The signs keep accumulating that the wheels are coming off the Trump bus. His narcissistic cruelty hits new lows, prompting disgust from leading Republicans. He doesn’t seem able to give a coherent speech, even when he sticks to the teleprompter. His rants are becoming more unhinged.
Despite Trump’s claims that all economic woes are either Biden’s fault or that things are better than they seem, the economy is getting away from him, sandbagged by his own policies. More and more Republicans are willing to defy him, the latest case being the discharge petition to force a House vote on Affordable Care Act subsidies in January.
The great gerrymander caper has fizzled. More important than the willingness of Indiana Republicans to reject Trump’s arm-twisting is the fact that several viewed their defiance of Trump as something positive politically. His threats to primary Republican dissenters ring hollow.
Ezra Klein has declared that the Trump vibe is dead. Ian Bassin, who leads the exemplary group Protect Democracy, recently said that Trump “is losing the race against time and has failed to sufficiently consolidate power before becoming deeply unpopular.”
BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN to consolidate power? Trump is surely losing popular support, but unlike in his first term, Trump’s henchmen have managed to consolidate the machinery of government.
And in contrast to Trump’s own short attention span and penchant for impulsive and mutually inconsistent policies, officials like Russell Vought at OMB, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and the Justice Department group working to sabotage the 2026 elections are deeply knowledgeable and strategic.
Assuming anything like free and fair elections next November, the Democratic wave would be sufficient to overcome Republican attempts at voter suppression, as was the case in 2018. But this time, the effort to undermine elections is far more sinister and systematic.
Over the next several months, we can expect a kind of trench warfare, where the DOJ makes outrageous demands, states and cities resist, and the courts arbitrate.
It begins with the attempt by the Justice Department to get control of state voter lists and conduct massive purges. The Constitution unambiguously gives control of election administration to the states, except where Congress expressly delegates some authority to the executive branch, as in the case of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act or administration of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, otherwise known as the motor voter law.
The Trump administration has turned both laws into their opposites, using the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to suppress voting. The Justice Department has made demands to at least 40 states for their voter files, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Civil Rights Division, staffed by people expert in voter suppression, has an elaborate plan to run these voter files against commercial databases that purport to show deaths, address changes, double registrations, etc., but that are filled with inaccuracies. This process then becomes the basis for federal purges of accurate state voter files, and for federal prosecutions of state officials who resist. Each week, the DOJ makes new demands.
The DOJ’s Voting Section is now headed by Maureen Riordan, former counsel to the right-wing Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which developed many of these strategies. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, also has a long career in voter suppression.
On December 12, the Civil Rights Division announced lawsuits against four more states—Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada—for failure to produce their statewide voter registration lists upon request. The Civil Rights Division is also suing one locality—Fulton County, Georgia—for records related to the 2020 election.
This strategy follows up on a Trump executive order from March, which attempted to federalize elections and added other unconstitutional requirements. The order directs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—an independent, bipartisan agency that assists states with election administration—to mandate that voters show proof of citizenship (a passport or other, similar document) when they register to vote using the federal voter registration form. The order also attempts to require the EAC to rescind all previous certifications of voting equipment based on prior standards and begin a process of demanding new equipment and new certifications.
So far, lower courts have blocked these orders in response to myriad lawsuits. Those cases have not reached the Supreme Court.
Indiana and Wyoming have already handed over confidential data to the Justice Department. Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia have said they will cooperate. Here is a comprehensive summary of threats and state resistance by the Brennan Center.
Blue-wave strategists have comforted themselves with the reminder that election administration will be honest in states governed by Democrats. I recently reported that out of the 23 Republican House seats won in 2024 by eight points or less, 19 are in blue or purple states. However, if the Justice Department even partially succeeds in taking over election administration from the states, it won’t matter if the state is governed by Democrats or Republicans.
What we can expect over the next several months is a kind of trench warfare, where the DOJ makes outrageous demands, states and cities resist, and the courts arbitrate. For the most part, the lower courts have sided with the law and the Constitution, and so have some appellate courts.
As in so many other areas that will determine whether this country remains a democracy, the ultimate arbiter will be the Supreme Court. The Roberts Court has been terrible about constraining Trump’s assertions of executive power and has been especially bad on civil rights.
At the same time, the high court has signaled that its forthcoming decisions will likely overrule Trump in his claims to be able to fire Federal Reserve governors with fixed terms, his use of emergency economic powers to turn tariffs on and off, and his challenge to birthright citizenship.
It’s probably not practical for the Supreme Court to take every one of these lower-court voting cases in time for the 2026 elections, which means that at least some decisions protecting voting rights will stand. At the same time, Trump’s allies in and out of government will engage in all manner of voter intimidation. The Court may yet decide that it does not look kindly on the scrapping of democracy and the rule of law entirely. But even if the Supreme Court were to block the illegal demands for voter lists, threats will dissuade some voters.
Were this a remotely normal presidency, Trump would be on track for a massive Democratic wave election next November, a loss of one or both houses of Congress, a personal repudiation, and lame-duckery for the remainder of his term. But of course, Trump is anything but normal and he is especially dangerous when cornered.
In addition to assaults on the right to vote, I worry that Trump, always looking for distractions, will lead us into a major war. I even worry that as Trump’s narcissism becomes more pathological, he concludes that an ungrateful world doesn’t love him—and decides to blow it up. Trump may well be repudiated in November and constrained by a new Congress. Barring an act of God, he’s still president for three more years.