Donald Trump is certainly going to lose the popular vote, like he did in 2020 and 2016.
Donald Trump is probably going to lose the Electoral vote, like he did in 2020.
But if the latter is close—and thanks to the antidemocratic architecture of the archaic Electoral College system, it may be—the House of Representatives might wind up deciding who will take the White House on January 20. Trump would probably win in the House (which, despite its intended purpose and its name, is not accurately representative of the American people).
And if it ever got that far, Trump would certainly win in the Supreme Court. There, Leonard Leo’s far-right drones are chomping at the bit to return FPOTUS to the Oval Office. Amy Coney Barrett would join with the four hateful men in robes in holding with the Donald. And proudly, eagerly joining them in such a nightmare scenario would be Chief Justice John Roberts, the reactionary in moderate’s clothing, whose raison d’être is to make the United States as antidemocratic (or, if you will, as fascist) as possible—all the while convincing the media that he’s merely an umpire calling balls and strikes.
Roberts may well be an umpire. But umpire-ness does not automatically guarantee objectivity and neutrality. Like, I’ve seen the baseball scenes in The Naked Gun. Who better to rig the game than the umpire, who can call a slider under the chin a strike and a fastball right down Broadway a ball?
That’s exactly what Roberts has done. In his court, balls are strikes, white is black, up is down, Radiohead is Coldplay. Words have no meaning. On his watch, SCOTUS decided that “well regulated” means “not regulated at all, even a little,” and that, in the case of Trump being removed from the ballot in Colorado for leading an insurrection, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” means that it’s not actually necessary for Congress to do such a thing. Roe, legal precedent for half a century, is overturned, but the Comstock Act is okay.
There is not, and will never be, an internal logic to these decisions. Leonard Leo and the rightwing machine decide what outcomes they want, they game the lower court system to get the Supreme Court to take on the requisite cases, and then Roberts & Co. pull shit out of their collective ass to produce a ruling that pleases their rightwing whoremasters. And who pays the price? Pregnant women who cannot access necessary healthcare. Children who get gunned down by the score in schools all across the country. Minorities who have seen their federal civil rights protections evaporate. Consumers of tainted cold cuts. And, just to pull something out of today’s news, homeowners in the path of Hurricane Helene, victims of the climate change the GOP and its stooges on the Supreme Court will deny until Florida is underwater.
At the heart of all of this is voting rights. A country is only as democratic as its system for electing its leaders. By that measure, the United States is not all that democratic. State legislatures devise lopsided redistricting maps; that ensures a significant number of extremists in the House. The Senate, meanwhile, is inherently fucked by its construction, which vouchsafes New York the same number of senators as North Dakota. Thus has a minority of reactionary weirdos managed to hijack our federal government. And no one has done more to make this a reality than John Glover Roberts Jr.
“This is who he is,” David Daley, author of the excellent and exigent new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, tells me. “And John Roberts has so successfully maintained his reputation as an institutionalist, as an umpire, as a caller of balls and strikes, that he’s gotten away for 25 now with being what I call the most effective Republican politician of the last fifty years—who has delivered the right victory upon victory that they never could have won at the ballot box.”
In 2013, Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, torpedoing Section 5, which required historically racist states like Alabama and Mississippi to “preclear” any proposed changes to laws, policies, or maps related to elections. In the disgraceful Shelby County decision, the Chief Justice assured us that the South “has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” Section 5, he wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”
Incredibly, a white Republican who grew up in a whites-only town in Indiana was somehow ignorant of what was happening to racial minorities in the South. As Daley writes in Antidemocratic:
Spend some time with the Justice Department files from this era and two things become immediately clear: First, across small-towns in the South, the VRA helped to promote parity in voter registration numbers, but preclearance prevented the adoption of many new-school methods of voter suppression designed to keep the past alive in little locales where no media played watchdog and officials could not be trusted. And second, the five Supreme Court justices who declared that preclearance should have been a vestige of the past spent little time examining these stories.
They likely knew nothing of the majority-Latino town Seguin, Texas, about a half hour east of San Antonio, where the white population accounted for a third of the population but two-thirds of the City Council. That imbalance persists because officials simply refused to redistrict for more than two decades, after both the 1980 and the 1990census. Latino leaders filed a lawsuit using Section 5 and won—only to see the city respond by rushing the filing deadlines forward for candidates so that no Latino candidates could qualify. To stave off that latest scheme, the Latino majority had to rely on preclearance—and another successful lawsuit.
Seguin, Texas is hardly the only example. Daley recounts many of them in his book. They are nauseatingly, infuriatingly unfair. To this day, and contrary to Roberts’s assurances in Shelby County, voter suppression in the South remains a big deal. And that’s just how the Chief Justice likes it.
“[P]eople on the left still say, ‘Oh, John Roberts is going to save us on this really important thing,’” Daley tells me. “And John Roberts is not going to save you. John Roberts is not an umpire. John Roberts is not your friend. John Roberts was raised in a town for whites only, that was still advertising itself as a place for Gentile Caucasians, even after the United States outlawed housing discrimination.”
Sam Alito is the most pompous of the current Leonard Leo justices. Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt. Brett Kavanaugh is the most nakedly partisan. But John Roberts is the most dangerous, the most insidious, the most fascistic, and, worst of all, the most appealing in the eyes of the press—despite the severe and possibly fatal damage he’s done to our democracy.
“This is who John Roberts is,” Daley says. “Curtailing voting rights has been John Roberts’s life’s work—and he’s really really good at it.”
In an opinion piece in Scientific American, Cecilia Menjívar of UCLA and Deisy Del Real of the University of Southern California contend that the United States and other nations are sliding toward autocracy. They believe we can learn from the experience of other nations.
They write:
An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.
With the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November, questions about the future of American democracy take on urgency. As the American public seems increasingly receptive to autocratic tactics, these questions become even more pressing. Will the U.S. slide into autocracy, faced with a presidential candidate in Donald Trump who promises to be a dictator on his first day in office? Can lessons from autocracies elsewhere help us detect democratic backsliding in the U.S.?
To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d’état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.
Rather than eradicating democratic institutions as leaders like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko did in the past, today’s established and emergent autocrats (as is the case of Maduro or Orbán, for instance) corrupt the courts, sabotage elections and distort information to attain and remain in power. They are elected through ostensibly free elections and connect with a public already primed to be fearful of a fabricated enemy. Critically, they use these democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes. Autocratic tactics creep into the political life of a country slowly and embed themselves deeply in the democratic apparatus they corrupt. Modern autocracy, one may say, is a tyranny of gaslighting.
We gathered a group of scholars who have looked at successful and failed autocracies worldwide in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, to identify common denominators of autocratic rulers worldwide. This research shows that modern autocrats uniformly apply key building blocks to cement their illiberal agenda and undermine democracies before taking them over. Those include manipulating the legal system, rewriting electoral laws and constitutions, and dividing the population into “us” versus “them” blocs. Autocrats routinely present themselves as the only presumed savior of the country while silencing, criminalizing and disparaging critics or any oppositional voice. They distort information and fabricate “facts” through the media, claim fraud if they lose an election, persuade the population that they can “cleanse” the country of crime and, finally, empower a repressive nationalistic diaspora and fund satellite political movements and hate groups that amplify the autocrats’ illiberal agenda to distort democracy.
In February, Bukele, the popular Salvadoran autocrat and self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” spoke at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual convention for U.S. right-wing elected officials and activists. There he received a standing ovation after he flaunted his crackdown on crime in his country and suggested the U.S. should follow his tactics. His speech demonstrates how, regardless of political history and ideology, or their nation’s wealth and place on the global stage, autocrats today deploy a similar “toolbox of tricks” aimed at legalizing their rule. That’s because they copy from one another and learn from one another’s successes and failures. Vast interconnected networks enable autocrats to cooperate, share strategies and know-how, and visit one another in public shows of friendship and solidarity to create an international united front. Just ask Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and autocrat, who received a warm reception when he spoke at the CPAC in 2022, reminding the crowd of the reason for his visit: “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces.”
Global networks of autocratic regimes also provide economic resources to other autocrats and invest in their economies, share security services to squash popular dissent, and sometimes interfere in each other’s elections.
Modern autocrats do not act alone; their connections with one another are complemented and sustained by a varied cadre of legal specialists, political strategists and academics who tend to be economically secure, well-educated and cosmopolitan. These individuals, like Michael Anton and those tied to the Trump-defending Claremont Institute, the over 400 scholars and policy experts who collaborated on Project 2025— the extreme-right game plan for a Trump presidency—and Stephen K. Bannon, who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” by filling government jobs with partisans and loyalists, move in and out of government positions and the limelight. They are nimble and, moreover, fundamental to the autocrats’ strategies, as they create videos and podcasts and write books to fabricate good images of the autocrats, write detailed blueprints for an autocratic form of government, and consult aspiring autocrats on best practices.
Evidence indicates that we are in a critical moment in U.S. democracy. Will the U.S. inevitably descend into autocracy? No, not with an alert and well-informed electorate. Recognizing the strategies that autocrats use and share, veiled behind a façade of democratic elections and wrapped in fearmongering, equips us to understand the harmful consequences of these strategies for democracy, and perhaps to stop the wave in time.
Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a Nicaraguan opposition politician and prospective presidential candidate, was accused of treason, arrested and banished simply for running as an opposition candidate by the regime of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo (who is also first lady). In exile, Chamorro has described a danger countries face: autocrats who come to power through democratic systems are “like a silent disease—the early symptoms of this silent disease are usually dismissed, but once it begins to consume the body, it is usually too late to stop it.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.
But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.
He knew.
It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.
For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.
This is good news. The misuse of AI threatens the integrity of our elections and our ability to trust anything that is communicated to us other than in person. Justice was served!
Steve Kramer, the New Orleans-based political consultant who has admitted his involvement in the hoax, must pay the fine for violating the federal Truth in Caller ID Act, which makes it illegal to make automated telephone calls with intent to defraud or cause harm. The FCC says that it will hand the matter to the US Justice Department if Kramer doesn’t pay up in 30 days.
The hoax occurred in January, when New Hampshire voters received robocalls in the runup to the state’s primary elections. The calls, which featured a computer-generated voice that mimicked the voice of President Joe Biden, urged voters not to cast ballots in the primary.
Kramer hired New Orleans magician Paul Carpenter to create the recording with help from ElevenLabs, a company that uses artificial intelligence to generate highly realistic simulations of individuals’ voices. Carpenter has said that he didn’t know Kramer’s plans for the AI recording. Kramer has claimed that he did it to demonstrate the dangers posed by computer-generated “deepfakes.”
In addition to the FCC fine, Kramer faces 13 felony counts of attempted voter suppression in the New Hampshire courts, as well as 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonating a candidate.
Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University, expresses his alarm about Trump’s turn toward fascistic rhetoric in this post. Trump knows how to excite his base by repeating conspiracy theories and blaming the Jews if anything he wants goes wrong. Snyder does not invoke the reference to Hitler lightly. He knows European history.
He writes:
Trump just had quite a Hitlerian month.
But before broaching the subject of Trump and Hitler I have to say a with a word about the American taboo on “comparisons.”
Anyone who refers to Trump’s Hitlerian moments will be condemned for “comparison.” Somehow that “comparison” rather than Trump’s deeds becomes the problem. The outrage one feels about the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s is transferred from the person who resembles the criminal to the person who points out the resemblance.
This cynical position opposing “comparisons” exploits the emotional logic of exceptionalism. Americans are innocent and good (we would like to believe). We are not (we take for granted) like the Germans between the world wars. We would never (we imagine) tolerate the stereotypes German Nazis invoked. We have learned the lessons of the Holocaust.
Since we are so innocent and good, since we know everything, it just cannot be true — so runs the emotional logic — that a leading American politician does Hitlerian things. And since we are so pure and wise, we never have to specify what it was that we have learned from the past. Indeed, our our goodness is so profound that we must express it by attacking the people who recall history.
And so, in the name of our capacity to remember great evil, we make it impossible to actually remember great evil. A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator. Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.” Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.
I hope that the irony of all of this is clear: the idea that “comparison” is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism. In this strange way, outrage about “comparison” reinforces fascist ideas about purity and politics. We should hate the dissenters. We should ignore whatever casts doubt on our sense of national virtue. We should never reflect.
Democracy, of course, depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past. The past is our only mirror, which is why fascists want to shatter it. In fascist Russia, for example, it is a criminal offense to say the wrong things about the Second World War. The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere. That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers.
“Never again” is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.
Before we think about this past month, we also have to consider the past four years. This entire election unfolds amidst a big lie. It was Hitler’s advice to tell a lie so big that your followers would never believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. Trump followed that advice in November 2020. His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.
This year we have seen that explicit Nazi ideas are tolerated in the Trump milieu. The vice-presidential candidate shares a platform with Holocaust deniers, and defends Holocaust denial as free speech. This is a fallacy people should see through: yes, the First Amendment allows Nazis to speak, but it does not ennoble Nazi speech. The fact that people say fascist things in a country with freedom of speech is how we know that they are fascists — and that, if they themselves comes to power, they will end freedom of speech and all other freedoms.
Which brings us to North Carolina and to the gubernatorial candidate Trump once called the country’s hottest politician. No one is denying that Mark Robinson has the right under the First Amendment to call himself a Nazi or to praise Mein Kampf. The question is what we do about this. Trump will not intervene here because he believes that Robinson is more likely to win than a substitute candidate would be. Consider that for a moment: for Trump, the reason not to distance himself a self-avowed Nazi is that he hopes that the self-avowed Nazi will win an election, take office, and hold power.
This is not surprising. Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign. Its main theme in September was inspired by a lady in Springfield, Ohio, who lost her cat and then found it again. For J.D. Vance, who knew what happened, this became the basis for the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals. For Donald Trump, that became a reason to promise that Haitians in Springfield would be deported. He had found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the “them” in his politics of us-and-them.
It is fascist to start a political campaign from the choice of an enemy (this is the definition of politics by the most talented Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt). It is fascist to replace reason with emotion, to tell big lies (“create stories,” as Vance says) that appeal to a sense of vulnerability and exploit a feeling of difference. The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done.
It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression. Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people….
In international politics, the key moment concerns Ukraine and its head of state. Since February 2022, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, has been rightly understood and admired as a symbol of physical and political courage. When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens’kyi would (and should) flee. Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country. He has since visited the front every few weeks.
This is how Trump characterized Zelens’kyi in September, echoing comments that he has made before: “Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $100 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth.” Trump seems threatened by Zelens’kyi. As Trump has made clear numerous times, his first and only impulse is to give Putin what Putin wants. The idea of taking risks to defend freedom from the Russian dictator is well beyond the pinprick-sized black hole that is Trump’s moral universe.
And of course the claim itself is false. The number is too big. And the money does not go to Zelens’kyi himself, obviously. That Zelens’kyi does personally profit is a favorite idea of Vance, who repeats Russian propaganda to this effect. The money does not even, for the most part, go to the Ukrainian government. Most of the military aid does to American companies who build new weapons for American stockpiles. We then send old weapons to Ukraine, to which we assign a dollar value.
The essential thing, though, is the antisemitic trope Trump chose to express himself. It goes like this. Jews are cowards. Jews never fight wars. Jews stay away from the front. Jews only cause wars that make other people suffer. And then Jews make vast amounts of money from those wars. Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish. And thus “the greatest salesman on earth” for Trump. And the corrupt owner of “yachts” for Vance. A war profiteer, as in the antisemitic stereotype, not a courageous commander, as in reality.
Indeed, most of what Trump says about Zelens’kyi, Ukraine, and and the war itself makes sense only within the antisemitic stereotype. Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself. He never recalls Russian war crimes. He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right. He certainly never admits that Zelens’kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage. The war, for Trump, is just a scam — a Jewish scam.
And that, of course, is why he thinks he can end it right away: he thinks he can just shoulder the Jew aside and deal with his fascist “friend” Putin, who for him is the “genius” in this situation, and who must be allowed to win. Despite the evidence, Trump says that Russia always wins wars, dismissing both history (regular Russian losses such as the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War) and the actual events of the ongoing Russian invasion, in which Ukraine has taken back half the territory it lost and driven the Russian fleet from the Black Sea. Russia is counting on Trump. They need him in power to win their war, and they know it.
It need hardly be said that if Trump throws American power on the Russian side, the “deal” that follows will not end the war. It will only mean that Russia is able to kill more Ukrainians faster. Trump will then claim that the deal itself was beautiful and perfect — and try to change the subject from the slaughter he brought about through his antisemitic hubris and admiration of Russian fascism.
And, of course, Snyder explains, Trump has warned Jewish groups that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jews. Anti-Semitism will be Trump’s legacy.
The first election in which I was fully aware of the candidates and their policies was in 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for re-electionnagainst Adlai Stevenson. I was a freshman in college but I could not vote because the minimum voting age then was 21. My first vote was cast for John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon. I was an active volunteer in that election, working in Kennedy headquarters in New York City. I have been active in every election since then.
I mention this background to point out that over a period of nearly 70 years I have never seen a candidate of either party lie as persistently, casually, and audaciously as does Donald Trump. His lying is not normal. In my lifetime, Presidential candidates strived to appear honest (even if they weren’t, they wanted to appear to be honest), thoughtful, and dignified. They did not insult or belittle their opponent. They did not curse when giving campaign speeches. Trump’s behavior is not normal. He demeans the office of the Presidency.
Heather Cox Richardson contends here that Trump’s incessant lying is not simply a sign of poor character or the defense mechanism of a spoiled man-child. As she shows, the lying has a political purpose.
She writes:
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.
Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”
They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.
Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.
But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States… encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,… [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”
But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.
In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.
Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.
Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.
Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.
Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.
Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.
Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.
They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.
But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.
Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.
The Economic Policy Institute is a nonpartisan think tank that leans left, which is a rarity in D.C., where billionaires shower their largesse on rightwing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. This is the EPI analysis of the devastating effect of vouchers on public schools. This is their purpose: the privatization of public funding for education.
Here is the EPI report:
Since the early 2000s, many states have introduced significant voucher programs to provide public financing for private school education. These voucher programs are deeply damaging to efforts to offer an excellent public education for all U.S. children—and this is in fact often the intention of those pushing these programs. In this post we argue that:
Public education is worth preserving—it should be seen as one of the most important achievements in our country’s history and crucial for the social and economic welfare of future generations.
The economic logic behind voucher programs is weak; it rests on ideological commitments to markets over public provision of goods and services, even in realms of activity where the virtues of markets do not hold—like public education.
Most damagingly, introducing significant voucher programs has gone hand in hand with steep declines in public school spending relative to states that have not adopted these policies.
This spending stagnation has had profound effects in generating larger “adequacy gaps” in school funding in voucher states.
Paradoxically, even while they take resources away from public schools, many newly introduced voucher programs could result in more total state spending in coming years.
This would be a particularly perverse result given the expansive research literature showing that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. In essence, states that have introduced large-scale voucher programs are looking to substitute a more expensive and less effective system for educating kids than public education. The only reason for this policy thrust is ideology rooted in hostility to public education.
Background on public education and the voucher debates
Universal public education was perhaps the most important reason why the United States became the richest country in the world in the 20th century. As Claudia Goldin, the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, has written:
At the dawn of the twentieth century the industrial giants watched each other cautiously. The British sent high-ranking commissions to the United States and the United States sent similar groups to Britain and Germany. All were looking over their shoulders to see what made for economic greatness and what would ensure supremacy in the future… Earlier delegations focused on technology and physical capital. Those of the turn-of-the-century turned their attention to something different. People and training, not capital and technology, had become the new concerns…For the twentieth century to become the human capital century required vast changes in educational institutions, a commitment by governments to fund education, a readiness by taxpayers to pay for the education of other people’s children, a belief by business and industry that formal schooling mattered to them, and a willingness on the part of parents to send their children to school (and by youths to go). The transition occurred first in the United States and was accompanied by a set of “virtues” or principles, many of which can be summarized by the word “egalitarianism.”
In the 21st century, unfortunately, too many policymakers seem determined to squander this legacy by starving public education of money and legitimacy, often in the name of “school choice.” Their central claim (when they bother to make one with any clarity) is that public provision of goods or services is ineffective by definition and that a dose of private, market-like competition will lead to better schooling outcomes for the nation’s children.
This claim is weak on its logical face, as the conditions needed for market competition to lead to better outcomes clearly do not exist in the educational realm. Take just three obvious examples. First, unlike other goods and services, there is no option to forego education entirely. In other markets, if the private sector is doing a poor job at offering attractive options for a good or service, people can just consume other things. But the United States—rightly—mandates basic education for all kids. Second, competition works well when the cost of switching providers is small. If you get tired of prices or goods at Whole Foods, you can shop at Giant. By contrast, switching schools is an extraordinarily costly decision in time, administrative burden, and severed social networks. Third, competition works well in markets when a transaction only affects the buyer and seller—and not unrelated third parties. But if third parties are affected by a transaction (think of pollution affecting third parties when I decide to buy gasoline for my car), then private markets will fail to match costs and benefits. Universal schooling generates positive spillovers to society at large, meaning that individuals would be inclined to underinvest in education relative to the full benefits it provides.
The easiest way to boost educational outcomes is providing more public resources
To the degree any evidence is mobilized in support of the view that public education needs market-like disruption through “school choice” instruments like vouchers, it generally relies on outdated research claiming that public schools already have “enough” funding, and that additional resources would not generate better outcomes. If one believed that the level of public education resources was sufficient, then strategies aimed at changing the composition of these resources or how they were mobilized—say through privatization via vouchers—might make some sense.
But this is wrong on several fronts.
First, newer research with better methods confirms that more money for public schools does improve educational outcomes. And not only does more money improve schooling outcomes for children, it also has the largest beneficial effects on the performance of particularly disadvantaged students.
Such spending is not random and depends on a number of factors that are correlated with student success. For example, spending in a given district might rise as higher-income families move into the area and property values increase. These higher-income families might also be able to provide greater in home resources that will aid their children’s academic performance. Simple correlations between the level of district spending and student success might hence show a positive relationship, but the causality would not necessarily be running from district spending decisions to student success; both might instead be driven by a third variable, which is simply the level of family resources on average across the district.
Running the opposite direction, much school funding is explicitly compensatory, targeting students facing greater socioeconomic disadvantage to attempt to even out total resources (both in home and public) available to students for academic success. But if this greater spending targets students with fewer in home resources, it could show a negative relationship between levels of spending and student performance, but again will not be reflecting the causal effect of this spending.
The new research has overcome this key challenge in empirical assessments of the relationship between school spending and student outcomes: It found natural experiments that allow truly exogenous changes in school spending to be identified, and hence the effects on student achievement to reflect the causal effect of this spending. The exogenous changes that allowed for these examinations were largely court-ordered school finance reforms (SFRs).
For example, Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2016)examined the impact of school finance reforms between 1972 and 2010, and found that a 10% increase in school spending for 12 years lead to increases in high school graduation rates, 7% higher wages, and 10% higher family incomes in adulthood for children from districts that saw the spending increase. Gains were concentrated among students in high-poverty households. Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018)similarly found that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending for low-income districts would reduce the test score gap between low- and high-income school districts within a state by roughly 0.18 standard deviations (SDs) following court-ordered SFRs, or by nearly 40% of the baseline gap.
In short, the evidence indicates that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions.
Second, vouchers don’t lead to better student achievement. Several high-quality studies have investigated the impact of recent voucher programs and have found notably worse outcomes for student achievement. In the first two years following Louisiana’s Scholarship voucher program, student achievement in language arts and math both decreased by as much as 0.34 SDs. In Ohio, under the Ed Choice program, students who went to private schools with a voucher performed worse than they would have had they remained in public schools. In Indiana, students that used the Indiana Choice Scholarship voucher program experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics.
The promise of vouchers improving educational outcomes rests on assumptions that the private sector is always and everywhere more efficient than public providers of goods and services. But the private schools that expand or are created in response to the introduction of voucher programs are often of very poor quality. In the case of Milwaukee’s longstanding voucher programs, for example, researchers found that 40% of private voucher schools failed or closed down within the program’s first 25 years. Parents often belatedly realize that these schools are no improvement relative to public schools; this has lead a large share of students that took vouchers to return to public schools shortly after. In Milwaukee, nearly 20% of kids left voucher programs every year, with most coming back to public school.
Vouchers reduce public school resources, but introduce large new fiscal obligations overall
It would be bad enough if the introduction of vouchers simply funneled some students into poorly performing private schools for a stretch of time. But vouchers also affirmatively drain resources from the entire public education system—resources that would reliably produce better outcomes for children if they had stayed in public schools. Paradoxically, while vouchers are associated with significant drains from public school resources, they could actually boost the total fiscal cost of state support for education over time by shoveling more and more resources to (poorly performing, on average) private schools.
Arizona provides a cautionary tale. Arizona’s 2023 universal voucher program was forecast to cost $33 million in the first year and $65 million in the second. Instead, the program ended up costing $587 million in the first year and is projected to cost upwards of $708 million in 2024 fiscal year. Even smaller programs tend to be dramatically underestimated.
Part of this unexpected cost was the subsidy offered to parents who had already enrolled their kids in private schools: 75% of the first wave of applicants to the Arizona program were parents of students with no history of public school attendance, who could now tap taxpayer money to pay for their children’s private schools. Much of the cost of vouchers is essentially a subsidy for parents (many of them affluent) who never intended on using the public school system.
Other states have followed this pattern of introducing programs promised to be small and seeing them balloon in size. New Hampshire’s 2021 Educational Freedom Account was estimated to cost $300,000 in the first year and $3 million in the second, but in reality the bill cost $8.1 million in the first year, $14.6 million in 2022, and $25 million in the 2023-24 school year.
The rise of vouchers in the past 15 years represents an affirmative effort to erode public education by starving it of needed funding. Voucher proponents often want voters to think these programs simply broaden the suite of options enjoyed by parents and students. But the data tell a different story: Where significant voucher programs have been instituted, the resources available to public school children have decreased. Again, highly persuasive recent research shows that public school resources are crucial on the margin, and that more public resources reliably improve student achievement and economic outcomes later in life—while fewer public resources reliably harm education. Voucher programs that starve public resources for education are therefore deeply damaging.
Figure A shows state and local per-pupil funding levels in 2007 and 2021 (expressed in 2020 dollars) for states that passed substantial voucher programs during the period (defined as having >1% of enrolled students using vouchers by 2021) as well as for states without any voucher programs. In 2007, the average difference in per-pupil spending between these two groups of states was around $900 (higher in states that did not subsequently pass significant voucher programs). Between 2007 and 2021, voucher programs grew significantly in one set of these states. By 2021, states without voucher programs were spending $2,800 more per-pupil—essentially more than tripling the spending advantage they had before the rise of voucher programs in the 2010s and early 2020s.
The failure to increase per-pupil funding leads to the erosion of public education services in all forms: everything from school meals, extracurricular activities, mental health and counseling services, vocational and technical programs, and investments in teacher quality and pay. It is also worth noting that flat per-pupil educational spending—even in inflation-adjusted terms—is effectively a decline in the quality of education over time. Take the example of teachers: In a growing economy, simply keeping real pay constant for teachers means that their pay, relative to other skilled and credentialed professionals, is declining. This decline in relative teachers’ pay (even with absolute pay levels flat) will put downward pressure on the quality of the teaching labor pool, as more and more people who could have been excellent teachers decide to choose higher-pay occupations.
Stagnant spending in states with significant voucher programs has also left education funding in those states substantially below measures of funding adequacy. In school finance research, adequacy is defined as the level of funding needed in a district to ensure students reach an average level of student achievement. For the measure of adequacy used below, the outcome is achieving the national average of test scores. Adequacy measures account for needs that differ by district depending on influences like the socioeconomic status of the student population.
FIGURE A
Per-pupil state and local education spendingBy voucher program status, 2007 and 2021
States without voucher programsStates with voucher programs2007$11,211$10,3242021$12,820$10,054
Notes: States with substantial voucher programs, defined as having >1 percent of all students enrolled in 2021, include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. States with smaller voucher programs are excluded from analysis.
State constitutions mandate sufficient education funding for students to have access to an adequate education, regardless of students’ economic or social circumstances. For example, students in high-poverty districts will need more education funding than students in low-poverty districts to achieve the same outcome because they live in neighborhoods where there are fewer resources available to help them succeed. Several court cases in recent decades have found a constitutional responsibility for states to provide such adequate funding.
Figure B relies on total per-pupil spending data from the School Finance Indicator Database to assess the adequacy of school spending for states with large voucher programs and states without any voucher program, comparing the gap for students in medium-, high-, and highest-poverty districts in our two groups of states in 2021. A negative gap implies that state spending is inadequate, and students are not receiving the resources required to meet average academic achievement levels. Regardless of poverty status, states with substantial voucher programs in 2021 are not spending enough to meet students’ needs.
FIGURE B
Funding gap for adequate per-pupil spendingBy voucher program status, 2021
States without voucher programsStates with voucher programsMedium Poverty-$249-$4,000High Poverty-$2,202-$5,429Highest Poverty-$8,490-$11,859
Notes: States with substantial voucher programs, defined as having >1 percent of all students enrolled in 2021, include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. States with smaller voucher programs are excluded from analysis. Medium poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 3rd quintile (40-60th percentiles). High poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 4th quintile (60-80th percentiles). Highest poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 5th quintile (80-100th percentile).
For medium-poverty districts, the adequacy gap is negative, but quite small in schools without a voucher presence (roughly $220 per pupil). In medium-poverty districts of states with a significant voucher presence, however, the adequacy gap is negative and very large—with actual spending lagging adequacy measures by $3,750 per pupil. In high-poverty districts, even states without vouchers have large adequacy gaps—roughly $2,200 per pupil. But these gaps are double the size in states with significant voucher programs—roughly $5,400 per pupil. Finally, adequacy gaps are shamefully large in both states without vouchers ($8,500 per pupil) and in states with significant vouchers ($11,900), but the difference remains quite high.
These results clearly show that school financing is far from perfect in states without voucher programs, but is far worse in states that have introduced these programs.
Conclusion
Vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education, one of the crown jewels of U.S. society. Vouchers make no coherent economic sense, and the evidence shows that vouchers harm student achievement and expose state budgets to large future obligations that are hard to forecast, even while they divert spending away from public education. Our analysis shows that states that have introduced significant voucher programs over the past decade and a half have experienced significant declines in per-pupil spending relative to states without voucher programs. In short, the data clearly show that choosing to implement vouchers programs takes funding away from public education. The public spending declines associated with the introduction of vouchers will reliably cause significantly worse educational outcomes and will harm kids in high-poverty neighborhoods more than kids in low-poverty neighborhoods.
The rise of vouchers is especially damaging given that we now know what does boost educational outcomes: more spending on public education. Leaving these potential gains on the table and promoting voucher programs instead of investing in public education demonstrates that kids’ education is not a priority.
We need to be talking more, not less, about the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy. The former president and his understudy, JD Vance, have been trying to convince voters, with no evidence and a head-spinning level of hypocrisy, that violence against the former president was caused by rhetoric from Democrats.
Trump has upended the political script, saying, “[The Democrats’] rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country.” Followed closely by JD Vance’s incendiary quip: “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence. The left needs to tone down the rhetoric. It needs to cut this crap out.”
And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Among the media and the campaigns, the “threat to democracy” line has apparently become old hat. When he was running for reelection, President Joe Biden often used it in an effort to differentiate himself. Unfortunately, this idea apparently doesn’t poll all that well. While it is true and terrifying, it is also a bit abstract — and for some, hard to believe. Lowering the price of milk is concrete and plausible.
So the Harris campaign hasn’t been talking about democracy much, instead concentrating on tangible policies to help the middle class. While this makes sense politically — and I hope it works — I’m here to say we cannot lose sight of the fact that a second Trump presidency would threaten our way of government and our way of life.
Trump’s term as president was just a precursor to what we can expect the second time around, but it bears repeating to remind us what he is capable of. In case anyone has forgotten, here is a partial list of how he has jeopardized democracy:
Attempted to overturn a free and fair election, a number of times in a number of ways.
Tried to block the peaceful transfer of power by inciting a mob to attack the United States Capitol.
Undermined the independence of the Justice Department, while claiming our legal system was rigged.
Botched the federal government’s response to the pandemic, resulting in a massive loss of life, because he doesn’t believe in inconvenient truths.
Cozied up to dictators and autocrats, even asking one to investigate a baseless claim against his political rival.
Selected Supreme Court justices who curtailed reproductive rights, to the point where women are being denied care and dying.
Lied. All the time. The leader of the free world must be credible.
Is sowing seeds of doubt that the 2024 election will be legitimate.
There is every indication that a second Trump trip to the White House would be even more harmful than the first.
This time around he is angrier and thirstier for vengeful retribution. He has said he will weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Full stop.
His loyal cronies have had more time to plan. We know they are vetting and training a legion of sycophants to displace career bureaucrats across the executive branch. The guardrails we had last time, whistleblowers and “adults in the room,” will be gone.
After nine years of Trump at the top of the Republican Party, his cult-like reach has created an army of MAGA-elected officials at the state and local levels who are more than happy to do his bidding, even if it’s illegal.
He is more gullible than ever — wanting, needing to believe his own hype. Believing his own bluster has had dangerous consequences. See: January 6, 2021. He spends his time searching social media for confirmation of his over-inflated self-importance. He surrounds himself with yes-men and women falling all over themselves to prove their fealty. No one will tell him the truth, for fear of retribution. It is a modern spin on the children’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — only this horror story would be titled, “The Politician’s Stupefying Greatness.”
The coup de grace is that Trump has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. That terrifying reality is brought to you by none other than the Supreme Court with its ruling in Trump v. United States. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee following that decision, representatives from 75 legal organizations said it “poses a significant threat to our democracy by effectively providing the president with sweeping legal immunity for criminal acts.”
We tend to memorialize significant dates in our nation’s history. In my lifetime, there was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. More recently, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021, have been etched into our psyche. But I would argue November 5, 2024, could be as or even more significant. It will test the strength of our country’s democratic infrastructure. That infrastructure and the American voter can save democracy by sending Kamala Harris to the Oval Office.
For those of us who take the law seriously, Trump’s successful evasion of accountability for the failed coup on January 6, 2021, is outrageous. Trump has used delay as his primary strategy for avoiding accountability, as well as his partisan ties to federal judges like Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed, and the rightwing majority on the Supreme Court. Judge Cannon tossed out the documents case. The only viable case right now is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for launching the events of that day. That case will be heard by Judge Tanya Chutman, who was appointed by Obama. It’s a sad day when the ability to get justice depends on which judge is assigned to the case.
Jordan Rubin writes about Jack Smith’s latest filing here. Smith had to rewrite his brief to acknowledge the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the President has absolute immunity for any “official acts.” Should planning to overthrow the Constitution, to subvert the election, and to send a mob to storm the Capitol be considered “official acts”?
Special counsel Jack Smith’s big immunity brief is here. The 165-page (somewhat redacted) motion lays out why, in the government’s view, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling doesn’t stop Donald Trump from standing trial in his federal election interference case.
As an example of what the motion seeks to accomplish, consider the discussion of the alleged evidence related to former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump pressured to subvert the 2020 presidential election.
As an example of what the motion seeks to accomplish, consider the discussion of the alleged evidence related to former Vice President Mike Pence.
To understand the Pence analysis, recall that Chief Justice John Roberts’ July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States granted absolute immunity for “core” presidential acts, presumptive immunity for all other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts. While the high court’s Republican-appointed majority said that it’s up to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to perform the immunity analysis in the first instance, the justices gave the Washington judge a head start in some parts, including with Pence. They said that whenever Trump and Pence discussed “their official responsibilities” — namely regarding Pence’s certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — they had engaged in “official conduct.”
That means Trump would have presumptive immunity for those alleged actions, which Smith would need to rebut. Roberts’ opinion (rather vaguely) said that can be done by showing that the prosecution wouldn’t “pose any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” So that’s why Smith wrote in the motion that because that branch “has no role in the certification proceeding — and indeed, the President was purposely excluded from it by design — prosecuting the defendant for his corrupt efforts regarding Pence poses no danger to the Executive Branch’s authority or functioning.” (The vice president is involved in certification via the office’s role as president of the Senate.)
The special counsel further wrote that Trump “sought to encroach on powers specifically assigned by the Constitution to other branches, to advance his own self-interest and perpetuate himself in power, contrary to the will of the people.” Therefore, Smith wrote, prosecuting Trump wouldn’t “pose any danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch; rather, it would advance the Constitution’s structural design to prevent one Branch from usurping or impairing the performance of the constitutional responsibilities of another Branch.”
Smith’s team also made clear in the filing that prosecutors intend to introduce more evidence at trial related to Pence, who is not accused of any wrongdoing. For instance, they want to introduce evidence of what they call unofficial communications that Trump had with Pence in their capacity as candidates (not as president and vice president), including when Pence “tried to encourage” Trump “as a friend” when news networks began to call the 2020 race for Joe Biden, and later when Pence suggested that Trump should recognize the process was over and run again in 2024. Even if those communications were deemed “official,” Smith wrote, the immunity presumption would be rebutted there too, he argued.
To be sure, the Pence evidence is only part of the case that Smith wants to bring against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty.
To be sure, the Pence evidence is only part of the case that Smith wants to bring against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty. And if the former president wins next month’s presidential election, he’ll be empowered to dismiss the case entirely.
But if Trump loses, then Chutkan would have a heavy task ahead in weighing the voluminous allegations and evidence Smith presents in the monster filing and deciding whether it passes the high court’s (again, rather vague) immunity test. Ultimately, whatever the judge rules will be subject to review again by the justices before any trial can go forward. That won’t happen before the election.
The case will either be killed soon by way of a Trump victory or will linger on for months, if not years, to first determine whether the Supreme Court will even let Trump stand trial over any of these allegations.
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