulations of his “python democracy” that ultimately backfired on Orbán and his Fidesz party.

Allow me to explain. Hungary elects its National Assembly using two different methods simultaneously: multi-seat proportional representation to elect 93 out of 199 seats, and US-style single-seat “winner take all” districts to elect the other 106 seats. Across four previous election cycles, Orbán’s secret sauce was manipulating Hungary’s “winner take all” district seats through two gambits: 1) extreme gerrymandering of the legislative district lines that make Donald Trump’s mid-decade gerrymanders look like child’s play; and 2) extreme malapportionment, in which Orbán allowed the population of the districts to vary greatly in population size by up to 35% (whereas in the US, the allowable variance is only around 5-10% in state and local legislative districts, and for the US House "as nearly as practicable" to zero, i.e. less than one percent).

This second factor, malapportionment, has been even more instrumental for Orbán/Fidesz because it allowed them to pack voters from opposition parties into a smaller number of heavily populated districts, ensuring they would win fewer seats. And then spread out its own supporters among a great many less-populous districts, where their voting influence was maximized. According to Princeton constitutional scholar (and Hungarian expert) Kim Lane Scheppele, essentially a vote in the countryside has counted three times as much as a vote in the cities, and Orban had a lock on the countryside. In previous elections, those were his voters. The districts expected to vote for Orban had around 30,000 voters, and the district expected to vote for the opposition had 90,000 voters. This allowed even more extreme manipulation of gerrymandering techniques than those used in the US, such as “packing,” in which you cram as many of your opponent’s voters into one district as possible, thereby making sure they win fewer seats.

The result? In the previous election in 2022, Fidesz only won 54% of the nationwide popular vote yet ended up winning 82% of the single-seat “winner take all” district races. When combined with the proportional voting results, in which Fidesz won 51.6% of the seats – closer to its share of the national popular vote -- overall Orbán won 67% of the seats, giving him his two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments focused on further eroding Hungarian democracy and cementing Orbán’s dominance.

In 2018, Fidesz won 49% of the nationwide popular vote, yet won 86% of the grotesquely gerrymandered and malapportioned “winner take all” district seats, and 67% overall legislative seats. In 2014, Fidesz won less than 45% of the popular vote, even as Orbán’s party captured an astounding 91% of the gerrymandered/ malapportioned single-seat districts, and two-thirds of the seats overall. In 2010, which was the first election that kicked off the Orbán-ification of Hungary, Fidesz won about 53% of the nationwide popular vote but ended up with an astounding 98% of the district seats and a super majority of 68% of the overall seats.

That’s an impressive history of manipulating elections and Hungarian democracy through extreme gerrymanders and malapportionments. One can expect these types of manipulations in a “winner take all” electoral system where details like legislative district lines and packing of malapportioned district size can have enormous repercussions for representation. It is these “winner take all” dynamics that have been playing such a major factor in creating huge “votes to seats” distortions in Hungary’s single-seat districts. That in turn has allowed Orbán’s party to be vastly overrepresented, with two-thirds majorities in the National Assembly that have allowed him to pursue constitutional changes and further ensure his control of government.

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Extreme pendulum swings in winner-take-all elections

It all worked like a well-oiled illiberal, authoritarian machine…until it didn’t. That’s because the “One Ring of Power” – i.e. the “winner take all” electoral system – turned on its master, Viktor Orbán.

It came crashing down during Sunday’s election because of the mercurial nature of “winner take all” elections in which the highest vote-getter wins in each individual district -- so if the victory margins in a lot of districts are close enough, a swing of even a relatively small number of voters can result in a huge shift in election outcomes. That’s exactly what happened in Hungary. Let’s look at the numbers from Sunday’s election, which saw a record-high turnout of 79.6%, the highest since the first election in 2002 after the fall of Soviet communism.

Orbán/Fidesz had a popular vote meltdown, winning only 39% of the nationwide popular vote, it’s lowest in 16 years, and watching its legislative seats more than chopped in half to only 52 seats from the previous 135, a loss of 83 seats. Meanwhile, the brand new political party Tisza won 53.2% of the national popular vote – about the same percentage of votes that Orbán used to win. Yet now it was the opposition’s turn to benefit disproportionately from Orbán’s strangely drawn and malapportioned districts. Tisza also benefited from more unity among the “anybody-but-Orbán” opposition, which prevented split votes among too many opposition candidates spoiling each other in the plurality-wins-all district races. As Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele has documented, that damaging dynamic has undermined the opposition in Hungary’s previous elections, and previously had the effect of advantaging the more unified Fidesz.

The swing of support from Fidesz to Tisza resulted in the opposition winning 96 out of the 106 “winner take all” districts seats, or 90.6%. Overall, Tisza won 70.8% of the parliamentary seats, so now it’s Tisza that has the two-thirds super majority for constitutional change, and with a larger majority than Orbán ever had.

This kind of “sweep effect,” in which a small to modest shift in the popular vote within a sufficient number of districts can amplify and result in a huge shift in the number of seats won, has manifested in US and UK elections as well. In the 1994 elections for the US House of Representatives, a shift of only 6.4% in the national popular vote resulted in a dramatic swing of 54 seats to Republicans, as the GOP won its first House majority in over 40 years. In 2010 during the Republican “Tea Party” wave, the GOP increased its share of the national popular vote by nine points and flipped 63 seats, one of the largest shifts in modern history. In 2018, Democrats took back the House during the first Trump administration, increasing their national vote share by six points, a swing of 41 seats and winning a 36-seat majority fueled by a modest vote swing in suburban districts.

One of the most extreme recent examples was the 2024 election in the UK. Prime minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party increased its nationwide vote totals by only 1.6% — yet it more than doubled its number of seats won from 202 to 411, while the ruling Conservative Party saw its number of seats collapse by 251 seats. Just a small number of voters changing their vote in a lot of districts caused an enormous swing in the election outcome.

Could something similar happen to Trump and the Republicans this November? I haven't done a thorough state by state analysis, but it certainly seems plausible. If the extreme GOP gerrymanders in Texas and other states cut their vote margins down in a number of safe GOP seats in order to try and maximize the number of possible GOP seats, and if there is a significant anti-Trump wave the way there was against Viktor Orbán, MAGA might well be looking at a meltdown of historic proportions in the midterms this November.

“Winner take all” makes us all losers

These are the chaotic swings of district seats that often occur in a “winner take all” system in which you elect one single-seat district at a time. In contrast, proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are noted for their capacity to elect political parties in proportion to their voting strength at the polls. If a party wins 10% of the popular vote it gets 10% of the seats, and if another party gets 40% or 60% of the popular vote it receives 40% or 60% of the seats. It is a fairer system in that way, in that both majority and minority perspectives can win a place at the legislative table. You also don’t generally see wild partisan swings from right to left and back again. Without single-seat district lines to manipulate or malapportion, political parties in a PR system don’t have as many opportunities to manipulate election outcomes.

The “winner take all” electoral system is known for its various distortions and manipulations, which can often result in one party winning a disproportionate number of seats. These kinds of manipulations have long created both the perception as well as the reality of unfair and undemocratic distortions.

Representative government can only work if there is a modicum of fairness and respect for lawfulness built into not only most people’s attitudes and popular culture, but also the institutions that form the scaffolding. America’s founders wisely “constitutional-ized” into our political system a degree of separation of powers and checks and balances, but we also inherited from them an 18^th century electoral system that is antiquated and easily manipulated. Most established democracies in the world don’t use it anymore. It’s well past time for the United States to adopt a more modern electoral system so that no political party — right of left — can benefit from the Orbán-ization of our politics.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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As we approach the November elections, in which the nation’s un-civil war will play out in dozens of electoral battles for control of the US Congress, already we have seen the Trump White House and his allies desperately trying to figure out ways to stack the deck. The mid-decade redistricting in Texas and various voter suppression ploys are but a few examples. Another one is playing out in California right now, and it may well be a preview of what is to come, all across the country.

Imagine you are the chief elections officer in a county or city, and your county sheriff shows up at your office after election day and tells you, in very authoritative terms: “I’m here to confiscate all of your ballots.” Why, you ask? “Because I’m going to recount them all, and make sure you did it right.” But why do you suspect that I did not count the ballots correctly, you ask. “Because I was contacted by an organization that no one has ever heard of, and which has no certified expertise in elections, but they showed me evidence that you didn’t count the ballots right. Now show me where you store all of your ballots, I’m taking them away for a recount.”

That’s exactly what happened recently in Riverside County, just east of Los Angeles, where a rogue sheriff confiscated more than 650,000 ballots that were cast in the November 2025 election. Adding further bewilderment, this sheriff, a fellow by the name of Chad Bianco, is a Republican candidate for California governor in this November’s election. He is also a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, and has admitted to having been a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group involved with the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. He also has opined that “some people should never be allowed to vote” and “we absolutely know that illegal aliens are voting.”

What was the evidence cited by the handlebar Wyatt Earp mustachioed Sheriff Bianco for taking such an unprecedented step of confiscating hundreds of thousands of ballots? Earlier this year a local elections activist group calling itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team, made up of conservative election skeptics, brought to Bianco it’s “finding” that county elections officials had counted 45,000 more ballots than were actually cast. That, they claimed, was a sign of irregularities and possible fraud. But Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco, a career county employee, easily rebutted their claims, showing that the group was relying on incomplete data about how many ballots had been cast. The actual discrepancy, said the registrar, was 103 votes — a variance of 0.016%, well within allowable limits.

Instead of accepting the expertise and impartiality of his own county’s election officials, Sheriff Bianco sided with the shadowy election skeptics and seized all 650,000 ballots. Sheriffs have no expertise or training in running elections, and the Riverside activist group has precious little of either as well. I have dealt with several of these citizen-based election “security” groups in various jurisdictions, they know just enough about election administration and its nitty-gritty details to sound convincing and confuse someone who knows nothing about elections.

The county election officials and the Secretary of State oversee elections, and they are the ones that are legally charged with investigating any fraud. Think about it: if a sheriff is competent to investigate election fraud, then why isn’t a Secretary of State competent to investigate drug trafficking or grand theft? Across the different branches of government, administration and supervision only work effectively, according to procedures which have been jointly established across many years, by trusting officials to do their jobs, unless they have displayed incompetence or corruption. In other words, by everyone staying in their own swimming lanes.

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Enter…the corrupt Republican judge

But that’s not Sheriff Bianco’s M.O. Adding to the mysterious subterfuge, this sheriff was able to shop around and find the right judge to issue sealed search warrants giving him permission to confiscate this “evidence.” The warrants were signed by Riverside Superior Court Judge Jay Kiel, who it just so happens had been endorsed by Bianco when Kiel, a Republican former deputy district attorney, ran for the bench in 2022. Bianco wrote on social media that Kiel should be elected judge “to help rein in political activism destroying the justice system.” Ironic, that. In this mutual backscratcher society, Kiel also previously praised Bianco, saying, “The people of Riverside County, I don’t think sometimes they realize” that Chad Bianco is “unbelievable when it comes to enforcing the law…We’re so fortunate to have Chad Bianco.”

Was this a case of collusion between a sheriff and a judge? Bianco says no, it’s just a coincidence, a lucky roll of the dice that Kiel was the duty judge that day assigned to consider warrant requests from police. Others say that’s bull; it’s common for prosecutors and law enforcement to know who is on duty on which day, and wait for the right judge.

So it looks pretty obvious that Bianco went to his hometown referee to get the evidentiary warrants that he wanted. Not only that, but Kiel took the nearly unprecedented step of ordering the warrants to be sealed. Typically under state statute, search warrants and sworn statements from police justifying their request for the warrant become public records 10 days after execution. But Kiel “black box” sealed all statements and warrants from public access. This forced lawyers representing the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CalMatters, Riverside Record and other national and local newspapers and television network affiliates to file a motion with the court to force the unsealing of the warrants and the sworn statements.

Bianco has tried to claim that his investigation is just “normal law enforcement,” but never in California’s state history has a sheriff seized ballots en masse for a criminal investigation. There is nothing normal about what Sheriff Bianco, or what Judge Kiel, have done. Sheriffs and judges in cahoots to confiscate ballots? To potentially overturn election results? This is just another part of the corruption and rot in US elections that have become all too commonplace in Trump’s America.

No evidence of widespread election fraud has been presented for the vast number of elections in the United States, despite over 60 lawsuits filed by Donald Trump and his allies claiming fraud. But if it ever does occur, there are correct pathways for dealing with it. That’s through the local election officials and secretaries of state that have expertise in these matters. Methods have been designed, tested and certified in California and many other states, going back many years, for how to do election recounts. It’s actually quite involved and labor intensive, involving teams of election workers who each check the accuracy of the counting. Sean McMorris of California Common Cause said the sheriff’s investigation of potential electoral fraud itself raises alarms because it’s happening outside of the well-established framework for election recounts. “The way it’s been handled is quite concerning. It’s not happening under the normal processes.”

The sheriff and the judge’s conspiracy storyline falls apart

This has dragged on for months, but just yesterday, Wednesday April 8, Sheriff Bianco and Judge Kiel’s little conspiracy unraveled as the result of two separate court rulings. First, another Riverside County judge ordered the secret black box warrants unsealed in response to the media organizations’ lawsuit (mentioned above) asking a judge to grant public review of the documents. The unsealing provided the first glimpse into the allegations of electoral fraud. As had been suspected, a whole lot of nuthin’ was contained in the evidentiary warrants. The affidavits did not identify any specific illegal action or offense that would have provided probable cause to believe that someone had committed a crime. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, says the probable cause in the warrants looks “incredibly thin.”

“For a warrant, you need to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed and there’s evidence that you need to seize related to that crime,” says Becker. “This is the same conspiracy theory-fueled stuff that we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s really unfortunate to see law enforcement officers fall victim to these same easily disprovable conspiracy theories and then misuse the warrant process with very flimsy claims before a friendly judge in order to seize materials that were already transparent and reviewed multiple times.”

Also on Wednesday, in a second blow to Bianco’s conspiracy fantasies, the California Supreme Court granted attorney general Rob Bonta’s request for a stay in Bianco’s recounting of the ballots. Bianco had defied all demands from the state’s chief law enforcement officer, as well as the state’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, that he cease his ballot confiscations and recount attempts. Following the Supreme Court ruling, Bonta issued a statement saying the decision “reins in the destabilizing actions of a rogue sheriff” whose ongoing pursuit of this case “will only sow distrust in our elections.”

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“Constitutional sheriffs” — part of a broader pro-Trump movement

While Sheriff Bianco and his allied judge’s effort has been shut down, it would be a mistake to think this battle is a one-off anomaly. Previously we saw FBI raids of election offices in Georgia and Arizona, with agents seizing ballots in Georgia. But here’s where matters get downright kooky and hair-raising.

In recent years, a national movement has emerged of what is known as “constitutional sheriffs,” whose law enforcement members have illegally confiscated voting machines and other election equipment in various parts of the country. Moreover, these law enforcement officials have asserted a chilling legal authority — that they are empowered with quasi-legal superpowers to ignore any law they deem unconstitutional, and that within their county jurisdiction their authority to do what is necessary to “protect” the people is greater than that of even the president of the United States. The movement’s most prominent group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, takes the extreme position that sheriffs can and should ignore any law they deem unconstitutional. Indeed, the CSPOA website says, “The law enforcement powers held by the sheriff supersede those of any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county. It is this responsibility that grants a Sheriff the Constitutional authority to check and balance all levels of government within the jurisdiction of the County.”

For example, following the 2020 election, a clerk at a town in rural western Michigan received an odd visit from a deputy sheriff and an “investigator” who demanded the handover of the township’s three central tabulator’s that had been used to tabulate all of that town’s votes. They demanded the central tabulators for inspection, which they suggested had been programmed in advance with a microchip to shift votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

The clerk refused. Election administrators are trained never to give up their voting machines, to always retain that essential “chain of custody.” Not only is it considered “best practices” for secure elections, but allowing access to them is illegal. Federal and state laws limit who can access election hardware and software. Undeterred, these “election inspectors” visited other townships in Michigan. Three clerks in two other Michigan counties turned over their voting machines, flash drives and other equipment, public records show. According to a legal filing, the confiscated tabulators were taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals, where a group of four men “broke into” the tabulators and performed “tests” on them.

In a number of states across the country, including battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Colorado, attempts by sheriffs and their associates to break into and breach voting machines have raised alarms. Bianco has been linked to this constitutional sheriff group, according to USA Today and other media sources. His actions and style certainly reflect the constitutional sheriff philosophy. These sheriffs are testing a bizarre legal theory with profound implications for American democracy. They envision a sheriff-ocracy, in which a sheriff rules his jurisdictional fiefdom like an authoritarian ruler. It’s harkening back to the old days of the Wild West, when the sheriff was often the only government in town.

Along with the increasingly visible “independent state legislature” theory and previous patriot movement nullification and interposition fanaticisms, these should all be recognized as branches of the sovereign citizen movement which manifested in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the rancher Bundy standoff in 2014, the Jan. 6 insurrection and other episodes of armed revolt. Taken along their logical trajectory and scaled to the grandiose proportions to which they aspire, this would mean the end of the rule of common law and the democratic institutions that make “E Pluribus Unum” governance possible.

Who will arrest the sheriff?

As Al Pacino’s lawyer character in “And Justice For All” shouted in the courtroom: “There’s something reeeeellly wrong here.” What if every sheriff in every (or most or many) counties were to act on the premise of the constitutional sheriff movement and assert their own powers as being above any other law in their counties? Confiscating ballots and voting equipment for the flimsiest of reasons, targeting battleground counties, districts and states, ready to throw out election results they deem “insecure”? The whole philosophical premise of Sheriff Chad Bianco and his constitutional sheriff allies, if it comes to fruition in this November’s election or any future elections, would unleash chaos. It would mean the end of our electoral democracy.

That’s what is on offer, and Chad Bianco’s gambit, even though it failed, may well be just the opening salvo of the next battle of this un-civil war. Attorney General Bonta communicated to Sheriff Bianco that by violating the attorney general’s directives, he was in violation of state law as well as the California Constitution. If there are no legal consequences – no accountability – no conviction and punishment for this wanton lawbreaking – that will only further embolden other constitutional sheriffs and election denier activists.

The real question is: if the rule of law must prevail, who is going to arrest Sheriff Chad Bianco?

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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A legal drama is playing out right now in Maine over ranked choice voting (RCV), and it will dramatically impact the upcoming governor’s race. The Maine state legislature is waiting for a judicial opinion to decide if voters will be allowed to use the popular RCV in this November’s contentious governor’s race.

Incumbent Democratic governor Janet Mills is term-limited and cannot seek re-election to a third consecutive term (she’s running for US Senate instead). The gubernatorial vacancy has inspired a crowded field of hopefuls, with numerous Democrats (five), Republicans (eight) and independent (four ) candidates. One of the independents is a state senator who was elected originally as a Republican, then bolted the party and now is running a maverick campaign for governor. Maine’s electoral system is an odd hybrid in which a semi-open primary will be held with ranked choice voting used to ensure that a single nominee for each party gains support from a majority of party primary voters.

But here’s where it’s going to get strange. Democrats and Republicans will each select their single nominee in the June primary, with independent voters allowed to pick which of the major party primaries they wish to participate in (as part of the semi-open primary process). Those primary winners will then advance to compete in the November election. But the independent candidates do not run in a primary, and several of them might well run in November. One of those independents, state senator Rick Bennett, is showing signs of being a serious contender. So the November general election appears to be shaping up to be at least a three-way race, possibly more.

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The problem of non-majority winners in multi-candidate fields

But unlike in the RCV-deployed primaries, in the November general the candidate with a plurality of the vote – more votes than any other candidate – will be declared the winner, even if that candidate has far less than a majority of popular support. This is not merely a theoretical supposition. In gubernatorial races across the country, going back many years, a multi-candidate field in the November general election has frequently caused havoc in the form of non-majority winners. From 1946 through 2015, 119 of the 1,027 gubernatorial elections nationwide – 11.6% – were won with less than 50 percent of the vote (that’s the latest I have data for).

It’s not just gubernatorial elections in which candidates often win with a low plurality of the vote. In the 2024 elections alone, 70 major-party candidates won their congressional or statewide primaries with less than 50% of the vote. In presidential elections, Donald Trump has never won a national popular majority, and neither did Bill Clinton. Among past gubernatorial winners, some of the lowest pluralities were won by governors in – you guessed it – Maine. In 2010, Republican Paul LePage was elected with only 38.2% of the popular vote, and in 2006 Democrat John Baldacci won with 38.1%. In 1994, independent Angus King – currently one of Maine’s US Senators – was elected governor with only 35.4%.

And that’s not all. Of the past 13 elections in Maine for governor, only four have topped the 50% popular majority threshold. That means in nine elections, the winner got less than half of the popular vote; of those nine winners, five of them won with less than 40%. And in fact when LePage was elected with only 38% in 2010, it was pretty clear that the wrong candidate won. A Democratic candidate and an independent who had served in the Carter administration together won about 55% of the popular vote. In 2014, that same independent candidate and the Democrat combined had nearly 52%, yet LePage won again with 48%. In both elections, the center-left vote fractured among two candidates, allowing a right-wing (and singularly nutty) Trump-like personality, which the Boston Globe called “New England’s George Wallace,” to get elected governor, even though a solid majority of voters strongly opposed him.

That’s the type of electoral meltdown of misrepresentation that ranked choice voting is designed to prevent. And why Maine’s gubernatorial race has long been the poster child for the importance of using a majoritarian method like ranked choice voting. When a candidate wins with less than a majority, that means you can’t be certain that the correct candidate actually won. Due to spoiler candidates and split votes among like-minded voting constituencies, a majority bloc of voters can split their votes among too many candidates, resulting in a winner who was opposed by a majority of voters. The legitimacy and credibility of elections are predicated on an assumptive belief that the will of the majority can and must prevail. Yet in too many elections, whether in Maine and across the nation, that is not how US elections work.

Given that Maine voters have been using RCV since 2018 to ensure the election of majority winners, and by most accounts it is popular among Mainers for liberating voters to pick the candidates they really like without worrying about spoilers and unintended consequences, it’s bizarre that Maine still uses the defective plurality method in November for certain major elections, including for governor and the state legislature. That has resulted in many non-majority winners, and to the highest offices.

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The common sense of majority winners

That’s why this year the Maine state legislature tried to pass a new electoral law that would produce majority winners in all Maine elections and create uniformity so that voters are ranking candidates in all state and federal elections. The legislative bill that has been introduced provides for ranked choice voting for both general and special elections for the offices of governor and state senators and representatives. But the legislators’ sensible effort has run into a buzzsaw – old parts of the Maine state constitution, written during antediluvian times, which is creating an obstacle to using a more modern democratic method like ranked choice voting.

At the heart of the debate is language in the Maine Constitution that stipulates that those state races must be determined “by a plurality of all votes returned,” or the highest number of votes received. But a “majority” is also a plurality, i.e. the highest number of votes. Since only one candidate in a race can win a majority, by definition that candidate will also be the highest vote-getter, i.e. the plurality winner.

So how should the term “plurality” be interpreted? That’s at the heart of the legal controversy in Maine.

In 2017, the Maine Supreme Court unanimously issued a non-binding opinion that said that RCV fails the “plurality test” and therefore violates the state constitution, but only for some elections and not others. This has created confusion. Since RCV began its usage in Maine in 2018, it has only been applied to state-level primaries and general elections for federal offices including the president, but not for state offices like governor or state legislators. This has resulted in a weird bifurcation of using different methods for the same offices, depending on if the election is the primary or the November general.

Since that 2017 advisory, interestingly the state of Alaska has implemented RCV and encountered similar anti-RCV legal arguments. But in Alaska in 2022, a ruling by the state supreme court considered similar constitutional concerns that have been raised in Maine.

In that case, Kohlhaas v. State, the petitioner argued that ranked choice voting may deny victory to the candidate who received the highest number of initial votes, i.e. a plurality. However, the Alaska court rules that a ranked choice election is not complete until each vote has been fully tallied — at which point the candidate with the most votes wins the election. In other words, a majority is in fact a plurality too. At least it is in Alaska.

But maybe not in Maine. The Alaska precedent at the state court level is not binding in Maine, but it does illustrate the ridiculous nature of the question. That’s why last month the Maine Legislature asked the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to issue an advisory opinion and then rule on the constitutionality of its bill to fully implement RCV across all elections. The court is hearing oral arguments this month.

I’m hoping the Maine supreme court figures out a way to do the obviously right thing. A majority is also a plurality, whether in Alaska or Maine. Thirty-six states will elect governors in 2026, and Republicans enter those races clinging to a narrow 26-24 edge after Democrats flipped Virginia and defended New Jersey. Democrats are trying to hold onto five seats in states Donald Trump won in the presidential election, while Republicans have only two seats to protect in states Kamala Harris won. More than half of the races are open seats, with the incumbents term-limited or retiring, setting up a cycle that the New York Times says could reshape the balance of power in statehouses nationwide.

With so much at stake, one would think that a nation that supposedly values democracy and representative government would ensure the common sense notion that the will of the majority should prevail. But in too many elections in the US, that is simply not the case. When electing governors, presidents or representatives in district-based legislatures, it’s important that we use a method that guarantees winners with a popular majority. There are different ways to fulfill this crucial goal, and ranked choice voting is the best of all the options to ensure that the will of voters is clearly heard.

The Maine supreme court has a chance to get this right. Let’s hope April isn’t the cruelest month, and that common sense prevails in Maine.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Wars are expensive. Besides causing a lot of killing, terror, and mayhem, wars also take huge bites out of a nation’s public treasury. In a classic “guns vs butter” showdown, every dollar you spend on war is one less dollar you have for spending on the needs of everyday Americans, or for reducing the national debt.

The Iraq War in 2003 cost taxpayers an estimated $3 trillion, which is about $8500 per American woman, man, and child. That’s a lot of wampum, almost half of the entire federal budget for one year. Even shorter skirmishes like the Trump administration’s illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro during “Operation Southern Spear” cost US taxpayers an estimated $2 to $3 billion, with ongoing costs of nearly one billion dollars per month.

While not many are going to shed tears over the death of Iranian leaders who recently butchered thousands of their own people in the streets as they protested their government’s oppressive religious dictatorship, nevertheless, war should always be the last resort. It’s brutally costly, both in terms of human lives and wasted money and resources.

So what will it cost US taxpayers for the White House’s military attack on Iran? After two weeks, the cost rose fast to an estimated $16.5 billion as of March 13, about $8 billion per week. So by now it’s probably closer to $25-30 billion -- and counting. If this spending pace continues for six months, we will spend about $200 billion. In fact, the Pentagon just requested that much in a budget supplemental. That’s a lot of hard-earned taxpayer wages.

What else could we spend that money on if we weren’t dropping bombs all over Iran?

Recall last summer, when the White House passed its One Big Beautiful Bill. The OBBB made permanent huge tax cuts for the wealthy, even as the Trump administration refused to reauthorize premium health care credits, resulting in the near doubling of insurance premiums for about 24 million Americans. Many of them can no longer afford health care, and some are dropping off the rolls. Re-authorization would have cost about $30 billion. So President Donald Trump already has spent all the money on Iran that could have helped these struggling Americans afford their health care.

Also, as part of his OBBB, President Trump cut Medicaid funding by $1 trillion over the next 10 years, or about $100 billion each year. That stripped another 11 million Americans of their healthcare. One of the few Republicans to vote against the bill, Senator Susan Collins from Maine, criticized “the harmful impact it will have on…low-income families and rural health care providers like our hospitals and nursing homes.” The Medicaid program has helped people with disabilities, children, the mentally ill, and low-income families for 60 years.

Restoring this funding would save lives, but it’s pretty hard to do if your cash burn rate is about $1 billion per day to pay for dropping bombs on Tehran and the Strait of Hormuz.

Another OBBB victim was poor people lacking food security. MAGA Republicans slashed $187 billion in SNAP funds for food vouchers through 2034, the largest cut to SNAP in history. Over two million more children and families now have to face the anxious uncertainty of figuring out where their next meal is coming from.

While the White House preserved tax cuts for billionaires and is now bombing foreign countries, the nation continues to pile up debt. The federal debt has reached $37.2 trillion and is projected to rise by an average of about $2 trillion every year to a total of $47 trillion by 2030, sending the ratio of debt to GDP to a nearly Greece-like 130%, from just under 100% today. Interest payments on the debt have reached nearly a trillion dollars per year for the first time, surpassing most other federal budget expenditures. Trump’s OBBB made the nation’s account balances even more precarious by locking in lower tax rates for the wealthy, which will add significantly to the national debt.

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What can you get for your $25 billion?

What else would $25 billion buy? That amount could fund:

* nutrition and food access for five years in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program (based on a $5 billion annual budget).

* restore the billions in housing assistance that the Trump Administration stripped away from over 170,000 formerly homeless people, potentially forcing people back onto the streets or into cars or shelters.

* add back the more than $12 billion for K-12 education that the White House cut or delayed disbursing, even though lawmakers had already allocated the money before Trump took office the second time.

* reinstate the nearly $8 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states that President Trump cut.

* restore the $10 billion in funding for child care subsidies, social services, and cash support for low-income families in the five Democratic states in which the president froze the funding in early January.

* release the $39 billion in frozen funds meant for transportation, highways, bridges, and energy projects in Democratic-controlled cities and states.

* restore some cuts to the federal workforce, which have affected the operation of social and public services, including the IRS, Social Security, Department of Labor, and more.

It seems more than a bit ironic that Donald Trump returned to office last year and appointed Elon Musk, a chainsaw-wielding slash-and-burner, to hack away at the budgets for government agencies, cut grants, and cancel contracts deemed unnecessary. The administration canceled 122 grants centered on controlling infectious diseases and expanding epidemiology, and another 136 grants that focused on “immunization and vaccines for children.”

That’s just a small list. The economic and funding needs of our 350 million-strong nation are substantial, and neglecting those to pay for a “war of choice” isn’t the only domestic cost. Already, oil prices have surged to $111 a barrel – a 58% increase -- and the price of gas at the pump has shot up by 31% to a nationwide average of $3.98 per gallon, the highest level since September 2023, according to data from AAA. We the People will be paying for that inflation, while the Arab states and Russia (too bad, Ukraine) will benefit from this wartime bonus of escalating prices for crude to fill up their national treasuries.

With so many Americans already struggling with affordability, a war that spikes gas prices is already disproportionately impacting middle- and low-income Americans.

Our uncertain futures

We are living in a time defined by breakneck technological change with AI and all its consequences, and economic inequality and volatility. It feels like the United States is poised at several critical junctures. Investing in our domestic needs, such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, the environment, expanding access in rural areas, and strengthening the social safety net, is essential for the long-term health and competitiveness of the nation.

True, military spending also stimulates the economy, and as it is spread out geographically across the nation, it’s also a source of pork for the use of politicians in their re-election campaigns, who can brag about bringing home the bacon to their districts.

Yet, as a fiscal stimulus, military spending is extremely inefficient. Many studies have shown that the economic ‘multiplier effect’ that causes each dollar spent to ripple through an economy is much higher for spending on physical infrastructure – maintaining roads, bridges, airports, and harbors, for which the American Society of Civil Engineers says the U.S. has fallen $3.7 trillion behind – than military spending. Unfortunately, the U.S. economy has become hooked on this wasteful military stimulus, making it difficult to transform.

Right now, we are watching in real time as the funding and resources needed to make America great again are swirling down the drain of an undeclared war of choice against a faraway nation that wasn’t directly or imminently threatening our country, according to even Trump administration officials. By channeling the vast resources required for foreign wars toward domestic needs, our nation can fortify our future far more effectively than through military meddling in the Middle East.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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These are puzzling times. Why Iran, and why now? Thinking this through:

1) On the one hand, the attack is clearly a violation of US and international law, including a lack of war declaration by the supine US Congress, a lack of UN Security Council authorization, an abysmally weak “self-defense claim,” which under Article 51 of the UN Charter would be allowed against an “armed attack” or “instant, overwhelming” or “imminent” threat from Iran (not even a preventative attack against Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb is credible, since President Donald Trump bragged after last June’s attack that Iran’s bomb capabilities were “completely and totally obliterated”), and legal experts are saying the strikes are a clear Article 2(4) Violation as a “manifestly illegal” breach of the prohibition on the use of force against a sovereign state.

2) On the other hand, who is going to shed tears over the downfall of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime, who recently butchered thousands of their own people in the streets as they protested their government’s tyrannically oppressive religious fundamentalist rule, and who has been the prime military and financial sponsor of murderous Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq and supplier of drones to Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trump is right when he says this Iranian regime is led by “bad guys.”

3) However, recognizing #2 above does not let the US and Israel off the hook for their own terror activities, including Gaza and Trump’s ICE rampages across the US. The world is a tough, increasingly dangerous place, more and more like a battle zone among organized crime cartels for top gun position than a world guided by international law. Where did the “rule of law” go in the formerly respected United States? It has slipped away faster than melting ice.

4) Despite #3, nevertheless a part of me can’t help but cheer the prospect of getting rid of the Iranian regime and ushering in a people-led democratic revolution there, a Turquoise and Azure Revolution, let’s call it (Persian colors), that would allow this proud nation and ancient culture, with a history that stretches back thousands of years to the cradle of human civilization, to emerge with a government that allows the pluralism and aspirations of its people to flourish.

5) Beautiful dream, right? But is Donald Trump likely to be the great world leader that can usher in such a dream? Is he going to allow an independent Iran to chart its own course? Just asking the question kind of answers it. He’s going to want Iran’s oil. He’s going to want a pliable government. Welcome to Venezuela in the Middle East.

6) We’ve seen this movie before. More to the point, Iran has seen this movie before. If the best case scenario ever comes to pass, that would not be the first time that Iran tried a non-authoritarian government, and tried to maximize its oil resources and development rights for the good of its people. The ghost of Mohammad Mossadegh hangs over Tehran like the billowing smoke from the American and Israeli bombs.

7) Mohammad Mossadegh was the Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953 – until the US and the UK mounted a coup against him. Why did the Anglo-American alliance do that? Because Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control for decades. He dared propose that Iranians should benefit from their nation’s own natural resources. And Mossadegh, an avowed anticommunist, also steered Iran toward an independent foreign policy. With its strategic location and vast oil reserves, Iran was too valuable a piece of real estate for the US, Britain and other powers to let go. For this, Mossadegh was overthrown in a CIA and MI6-backed coup known as Operation Ajax.

8) In the aftermath of the coup, the US/UK colonialism brought to power the notorious “Shah of Iran” – a name that has become synonymous with corrupt, murderous, authoritarian regimes. “Shah” means “king” in Persian, and during the long reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, family corruption, enriching his cronies and human rights violations became a regular occurrence. Systematic suppression of political dissent, extensive use of torture (whippings and beatings, electric shocks to sensitive parts, nail and tooth extraction, hanging prisoners from ceilings, sleep deprivation, rape, and threats against family members) and restricted protests and civil liberties (opposition groups were outlawed, trade unions were illegal, and universities were under heavy surveillance) is the tragic legacy of those decades. These crimes were carried out by SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police, all of it sanctioned by Western colonial powers.

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9) By 1975, Amnesty International said “no country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.” The Shah was so reviled that President Jimmy Carter tried to pressure him into reining in his excesses. Like other US-supported dictators around the world at the time, such as Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, the Shah was a bastard but he was “our bastard.”

10) Eventually in October 1977, popular unrest congealed into a campaign of civil resistance and mass protest that included Islamists and secularists, communists and fundamentalists, and scores of everyday people. Mass protests took to the streets. By the end of 1978, the revolution had become a broad-based uprising that paralyzed the country. The Shah’s security forces repeatedly fired on demonstrators, and on “Black Friday,” September 8, 1978, troops killed between 64 and 94 people in a street protest.

11) In January 1979, finally the Shah fled into exile, and on February 1, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamist cleric who headed one of the rebel factions, returned to Tehran and several million people greeted him. The secular factions were edged out in the ensuing power struggle. A pro-Western authoritarian government was replaced by an anti-Western Shia-sect, Islamic authoritarian government. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

12) Now in the aftermath of the recent massive bombings and the illegal assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Islamist regime leaders, the US already appears to be pushing forward a new opposition leader to head the future government in Iran. Guess who is eagerly waiting in the wings? Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed, murderous, discredited Shah. Technically, he is the deposed “prince” of Iran, and has not lived in Iran for nearly fifty years since his father was run out. Why would Iranians welcome back the son of the dictator whose brutalized all opponents and whose excesses made it possible for the Islamist fundamentalist takeover?

13) The answer is simple – because Donald Trump tells them they have no choice. After all, there’s money to be made with Pahlavi as a partner. The former Iranian dictator’s son told Fox News, “Just by a change that we hope to bring to the table, that will be probably over a trillion dollars worth of impact and revenue to the American economy…we stand to benefit from billions of dollars willing to be invested into Iran.” His pitch to Trump is MIGA: Make Iran Great Again. In Donald Trump’s image.

14) That sound of “Ka-ching! Ka-ching!” is the jingle of the new Iranian revolutionaries and their Trump allies, licking their chops like salivating wolves. Where did this Shah’s son come from, suddenly appearing on the scene and presenting himself in major media interviews as “the only option” to lead post-Islamist Iran? His name has been appearing on the lips and protest signs of some of the Iranian protestors, but for most Iranians with long enough memories, “Bring back the dictator’s son” is not a very inspiring campaign slogan. Pahlavi and his supporters already are starting to exhibit their own authoritarian tendencies toward other opposition leaders, as Trump’s MAGA leaders position him as the favored choice.

We’ve seen this movie before as well, about the handpicked puppet that is undoubtedly paid for and directed by the CIA. So it is all coming back full circle, back to Mossadegh and the CIA’s overthrow in 1953. With Donald Trump and his Death Star pushing the war buttons, what hope is there that this time things will turn out differently?

15) Sadly, the return of the Trump puppet dictator’s son is probably the best case scenario. What’s the worst case scenario? A civil war in Iran, as remnants of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – Iran’s elite military force whose mission is to protect the rule of Shi’ite Muslim fundamentalism – retreats into strongholds around the country to organize a well-armed counter-insurgency. That’s what happened in Iraq, after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. The militant remnants of his regime formed separate militias in the ensuing Iraqi civil war, and then helped form ISIS/Islamic State that pillaged huge swathes of the Middle East, beheading their victims along the way.

I am hoping the best for the Iranian people, but it’s hard to imagine how this could end well. Karl Marx famously wrote, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” While it’s still anyone’s guess where Trump’s rampage in Iran will go, I would guess that we are about to enter the farcical stage of Iran’s future, as well as that of the Middle East.

And I can’t help but wonder: which country is next in Trump’s crosshairs? Denmark, if it won’t give up Greenland? Canada, if it won’t become the 51st state? Tiny Cuba, just because he can? Mexico, if it won’t do more to rein in the narco-trafficantes, who ironically enough are heavily armed with US military-grade firearms, most of which have been illegally smuggled across the border from Trump’s America?

This new Mad American King has gotten a taste of conquest. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like…victory.” It’s clear Trump craves the adrenaline rush of absolute power, the surge of autocratic omnipotence. He has entered the realm of a Shakespearean tragedy, and he is dragging the country — the world — with him. Think about this: Trump single-handedly controls the world’s most powerful military in history, with the US spending more on its war machine than the next nine countries combined, including China.

Frighteningly, the Mad King has come to the realization that he is wholly unchecked globally. Who can stand in his path? I doubt we have seen the last of his predations and rapacious opportunism. I shudder to think what comes next.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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If any city is badly in need of political reform, it’s Los Angeles. Three recent city councilors have been sentenced to prison for corruption, and a fourth one is going to trial. And just three years ago, three Latino city councilors were caught in a scandalous hot mic moment using ugly racial and homophobic slurs as they plotted how to gerrymander favorable council districts.

A charter review commission in LA is currently weighing various reforms that could amount to either something significant or the usual ho-hum. LA’s scandals are a byproduct of its “winner-take-all” district elections that have been used for decades to elect its 15-member city council. In a “multi-everything” city like Los Angeles, single-seat districts amplify and exacerbate the turf wars over both representation and land-use issues. Whether between different racial groups, or downtown vs. neighborhoods, westside vs the Valley, renters vs landlords or liberals vs. moderates, arguing over housing, transportation, public safety and more, nothing magnifies tension more than this “if you win, I lose” winner-take-all brand of politics. “If I win the district seat, you and everyone else lose.” It’s a formula for political in-fighting and voter alienation.

It also incentivizes city council members to rule over their individualized districts like their own personal fiefdoms, in which they control the cookie jar in the form of allocating “discretionary” funds, licensing and zoning. That’s been a formula for criminal behavior.

Some hope that a newly passed independent redistricting commission (IRC) can wring some lemonade from these lemons. But that seems unlikely. An IRC can bring some semblance of fair play to the line-drawing process, but at the end of the day whoever sits in the council member’s chair doles out the spoils. It’s too much temptation for one person, and that’s a major problem that an IRC cannot easily resolve. Besides, IRC’s don’t always work as intended; in San Francisco during its 2022 redistricting, its IRC saw a major failure when the mayor’s allies on the IRC managed to set the Asian and Black communities at each other’s electoral throats, each group fighting for more representation.

LA’s problems are so much deeper than what an IRC can reasonably solve. Los Angeles needs to use a better democratic method that is not based on these toxic “winner-take-all” dynamics.

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LA’s city council districts bigger than either NY City or Chicago

Let’s close our eyes and imagine a different kind of democracy for the City of Angels.

Los Angeles, with a population of nearly 4 million people and only 15 city council districts, has – by far – the largest city council districts of any major city in the country. That works out to about 253,000 residents per city council district. That is simply too over-populated to provide effective “representation.” Chicago with almost 3 million people has 50 city council districts each representing about 56,000 residents. New York City, with twice the population of LA, has 51 city council districts each representing about 166,000 people.

Imagine a store in which a single salesclerk has to service a quarter million customers. LA has had the same 15 council seats since 1925, when the population was only a quarter of what it is now. So LA’s enormous, highly populated districts, overseen by a single city councilor with veto power over discretionary spending and land-use issues, have contributed greatly to poor constituent service and a civic frustration and alienation that feeds the unpopularity of city government. If LA increased the size of the council from 15 to 27 seats, about 140,000 Angelenos per seat, that would bring the council closer to the people.

Proportional ranked choice voting for the 21st century

But here’s the reform that will really give Los Angeles a 21^st century democracy. To elect those 27 seats, instead of using the same old winner-take-all method electing one-seat district fiefdoms, LA would benefit from electing its city councilors from nine districts with three seats each. And the city should elect them using a method known as proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV).

Under the rules of PRCV, when electing three seats at once, a candidate would need 25% of the vote to win one of those three seats. That key difference would open up representation to any constituency group, coalition or community of interest that can win a quarter of the vote in any of these 9 districts.

Within that design, Latino voters would be in a strong position to elect candidates to one or two seats in most of the 9 three-seat districts -- close to a council majority. In three or four of the 9 districts, the Black community would be in a strong position to win a seat in each district, and in other districts the Black vote would be influential. The Asian vote also would be strong in several of these districts, as would the White vote, and influential in other districts.

In some districts you could end up with two Latinos elected and one African-American; or one Latino, one Asian and one White councilmember, or any number of other representational combinations. The zero-sum game of “this is my district, not yours” would be over. The redistricting-gerrymandering wars would be over. Such a mosaic of multi-racial and multi-interest representation is a better fit for modern day Los Angeles than trying to gerrymander diverse representation into a couple dozen single-seat districts, contorted together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Consider city council District 15, the elongated shoestring district reaching all the way south to the Port of Los Angeles. The racially and culturally diverse neighborhoods of San Pedro, Wilmington, Watts and Harbor City have all been packed into the same district for decades, and so must share a single city councilor. Yet the last six councilmembers, going back 70 years, have been White and from San Pedro, which holds less than one-third of the district’s population.

If CD15 elected its city councilor as part of a three-seat district, racially diverse communities like Watts and Wilmington would be far more likely to also elect a representative from their areas than under LA’s current single-seat districted system. Each three-seat district would be competitive for several political viewpoints. Such multiracial representation in every council district would do a much better job of representing LA’s diversity.

With PRCV, city councilors also would no longer be the kingpins of their own personal district fiefdom. With three elected councilors per district, each would act as a check against the type of behavior that has resulted in so many council members convicted for corruption.

And voters would be liberated to sincerely rank their favorite candidates instead of being stuck with one-choice elections in which they often pick the lesser-of-two-evils. A lot more Angelenos, no matter their race or where they live, would be able to enthusiastically rank multiple candidates and see them win one of the three seats. Use of ranked ballots also would encourage coalitions to form fluidly in response to the pressing issues of the day, instead of in backroom deals with land use arm-twisting or racial gerrymandering.

About 200 jurisdictions across the US have adopted some form of proportional voting, usually to resolve voting rights disputes over minority representation. In Portland, Oregon, a city of nearly 700,000 with a racially-conflicted past, a multiracial charter commission voted 17-3 to place PRCV on the ballot and voters adopted it overwhelmingly, with its first successful use in November 2024. New York started using ranked choice voting in 2021, and in its first use elected a city council with a governing majority composed of women of color, and a Black mayor and city council president.

The LA charter commission has a real opportunity to lead Angelenos into the 21^st century with a modern representative democracy. With the stain of rampant corruption and racialized scandal tainting City Hall and turning local governance into one of the most disgraceful episodes in City of Angels history, it’s time for charter commission members to lead Los Angeles into a new chapter.

[Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is co-founder of FairVote and author of “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy,” among other books]

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[Dear DemocracySOS readers, sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. The article below is based on real news reports, but with a few satirical quotes from Donald Trump and Stephen Miller sprinkled in. The scary part is that the quotes, however deranged, sound believable! At this point in the Trump White House, anything goes, there is no outrage that can’t be spoken or done. With three years remaining.]

Just when we thought the Trump madness unleashed over the course of his first year of his second term couldn’t get any stranger or scarier, now comes this from the current Epicenter of Insanity: Minnesota.

The Washington Post reports that Native American tribal leaders in Minnesota say that ICE has now begun stopping, questioning, harassing and, in some cases, detaining Native Americans.

Jose Roberto Ramirez, a 20 year old Native American and a US citizen, was forcibly removed from his aunt’s car and detained by masked federal immigration officers in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. A video of his arrest on Thursday, January 8, shows the officers yanking Ramirez from the passenger’s seat, slamming him on the hood of another car, handcuffing him and whisking him away. Amidst panicked screams, the detainee’s aunt tried to inform the kidnappers of her nephew’s American-citizen status.

Ramirez, a descendant of the Red Lake Nation, a federally recognized Ojibwe tribe in northern Minnesota, is among a number of Native Americans who have been swept up in the Minneapolis area during the Trump administration’s surge in immigration kidnapping operations that began late last month, and has escalated since a US citizen, Renee Good, was murdered at point blank range by an ICE agent on January 7.

Minnesota has 11 federally recognized tribes, and around the same time as the Robbinsdale kidnapping, four members of the Oglala Sioux tribe were detained, with three of them still missing deep inside the gulag of the ICE facilities. Earlier in December, the Navajo Nation said dozens of Native Americans were questioned or detained by ICE agents. One detainee was Native American actress Elaine Miles, known from her roles in “Northern Exposure,” “The Last of Us,” and “Smoke Signals,” who said ICE agents approached her near a bus stop, asking for her ID. When she showed them her tribal ID, which is federally recognized, she was harassed by her interrogators saying her ID looked fake.

When asked about why Native Americans – the original Americans -- would be swept up as part of his detention of illegal immigrants, President Donald Trump advanced a new theory.

“Well, you know, Native Americans came here a long time ago, from another place. There was this kind of land bridge -- from Russia – Siberia, they call it there– that they walked across to get here. Walked, can you believe it? Or ran, I’ll bet some of them ran, you know, the tide, it comes up pretty fast in that part of the world. But, technically speaking, they come from somewhere else. And so they also are immigrants to this land. To this country.”

White House deputy chief of staff for homeland security, and American neo-Nazi leader, Stephen Miller, clarified.

“So-called Native Americans have been reclassified as ‘ancient immigrants.’ The current ones are descended from the ones from a long time ago, who were not in fact original to our shores. They were Russians, in fact. It doesn’t matter when you came, you need permission to –”

A CNN reporter interrupted: “But sir, in 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act which guaranteed birthright citizenship to all Native Americans born in the US, so why are —”

“Fake news,” smirked Miller. “To facilitate the proper handling of this ‘ancient immigrant’ problem, we are engaged in a thorough review of all laws and treaties passed before, well, today. I mean, before, like, right now.”

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The president further clarified.

“I’ll be honest with you, at this point, to make sure we have enforcement -- of federal law, not weak Tim Walz ‘anything goes’ law -- we are basing our detentions and sweeps solely on the basis of skin color and names. I mean, Native Americans are brown, but it’s more of a cinnamon brown. Hispanics have more of a milk chocolate mocha brown. So ICE should be able to tell the difference, you know?”

Added Deputy Chief Miller, “Come on, get real. We live in the real world, governed by strength, force and power. I mean, if you’ve got brown skin and a last name like ‘Ramirez,’ what do you think is gonna happen?”

Added Trump: “Honestly, they don’t look like Indians to me. They certainly don’t dress like them. It’s like all those Indians running casinos, dressed up in business suits. Believe me, I know about casinos, I run casinos. OK, well, mine all closed down, it’s a tough business, but those aren’t really Indians, I can tell you that. First, we get Venezuela’s oil, then we get the ‘ancient immigrant’ casinos. Make America Great Again!”

The Oglala Sioux Tribe’s leaders said they notified federal officials that detaining tribal members under federal immigration laws is not only illegal but also violates binding treaties between the federal government and the tribe. Tribal leaders and members who live in the greater Minneapolis area say Indigenous family members, friends and neighbors are being increasingly harassed for reasons no one can figure out.

Nearby protestors called out the president for racial profiling, but the president responded indignantly. Asked by a New York Times reporter if basing a policy on skin color was illegal racial discrimination, Trump sneered.

“Who let the ‘failing New York Times’ in here. That’s ridiculous. That’s the liberal media, fake news, George Stephanopoulos, kind of BS. I would flip you the bird over that question but I’m not going to soil the dignity of my office. Maybe we’ll sue their ass off – again -- if they aren’t careful. The fact is, the Supreme Court has already ruled that I can do whatever I want as president, and I am not legally or criminally responsible for anything. I could punch you in the face right now – because you are being rude to the dignity of my office, you know that – and there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.”

The room fell silent.

“End of Year 1, we’re just getting started,” said President Trump. “Even if the Democrats retake the House next November, do you think that’s gonna slow me down? The House is irrelevant, so is the Senate. I’ve got my court Supremes in my…when you’re the president, they let you do anything. Grab ‘em by the…you can do anything…

“The only thing that can stop me at this point is…well…you already tried that.”

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 @StevenHill1776 bsky.social

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[Happy new year to DemocracySOS readers and subscribers. I hope you had a restful holiday season. It looks like 2026 is starting off with a Trumpian bang. Remember, DemocracySOS only survives due to the support and contributions of our subscribers. Why not start out the new year with a $5 subscription — less than a cup of coffee. Thanks for considering it].

On January 2, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, a Russian missile attack slammed into a multi-story apartment complex, substantially destroying the building. Two people were killed and around 28 others injured. The bodies of a woman and a three-year-old child were found in the rubble.

Throughout the nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine, the Russian despot Vladimir Putin has shown utter disregard for civilian casualties. By all appearances, Putin’s military actually targets civilians in his merciless drive to force the Ukrainian people to buckle and surrender under the strain of his relentless bombardments. If that is the case, Putin is in violation of international law and committing war crimes, since military attacks must target military objectives and try to minimize civilian casualties., according to international law.

On January 3, outside Caracas, Venezuela, an American missile attack slammed into a multi-story apartment complex, substantially destroying the building. The strike killed Rosa González, 80, and seriously wounded other civilians. There is no evidence, so far, that the US military was targeting civilians, but it’s not unreasonable to think that, in Donald Trump’s military, civilians will be treated with wanton disregard as acceptable collateral damage. A three story apartment building complex is a pretty big thing to miss, and it would appear that Trump’s invaders did little to minimize civilian harm. If so, that too is a war crime, according to the international laws that we, the mighty United States, helped write.

The despotic resemblances between Donald Trump and Putin are growing harder to ignore. Both operate according to their own authoritarian whims; national legislatures are mere hindrances to be snubbed. In pursuit of power, President Trump has sidelined even his own Republican-controlled Congress, just like Putin ignores the Russian Duma. Trump has issued a total of 225 executive orders in less than a year, more than he did in his entire first term and nearly three times as many as any other president in their first year in over 40 years. Many, but not all, of these have been struck down by various courts as illegal, as exceeding the president’s authority.

But that doesn’t slow Trump down much, he just plunges forward recklessly with his latest “move fast and break things” thrust. And his in-the-back-pocket GOP-majority Congress has become a historical “do-nothing” body, passing just 61 laws, only a small fraction of the number enacted annually by Congress between 1975 and the previous Congress under Biden, or even during Trump I.

When is an act of war not an act of war?

And now Trump has committed an unambiguous act of war against a sovereign nation, on a Latin American neighbor (where I lived and worked for a year in 1982, as a geologist in the oil exploration industry). A troubled neighbor, to be sure, but one who had not attacked us in any reasonable understanding of the word “attacked.” Trump did this without procuring the required congressional approval, or even bothering to brief members of Congress from his own political party, something explicitly required under the War Powers Resolution of 1973. In other words, Trump broke US law.

The flimsy fig leaf of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s legal rationale is that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was arrested to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States for drug trafficking. Drug trafficking? The narcotic scourge that kills most Americans is fentanyl, and it enters the US via Mexico from China – not Venezuela. Venezuela is a minor exporter of drugs, mostly cocaine, which it mostly exports to Europe. Cocaine imports to the US largely come from Colombia. Besides, how can we take Trump seriously when last month he pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was actually convicted as a big time coke trafficker during Trump’s first term, and serving time in prison?

We are way passed double standards, now entering into Trump’s parallel universe where anything can make sense if he declares it so. That’s a dangerous trait of the worst kind of authoritarian personality, bordering on a despot. There’s no question that the charges against Maduro are, shall we say, “trumped” up. They are based on a vague grand jury determination from over five years ago during the first Trump administration. Huh, a grand jury? And according to the formerly “moderate Republican” Rubio, that is sufficient justification for the president of the United States to execute an “arrest” of a foreign head of state by bombing and invading his country, and killing civilians along the way, like one would swat a pesky mosquito.

Andy Craig from The UnPopulist adeptly unpacks the frightening precedent being established by this bogus rationale:

“If taken seriously, this would mean that a simple vote by a grand jury can replace congressional power to declare war and regulate the use of military force. In other words, a secret process by randomly selected citizens—not elected representatives—and so deferential to prosecutors that it could supposedly ‘indict a ham sandwich,’ is sufficient to launch a war…Taken on its own stated terms, this reduces congressional war powers to an easily evaded nullity. A mere grand jury indictment in a federal district court could replace the Congress on matters of war.”

So yes, we – we Americans -- are in dangerous waters. Yes, there are differences between Trump and Putin, but increasingly they are superficial. See Trump for who and what he is. Connect the dots. The similarities on the important matters are now much harder to ignore. We are past the point of parsing and dissembling the similarities vs differences, it’s not just in Caracas where fire alarms are resounding all across the city. It’s also in the hallowed, centuries-long hallways of US democracy. Trump has firebombed much of our values and institutions. He has shot missiles into the United States Congress, and the Congress is now burning. It’s not quite the level of the Reichstag burning, but it’s getting frighteningly close. And with three years left to his term of maximum destruction, who can say for sure where this is ultimately going?

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The Donroe Doctrine

Trump’s vision for foreign policy is slowly coming into view, and it’s a throwback to another century of gunboat diplomacy and imperialism. It’s a direct repudiation of the American role as the victor in World War II, and guarantor of peace and prosperity, based on international law, the Nuremberg principles (which the US did not always follow faithfully, but that’s another article…), and economic development in which “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Instead, Trump appears to be accepting the invitation from Putin and from Chinese autocrat Xi Jingping to re-structure the world along the lines of “spheres of influence.”

Hence, the announcement of the Trump Corollary to the early 19th century geopolitical manifesto called the Monroe Doctrine. That doctrine held that all foreign powers – at the time mostly France, England and Spain – were to stay out of the western – “our” -- hemisphere, including South America. Updated to 2026, that means the unilateral Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, make Canada our 51^st state, possibly attack Colombia next, retake the Panama Canal, undermine Cuba, and then – it’s hard to believe we are even talking about this – invade frozen Greenland. Trump has even put his own smug name on his wildcat geopolitical ambition – he is calling it the Donroe Doctrine.

This re-drawing of the hemisphere’s geopolitical map is consistent with the Trump administration’s recently announced National Security Strategy, in which longtime allies like Europe, Australia and Japan are reduced to a footnote, while Donroe Trump, acting like a mob boss trying to take over the territory of a rival mafioso, lays claims on any place in his turf, i.e. the entire western hemisphere.

How all of this frenetic “neighborhood” activity is supposed to make the United States safer or more powerful in the world, or increase economic development and decrease inequality and soaring prices, is anyone’s guess. Trump seems to think he is playing a game of Risk (Donald Trump edition here), or maybe Stratego. Not to mention that Greenland is actually a part of one of our NATO allies, Denmark. NATO allies are bound by Article 5, a collective defense clause, which says that an attack against one member is an attack on all, obligating others to assist, including using armed force, to restore security. So if Donroe Trump invades Greenland, does that mean that Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Poland et al are obligated to attack the US?

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Welcome to Orwell’s “spheres of influence”

Trump’s foreign policy also shares an uncomfortable overlap with The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a secret pact that carved up Eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones, allowing Germany to invade Poland without Soviet interference and enabling Soviet expansion into the Baltic region (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, parts of Lithuania) and Poland. Each superpower was delegated its own sphere of influence, and then launched a round of invasions within their sphere to assert territorial claims, paving the way for World War II.

Redrawing today’s map, that would mean Taiwan becomes part of China – Hong Kong has already been effectively gobbled up – as well other parts of southeast Asia. Half of Ukraine – if not more – becomes part of Russia, along with other parts of Russia’s near abroad and satellite countries. Over three decades after the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union, Putin apparently will be allowed to re-constitute his sphere, Soviet-lite or historical Russia, whatever you want to call it, at the expense of those countries that are tired of being mauled by the Russian bear over the last two centuries. “Well, too bad, you’re a victim of living in the wrong place. Location location location.”

The world will be run by authoritarian “great power” countries, including the US in the western hemisphere, and the Europeans, Canada, Japan, Australia – you know, those old-timey allies from a bygone era – will henceforth fend for themselves, still clinging to those American-led ideals and principles that are barely still visible in the rearview mirror.

That’s Trump’s vision for his New World Order. But it’s not so new, we’ve seen it before. It’s what George Orwell wrote about in his dystopian novel 1984. In that imagined world, the planet is divided into three authoritarian superstates—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Each superpower contests against the other two for dominance and control over disputed territories. Endless conflict between the superstates becomes the means for each state to suppress and maintain control over their own domestic populations, with constant nationalist propaganda and Nazi-like rallies striking a patriotic tone. Abetting this mass control, today the technologies for surveillance are the most powerful and comprehensive that the world has ever seen.

This crazy national moment

Honestly, one part of me can hardly believe that I am writing this, it sounds too crazy to be true. And yet, if we fully open our eyes to what’s happening around us, it has a frightening ring of truth, a striking resemblance to the unfolding events over the past year. Connect the dots, see the big picture. The United States and our representative form of government and democracy is under full scale attack. The world envisioned by Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Thomas Paine and other founders is being overturned. When President George Washington declined to order an attack against a foreign enemy (hostile Indians), he sagely observed, “The Constitution vests the power of declaring War with Congress, therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorised such a measure.”

That kind of Washingtonian sobriety has not always prevailed under other US presidents, both Democrat and Republican, especially in recent decades during the Vietnam War and in various invasions or bombing campaigns in Grenada, Panama, Libya, Yemen, and the former Yugoslavia. But the Donroe Doctrine has taken those past abuses and pumped them up with steroids. It constitutes an attack on America itself, and what we have long stood for and how most Americans have thought of ourselves as a nation. It is the most dangerous attack of all because it is from within, the wounds are self-inflicted.

The world is watching. Our national insanity and desperation is stomping around the American landscape and across the globe, like a Frankenstein monster that will destroy uncontrollably – unless the monster is stopped.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 @StevenHill1776 bsky.social

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[DemocracySOS welcomes back guest author Joe Mathews, who is co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute and also democracy editor and columnist at Zocalo Public Square. Joe, who was a political reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has his own Substack @ Joe’s Newsletter and is co-author of “California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It.” This article was published originally by Zócalo Public Square].

This Christmas, let’s gift California an insurance policy.

No, not an insurance policy for our homes—those are too expensive, if you can find a company to sell you one in the first place. (Mine has nearly tripled in cost in three years, but let’s save that complaint for another column.)

Instead, let’s get an insurance policy to protect California and its democracy against Trump and his acolytes.

This insurance policy is cheap and easy. All it will take is the legislature passing a bill to allow write-in candidates to run in our November elections.

That may seem like a small thing. But it could be huge next year, thanks to the volatile combination of California’s top-two election system and a wide-open 2026 race for governor.

Since 2011, California has had a voter-approved, nonpartisan system that puts all candidates of all parties (and of no party) on the same ballot in a first-round election. It’s sometimes called a “jungle primary” because dozens of people can appear on the ballot. Next year’s first-round election will be in June.

Then the top two candidates, regardless of party, advance to a runoff (the so-called “general” election) in November. And it’s only two candidates. While other states allow write-in candidates in November elections, California bans them at that time.

This top-two system was adopted on the theory that eliminating partisan primaries would produce more moderate officials. Opinions differ on whether it’s worked. But it definitely has produced some perverse, anti-democratic results.

Particularly when the majority party has too many candidates in a race, and the minority party has just two. In these cases, the majority party candidates can take such small shares of the vote that the two minority party candidates finish first and second—thus locking the party most people support out of the runoff. Such a “lockout” of the majority party has happened four times, most recently in 2022 in a very Republican state Senate district, where two Democrats squeezed through in a field with six Republicans.

Frighteningly, the 2026 governor’s race is starting to shape up the same way.

At this moment, seven Democrats with professional, resourced campaigns are running for governor. Only two Republicans with professional, resourced campaigns are running: broadcaster Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

Both are strong supporters of Donald Trump.

That fact constitutes a political emergency, especially in light of recent polling showing a real chance that the two Republicans could finish first and second.

How? Hilton and Bianco could evenly divide the 40% of the vote that is Republican, ending up with about 20% each. Meanwhile, the little-known Democrats, none of whom is a strong candidate, divide the 60% of the vote that goes Democratic in seven ways, with the leading contenders only registering the teens.

Four polls taken this fall have shown one of the Republicans in the lead, with the other Republican within a few points of second place.

Which is why California needs that insurance policy, to prevent our next governor from enabling a tyrant hellbent on hurting the state in every way possible.

Allowing write-in candidates in the November election is the obvious solution. If the two Trumpists advance, Democrats and independents could back a write-in candidate as an alternative.

This isn’t a wild and crazy idea. More than 40 states permit write-in candidates in some form. California allows them for all elections other than November “general” elections. And, as noted by Ballot Access News, Washington state, the only other state with top-two primaries, has write-in space on all ballots.

All it would take to make this insurance policy a reality would be for Democrats in the legislature to introduce a bill and pass it with a very attainable two-thirds majority in both chambers—which would allow it to take effect immediately. Should the Republicans take the top two spots in June, I’d expect Democrats and independents to choose either a unifying figure (like Sen. Alex Padilla, who declined to join the governor’s race) or whichever Democrat places third as the write-in candidate in November.

Republicans would cry foul—they always do—but they’d be wrong. Write-in candidates exist precisely as insurance policies against election systems that produce perverse results. Take, for example, Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican who was her state’s most popular politician but lost the 2010 Republican primary to a right-winger. She ran as a write-in in November—and won the seat she still holds.

Democrats in the legislature shouldn’t be bashful about pushing for write-ins. After all, they just passed Prop 50, a partisan intervention that was also anti-democratic, since it used a gerrymander to limit the power of voters. Installing write-ins would also be a partisan intervention, but a more democratic one, since it increases voter choice.

Allowing write-ins would offer nice insurance for now. But a smarter long-term plan

would be to eliminate the top-two system altogether. That would require a constitutional amendment, and another vote of the people.

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I should end the column here. But—sorry—I can’t resist adding one more (obnoxious but proud) personal note, aimed at Democrats and political elites starting to panic about the governor’s race.

I told you so. Your columnist has been the state’s loudest and loneliest critic of top-two since its beginnings, over 13 years ago. I warned that the system was full of risks. Now, it’s an existential threat to the state.

If we want to protect democracy, if we want all our votes to count, and if we want our government to be more representative, we must adopt a system of proportional representation, giving parties seats matching their percentage of the vote.

That would be an insurance policy even State Farm couldn’t cancel.

Joe Mathews @joemmathews

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[Dear DemocracySOS readers: this newsletter chronicling and analyzing the most important political reform efforts only works because of the support of readers like you. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a $5 subscription — less than the price of a cup of coffee. Thanks, here’s the link]

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince of Denmark utters a memorable quip about an enemy being “hoisted with his own petard.” A petard was a medieval instrument of war consisting of a bell-shaped metal container filled with explosives, used to blow in a door or a gate or breach a wall. Premature explosion in your own face was an ever-present danger, and being hoisted by your own petard morphed into a popular expression implying an ironic reversal where one’s own actions backfire and cause you harm.

And now, in the wake of Tuesday’s federal court ruling, how bracingly it can be applied to Donald Trump’s malicious and destructive mid-decade redistricting gambit. Trump and his MAGA congressional cohorts were willing to greedily blow up American democracy in order to squeeze more House seats out of the Texas delegation in order to save MAGA’s three-vote majority. To lock in what MAGA Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called their One Big Beautiful Map, they were willing to deploy Vietnam war era logic: “We had to bomb the village to save it.”

But now a three-member panel of federal judges has, at least temporarily, saved the village and stopped the bomb squad by ruling that the new Texas map is unconstitutional. Trump and Republican’s tawdry strategy has gotten hoisted by their own petard in three different ways.

First, Trump and MAGA have, as a matter of policy and ideology, always attacked every form of race-based interventions. Whether the policy is over admission to college, banning the use of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives as illegal discrimination, ending federal contractor affirmative action requirements, or using the power of the presidency and the federal government to censor discussions on historical or systemic racism, Trump’s version of a so-called “colorblind society” has always meant a white dominant reich. Racial considerations, present or past, have been banished from government policy.

Except when it benefits Republicans. Not only has the federal court blocking Texas’s plan ruled it unconstitutional, but it has also decided that it is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. It turns out Harmeet Dhillon, the anti-civil rights attorney who heads the civil rights division in Trump’s Department of Justice, inadvertently revealed the administration’s race-based strategy for Texas’s mid-decade redistricting in a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who then cited Dhillon’s letter when he added redistricting to a special session he’d scheduled for the Texas legislature.

US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was actually appointed by Trump in 2019, wrote in the court’s opinion that “the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race.” The White House apparently didn’t realize they were stoking their petard full of explosives that were going to blow up in their face. In the 2-1 decision, Judge Brown and his fellow judge not only overturned the Texas map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, but he skewered Dhillon’s letter in his decision, writing that it is “challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”

What this means is that, for his redistricting attack, Trump tried to use a race-based policy even though he had banned such policies. The evidence just keeps piling up, as Republican-drawn mid-decade maps across four states have targeted a total of nine Democratic-held seats, and six of those seats have been held by Black or Latino lawmakers.

“The state of Texas is only 40 percent white, but white voters control over 73 percent of the state’s congressional seats,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated.”

Here’s where it gets even more Shakespearean. Unashamed by its hypocrisy, Trump’s Department of Justice used the opposite rationale when it sued California over its new voter-approved redistricting plan, which is meant to give Democrats in the Golden State an edge next year. DOJ attorneys are arguing that California’s redistricting plan was sold as a purely partisan gerrymander when in fact “the focus was not partisanship, but race,” according to the DOJ, which they say is impermissible under the US Constitution.

So the White House would ask everyone to believe that in conservative Texas the mid-decade redistricting is partisan-based, not racial, which is constitutionally permissible; but in Democratic stronghold California, it’s just the opposite. Unfortunately for Trump, his own-appointed federal judge is not buying it.

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Petard number two, ready for hoisting

The second petard blowing up in Republican’s face is the judge himself. Not only was he appointed to the federal court by Trump in 2019, but Judge Brown served before that on the Texas Supreme Court. Texas Governor Abbott celebrated Brown’s appointment, noting that the judge had started his career as a law clerk for the governor himself when he was serving on the state Supreme Court. Abbott released a statement at that time saying, “I applaud President Trump for nominating Jeff Brown…I have had the privilege to work with [Jeff]…and have witnessed firsthand” Brown’s and another nominee’s “sharp legal minds and commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Jeff Brown was their man on the federal court, ready to provide judicial cover for whatever outrage stampeded out of the White House. But now he’s their judicial petard, plumped up like a Mexican piñata that also has exploded in their faces.

Petard number three – California’s revenge

Trump’s greedy demands for more GOP seats in Texas was the centerpiece of a national campaign to redraw maps ahead of the midterms. The new Texas map was focused on turning five Democratic-held House seats into GOP seats next year, and it kicked off a number of redistricting efforts from both parties across the country. That dubious process culminated in California Democrats winning voters’ overwhelming approval to launch their own favorable map trying to flip five Republican-held seats.

Now Judge Brown has ordered Texas to use its previous map enacted after the 2020 census. But California’s plan will still march forward. Not surprisingly, Texas has announced it will appeal the federal court ruling to the US Supreme Court but if the ruling stands, Republicans might well end up on the losing end of this mid-decade redistricting battle that they started. Ka-boom, petard number three could blow up in their faces as well.

Drawing racialized districts was a temporary solution that eventually backfired

If Shakespeare were alive today, writing and commenting on the ridiculous foibles of political intrigue coming from the Trump White House, he might well call this poetic justice for the unjust.

But it’s also yet another ridiculous episode in American politics. These are the bitter games of a representative democracy in freefall. When the public discourse has degenerated into, “Which is better, a partisan or a racial gerrymander,” you’ve entered a Hall of Mirrors inside of which reality has lost track of itself. What’s “legal” and what is not has become a game of gotcha from which one party will eventually win, but the nation as a whole cannot possibly emerge victorious. “E Pluribus Unum” takes another hit.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But truth be told, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to want to enact the deep-rooted changes necessary to end these destructive shenanigans. Because to do so, they would have to overhaul the most basic architecture of all – winner-take-all, single-seat districts that are used to elect all members of Congress, most members of the 50 state legislatures, and most city councils in major cities.

As this whole sordid episode of mid-decade redistricting shows, there is perhaps no better illustration of the deep dilemmas of representation associated with winner-take-all districts than the 60 year effort to manipulate the district lines in legislatures in order to effectuate racial minority representation. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, a full court press of legal actions to enforce the drawing of black-majority districts was unleashed. A measure of long-overdue electoral justice was finally achieved, with the number of elected black House members tripling in 15 years, from 6 to 18, and continuing to climb, with fits and starts, for six decades to today’s record of 61 blacks (along with 46 Hispanics, 18 Asian Americans and 3 Native American members out of 435). Yet, despite 60 years of the VRA, whites are still vastly overrepresented, with 72% of House members despite being only 59% of the US population.

While the Voting Rights Act (VRA) has been an enormous and gratifying triumph, at the same time, it has now badly stalled before full and fair representation has been achieved. With the careful gerrymandering of legislative district lines to capture the right pockets of racially-minded voters, with districts infamously shaped like “smashed mosquitos” and the Zorro district shaped like a giant Z and other Picasso painting-like districts, the winner-take-all electoral system has been literally twisted, contorted and forced to do something that it was never meant to do – elect representatives from a minority constituency. Winner-take-all districts are meant to be majoritarian = minorities need not apply.

But the VRA achievement has become an increasingly pyrrhic victory. As the US Supreme Court has turned more right-wing (due to the constitutional bias that gives overweighted influence to nominee-confirming Senators from low-population conservative states), the federal courts have begun turning against the goals of racial representation. Supreme Court decisions like Shaw vs Reno (1993), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Brnovich v. DNC (2021) and others have made Swiss cheese of voting rights jurisprudence. The only arrow left in the VRA quiver is Section 2, but the US Supreme Court heard arguments in October on whether Section 2 is still constitutional. Longtime VRA advocates fear that, by next summer, there will be nothing left to voting rights jurisprudence and that will be followed by a gradual loss of diversity in legislatures.

As VRA advocates understandably circle the wagons, it is important to recognize that decades of successful voting rights actions have served to perpetuate the continued use of winner-take-all districts and their racially-tinged context. It has unintentionally reinforced the same racialized culture that has fed into the current MAGA white backlash. It is understandable why voting rights leaders have continued down this loaded path, since it has led to levels of electoral success that had not been seen since pre-Jim Crow Reconstruction. But it has always contained the seeds of its own undoing.

In a very real sense, the goals of the Voting Rights Act itself have also been hoisted by their own petard.

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Innovation through Proportional Ranked Choice Voting

At this point in the nation’s political evolution, we have no choice but to enact new and innovative approaches that do not depend on the Courts to engineer racial representation and political equality. The most beneficial arrangement for the Democrats and racial minorities would be for the electoral system to evolve from the current single-seat, winner-take-all blueprint to a multi-seat system elected by Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV). That would allow racial minorities, as well as other minority constituencies, to win their fair share of representation without having to gerrymander any district lines. In the South, such a plan likely would elect more black and white Democrats, as well as some black and moderate Republicans, instead of today’s macabre Southern gallery of nearly all white, right-wing MAGA Republicans. Under a PRCV plan, representatives in the South would reflect the actual demographics of the diverse southern electorate, instead of the MAGA white Congress members that have the largest plurality and dominate there today.

Despite ample opportunity in recent years, there has been little discussion by the national punditry or most Democratic or GOP leaders about how the political mechanics and calculations of the winner-take-all system substantially drives pointlessly adversarial, race-tinged politics (another example of how, as I have previously written, the Democrats are often their own worst enemy). The logic of winner-take-all dictates a singular ambition: that you beat the other side. It is instinctual to the “us against them” knee-jerk DNA of the winner-take-all system.

Nothing in the US Constitution requires single-seat districts for the US House or the 50 state legislatures, and support is building for trying proportional voting options. As has been true throughout US history, the states and cities would be exciting laboratories for trying out this new innovation. We need new tools in the democratic toolbox. Proportional ranked choice voting should be at the top of the list.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 @StevenHill1776 bsky.social

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[Democracy SOS would like to welcome as a guest author Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota. Jeanne has been a state and national reform leader for many years, and under her steady stewardship the state of Minnesota has become a national leader in ranked choice voting. Five MN cities used ranked choice voting to elect their local governments in the November 2025 elections.]

This article was originally published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Throughout this fall’s campaign season, as I tabled at community events and candidate forums across Minneapolis and St. Paul, I conducted my own informal poll. I asked voters what they were thinking about the mayor’s race. The answers were never uniform. In my hometown of Minneapolis, some were firmly in the “change” camp. Some were committed to Mayor Jacob Frey, others to Omar Fateh, others to neither. Many voters were blending candidates: Frey-Hampton-Davis, Fateh-Hampton-Davis, Davis-Hampton-Frey, Hampton-Frey-Davis. It was a kaleidoscope of civic expression, and it told me something important: Voters were thinking, comparing and weighing the field on their own terms.

What we saw on Election Day confirmed it. Voters claimed their power. They used ranked choice voting (RCV), and they used it well.

For more than a decade, Minneapolis and St. Paul have used RCV in competitive mayoral and council elections. But this year, RCV came fully into its own. Voters not only understand the system, they embraced it. Campaigns, too, have learned to organize and build broader voter coalitions in ways that reflect the incentives RCV is designed to create. And the results speak for themselves.

Take Minneapolis. Frey was re-elected to a third term, but not because of a narrow ideological lane. He won with more than 50% support after second-choice rankings from voters who first backed Jazz Hampton or DeWayne Davis. Under the old primary system, Hampton and Davis would never have appeared on the November ballot; their voices — and their supporters — would have been shut out. Instead, their voters helped decide the outcome by contributing directly to the coalition that carried the winning candidate across the finish line.

In St. Paul, we witnessed a different story but a similar democratic benefit. Kaohly Her, who entered the race during primary week under the old timeline, was not just allowed to compete, she was allowed to win. After placing second in the initial RCV count, she gained broad second-choice support from voters who had first chosen candidates Yan Chen, Mike Hilborn and Adam Dullinger. Without RCV, she may not have made the November ballot. Instead, the voters decided — fully and clearly — that Her should be the city’s next mayor.

Two cities. Two very different outcomes. One shared truth: RCV gave voters real choice, real voice and real power.

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And the voters used that power. In Minneapolis, 94.4% of ballots counted in the final RCV round. In St. Paul, it was 92.7%. These exceptionally high continuation rates reflect what voters tell us again and again: They like ranking, they find it easy and they do not want to return to a primary-general system that limits choices in November.

Turnout also hit new highs in both cities — again — under RCV, which encourages competitive campaigns throughout the fall, rather than an early August primary that too many voters miss. When the meaningful election happens in November, more people participate — and they did.

Beyond the Twin Cities, Bloomington, Minnetonka and St. Louis Park all conducted smooth RCV elections. Voters ranked confidently, results were clear and turnout was strong. And in Fort Collins, Colo., voters participated in their first RCV mayoral election with similar success, showing how quickly communities can adapt and embrace more meaningful choice.

Election administration ran smoothly across the board. Minnesota’s election officials once again demonstrated the professionalism and transparency that make our state one of the most trusted in the nation. The ranked tally was fast, accurate and easy for the public to follow.

After 12 years of RCV in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the culture of campaigning and governing has changed. Candidates reach beyond their base. They seek second-choice support rather than demonizing opponents. Voters consider a full range of candidates. And communities see their voices reflected more fully in the final outcome.

This is what stronger democracy looks like.

RCV didn’t cause any particular candidate to win or lose on Election Day. What it did do was ensure that the mayors elected in Minneapolis and St. Paul are the candidates who could build the broadest support across the electorate.

That is the point. That is the promise. And this year, we saw that promise fulfilled.

Ranked-choice voting has come into its own. And Minnesota has shown the nation what it looks like when democracy gives people real choice and trusts them to use it.

Jeanne Massey (@jkmassey) is executive director of FairVote Minnesota

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[Dear DemocracySOS readers: this newsletter chronicling and analyzing the most important political reform efforts only works because of the support of readers like you. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a $5 subscription — less than the price of a cup of coffee. Thanks, here’s the link]

While the national media was focused on the bitter battle between Donald Trump and the Democrats, playing out in elections in Virginia, New Jersey and California, a quieter positive story was percolating in a number of local hotspots.

Ranked choice voting (RCV) was used successfully in 14 cities and counties to elect mayors and city councils. That included Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington and St. Louis Park, all in Minnesota, Fort Collins, CO, Santa Fe, NM, and Cambridge, MA. The results really demonstrate the power of RCV as a voter-empowering reform that gives people more electoral choices and better campaigns. These elections, like so many previous RCV elections, also demonstrate the miracle of ranked ballots. If RCV was used in national elections for Congress, President, governors and more, that single change would dramatically improve US politics in ways that would provide relief for so many alienated and frustrated Americans.

FairVote has done a great job of tracking these elections and reporting on the outcomes. Within a day of the final cast votes, FairVote had already provided detailed and nuanced analysis that really lifts up the hood and lets us see the nitty-gritty of what happened in these elections, and what real reform looks like. Check this out, from FairVote’s report:

In St. Paul, Minnesota’s capital city, voters elected the city’s first woman and Hmong-American mayor, state representative Kaohly Her. Mayor-elect Her will be joined by an all female city council, which was also elected with RCV. As FairVote points out, “In RCV elections across the nation, including in Minnesota, more women and people of color have run for office and won.”

This election saw the highest turnout for a mayoral contest in St. Paul since at least 1999. Representative Her was one of four candidates challenging incumbent mayor Melvin Carter, the city’s first Black mayor. Unlike the brutal bash going on in the mayoral election in New York City, where the “choose one candidate and the highest vote-getter wins” format resulted in a “me against you” contest, Mayor Carter and Representative Her kept the tone of the campaign relatively positive as each candidate tried to court the second and third ranked choices from the supporters of other candidates. In fact, Carter and Her even campaigned together on Election Day in favor of a city ballot measure. That’s one of the miracles of ranked ballots – instead of “knock ‘em down” campaigns voters see more of a focus on issues and coalition-building.

The coalition-building was essential to Her’s victory. She narrowly trailed Carter in first-ranking support, but the supporters of other challengers preferred Her as their backup selection allowing her to pull off an impressive “come-from-behind” victory. But the real winners were the voters, who were not stuck picking between the “lesser of two evils” and were able to express the nuances of their preferences in a crowded field. 9,218 voters (14%) ranked as their first choice a different candidate than Carter or Her, yet did not waste their vote on a loser. They were able to register their backup choices in this “instant runoff,” as wellas expressing their preferences between the top two candidates Carter and Her. By the end of the instant runoff process, 93% of the 68,000 St. Paul voters had their vote count for one of the two finalists.

I found this result to be particularly uplifting for a few reasons. In nearly every place where RCV has been used, it has liberated minority voters and candidates to run and compete and experience success. Previously outcast communities have found inclusion and their piece of the American dream. Following her victory, Mayor-elect Her said:

“My family came here as refugees. Never in their wildest dreams would I be standing here today accepting the position of mayor, mayor of the city that gave them the opportunity to live the American dream. I am doing this work for them, for you and for the future of this great city.”

But that’s not all. Her came from behind and beat an incumbent mayor, and often such an upset results in bitterness and backbiting. But following his loss Mayor Carter, who was originally elected in a previous RCV election, said:

“[Mayor-elect Her] is going to be the next mayor of this city, and I told her that me and my team will be there to set her up for success. Because this has never been about me and this has never been about my team. This has to be about the city, and that means we have to set her up for success.”

Can you imagine Donald Trump, or even many Democratic leaders like Andrew Cuomo, responding to their electoral loss with such graciousness and selflessness? RCV attracts a different type of candidate and elects a different type of winner. If we used RCV on the national level, I have no doubt that it would result in a dramatic improvement in partisan politics.

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Similar stories in other RCV cities

Fort Collins, Colorado used RCV in its local elections for the first time on Tuesday. In a field of seven candidates for mayor, city councilor Emily Francis won the city’s RCV election with 53% of the vote over her fellow city councilor Tricia Canonico. Thousands of voters ranked as their first choice a candidate besides either Francis or Canonico. Yet instead of wasting their vote on a losing candidate, these voters’ ballots counted for their next-ranked candidate. Nearly 8000 voters (approximately 21%) ranked one of the two finalists and had their vote contribute to the outcome. That means more Fort Collins voters had a say in which candidate became their next mayor.

Interestingly, both of the front running candidates, Francis and Canonico, praised RCV during the campaign. Francis said that“Ranked choice voting is such a great opportunity for Fort Collins. It gets more people involved in running for office… you have more choice. More people are out there talking to community members, getting more people interested.” Canonico shared that “We have so many great candidates… It’s really enlightening for people to recognize this isn’t so binary as it is in a regular election and they have more choices… I think RCV is really going to help us keep [rancor] out of our local politics…It’s really the collaborative candidates that win elections.”

Once again, candidates praising each other, differentiating themselves from the pack of candidates through their positions on the issues and their personal qualities instead of by viciously attacking their opponents. This is the type of change that national US politics desperately needs.

In St. Louis Park, MN, voters effectively used their rankings in the one (out of four) city council race that needed an “instant runoff” to decide the outcome. The three frontrunning candidates had 43%, 31% and 25.4% respectively. A full 93% of ballots continued into the final round as voters used their lower rankings for the two finalists. The lead candidate Daniel Bashore ultimately claimed victory with a decisive 62% of the popular vote.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota’s largest city, a record-breaking turnout picked its mayor from a 16 candidate field. Incumbent mayor Jacob Frey, whose term became controversial due to his handling of the George Floyd protests and its aftermath, led in the first round with 41.7% of first choices. State representative Omar Fateh, who was compared to New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, was in hot pursuit in second place with 31.6% of the vote. It was a dramatic race from start to finish. Fateh tried to overcome the mayor’s incumbency by using the ranked ballots to build a coalition among several of the competitor candidates. Fateh and two of his fellow candidates crossed endorsed each other and campaigned together as part of a “slate for progress.” Several endorsing organizations also started to employ ranked endorsements as a way of maximizing the power of their organizational voice. While there were some strong differences between candidates, campaigns remained largely civil.

Voters enthusiastically responded by ranking a full slate of candidates, with 94% of all voters ultimately having a say in picking either Frey and Fateh. Incumbent Frey ultimately was re-elected with 53% of votes in the final round of the RCV count. Yet Fateh’s coalition-building and cross-candidate collaboration certainly helped him make it close, because he gained nearly 20,000 votes between the first and final rounds of the RCV count, compared to the 12,000 votes Frey gained.

Cambridge, MA, voters used proportional RCV to elect their City Council and School Committee. Even more than single-winner RCV, proportional RCV makes even more votes count, and ensures that the vast majority of voters are able to elect a candidate of their choice. This year, 90% of Cambridge voters ranked a winning candidate for City Council, and 85% ranked a winning candidate for School Committee.

FairVote found that across all of these mayoral contests, RCV led to an average of 19% more voters having their vote count to make a difference in the outcome of those elections. That means a lot more people had a sense that their vote is worth something, and that they were not throwing their vote away by picking a candidate who had no chance of winning. Or even worse, by voting for a spoiler candidate that resulted in the perverse outcome of a voter’s “greater of two evils” candidate winning.

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Meanwhile, in New York City’s “choose-one” elections – same ol’ nasty politics

A sharp contrast to what happened in the mayoral elections in those RCV cities was the New York City mayoral election. Ironically, New York City used ranked choice voting for its partisan primaries in June to decide the mayoral nominees for each political party. But then the Big Apple reverted to the same old defective “choose one and the highest vote-getter wins” type of election in the November runoff to decide the mayors contest.

Usually it’s not a big deal because, in this liberal city, the winner of the Democratic primary usually wins the November election. But this year, after the controversial candidate Zohran Mamdani vanquished the controversial candidate Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, former governor Cuomo decided to run in November as an independent candidate. Suddenly NYC had a competitive election in November with four candidates running, but without RCV and ranked ballots to ensure a majority winner.

Everyone knows how this one turned out. Cuomo the independent, Mamdani the Democrat and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa all viciously attacked each other. Debates became highly negative, and New Yorkers heard the worst of the worst about the candidates, one of whom would soon become their new mayor. As FairVote’s report of this race pointed out, the campaigns were “dominated by discussion of which candidates were playing ‘spoiler’ and who should drop out – rather than candidate platforms and the issues facing the city.”

Without RCV for this election, New Yorkers missed out on the benefits of ranked ballots, which would have incentivized coalition building and candidate collaboration. With the supporters of Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in a position to possibly decide the outcome, both Mamdani and Cuomo might well have benefited from reaching out to those more conservative voters. The dynamics of the race would have changed dramatically.

As the FairVote report concluded,

“RCV may have delivered the same outcome – a majority win for Mamdani. (Mamdani earned more votes than Sliwa and Cuomo combined.) However, RCV would have changed the tone of the campaign and empowered voters. Voters could honestly rank their favorite candidate first, without fear that doing so would help the candidate they like least.”

Voters would not have to fear that “a vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani,” as the Cuomo camp emphatically stated in an effort to drive Republican voters to vote for him.

Lessons to learn

New York City should expand ranked choice voting to its November general election so all voters can have better choices and better elections. And the rest of the US should adopt RCV for presidential and congressional elections, as well as elections for governors and other offices. RCV puts voters first and gives them more choices without fear of spoilers or vote splitting. It incentivizes candidates to build coalitions and not tear down the opposition, but instead to try and find some common ground as a way to woo second rankings from their supporters.

As FairVote’s report points out, “Ranked choice voting also makes more votes count. If a voter’s first choice can’t win, they can still express their preference among the strongest candidates – an opportunity that ‘choose-one’ elections do not offer.”

These RCV elections demonstrated the miracle of ranked ballots. The attractive features that were on display in these RCV elections in various cities are all ones that our national politics desperately need.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 @StevenHill1776 bsky.social

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The national mid-decade redistricting scandal unleashed by President Donald Trump’s grab for more US House seats is still roiling from coast-to-coast. By the time the Trump administration finishes its blatant attempts to rig election outcomes in Texas, Missouri, Indiana and other states through gerrymandering seats, the congressional majority to be decided in the November 2026 elections may already be a fait accompli. The GOP could end up locking in its current three-seat control of the House before a single ballot is cast.

Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante by pushing a California redistricting plan to neutralize the Texas plan. Newsom’s plan will appear on this November’s ballot as Proposition 50 because it must be approved by voters, since in 2010 California unilaterally disarmed via a voter initiative-enabled Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC).

The Democrats have no choice but to fight back against the Trump power grab. To be sure, the goal of an IRC is to better ensure fairness in the redistricting process, so the Democrats unraveling of the IRC in California is a blow against fairness in the Golden State. But Trump and his allies have already put chains around Fairness and tossed it over the gunwale into the sea. What’s left is a naked partisan power grab, trying to rig the process so that MAGA politicians get to pick their voters before the voters pick them.

This is a clear sign that the populist Trump is afraid of what “The People” will do in the next election, due to the unpopularity of many of his policies. Gallup’s Job Approval poll shows Trump’s is lower at this point in his term than any previous modern president except himself in his first term. So if you fear that the people won’t vote the way you want, then take the vote away from the people.

This is a tried and true tactic of authoritarians and despots, but it’s shocking to see it happening so blatantly in the USA. Trump has turned the United States into a very dangerous, well-armed Banana Republic. So the Democrats really have no choice but to fight back in any way they can. Which makes passage of Proposition 50 a must.

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Putting fairness on hold

Yes, it is paradoxical that, in the name of fairness, the Democrats have to put on hold the IRC that California voters passed in the name of fairness. Such are the incongruous, topsy turvy times that we live under in the Age of Trump. Sometimes when confronted by a bully who likes to fight dirty, you have no choice but to stand up and fight.

But here’s the crucial lesson that we need to learn from this corrupted affair. The real villain here is not any single person or political party, it’s our electoral institutions and practices that provide all the wrong incentives and result in these constant winner-take-all power grabs.

In the Congress, most state legislatures and many city councils, officeholders are elected one district at a time. Everyone who votes for the winner gains “representation,” everyone who votes for the loser is out of luck. In district after district and state after state, only one partisan side will win each seat up for grabs, while the other side loses. The operative principle is “if you win, I lose,” that’s why it’s called winner-take-all. The stakes are high in hundreds of all-or-nothing contests. In the 49-49 nation, only one side can win and the battle is bitterly contested.

Winner-take-all is the real problem

In today’s politics, of course Trump and his GOP allies would attempt this audacious mid-decade redistricting gambit, because in our winner-take-all system that’s how you win. And of course the Democrats would have to follow suit, because that’s the only way to keep up the pace in this race to the bottom. Within the narrow, knee-jerk logic of how you win in winner-take-all elections, the Republicans are right to do this and the Democrats are right to respond in kind.

But that just illustrates how wrong is America’s single-seat district “winner take all” electoral system. It is at the core of what has been hurtling the US towards this bitter partisan conflict. At the federal, state and local levels we need new tools in the democratic toolbox, with another representative method known as proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV) at the top of the list.

Proportional PRCV would reduce the partisan warfare

Proportional ranked choice voting produces a different kind of democracy than winner-take-all districts. Political parties win seats in proportion to their vote share -- in a five-seat district, a party winning 40 percent or 20 percent of the popular vote wins two seats or one seat instead of nothing. A party with 60 percent wins three seats instead of everything. There are no winner-take-all districts to gerrymander. So the formula “if you win, I lose” transforms into “we all win representation,” and even more precisely, “the majority decides but the minority earns its fair share.”

Proportional voting methods are used in most of the established democracies around the world, very few of them still use a US-style “if you win, I lose” voting method. Wherever proportional voting is used, it generally results in multi-party democracy and more choice for voters. With more choice, more voters actually participate and turnout is generally much higher. Also more women tend to win representation, as well as geographic minorities and young people. You tend to get legislatures that are “an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large,” as Founder John Adams called for.

The real problem with US democracy is that the winner-take-all system is not about “We, the Voters,” it’s about two parties duking it out to see which one will lord over the other, as well as over the voters. If American democracy was about the voters, we wouldn’t be using a winner-take-all, two-choice tango electoral method, we would be electing our representatives by proportional ranked choice voting which would give voters multi-party democracy, more authentic choices and more reasons to actually vote.

An opportunity in Los Angeles

The city of Los Angeles has empowered a charter commission to make recommendations to the city council about ways to improve local democracy. This commission should consider the use of PRCV as a way to end the race-based redistricting battles and the terrible corruption that has resulted in three councilors sentenced to prison. Proportional ranked choice voting would constitute a major step forward and toward a new future for the City of Angels. And it would do the same for the nation.

The mid-decade redistricting scandal is sending a loud message: evolving America’s antiquated winner-take-all electoral system into a more proportional system at federal, state and local levels is an urgent priority, if we want to save representative democracy in the United States.

[Steven Hill is a co-founder of FairVote and author of 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy and Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics.]

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Hoo boy. I’m trying to make sense of it all. I’ll bet many DemocracySOS readers are too. First, there’s the national level.

Banana republic. Failing state. Dying democracy. Winner-take-all psychosis. What metaphor aptly describes the Dis-united States of America at this point in our nearly 250 year history? Every month, every week, practically every day is seemingly a new twist, a new convulsion, the latest mass murder, in our tragic fall from historical grace.

The operative principle of a political system based on America’s winner-take-all institutions and culture has always been, “If you win, I lose.” That led to some tragic decades across our two-century trajectory, but at this point we've gone beyond that into: “I don't care if I lose, just as long as you lose too.” It's a bitter politics of loathing, vengeance and retribution. A Hunger Games of attrition and nihilism. Grisly stuff.

Our historical fall calls to mind what Benjamin Franklin warned, when he emerged from the final day of the Constitutional Convention, September 18, 1787, and was asked: “Well, Doctor what have we got -- a republic or a monarchy?” He replied: “A republic. If we can keep it.”

Prior to the rise of Donald J Trump, few would have imagined that we might not be able to keep this representative democracy. But suddenly here we are, and… anything goes.

How many of the January 6 thousands, pardoned by Trump, or their like-minded allies led by a ghoulish Stephen Miller-type figure, are ready to be the Sturmabteilung Brownshirts for what might come next, i.e. shock troops ready to intimidate political opponents and carry out violence on command? Trump already has roaming federalized troops conducting domestic raids in Los Angeles and Washington DC, with Memphis, Chicago and possibly other cities coming soon. Sure, they start out with the most vulnerable, targeting one of this era’s “untouchables” – immigrants who committed crimes – but it didn’t take the White House long to start sweeping up others, including US citizens and essential workers.

At this point, who can confidently say that we are not dangerously approaching our “1933 moment”? That’s when Hitler and his Nazis seized upon the mysterious burning of the Reichstag parliament as an opportunity to essentially outlaw their political opponents and began the implementation of their master plan. In similar fashion, just yesterday, Trump and his top advisors capitalized on Charlie Kirk’s murder to level unsubstantiated claims about his political opponents, and threatened to unleash the full power of the federal government to harshly punish what they alleged, without evidence, is a vast leftist network that funds and incites violence against conservatives.

In our national hour of need, during this time that is trying men and women’s souls, where do we find points of light amidst the madness? Certainly not from the president of these Dis-united States. There is no bottom to the corrupt, rotten barrel of Donald J. Trump. This is a man who, like the duplicitous chief pig Napoleon in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in one breath could call for unity and in the very next place blame for the murder on the “radical left” before he knew anything about the murderer, and not even notice the cognitive dissonance that has everyone else’s heads spinning. No, instead he upped the ante last Friday on Fox News by calling on prosecutors from his weaponized Department of Justice to file racketeering charges against George Soros, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, claiming without evidence that the 95-year-old Soros is fomenting violent protests.

Nor does Trump mention the easily provable truth that the young white man who came within an ear length of ending Trump’s life in July 2024 was a registered Republican; or that the Colorado high school shooter who went berserk on the same day as the Kirk murder, and the Jacksonville Dollar General shooter, the Allen, Texas outlet mall shooter, the Buffalo supermarket shooter, the Boogaloo murders of law enforcement, the El Paso Walmart shooter, the shooter Dylann Roof at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, or the 13 men arrested in 2020 for plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan -- the list goes on and on -- all espoused some variation of neo-Nazi, racist, anti-semitic, white supremacist or anti-government far-right nationalism that has become shockingly all too familiar.

These right-wing extremists and their murderous activities are invisible to Trump. Who knows, maybe he is planning to pardon them.

The psychosis of the shooters

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed many more people than left-wing extremists, according to the Anti Defamation League (ADL). With 429 deaths from 2015 through 2024, right-wing extremists accounted for 76% of those deaths, while left-wing extremists accounted for only 4%. Most of the rest was perpetrated by domestic Islamist extremism (18%). So far this year, the table has tilted a bit, with 21 plots and attacks targeting Republican lawmakers and 10 targeting Democrats. Our troubled nation has been shocked by waves of violence from across the political spectrum that has targeted both Democrats and Republicans.

Indeed, this “right wing vs left wing fanatic shooter” analysis is not the full story. Look at the recent shocking attack on children at the Annunciation Catholic Church school in Minneapolis. The killer posted two YouTube videos which showed scrawl on the guns including racist phrases. Maybe a Donald Trump supporter? The messages also spewed “kill Donald Trump.” And also anti-semitic messages like “6 million wasn't enough,” plus anti-Catholic messages and the names of several mass shooters, and also references to suicide. The lunatic’s hatred was spread in all directions like a mass killer strafing the room, targeting everyone.

And the mass killer at the Poway synagogue shooting was clearly anti-semitic, yet a month earlier he attempted to burn down a mosque in nearby Escondido. Anti-Muslim too? WTF.

Or how about the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, last April by burning down his governor’s residence while he and his family slept inside. The would-be assassin tried to convince family members to vote for pro-Israeli Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, yet in a 911 call criticized the Jewish Shapiro as anti-Palestinian, saying that he “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

That’s ecumenical hatred and terror for you. All…over…the…map.

Then there’s Luigi Mangione, apparent killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – must be a leftist? But his social media posts showed skepticism toward both Trump and Biden and support for Robert F Kennedy Jr. A number of media outlets found that they couldn’t figure out if his political views were left- or right-wing.

As much as some on the different sides, right and left, want to blame each other for these killers, it seems more likely that many of these murderers, whatever their political leanings, hail from the sad and tragic fringes of mental illness and psychosis. That seems to be the best answer to the daunting question of why, given these killers’ lack of loyalty to any particular organization or ideology, would they consciously choose to throw their lives away committing a brutal act that is not part of any political program or movement?

The established media seem to be uncomfortable pointing out a rather obvious fact: most of these crazy perps are all young-ish white men from Christian backgrounds – including the guy who short Kirk -- not blacks, immigrants or any of the usual Trump-targeted demographics. Others however are noticing the double standard… most particularly in a series of darkly humorous posts on X from black commentators following the Kirk murder (see here and here and here).

According to the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, in the first six months of 2025 more than 520 plots and acts of terrorism and targeted violence have occurred, affecting nearly all US states and causing 96 deaths and 329 injuries. This is a nearly 40% increase over the first six months of 2024. Mass casualty attacks, where four or more victims were killed or wounded, increased by 187.5% in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year.

Michael Jensen, the organization’s research director, wrote on LinkedIn in late August that “the warning signs of growing civil unrest in the US are evident.” As the increasingly rabid Trump declares war on the left following Kirk’s murder, prominent politicians have canceled events over safety concerns and historically Black colleges and universities have had to lock down their campuses in reaction to threats. Meanwhile more white men, incensed by their grievances that existed well before the Kirk murder, are marching in the streets and demanding their “rights” (see here and here).

This is a national moment for reflection, balance and recalibration. Instead, Donald Trump has doubled down on blame, accusations and threats against perceived opponents, threatening to unleash the power of the federal government to punish what they believe is a left-wing network that funds and incites violence.

Banana republic. Failing state. Dying democracy. Winner-take-all psychosis.

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The relentlessly toxic role of the internet

While this era is shaping into one like the 1960s, when assassins killed John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Kennedy and Malcom X within a few short years, amidst a time of massive social change and backlash, two key differences make this era arguably even more lethal: digital media platforms, first and foremost, and widespread availability of even more lethal weapons.

The ecosystems for so-called “social” media (it should actually be called anti-social media) are fragmented, and their algorithms have unleashed a firehose of sensationalized misinformation and conspiracies that are meant to provoke in us a sense of righteous anger toward some other “tribe.” Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk have excelled in this new media format since they are skilled practitioners who have masterfully trafficked in outrage and sensation.

Online networks such as private, encryption-protected Facebook Groups create the digital hideouts for extremists looking to find each other. Launched in 2010, Facebook Groups can be walled off as “private”—secured as “hidden” or secret and accessible only to admitted members, who must invite new members. As an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project has found, the violent anti-government movement has used hundreds of Facebook Groups, under an array of code names, where followers have circulated links to manuals on bomb construction, kidnapping, making flash stun grenades, snipers, and murder. Some of these groups have had thousands of members.

Other secret meet-ups on the internet can be found on platforms like subreddits, Parler, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and chat rooms on 8kun. The notorious digital platform 4chan—a hideout for hackers, hate purveyors, child pornographers, murderers, and other digital misfits—features anonymous, anything-goes forums. What the internet has facilitated, according to Stanford law professor Nathaniel Persily, is the creation of hidden online lairs in which extremists of all stripes can make common cause, unconstrained by real-world geography, with “people they would not find in their neighborhood or in face-to-face forums.” Before the rise of digital media, if you were the only person in your area who had extremist views about overthrowing the government or kidnapping a governor, organizing with like-minded but geographically dispersed compatriots was costly and logistically difficult.

Now, the use of digital media drastically reduces these costs and allows such individuals to find each other more easily and to organize and learn from each other. The Boston Marathon bombers, two Muslim brothers, used digital platforms to easily find sources of radicalization and an article by al-Qaeda titled, “How to Build a Bomb in Your Mom’s Kitchen,” which taught them to devise their bombs from pressure cookers filled with explosives.

This capacity of digital platforms is powerful and dangerous. And it is being increasingly used by toxic political actors to foment everything from spoiled elections to genocide. Members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar were brutally massacred at the behest of a Buddhist leader and his fanatical followers using Facebook and other digital media to whip up anti-Rohingya hysteria. Pro-democracy activists in the Philippines were harassed and murdered by a Trump-like quasi-dictator, President Rodrigo Duterte, who used Facebook not only to get elected but to foment violent paramilitary attacks against his opponents, and used YouTube and X to spread “deep fake” videos of political opponents. The unique powers of digital platforms have pushed the tribalist tendencies of a small but dangerous faction of people into overdrive. These unprecedented “tools of virality” are being utilized in the United States as well, deployed by a number of super-charged leaders with huge numbers of followers, like Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and other companies have been let off the hook for the way they have created dangerous technologies that frictionlessly network together the most extreme elements of our societies. Indeed, those companies are getting rich off of it, even as their products and services are having a disproportionate impact on our political discourse and electoral outcomes. Combined with the widespread availability of lethal weapons, this makes this era more dangerous than the 1960s.

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A point of light emerges…

Beyond the issues that separate them, both partisan sides need to be willing to tamp down the volatility and escalation. Which means the nation desperately needs new Republican leadership. Into the current void has stepped Utah’s GOP governor Spencer Cox with a soothing and common sense message. Following the assassination of Kirk, Gov. Cox was a frequent media spokesperson for his state as it struggled to cope with the tragedy. To a nationwide audience he said:

“I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community… At some point we have to find an off-ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”

The attack against Charlie Kirk, he said, is “much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been and who we could be in better times.”

Governor Cox previously had tried to make cross-aisle collaboration and depolarization a central theme of his administration. He has tried to combat polarization and issues over teenage social media use in favor of civil discourse through his “Disagree Better“ campaign, partnering with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado and other governors to show what “disagreeing better” looks like.

Calling digital media a “cancer on our society,” Governor Cox said:

“To my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option. But through those words we have a reminder that we can choose a different path. Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now. Not by pretending that differences don't matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”

While Gov Cox is saying that, the president of the Dis-united States is still escalating. Banana republic. Failing state. Dying democracy. Winner-take-all psychosis. Gov Cox is one of the nation’s moral leaders now, stepping up and assuming the chair of responsibility and leadership that has been vacated by this Trump White House.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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It’s “drive off the cliff” time again in America’s casino democracy. The Trump racketeers have a plan to swipe votes from Americans in order to keep their bare GOP House majority in the 2026 midterm elections. But they aren’t going to do it by tampering with voting equipment or storming the US Capitol building, instead they are going to monkey with the legislative district lines, a.k.a. extreme gerrymandering, in a number of red GOP states. The plan is to pick the voters before the voters have a chance to pick them. They believe that will maximize their chances of winning more seats and keeping and possibly expanding their slim House majority.

Much has been written recently about this latest travesty, about how the Democrats are counter-responding to this MAGA assault on the American castle of democracy by copying Trump’s tactics and threatening to re-gerrymander some blue states. “No unilateral disarmament,” has become the Democrats battle cry. Which is understandable, because if the Republicans are able to successfully manipulate the process to gain unconstitutional advantage, the Democrats have little choice but to fight back, and by any means necessary. So begins yet another American-style banana republic race to the bottom.

I have been an advocate for independent redistricting commissions all my political life, and it pains me to admit this, but the evidence is now overwhelming. In the face of Trump’s authoritarianism and willingness to cheat until the courts or term limits stop him, it’s time to admit that IRCs at the federal level have failed. IRCs should not be ends in themselves. They must solve a larger dilemma of democracy – levelling the playing field and making politics more fair. But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that this worthy goal cannot be done on a piecemeal basis, state-by-state, for federal elections. It must be done nationally. Otherwise, as we have seen, it does in fact amount to unilateral disarmament in which one party (the Democrats, who have supported IRCs) is relinquishing a powerful tool in an increasingly bitter political war, while the other party is merrily brandishing its weapon. That is not a fair fight.

Winner-take-all makes all of us losers

But we should hardly be surprised by this. The US uses a winner-take-all form of representative democracy in which representatives are each elected from a single geographic district. So how the district lines are drawn becomes all important. Move a line a few miles to the east, and another line a few miles to the north, and suddenly a district goes from electing a Democrat to electing a Republican. In the wrong hands it can be a dangerous and arbitrary business. There have been infamous examples of districts that looked like a smashed mosquito, another compared to a Picasso painting, another to an inkblot test, or the Zorro district in Louisiana shaped like a giant Z, or another district in North Carolina that snaked along the Interstate 95 corridor capturing pockets of Democratic voters – as one pundit commented, “If you drove along I-5 with your car doors wide open, you would kill everyone in the district.”

Of course, gerrymandering wars have gone on in the US ever since our national birthquake, and both the GOP and Democrats have resorted to it. And truth be told, in most states and for most districts it’s not the line-drawing that decides winners and losers, it’s the partisan demographics of where people live. In cities and many suburbs, there are too many Democratic voters for a Republican to win; in rural areas and exurbs, too many GOP voters render it impossible for a Democrat to win. But in recent years Republicans have cleverly outmaneuvered Democrats in the redistricting wars, both in their audacity and their ability to win control over more state legislative chambers with the power to oversee redistricting in each state.

This part of the democratic sausage-making has always been ugly, but at least it was restricted to a one-time travesty at the start of each decade, right after the release of the US Census. Now, the MAGA Trumpers are going for the jugular by launching a perverse twist – a second redistricting in the middle of the decade. The GOP is looking to redraw maps in Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio and perhaps other states, especially if Democrats respond in kind in their major blue states, including California, Illinois and New York. The two sides will deploy increasingly sophisticated computers, data sets and biographic tracking of voters to really twist the lines further than they did in 2021-22 and wring a little more blood out of the stone. Republicans have perfected this dark art to its most perverse artform yet. After all, if you can redistrict in the middle of the decade, why not redo the district lines every two years for each House election?

Sure, it would be confusing as hell for voters as they could see their “representatives” regularly switching from Democrat to Republican and back again. But damn the voters. If US democracy was about the voters, we wouldn’t be using a winner-take-all, two-choice tango electoral method, we would be electing our representatives by some kind of proportional representation method which would foster multi-party democracy and give voters more authentic choices. If this was about the voters, we would have universal/automatic voter registration like every other established democracy has and finally terminate the ridiculous voter registration wars we suffer through, and we would have publicly financed elections so that voters could hear from a range of candidates offering different, exciting ideas, instead of only from those blah-blah candidates who have access to wealthy donors or are themselves wealthy.

No, this is not about the voters. That’s the perverse logic of winner-take-all. In the world of winner-take-all, of course Trump and his mini-me Republicans would attempt this audacious gambit, because in winner-take-all that’s how you win. And of course the Democrats would have to follow suit, because that’s the only way to keep up the pace in this race to the bottom. Within the narrow reptilian logic of winner-take-all, the Republicans are right to do this; and the Democrats are right to respond in kind.

But that just illustrates how wrong is America’s winner-take-all democracy, as we spiral downward toward post-democracy. This is just the beginning. Here’s a front row seat to where it’s likely to go next.

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The Orban-ization of US politics

Trump’s role model, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, has unleashed a brand of crony capitalism and Christian nationalism that has turned Orbán into the Jedi master of exploiting the “loopholes of democracy.” As Donald Trump has illustrated by his noxious daily examples, representative government can only work if there is a modicum of fairness, justice and respect for the rule of law embraced not only by its elected leaders but also most of its citizens’ attitudes and the institutions that form the scaffolding of democracy. America’s Founders built into our political framework a degree of separation of powers and checks and balances. Under Trump, these features are now struggling mightily. Even more effectively than Trump, Orbán has systematically undermined representative government in Hungary from its halcyon post-Communist days, including substantially constricting and in some sectors eliminating an actual opposition. But he hasn’t done it the old-fashioned way, through martial law or political repression.

Instead, Orbán has accomplished this by using the rules of democracy to manipulate and squeeze democracy itself. Orbán cleverly practices what I call “python democracy,” i.e. strangling Hungary’s civic and democratic institutions to the point where they barely function and the opposition is suffocated by a lack of political space.

While some have called Orbán a quasi-dictator, his regime continues to hold elections. But he has rigged the rules so that the results are grotesquely lopsided. In 2010 when he first came to power, Orbán began a process of changing a number of electoral laws that would cement his advantage for years to come. First, in Hungary’s National Assembly elections, which combine US-style single-seat “winner take all” districts with a European-style proportional representation method, Orbán increased the percentage of US-style winner-take-all districts from 46% of all seats to 53%. Then, he became the Gerrymanderer in Chief, by granting the power to redistrict the entire country to his political party instead of an independent commission.

And here’s Orbán’s secret sauce that you could expect Trump to try at some point. He allowed the population of the districts to vary greatly in population size by up to 35% (in the US the allowable variance is usually 5%). This has allowed Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, to pack voters from the opposition into a smaller number of heavily populated districts, and spread out its own supporters among a great deal of less-populous districts. Pretty clever.

The result? In 2014, Fidesz won less than 45% of the popular vote, so you’d think that another political party might be able to command a majority of the parliament. Instead, Orbán’s party captured an astounding 91% of the gerrymandered single-seat districts, and two-thirds of the seats overall. In the 2022 election, things were hardly better, with Fidesz winning “only” 82% of the single-seat district races, and 67% of the seats overall, even though it only won 54% of the popular vote. These winner-take-all dynamics have been a major factor in creating such huge “votes to seats” distortions in the single-seat districts that allow Orbán’s party to be so vastly overrepresented.

Orbán also has packed the courts and eroded judicial independence, and packed the media with his cronies and curtailed press freedoms, including forcing some media outlets out of business. Orbán and his allies now own many of the newspapers in the country, and only a handful of independent outlets have survived.

Following that playbook, Trump also has powerful allies for his own pursuit of power – including a deeply conservative Supreme Court. The third branch of government, with a 6-3 right-wing majority, as well as the increasingly conservative lower courts, have been undergoing their own “Orbán-ization.” Judicial leaders are using the vagueness of some legal and democratic norms to overturn precedent and push a backward-looking jurisprudence. These Judicial Orbáns already have begun flexing their power to undermine US democracy by using their extraordinary authority to reverse long-standing judicial practices employed by the lower courts.

The US Supreme Court and a federal appeals court overruled four state judges in Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama which had thrown out illegal GOP gerrymanders. The GOP legislatures stalled and stalled over re-drawing the court-ordered lines, and as the Congressional elections approached, the federal courts decided to allow those four states to go ahead anyway and use the illegal GOP maps for their congressional elections. When I played competitive sports, that’s what we called a “home town job” by the referees. Those four states contained nearly 10 percent of the seats in the House, and likely handed to Republicans the five to seven House seats needed for the GOP to win a House majority. This marked an outright defiance of representative democracy by Republican-appointed federal judges, and a warning sign about what may lie ahead.

Trump's attacks on the media, Orbán-style

And then there’s the US media, another battle scene of illiberalism. Trump has Orbán-ized that space too. Media lawyers scoffed when Trump sued two major news organizations for producing journalism he didn’t like; First Amendment experts laughed and said the lawsuits lacked any legal merit whatsoever. But no one’s laughing now.

Last month, CBS News and its parent company Paramount Global settled Trump’s lawsuit against them over a 60 Minutes interview he didn’t like with Kamala Harris. CBS paid Trump $16 million, despite doing nothing wrong besides practicing journalism. That settlement followed Trump’s $15 million settlement with ABC News in December 2024, over a minor misquotation by one of its hosts.

Most recently, Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the conservative Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over a story detailing a letter reportedly sent by Trump to celebrity pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has also sued smaller outlets, including the Des Moines Register and an Iowa pollster in December 2024, ridiculously alleging election interference. He has cut the funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR and PBS, which are pushing back by suing Trump, as is the Associated Press. According to an Axios analysis, Trump and his businesses have been involved in 34 media or defamation lawsuits since 2015. Trump’s lawsuits are vindictive retaliatory acts, weaponized missiles that are proving effective at harassing the media and creating a chilling effect around news reportage.

This is life in a python democracy. In short, Orbán has squeezed all important institutions to establish a new quasi-model of illiberal government in which he doesn’t need to use violent or thuggish tactics against his political opponents or grab power with the point of a gun. He has done it by manipulating the practices of Western democracy itself to control the fundamental institutions. He has used his electoral mandate to legally dismantle the constitutional systems he assumed stewardship over. Hungary under Orbán has devolved into a new perverse form of representative democracy that doesn’t care about voters, it only cares about power.

Now Trump is trying to do the same. From everything we can tell, this is the direction that Trump and MAGA are trying to go. This is not just your usual partisan bickering and gamesmanship over the rules and rituals of democracy. We are now approaching a whole new level of democratic hell akin to Dante’s Inferno:

“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

Human history has been through this kind of tragic trajectory before. This increasingly feels like a dangerous moment in the long life of American democracy. Trump’s muscular power play trying to overthrow the norms and standards of governance that, along with the laws themselves, ensure fairness, justice and respect for the law, are threatening to seep into the timbers and establish a new and deeply rotten “American Way.” Trump’s illiberalism in turn will establish a new model for the world that will make the political sphere an increasingly perilous place.

Only six months into his term, Donald Trump has the whole world holding its breath, waiting to see what the vengeful fallen leader who survived an assassin’s bullet, and now is wielding the reins of the imperial presidency like no one before, is planning to do. What is his end game? I’m not sure even the thin-skinned president himself knows.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[DemocracySOS welcomes back Canadian political scientist Henry Milner as a guest contributor. Professor Milner has been on the faculty of Vanier College in Montreal and at Umea University in Sweden, and has been a visiting professor or researcher at universities in Finland, Norway, France, Australia and New Zealand. He is currently a Research Fellow at the l’Université de Montréal, where he is at the Chair in Electoral Studies in the Department of Political Science. He is also the author of eleven books, including his recent political memoir “Participant Observer: An Unconventional Life In Politics and Academia.” This article is adapted from the original published in “Inroads: the Canadian Journal of Opinion,” of which Prof. Milner is a co-founder].

What can we expect from the United States in the coming months, indeed weeks? We Canadians are watching our neighbor to the south and seeing it transform into something ugly that we do not recognize.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a close observer of what was happening in Canada’s neighbor to the south, especially in 1968–69, when I lived in a highly political commune “in the belly of the beast” – Washington, DC. My intense immersion there in the American antiwar and civil rights movements left me with a profound ambivalence toward our neighbor.

In the ensuing decades, my academic and personal interest and focus as a political scientist shifted back to Canada and beyond to Scandinavia and Europe, but recently, with the emergence of the New Right and then Trumpism, I have renewed my interest in the United States. Only this time, ambivalence has given way to a perception of the United States as, in effect, a reverse social model, providing a lesson in what modern democratic countries, starting with Canada but also other democracies in Europe and Asia, need to be wary of.

This is an emotional matter for me. At least in one case, it has even affected my friendships. I have no problem respecting conservative views on domestic and international issues, but Trump is no conservative, he is the worst kind of radical. Some of the policies he advocates are not necessarily bad. With so many issues needing attention, statistically it is inevitable that even an autocrat can make a valid point. It was true of Mussolini, Franco and other authoritarians as well. If Trump could, from what I can see from here, he would be a dictator like them.

An institutional outlier

The United States, we need to remind ourselves, is an outlier among democracies, notably with its pure two-party system in which the only way to express dissatisfaction with the party in power is to vote for the opposing one, even if you don’t like that party very much and have to hold your nose while voting. There is, I suggest, good reason to believe that a large number of Trump voters from 2024 are starting to release their noses.

But whether they will vote for Democrats is not yet certain, given the US pure two-party system. In other modern democracies with a multi-party system, including Canada, voters can register discontent with the party in power in several ways, including voting for one of a menu of parties. Hence we can be sure that an unpopular governing party can be replaced, if that party messes up too badly. But given America’s outlier institutions, that is not necessarily the case with Trump.

What we do know about the current situation can be spelled out in several key points:

• Although the United States is politically divided almost evenly, Trump’s Republicans control both houses of Congress, and their appointees comprise a solid super-majority on the Supreme Court. In effect, at this moment, at the federal level the United States is a one-party state.

• Trump, even if increasingly unpopular, can call on the MAGA network to threaten congressional Republicans with being “primaried” – denied renomination – and force them to mouth the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen,” as well as other ridiculous distortions of political reality (Apparently, the intimidation extends to death threats and being attacked physically, according to the US Capitol police.)

• For his part, Trump is a lame duck, with no personal stake in GOP unpopularity (assuming he and his cronies don’t attempt to find a pretext for canceling the 2028 presidential election).

• When it comes to domestic policy, in contrast to the Trump I cabinet and administration, Trump II consists of ‘yes’ men and women, almost all of whom are unqualified for their jobs.

• Those organizations and agencies still working directly or indirectly for the federal government are silenced by threats of withholding funds and fears of further layoffs.

• Trump brings nonstop media attention to his schemes, many of which are empty (e.g. annexing Canada, Greenland or Panama), while the real threats in what he is planning receive far too little attention.

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A reverse social model

Trumpites imagine that, given America’s high GDP, people elsewhere all want to be Americans. But people in advanced democracies accurately perceive that GDP in the US is especially unequally distributed, and that the high American GDP belies a relatively poor quality of life for many (as noted, for example, by a committee of 13 experts who advised the past five presidents, assembled by Tulane University economist Douglas Harris. The committee’s analysis was based on 37 measures of success grouped into 15 topics: education, mental health, social capital, environment and others, as well as economy.)

In its 2024 election campaign, the GOP took advantage of the unique American political institutional structure – only two parties, with small rural states overrepresented – and repeatedly drew attention to various expressions of discontent, notably via Elon Musk’s X and Fox News. The underlying message was that you may not like Trump, but the only way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo is to vote for him and his party, a message meant to appeal to a particular type of voter. Those appeals were successful.

Many qualities distinguish Trump voters: gender, region, generation, income, race, education, class, and urban/rural. Cross-cutting all of them is what I call low “civic literacy,” a subject I wrote a book about a number of years ago (Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work). The average Trump supporter shows a relative absence of social- and physical-science-based understanding of how the world works, or how specific policies might in fact impact their own individual lives. The data as to who elected Trump are unambiguous. More than 70 percent of “low information” Caucasian males without a college degree voted for him and his candidates, a sufficient number of them residing in the key “purple” (toss-up) states to secure a majority of electoral college votes. (My comparative research found the proportion of uninformed potential voters, to be higher in the US than in comparable societies. From the numbers I have seen, what has been happening in US politics and society in the era of Trump is that a larger proportion of the civically illiterate turns out to vote.)

Trump unbound

The constraints Trump faced when taking office early this year were much reduced from when he was sworn in as President in 2017. External constraints matter because Trump has no internal ones. Those in positions of power in democracies take into consideration institutional and legal, not to mention principled, constraints in making policy choices. None of this applies to Trump. It is only when encountering insurmountable external constraints after the fact that he changes his policies. And then he rewrites the facts.

So, without even elementary planning, he talks of taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, or Canada. He makes the announcements on Fox News, assured that no one will raise any questions or objections. The serious media, national and international, have no choice but to report on Trump as if he is a serious person.

But he is ultimately no different as President than he was as a media personality. Then, his power was limited to “you’re fired.” Now, he can attack the message and the messenger of any and every version of events that makes him look bad, making the cost of unflattering coverage so steep that journalists are reluctant to risk his displeasure. That is the point of his $16 million lawsuit against CBS News over a segment of 60 Minutes which he claims “put a halo” on Kamala Harris.

There is thus no constraint on what he will say or threaten to do, whether or not there is any real chance of it coming to pass. The media covering the presidency are at a loss for how seriously to take his exaggerations, distortions and threats. They know they can get little of value from his cabinet secretaries, selected on the sole criterion of loyalty. How to report on a personal dinner with foreigners who poured large amounts of money into his own personal crypto business, or his accepting Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “flying palace”? Or the fact that Trump or his team have charged, investigated or threatened with investigation former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former vice president Kamala Harris, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, the city of Chicago and the Kennedy Center. More are being added daily to the “wanted list.” As Robert Reich puts it, “Trump seems to have entered into a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds: rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt.”

And there is Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, which Trump is trying to make an example of, exaggerating and misusing the issues of immigration and anti-semitism to keep the academics in line. This amounts to an unprecedented, never-before-in-history attempt to stamp out dissent and independent thinking on university campuses.

When it comes to international relations, foreign leaders have learned to play the game with Trump, avoiding direct criticism while building popular support for standing up to his bullying. The recent trade/tariff agreement between the US and EU has all the hallmarks of transatlantic placation and appeasement by the EU towards the constantly tantrumming Trump. But in my own country of Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has publicly called for Canada to join the European Union’s major rearmament plan, aiming to rely less on US weapons and defense supplies because Donald Trump is so unstable and unreliable. Trump, ever the venal authoritarian, clearly prefers lopsided relationships rather than the previous mutual alliances built across decades among democratic nations united by similar values and principles, and keenly aware of which nations and rulers don’t uphold them.

Will Republicans in Congress continue to keep silent as the real costs of Trump’s economic and geopolitical threats to America’s allies and the uncertainty surrounding them emerge, costs that they will pay for in votes lost in purple, i.e. swing vote regions? Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne may be right: despite all this, he says, “we should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses.”

But perhaps we need to worry about what Trump will do if Americans do come to their senses. As this excerpt from US radio commentator Thom Hartmann puts it:

“The first lesson they teach in dictator school is that ‘there must be an enemy within.’ Trump embraced this from the first day of his campaign for president when he attacked ‘Mexican rapists and murderers’ he said were ‘invading’ America. In the years since, his enemies’ list has grown…

“Trump appears to be preparing for the type of authoritarian crackdown Germany saw after the Reichstag fire that propelled Hitler to power in 1933. Strongmen leaders are generally dangerous, but they’re particularly perilous when their grip on popularity and thus power begins to slip. Trump’s there now, which should put us all on high alert. And, to compound the alarm, he’s firing the people responsible for early warnings and investigations. History has shown us that when autocratic leaders are cornered, they often resort to drastic measures to retain control.”

My own view is that, while Donald Trump will try to tamper at the edges of American electoral democracy, he is too much of a coward – and American institutions are more resilient – for him to follow the examples of such strongmen leaders. But I have been wrong before.

Henry Milner

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[Dear readers: DemocracySOS would like to welcome guest author Nathan Lockwood. Nathan is co-founder and past-Executive Director of Rank The Vote, now its Director of Strategy & Advancement. Rank The Vote is one of the premier RCV advocacy groups in the US, working with groups in more than half the states to build a nationwide movement to change our elections]

In an exciting race in which Ranked Choice Voting really showed its worth, Zohran Mamdani soundly defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor on June 24. In the nation’s largest city, Mamdani held a decisive lead in first rankings, 43.5 percent to Cuomo’s 36.4 percent, and once the RCV tabulation was applied on July 1, Mamdani widened his primary night lead, picking up another 12.5 points to Cuomo’s 7.5 points from voters’ second through fifth rankings.

The news media all said Cuomo was “unstoppable,” aided by at least one $25 million PAC war chest, stuffed full by billionaire backers and corporations on top of his standard campaign haul. As far as the celebrity-focused reporting was concerned, the narrative was the famous, albeit disgraced, former governor versus a bunch of random progressives and assorted wanna-be’s. But then something amazing started to happen -- a combination of dedicated, inspired campaigning by certain candidates, listening and connecting with everyday people — within the space and possibility opened up by RCV. Voter turnout was the highest for a mayoral race since 1989, with over a million voters ranking their ballots.

As Mamdani’s campaign started catching fire, many of those seeking a Cuomo coronation started to get nervous and complain about the voter-empowering RCV system that might stand in the way of their steamroller. Why? Because in NYC's old-style elections, the powerful can rely on big fields of similar candidates to argue with each other, split the vote and rain on the parade of upstarts. But Ranked Choice Voting flipped the script.

Tag-teaming and coalition-building

The field of “nobodies” – that actually garnered almost two-thirds of first round support of the primary electorate – did not tear each other apart. In fact, many of these candidates started to cross-endorse each other, highlighting their shared purpose and values, without sacrificing their unique claims to be the best choice.

The influential Working Families Party endorsed a set of four candidates to rank, rather than just one. Along with this shared slate, the anti-Cuomo faction united around slogans like ABC (Anybody But Cuomo) and DREAM (Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor), showing that while RCV created civility amongst the like-minded, the sharp elbows of intense competition would be used as needed. And then, when the two strongest progressives in the race, Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander, formed a tight and compelling bond, it really got real.

Mamdani was seen by many as an inspiring, charismatic, and aspirational (or delusional, depending on who you are talking to) young politician whose fingers were glued to the pulse of so many in the city; and Lander was viewed as the experienced, trusted (or for some boring), former comptroller. Two progressives, youth and experience, a Muslim and a Jew – in a traditionally fractured field, each compelling as candidates but alone vulnerable – not least to the barbs they could have unleashed on each other. But under Ranked Choice Voting, they bonded into a fantastic pair to make a strong appeal together, each having the other’s back. And it could be the beginning of a new partnership, with speculation that Lander might serve as a deputy in any Mamdani administration.

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The rest is now a new and exciting part of New York’s electoral history. You don’t have to be a Zohran Mamdani fan or agree with his politics to appreciate this. If you believe in democracy, government of, by, and for the people, then the ability for the voice of the many voters to be heard over the powerful few matters. Zohran Mamdani began the contest polling under 1% before engineering a brisk and steady ascent. He spoke to the cost of living from the left and it resonated, similar to the way current Mayor Eric Adams spoke to crime from the right when he ran in 2021.

In this primary election at least, David beat Goliath, and Ranked Choice Voting was the slingshot that enabled it to happen. There’s reason to believe it can keep happening – Ranked Choice Voting along with term limits and public financing of campaigns have been doing wonders for getting responsive, new blood on the NY city council. In fact, it has not been widely reported that, since RCV was first used in the 2021 elections, the number of women-of-color elected to the New York city council has increased from only a handful to 26 out of 51 seats. Yes, New York has a majority women-of-color council! And the number of women overall has reached 31 out of 51 (61%). Yes, the city council for America’s largest and most dynamic city is one of the most racial and gender diverse in the country.

Exit poll revelations

How did voters fare in this RCV election? Did they like it, hate it, find it boring? We actually have good answers from a new exit poll from SurveyUSA that was just released. The findings are extremely encouraging. New York City voters say ranked choice voting is simple, they like it, and understand it. Key findings of the poll include:

• 96% of NYC voters say their ballot was simple to complete, including at least 94% of each racial group surveyed.

• 76% say they want to keep or expand RCV to other elections, with 42% wanting to expand it to general elections and 34% wanting to keep it for primaries. Only 17% say RCV should not be used for municipal elections.

• 81% say they understand RCV extremely or very well, with another 16% saying they understand it somewhat well. Only 3% say they do not understand it well.

• 82% say they ranked two or more candidates for mayor, with 45% reporting that they used all five of their allowable rankings.

• Among voters who ranked 2 or more candidates, 58% say “ranking allowed me to vote for candidates who aligned with my values.” Among the 18% of voters who ranked only one, 87% say “that was the only candidate I liked.”

• New Yorkers across ethnic groups found their ballots simple to complete:

  • 95% of Black voters found their ballot simple to complete.

  • 97% of Hispanic voters found their ballot simple to complete.

  • 94% of Asian voters found their ballot simple to complete.

  • 97% of white voters found their ballot simple to complete.

This new data confirms that voters of all demographics took advantage of RCV. And it is consistent with exit polling from New York City’s first RCV elections in 2021, which showed voters overwhelmingly understood RCV, liked it, and ranked their ballots. Exit surveys from other RCV elections in a range of cities have repeatedly found that voters like and understand RCV. No wonder Ranked Choice Voting is now used in over 50 cities, counties, and states, which are home to 17 million people.

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So everything’s perfect now?

Does that mean everything is perfect now in New York City elections? Heck no. Where do we start?

The general election in November still uses traditional, broken, “pick-one candidate” plurality voting. And that could backfire in the upcoming November general election to decide the mayor’s race. With multiple candidates running, the winner could win with less than 30% of the votes because -- the general election will not use Ranked Choice Voting, which guarantees a majority winner!

In addition to Mamdani, former Democrat and incumbent mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent. And the June loser Andrew Cuomo may abuse fusion voting to run on another party’s ballot line. There will be at least two other candidates, Republican Curtis Sliwa and Independent Jim Walden, a corporate defense attorney. More choice for the larger number of general election voters should be a good thing. But with old fashioned pick-one plurality voting and no majority requirement, it’s a voter coordination problem on steroids. Many voters’ hands will be tied, as they may split their votes among so many candidates. Voters afraid of Sliwa or Adams or Cuomo or Mamdani may feel pressure to vote, not for their favorite, but for who they feel has the best chance to beat their most feared candidate. The lesser of two or three evils. With so many different voter perspectives, this amounts to a coordination problem that pick-one plurality voting simply cannot solve. The winner may well end up with less than majority support.

New York City really should be using Ranked Choice Voting in the general election, so that voters don’t split their votes and new candidates and parties can compete and grow alongside the existing major parties. Multiple, strong parties with several orientations would be invaluable for exploring, crystalizing, and amplifying the most important wishes of the diverse constituencies of NYC, and identifying, developing, and resourcing highly capable, qualified, appealing candidates to champion these perspectives. Whatever else, there needs to be Ranked Choice Voting in the November election so that new parties can compete and grow alongside the existing major parties.

Another problem: many voters were not heard from

In the just-completed primary elections that determined which candidates will go to the November general election, many New Yorkers who chose not to register with a specific political party were not allowed to participate and were therefore locked out of nominating the candidates that will appear on the November ballot. How many voters? About 22% could not vote in partisan primaries because they were independent voters; New York has closed primaries that don’t allow independent voters to participate. Turnout was low for the Democratic primary – under 20% of the total registered voters. Solutions to this might include Mobile Voting (see for example, Bradley Tusk’s blog), Universal Voting, or perhaps Open Primaries.

Whether you have been swept up in the “Mamdani Magic” or would have preferred someone else, feel good about this – New York City’s 2025 primary has shown with Ranked Choice Voting we can:

• Get past cynicism and apathy by electing candidates that speak to huge swaths of voters who feel unheard

• Break the power of billionaire dollars to ram candidates down the throat of the electorate

• Continue improving elections with positive changes, so we get stronger parties and candidates, and people are central to the process.

Stronger elections with reforms like Ranked Choice Voting are the great hope and the great opportunity for us today. So let’s raise a glass to RCV in NYC, for letting the beacon shine in messy, real world elections that matter.

Nathan Lockwood @njlockwood

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The evidence is increasingly clear that President Donald Trump has adopted the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s manifesto, known as Project 2025, as the blueprint for his administration. Despite his disavowals during his presidential campaign, President Trump’s attacks on nearly two dozen federal oversight agencies—including the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve, Department of Labor, Department of Education, Federal Election Commission, USAID, Federal Communications Commission, and others—come right out of the Project 2025 playbook.

These are all agencies established by Congress decades ago. Connecting the dots on the bigger picture reveals a well-coordinated attack by Trump and his radical team on the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” traditions of American government and the US Constitution. In pursuit of what is called unitary executive power, the White House is promoting a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution as it seeks to imbue the Trump presidency with awesome and unprecedented control over traditionally independent agencies. This is an audacious attempt at a “soft overthrow” of US democracy.

Democratic government is about more than just elections. A democratic system must have effective relations between its different branches, each following the rule of law that defines their respective swimming lanes. Fair and effective governance must foster accountability to something greater than one’s own personal political whims, or lining one’s pockets via “insider trading” investment schemes.

MAGA Republicans like to rail against the “administrative state,” and certainly some bureaucracies can be wasteful and/or ineffective. Efforts to curtail incompetence, fraud or waste will be, like the poor, always with us. But that’s not what is happening as a result of the White House or Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, as headline after headline has illustrated. In a democracy, the alternative to the administrative state is the “chaotic state,” which is a thousand times worse and what Trump/Musk are inventing before our eyes.

The Project 2025 playbook

Here is one example of the Project 2025 playbook that the Trump administration is deploying to try and dismantle entire departments of government, leaving the president with unprecedented power. The latest regulatory agency to be targeted by the Trump administration is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), charged with keeping the nation’s environment clean and safe for all Americans. Established in 1970 by Republican President Richard Nixon as an agency mandated to act somewhat independently of the president and shielded from partisan politics, the EPA has been the decades-long enforcer of the nation’s most crucial laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more.

Before the establishment of the EPA, environmental conditions in the U.S. were characterized by smog-choked cities, businesses polluting rivers and contaminating lands, and very few federal standards. This resulted in egregious situations, for example, where polluting businesses in one state would not be responsible when their toxins washed downstream or blew across state lines to another state.

The quality of life of every American has been improved immeasurably through decades of environmental enforcement led by the EPA. Yet the Trump administration, following the recommendations from the Project 2025 chapter about the EPA, is in the process of dismantling the EPA and undermining basic environmental laws, regulations, and rulings. According to a Pew Research Center poll, the EPA has long been one of the most disliked federal agencies among conservatives, with only 32% of Republicans viewing the EPA favorably.

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New EPA leadership seeks to dismantle — the EPA itself

President Trump has appointed as head of the EPA a former GOP member of Congress, Lee Zeldin, who started his career as a moderate Republican from New York who supported solar energy and offshore wind power. But more recently, Zeldin has converted into a hard-right Republican, leading the effort to dismantle the very agency he now oversees.

The EPA, especially the work of the scientific research office, is supposed to be independent and protected from politics. It provides basic science, testing, and risk assessments, such as for toxins and chemicals, whether in the household, businesses, or nature. Nevertheless, a recent memo released by Administrator Zeldin calls for enormous changes at the EPA.

These include repealing dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including protections for wetlands and limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks. It also includes, in coordination with Elon Musk’s DOGE which is laying off tens of thousands of federal workers across many agencies, plans to slash the EPA budget by 65% and shed thousands of employees. A major part of the plan involves dissolving the scientific research office “to align with administration priorities.” Biologists, chemists, toxicologists, and other scientists—75% of the research program’s staff, who provide the scientific foundation for rules safeguarding human health and ecosystems — are on the chopping block.

Such huge cuts would vastly undermine the EPA’s ability to monitor air and water quality and respond to natural disasters. Is it just a coincidence that Elon Musk’s company, Tesla, was fined by the EPA for Clean Air Act violations at his California manufacturing plant?

Critics of this evisceration, including elected Democratic representatives, are pushing back, saying the EPA and its research office were created by Congress and “eliminating it is illegal” without an act of Congress. But beyond any specific change, what’s clear is that Administrator Zeldin is looking to completely reorient the mission of the EPA.

Is the EPA going out of business?

In a two-minute-and-18-second video posted on March 12 to Elon Musk’s X, Zeldin announced what he called “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.” He stated that the EPA’s new mission is not to protect the environment but to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.” He outlined what he called “31 historic actions,” including unwinding more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution, overturning limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to human respiratory problems and premature deaths, lowering restrictions on emissions of mercury (a neurotoxin), and a return to pre-1970 environmental chaos by abolishing the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds or rivers into neighboring states.

In addition, when the EPA creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the potential costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters, or prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities. Zeldin also announced that the EPA would reconsider decades of settled science that show how global warming is endangering humanity. In his video announcing the “new” EPA, Zeldin did not mention once about protecting the environment or public health, the pillars that have guided the agency since its founding over 50 years ago.

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Good bye climate enforcement

Most disturbing about this EPA reset is that it oversees the enforcement of one of the most important federal rulings in the history of climate policy. Known as the “endangerment finding” and dating from 2009, it requires the government to limit planet-warming greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that are driving climate change and intensifying hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and droughts. It supercharges the EPA to regulate these gases before they endanger human life. Last year was the hottest in recorded history, and, historically, the U.S. has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with the largest carbon footprint per capita in the world among high-population countries, twice as large as China’s. In effect, the Zeldin-led EPA is trying to relinquish its own legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases and climate change.

Under the new EPA, the Trump administration is declaring war against the environment. In the last two months, the White House has systematically degraded the government’s capacity to fight global warming by freezing funds for climate programs authorized by Congress, firing scientists working on weather and climate forecasts, and cutting federal support for the transition away from fossil fuels.

Trump’s stated mission for cutting back the EPA and other federal agencies is to reduce fraud and waste from government bureaucracy. Certainly, that is a laudable goal. But a closer examination reveals that Trump is actually using “fraud and waste” as an excuse to attack government agencies that MAGA Republicans don’t like. So far, there is little evidence that they are saving very much for American taxpayers.

Trump’s dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency will most certainly hurt the environment, undermine climate change mitigation, and endanger Americans’ safety. But it’s just one example of the playbook being followed in many federal agencies and departments: 1) install new leadership with antithetical goals to the very agency they are running; 2) gut the agency’s functional capacity by reducing funding and laying off workers, including the intellectual human capital of each agency; and 3) then shut down services that will undermine the ability of the government to do good things for people. The latter will further fuel anger at the government, and further fuel people’s acquiescence to cutting government further still, a vicious circle.

We are in a downward spiral that threatens to feed upon itself. This is how Third World countries work. Or rather, how they don’t work.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note: a shorter version of this article was published by The Fulcrum]

The Trump administration issued executive orders in February and March to try and rein in the independence of nearly twenty federal agencies. Among President Donald Trump’s near-daily assaults on these agencies, the one that is perhaps the most worrisome is his attempt to undermine the integrity and independence of the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), founded in 1934, is the nation’s primary regulator of television, radio, digital media, cell phones and cable. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), founded in 1974, oversees federal elections and enforces campaign finance laws. Both of these bodies were established by the US Congress to act as neutral bodies, flying above the political fray to watchdog their assigned areas of politics in a fair and nonpartisan manner.

There is no hiding the fact that the executive order's intent is to remove the independence of those congressionally-mandated agencies. The wording is clear:

Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials’ accountability to the American people...all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies, shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.

The independence of these 19 federal agencies has been established by federal law, upheld by numerous court rulings and by the policy practices of past presidents. So why would Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their Project 2025-led team suddenly act to remove the independence of those particular bodies?

Their stated reason is to bring “accountability” to these various agencies. But given the chaos they have created in other government agencies, it is doubly alarming that the White House seems dead set on establishing presidential control -- and a more partisan posture -- for the two agencies which oversee the administration of America’s most important elections.

Most alarmingly, Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, was named by President Trump as head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which is overseeing much of the downsizing of these federal agencies. In an interview with far-right broadcaster Tucker Carlson, Vought articulated the administration’s mission, based on its highly questionable legal theories.

“There are no independent agencies,” said Vought. “Congress may have viewed them as such… but that is not something that the Constitution understands. There may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them. But as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

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The goal of bringing independent agencies under White House control is laid out in Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation's blueprint for the Trump administration. Project 2025 references a 1935 Supreme Court decision, Humphrey's Executor v. US, in which the court decided that a president cannot fire the head of an independent agency. But Project 2025 took exception to that SCOTUS decision, arguing it violates the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Since his election, and in the past, President Trump has accused many well-known media outlets of being biased and treating him unfairly. He has explicitly threatened to yank the broadcasting licenses of the major television networks. He also launched numerous lawsuits against major media companies and in his first term repeatedly sought to defund public broadcasting. These actions show the president’s reservoir of vindictive intent to launch an assault on the freedom of the press. Having a FCC that does the president’s bidding is essential toward these goals.

Reining in the FCC

So who did President Trump appoint as the chairman of the FCC in January 2025? None other than Brendan Carr, who authored the chapter in Project 2025 on the FCC. Under Carr’s leadership, the FCC already has launched an investigation into CBS for alleged bias against Trump during the 2024 campaign. He has revived other investigations into claims of bias against NBC and ABC which Democratic chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel had dismissed in January, just before she was fired by the newly-inaugurated President Trump.

Carr also has launched investigations into PBS and NPR, suggesting that Congress should stop public funding for these outlets. And on February 11, he opened an investigation into Comcast and NBCUniversal. Trump’s FCC also has shut down the venerable Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 as part of the US effort to counter propaganda in authoritarian countries and in recent years was broadcasting content in 48 languages. Trump’s garroting of Voice of America was greeted with much praise from Russia and was condemned by Reporters Without Borders, who called it a "chilling signal" to China and Russia that they "now have free rein to spread their propaganda unchecked." The White House also shut down affiliates Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

Taken together, these amount to direct attacks on mainstream and legacy media outlets, most of which President Trump disfavors. The only broadcaster not under attack by the FCC is the Trump-positive Fox News. These harassment actions are having a “chilling effect,” as local television and radio broadcasters from around the country are advising their reporters to be careful about how they cover stories for fear of retribution from the Trump administration.

Carr also has indicated his plans to stack the FCC with new board members in favor of the president’s agenda. On most commissions and boards, it is common for a president to install his own appointments, but the FCC was established to have more partisan balance. It has five commissioners appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, which by tradition are divided politically between the two major parties with the president's party holding a one-vote majority. But FCC chairman Carr has emphasized that there is no legal requirement — only convention — that the president defer to the minority party when selecting, for example, a commissioner from the Democratic Party.

This adds important context to understanding recent events, such as the Trump administration's exiling of the Associated Press from White House events because of its refusal to use the preferred Trump name “Gulf of America” for the “Gulf of Mexico.” This was followed by the White House seizing control of the news press pool that covers the president in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One and in other meetings and events, breaking with long standing practice that allowed an independent journalist group to determine media participants in the presidential press pool.

All of these actions seem clearly designed for one focused goal -- to give the Trump administration unprecedented power to exile media outlets that it views as not being subservient enough, and to shape the country’s news reporting, broadcast, internet and social media landscapes, and by extension, their ability to shape public opinion. These unprecedented actions in the US are edging ominously close to Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels “Schriftleitergesetz” policy, which included threats to press/media freedoms such as:

“Editors are especially bound to keep out of the newspapers anything which tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich, outwardly or inwardly [and] the common will of the German people, the German defense ability, culture, or economy.” -- Editor’s Law, Section 14

Reining in the elections commission

The White House has been following a similar playbook in its efforts to bring the independent Federal Election Commission (FEC) under its thumb. Historically, the FEC is a bipartisan, six-member body (mandated as six Democrats, six Republicans), nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, that establishes the ground rules for how elections are run and financed.

In late January, President Trump sent a letter to Ellen Weintraub, a George W. Bush appointee and the Democratic chair of the FEC, informing her that she had been fired. Weintraub says the firing is illegal, citing a 1993 court ruling that the president can fire a commissioner only “for good cause.” The firing broke a 3-3 GOP/Democratic tie on the commission, marking the first time that a president had removed an FEC commissioner from the opposing party and not nominated in their place a candidate selected by that party’s congressional leadership.

This attempted firing came at a time when the FEC is expected to consider complaints against Trump's 2024 campaign, as well as complaints against the president's top donor, Elon Musk, who spent $250 million to elect Donald Trump and is playing a controversial role in this far-reaching reorganization of these important federal agencies. Musk also just spent $20 million in a losing effort to try and elect a MAGA candidate in a state supreme court race in Wisconsin.

Not surprisingly, the efforts of the Trump administration to establish control over these two particular commissions, which together have vast powers to shape the country’s election and media landscapes, is raising alarm bells. This is looking like a direct attack on the integrity of key federal institutions dedicated to ensuring fair and transparent elections. If successful, that will undermine the checks and balances central to enforcing the nation’s election laws. The White House appears to be ignoring the longstanding restraints that are supposed to keep the governing political party from abusing its control over the federal government to stack the deck and unfairly cement its dominance in future elections.

As Josef Stalin said (allegedly), "It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes." The US is edging ominously closer to a "post-democracy" danger zone.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Dear DemocracySOS readers,

I’m holding in my hands a book called The Reunification of Europe: Anti-Totalitarian Courage and Political Renewal. It is signed and was given to me by an extraordinarily virtuous gentleman by the name of Tunne Kelam. Mr Kelam was an Estonian anti-Soviet resistance fighter who later led the formation of the first post-Soviet government in Estonia, and then was elected to its first Parliament and also as a representative to the European Parliament. I met Tunne in September 2011 at a conference in Bucharest, Romania, organized by the European People’s Party, the largest center-right party of the European Union.

A number of the conference delegates were former anti-Soviet resistors, representing previously Iron Curtain countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and more. As an American, I was treated with the utmost respect and dignity. The amount of warmth, respect and gratitude extended to Americans for our nation’s role during the Cold War in supporting these countries and their people – including some of the very individuals in the conference room – against Soviet tyranny was something I had never personally experienced before. It left me with a renewed appreciation for some of the finer qualities of the United States.

This memory is what I flashed back on when I watched the preposterous performance by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in their sad attempts to humiliate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the hallowed forum of the Oval Office. There are ways to send a strong message to Europe that it needs to pay more for its own defense, particularly with the hot breath of the Russian bear bearing down – once again – on Eastern Europe. But that’s not what Trump did.

Instead, he disgraced himself, the presidency and our nation in the eyes of those freedom fighters and resistors. As a leader, its always incumbent upon your mandate to decide whose side are you on, who do you admire and want to impress and join with. The history of US militarism around the world – from Latin America to Vietnam to Indonesia and more – does not always show America in the best or most noble light. But in the support we provided to eastern and central Europeans during their decades-long battle against Soviet occupation, Uncle Sam was at its best.

Now as Trump and Vance, along with their reckless clown of a South African sidekick Elon Musk, align themselves with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Argentina’s Javier Gerardo Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Germany’s far right extremist political party Alternatives for Deutschland and others, the shock and sense of betrayal by those Eastern Europeans who gave their “lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor,” and who have long revered America for its steadfast leadership against tyranny, is profound. It should be a wake-up call to any American with a remaining drip of virtue and dignity, not to mention common sense.

Indeed, the world has been turned upside down. Apparently the US is embarking on a new chapter in which America will no longer be the “indispensable nation” it once was to those battling Russian despotism. Some Americans might think “good riddance” to that role, but they will discover soon enough that a number of good things came along with that preeminence. As Voltaire once said, “Every man is guilty of the good he did not do.”

There is perhaps no figure more qualified to communicate this failure of American character, not to mention this enormous foreign policy blunder, than Lech Walesa, the Polish shipyard electrician who became the leader of the Solidarity trade union and pro-democratic forces in 1989, that ended Poland’s Communist rule and hastened the end of the Cold War. Walesa was an American hero, invited to the rare privilege, extended to few foreign dignitaries, of addressing the Joint Houses of the US Congress. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1990 he was elected Poland’s first president of the post-Soviet era. He looked steadfastly into the eyes of Soviet oppression and refused to be cowed or to look away, drawing enormous support from his American allies.

Below, Mr. Walesa and more than 30 former Polish political detainees and anti-Soviet dissidents have signed a short but stinging letter of rebuke to the “agent of chaos” currently occupying the Oval Office. This letter was posted on Mr. Walesa’s Facebook page.

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*************************************

Your Excellency Mr. President,

We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenski with fear and distaste. We consider your expectations to show respect and gratitude for the material help provided by the United States fighting Russia to Ukraine insulting. Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the frontline for more than 11 years in the name of these values and independence of their Homeland, which was attacked by Putin's Russia.

We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see it.

Our panic was also caused by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of one we remember well from Security Service interrogations and from the debate rooms in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges at the behest of the all-powerful communist political police also explained to us that they hold all the cards and we hold none. They demanded us to stop our business, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffer because of us. They deprived us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government and our gratitude. We are shocked that Mr. President Volodymyr Zelenski was treated in the same way.

The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to keep its distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to themselves. This was understood by President Woodrow Wilson, who decided to join the United States in World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war for the defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.

We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial commitment it would not have been possible to bring the collapse of the Soviet Union empire. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom. His greatness was [measured] on the fact that he without hesitation called the USSR the "Empire of Evil" and gave it a decisive fight. We won, and the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands today in Warsaw vis a vis of the US embassy.

Mr. President, material aid - military and financial - cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, as well as the whole free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured with money. Gratitude is due to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. It is obvious for us, the people of "Solidarity", former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia.

We are calling for the United States to [uphold] the guarantees it made with Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which recorded a direct obligation to defend the intact borders of Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons resources. These guarantees are unconditional: there is no word about treating such aid as an economic exchange.

Lech Wales, b. political prisoner, Solidarity leader, president of the Republic of Poland III

Mark Bailin, b. political prisoner, editor of independent publishing houses

Severn Blumstein, b. political prisoner, member of the Workers' Defense Committee

Teresa Bogucka, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and Solidarity

Gregory Bogut, b. political prisoner, activist of democratic opposition, independent publisher

Mark Borowik, b. political prisoner, independent publisher

Bogdan Borusewicz, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk

Zbigniew Bujak, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Warsaw

Władysław Frasyniuk, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Wrocław

Andrew Gintzburg, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Richard Grabarczyk, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist

Alexander Janiszewski, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist

Peter Kapczy .ski, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition

Mark Kossakowski, b. political prisoner, independent publicist

Christopher the King, b. a political prisoner , independence activist

Jaroslav Kurski, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition

Barbara Swan, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Bogdan Lis, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk

Henryk Majewski, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist

Adam Michnik, b. political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition, editor of independent publishing houses

Slavomir Najniger, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Peter the German , b. political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses,

Stefan Konstanty Niesiołowski, b. a political prisoner , independence activist

Edward Nowak, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Wojciech Onyszkiewicz, b. political prisoner, member of the Workers' Defence Committee, Solidarity activist

Anthony Pawlak, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and underground Solidarity

Sylwia Poleska-Peryt, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition

Christopher Push, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Richard Push, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity,

Jacek Rakowiecki, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Andrew Severn, b. political prisoner, actor, director of the Polish Theater in Warsaw

Witold Sielewicz, b. political prisoner, printer of independent publishing houses

Henryk Sikora, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist

Christopher Siemien Krski, b. political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses

Grayna Staniszewska, b. a political prisoner, leaders of Solidarity of the Beskids region

George Degrees, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition

Joanna Happy, b. political prisoner, editor of Solidarity underground press

Ludwik Turko, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity

Matthew Wierzbicki, b. political prisoner, printer and publicist of independent publishing houses

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