By Micah Blake Allred

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Over the last decade, a lot of us have watched friends and family move from ‘the justice system should be neutral’ to ‘it’s good when our side uses it to hit back.’ That’s not just hypocrisy. It’s a slow shift in what feels moral in politics. I’ve termed this gradual political shift: Partisan Moral Drift (PMD).

Partisan Moral Drift is a long‑term, identity‑driven process in which individuals’ moral standards gradually shift to remain consistent with their partisan camp’s evolving positions and leaders, rather than with prior principles or institutional norms. It is not a momentary double standard or a single act of hypocrisy; it is a cumulative realignment of what feels morally right, wrong, or obligatory in politics.

Three features distinguish PMD:

• Partisan‑anchored moral change. Moral evaluations move in the direction of co‑partisan elites and leaders, especially when those cues clash with neutral institutions such as courts, election authorities, or the Justice Department.

• Identity‑protective updating. People rarely experience themselves as “changing morals.” Instead, motivated reasoning and identity‑protective cognition help them reinterpret new party positions as consistent with their enduring sense of being good, loyal members of “their side.”

• Environmental plasticity of moral priorities. Work on moral foundations and political ideology increasingly shows that citizens’ moral priorities are shaped by their environment and can shift within a few years. PMD is one mechanism: sustained partisan and leader cues slowly reweight which moral concerns (e.g., impartiality vs loyalty, fairness vs retribution) feel central and how they apply to institutions.

Conceptually, PMD sits downstream of social‑identity and motivated‑reasoning theories, but upstream of the more specific democratic‑breakdown dynamics I’ve named elsewhere: Internalized Political Skepticism, Opposition‑Dominance Assumption, and Corruption‑Immunity Shields. It describes how the moral “floor” on which those processes rest can move.

How Partisan Moral Drift Works: A Micro‑Mechanism

A simplified mechanism for PMD proceeds in five steps:

1. Elite moral framing. Party leaders and aligned media frame a situation or institution in moral terms (e.g., calling an opponent “crooked,” denouncing a “rigged” justice system, or casting prosecutions as righteous revenge).

2. Dissonance with prior beliefs. Supporters feel tension between earlier norms (e.g., “presidents shouldn’t pressure prosecutors”) and the new cues, but they also feel strong pressure to maintain loyalty to the party and leader.

3. Identity‑protective reinterpretation. To resolve dissonance, they adopt narratives that make the leader’s position feel consistent with their moral self‑image (“this case is unique,” “the system is already corrupt,” “they did it first”).

4. Generalization into a new rule. Repeated episodes turn those situational justifications into new general moral rules (e.g., from “justice must be impartial” to “justice is righteous when it punishes our enemies and corrupt when it targets us”).

5. Stabilization. Once these new rules align with partisan identity and social networks, they feel like the principles the person always held; reverting to the earlier standard risks betraying both self and group.

Partisan Moral Drift is this long‑run accumulation of identity‑protective updates into a durable, leader‑centric moral framework that subverts rational/critical political belief systems.

Case Study: Impartial Justice in Trump’s DOJ

The evolution of Republican attitudes toward prosecution, impartial justice, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Donald Trump illustrates PMD with unusual clarity. The trajectory runs from moralized calls to jail Hillary Clinton, through acceptance of Trump’s decision not to prosecute her, to widespread tolerance for his second‑term efforts to use the DOJ and related tools against hundreds of his political adversaries.

Moralizing the Prosecution of Hillary Clinton

In 2015–2016, the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was framed as a moral and legal scandal. A CBS/AP–GfK poll in August 2015 found that 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton “broke the law” by using a private email account and server, including 39 percent who said she did so intentionally and 17 percent unintentionally. Only 6 percent said she did nothing wrong; 36 percent called it bad judgment but not illegal.

Republicans were especially likely to see her as a lawbreaker: 71 percent of Republicans said Clinton intentionally broke the law, and another 18 percent said she unintentionally broke the law. In the same poll, 85 percent of Republicans viewed the email issue as a “major problem,” compared with 22 percent of Democrats. For many Republican voters, Clinton’s alleged criminality was not just a policy concern; it was a moral indictment.

Trump amplified and personalized that moral framing. At rallies, crowds chanted “lock her up,” and he repeatedly endorsed and escalated the message. Fact‑checking by PolitiFact and Poynter documents at least seven occasions in 2016 where Trump explicitly said Clinton should go to jail, including statements like “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail … she is guilty as hell” and “for what she’s done, they should lock her up; she’s disgraceful,” as well as his famous debate remark, “because you’d be in jail.” He later falsely claimed he had not said “lock her up,” blaming it on the crowd; fact‑checkers rated that denial as flagrantly false.

At this stage, the implicit moral rule for many Republicans was straightforward: if someone breaks the law at this level, justice demands prosecution and even imprisonment. Failing to prosecute was framed as evidence of a rigged system and entrenchment of impunity for America’s political elite.

After winning the 2016 election, Trump quickly reversed course. In late November 2016, he signaled in public comments that he no longer wanted to pursue criminal investigations into Clinton or the Clinton Foundation, telling reporters that he did not want to “hurt the Clintons” and that they had “been through a lot.” He did not appoint the “special prosecutor” he had promised on the debate stage.

Despite the intense moralism of the campaign, there was no sustained mass revolt inside his coalition over this reversal. The same base that had demanded Clinton’s imprisonment now largely accepted Trump’s choice to “move on,” often recasting it as magnanimous or strategically wise. The moral imperative shifted from “a just leader must jail his corrupt opponent” to “a strong leader can show mercy and focus on other priorities.”

From a PMD perspective, this is the first visible adjustment:

• The belief that Clinton was a lawbreaker remained widespread among Republicans, but the moral necessity of prosecution softened because the in‑group leader chose restraint.

• Many supporters resolved the dissonance by reinterpreting non‑prosecution not as a moral failure, but as a sign of Trump’s strength, mercy, or strategic acumen, rather than revisiting their earlier moral absolutism.

The underlying standard—when is it morally required to prosecute a political rival?—blurred slightly but already moved in a more leader‑centric direction.

Redefining “Law and Order”

Over Trump’s first term, the DOJ and the FBI became central villains in his rhetoric. He denounced the Russia probe as a “witch hunt,” accused career officials of being part of a “deep state,” and publicly criticized prosecutors and judges in cases involving his allies. Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was pushed out after recusing himself from the Russia investigation; subsequent appointees faced open demands for loyalty.

Public opinion on justice institutions moved in a sharply partisan direction. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that only 39 percent of Americans viewed the DOJ favorably, while 46 percent viewed it unfavorably, but party breakdowns were striking. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, 51 percent now viewed DOJ favorably, an increase of 18 points from the previous year; among Democrats and Democratic leaners, only 28 percent viewed DOJ favorably, a decrease of 27 points. The FBI showed a similar pattern: favorable views among Republicans rose, while Democrats’ confidence declined.

Analysts note that earlier in the 2000s and 2010s, partisan gaps in attitudes toward the DOJ and the FBI were smaller and more stable; by the mid‑2020s, trust had become heavily conditioned on which party held the presidency and how those agencies were perceived to treat Trump. A libertarian assessment summarized the result by saying that approval of the DOJ and the FBI “depends on who is in power,” reflecting the sense that these agencies have become “partisan weapons” in the eyes of each camp.

At the same time, when Trump was personally indicted on federal and state charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election and other alleged crimes, Republican moral evaluations diverged sharply from the publics. A 2023 Quinnipiac national poll found that 54 percent of Americans said Trump should be prosecuted on federal charges linked to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, while 42 percent said he should not. The partisan split was dramatic: 95 percent of Democrats favored prosecution, 57 percent of independents favored prosecution, but only 12 percent of Republicans favored prosecuting him, with 85 percent of Republicans opposed.

On the seriousness of the charges, 64 percent of Americans said they were very or somewhat serious, but nearly half of Republicans said the charges were “not serious at all.” The poll also found that 28 percent of Republicans said the indictment made them view Trump more favorably, a classic Corruption‑Immunity Shield pattern in which legal accountability is reinterpreted as persecution that enhances the leader’s standing.

Compounding this, panel and cross‑sectional polling shows that many Republicans still endorse the abstract proposition that someone convicted of a felony should not be eligible to be president, 58 percent agreed with that statement in the same Quinnipiac survey, yet they reject prosecution and downplay the seriousness of Trump’s own alleged crimes. This gap between abstract rule and concrete application is one of the clearest signatures of Partisan Moral Drift.

Second Term: Promising Political Prosecution

Trump’s second term, beginning in January 2025, brought more direct and sustained efforts to use the DOJ and related tools against perceived adversaries. Plans for such a “second‑term transformation” of the executive branch, often grouped under the “Project 2025” orbit, had been circulated by his allies even before the election, including proposals to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants, purge non‑loyal officials, and centralize presidential control over DOJ, FBI, and other agencies.

Once back in office, Trump moved aggressively along those lines. A detailed ABC News report and a comprehensive tracker by Protect Democracy document at least 22 federal prosecutions, investigations, or other actions that appear to be retaliatory in nature as of early 2026.

• Repeated efforts to prosecute former FBI director James Comey, whom Trump had publicly vowed to target. DOJ brought charges related to Comey’s handling of memos and classified information, but a federal judge dismissed the case because Trump had unlawfully appointed the special counsel leading the investigation.

• Criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who had won a civil fraud judgment against Trump in state court. DOJ indicted her on mortgage‑related charges; those charges were later thrown out by a judge, again citing problems with the appointment of key prosecutors.

• Attempts to indict six Democratic members of Congress (all veterans or with national security backgrounds) for “seditious” behavior after they recorded a video reminding service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders. A grand jury refused to indict them—an exceptionally rare rebuke.

• Investigations of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and governor Lisa Cook, widely read as politically motivated given Trump’s public attacks on the Fed and its independence. The Protect Democracy tracker highlights these as examples of punishing officials for decisions made in the course of lawful duty.

• Revocations of security clearances and protection details for dozens of political adversaries, including former President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, Representative Adam Schiff, and numerous former intelligence and national security officials who had been publicly critical of Trump.

Legal outcomes repeatedly suggest weak or politicized cases: cases dismissed by judges, indictments rejected by grand juries, or investigations abandoned without charges. Civil‑society groups argue that the pattern “frequently veers far over the line into political retaliation,” while acknowledging that not every investigation is necessarily illegitimate.

Critically, the public sees much of this. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in October 2025 reported that 55 percent of Americans agreed that Trump was using federal law enforcement to target his enemies, while only 26 percent disagreed. That included about three in ten Republicans who said he was doing so. At the same time, a separate States United Democracy Center/YouGov survey found that 61 percent of Americans disagreed that Trump should be able to direct the DOJ to pursue charges against his political opponents, with only 20 percent agreeing; among Republicans, support for giving him that power still did not reach an outright majority.

A Marquette Law School national survey adds a final layer. In November 2025, 58 percent of Americans said the criminal cases brought against Trump in 2023–2024 were justified, and 42 percent said they were unjustified; but 77 percent of Republicans said those cases against Trump were unjustified. When asked about criminal cases against Trump’s political opponents, 55 percent of Americans said DOJ had filed unjustified cases, and 45 percent said justified, with Democrats much more likely than Republicans to see those cases as unjustified.

Taken together:

• A majority of Americans see Trump as using law enforcement against his enemies, and most still reject the idea that a president should do that.

• Republicans strongly reject prosecutions of Trump, often view them as illegitimate or “not serious,” and yet are more split on prosecutions of his perceived opponents.

• Meanwhile, Republicans’ favorability toward the DOJ and the FBI has rebounded under Trump’s second term, at the same time these agencies are being used in obviously partisan and retaliatory ways, while Democrats’ trust has collapsed.

This is precisely the kind of environment PMD describes: moral standards about what justice agencies should do have drifted from impartial enforcement toward leader‑ and in‑group‑centric enforcement, even as citizens maintain abstract attachment to rule‑of‑law norms.

Partisan Moral Drift’s Conceptual Use

Existing concepts already explain pieces of this story:

• Motivated reasoning and identity‑protective cognition: people selectively interpret information to protect their group identity and avoid cognitive dissonance.

• Partisan elite cue‑taking and belief‑system constraint: citizens often change issue positions when party leaders do, and shifts in central attitudes propagate through belief networks.

• Moral foundations and moralization of politics: political attitudes are increasingly framed as matters of good and evil, and moral priorities can shift with context.

Partisan Moral Drift adds at least three things:

1. A moral focus over time. PMD draws attention to the trajectory of moral standards themselves. It is not just that people apply their existing morals selectively; the content of their moral rules about institutions and leaders changes under sustained partisan and leader influence.

2. A bridge from psychology to institutional breakdown. PMD connects individual‑level moral updating to system‑level outcomes: when enough citizens come to see loyal enforcement as morally superior to impartial enforcement, it becomes psychologically easier to accept or support politicization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the courts.

3. An explanation for sincere asymmetry. PMD explains why people can sincerely insist that jailing Clinton would have been righteous while calling prosecutions of Trump “witch hunts,” even when the abstract rule (“lawbreakers should be prosecuted”) remains in their self‑description. The moral baseline has drifted so that what counts as a “lawbreaker” or a “legitimate prosecution” is strongly conditioned by partisan identity.

Recent empirical work on “flexible morals” under misinformation supports the plausibility of PMD. Experiments by Kim and co‑authors show that voters often hold opposing politicians to strict factual standards, while allowing their favored politicians to share divisive misinformation if it expresses a “deeper truth” aligned with group grievances. PMD can be understood as the long‑run effect of repeatedly applying such flexible standards in one direction: over time, the moral line itself moves.

Relationship to Other Original Terms

• Internalized Political Skepticism (IPS) describes when distrust of institutions becomes a stable part of political identity, especially distrust of independent information and oversight. PMD makes IPS more likely by recoding skepticism of previously respected political institutions and opposition leaders as a moral obligation when those entities contradict the leader.

• Opposition‑Dominance Assumption (ODA) captures the belief that key institutions are structurally controlled by the enemy camp, so that any adverse decision is read as partisan aggression. Once PMD has shifted moral standards so that impartial enforcement feels like persecution, it is a short step to believing that prosecutors and judges must be “theirs.”

• Corruption‑Immunity Shield (CIS) describes how evidence of a leader’s wrongdoing can be reinterpreted as proof of persecution, increasing support. PMD helps explain why this can feel morally satisfying: if the moral baseline has shifted to sanctify the leader’s cause and cast watchdogs as corrupt, then every indictment feels like confirmation that the leader is bravely opposing a corrupt system.

Partisan Moral Drift in Academic and Public Discourse

For scholars, naming Partisan Moral Drift clarifies that the problem is not only factual disagreement or polarization of trust; it is a slow, identity‑driven transformation of moral expectations about what state power should be used for, especially coercive power like criminal law. That suggests concrete research agendas: panel studies tracking moral rules, experiments manipulating leader vs opponent attributions for identical actions, and belief‑network analyses examining how moral judgments migrate toward partisan identity nodes.

For public discourse, PMD provides language to describe a pattern many people have observed in their families and communities: long‑time “law and order” conservatives coming to see attacks on the justice system and weaponized prosecutions as not just acceptable but morally necessary when their leader is involved. It helps distinguish between ordinary hypocrisy and a deeper process where the moral floor itself has shifted.

Conclusion

In the justice system, we can now see the full arc of Partisan Moral Drift: from chanting “lock her up” as a moral imperative, to accepting Trump’s decision not to prosecute Clinton, to treating later prosecutions of Trump as witch hunts and prosecutions of his enemies as, at best, ambiguous. The same voters who once insisted that serious lawbreakers must be punished apolitically now overwhelmingly oppose even bringing Trump to trial, while their trust in the US justice system rises or falls almost entirely with which party—and leader—is in charge.

Once you see that pattern, it becomes hard to pretend that we’re only arguing about facts or legal technicalities. We’re watching the underlying moral baseline move. Each new exception, each new rationalization, every “this case is different,” “they started it,” “the system is rigged anyway,” nudges people further away from impartial rules and deeper into a world where the justice system feels righteous only when it serves their side. That is the structure PMD illuminates.

Partisan Moral Drift is not confined to Trump or to Republicans. Any of us can slip into it whenever we hypocritically treat the same political acts (in ends or means) as unforgivable in our opponents and understandable, even noble, amongst ourselves. The point of naming PMD is not to declare ourselves immune, but to give ourselves and each other a clearer way to notice when our morals start quietly bending around the shape of our political identities. If enough citizens can see that drift in time and resist it, then independent courts, neutral law enforcement, and shared rules still have a chance. If we can’t, the US justice system will keep looking less like a public institution and more like a weapon, and it will feel increasingly natural to many people that this is how democracy is supposed to work.

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References

• CBS News / AP–GfK. “Poll: Email investigation damaged Hillary Clinton’s image.” August 2015. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-email-investigation-damaged-hillary-clintons-image/

• Poynter (PolitiFact). “Trump now denies saying, ‘Lock her up.’ But he said Hillary Clinton should go to jail at least 7 times.” June 4, 2024. https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/did-trump-say-lock-her-up/

• Jocelyn Kiley and Andy Cerda. “How Americans Rate ICE, FBI, Justice Department and Other Federal Agencies.” Pew Research Center, August 27, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/27/republicans-views-of-justice-department-fbi-rebound-as-democrats-views-shift-more-negative/

• Quinnipiac University Poll. “Majority Of Americans Say Trump Should Be Prosecuted On Federal Criminal Charges Linked To 2020 Election, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; DeSantis Slips, Trump Widens Lead In GOP Primary.” 2023. https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3877

• ABC News. “Here’s a list of the individuals, including James Comey, targeted by Trump administration.” April 27, 2026. https://abcnews.com/US/list-individuals-including-lisa-cook-targeted-trump-administration/story?id=124968309

• Protect Democracy. “Tracking retaliatory use of arrests, prosecutions, and investigations against perceived political opponents.” Retaliatory Action Tracker, updated 2025–2026. https://protectdemocracy.org/work/retaliatory-action-tracker/

• Reuters/Ipsos via The Straits Times. “Majority of Americans think Trump is using federal law enforcement to target enemies: Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.” October 22, 2025. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/majority-of-americans-think-trump-is-using-federal-law-enforcement

• States United Democracy Center. “Survey: Americans Don’t Want the Justice Department Investigating Political Opponents.” October 16, 2025. https://statesunited.org/resources/justice-department-survey/

• Marquette Law School Poll. “New Marquette Law School national survey finds 55% say DOJ has filed unjustified cases against Trump’s political opponents, 58% say cases against Trump are justified.” November 19, 2025. https://www.marquette.edu/news-center/2025/marquette-law-poll-finds-55-say-doj-has-filed-unjustified-cases-against-trumps-politi

• Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions That Liberals May Not Recognize.” Social Justice Research 20, no. 1 (2007): 98–116.

• University of Nebraska–Lincoln. “Study shakes foundation of morals’ role in political ideology.” News release, 2025. https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/study-shakes-foundation-of-morals-role-in-political-ideology/

• Minjae Kim et al. “Flexible morals: A key reason American voters support divisive misinformation.” MIT Sloan / Rice Business press coverage, 2024. Press release: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/flexible-morals-a-key-reason-american-voters-support-divisive-misinformation and summary: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/us-voters-exhibit-flexible-morals-when-confronting-misinformation

• Reason Magazine. “With government agencies turned into partisan weapons, trust is a tribal matter.” August 31, 2025. https://reason.com/2025/09/01/after-years-of-abuses-approval-of-the-fbi-and-doj-depends-on-who-is-in-power/

• Axios. “Inside Trump ’25: A radical plan for Trump’s second term.” July 22, 2022. https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term

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March 26, 2026

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The United States Constitution does not explicitly anticipate a presidency that governs through temporary officials. It assumes that the most powerful positions in government will be filled through a shared process between the executive and legislative branches. The president nominates. The Senate confirms. Authority flows from that joint act.

What happens when that process is systematically bypassed—not in open defiance, but through legal gray areas, strategic vacancies, and political indifference?

A pattern emerges. I call it a ghost cabinet: a governing structure in which officials exercise the functional authority of Senate-confirmed positions without actually receiving Senate confirmation, often for extended periods of time. It is not a single violation. It is a method. And over the past decade, it has become increasingly normalized by President Donald Trump.

But the danger isn’t merely administrative. It’s constitutional.

The Constitutional Design—and Its Vulnerability

The Appointments Clause of Article II requires that principal officers of the United States be appointed “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” It was designed as a structural safeguard against executive overreach. In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton described Senate confirmation as a necessary check against “a spirit of favoritism” in presidential appointments. Without it, he warned, presidents would be inclined to elevate individuals based on loyalty rather than merit.

The modern administrative state requires some flexibility. Vacancies occur. Officials resign or are removed unexpectedly. To address this, Congress passed the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which allows temporary “acting” officials to fill roles for limited periods—generally between 210 and 300 days.

The law was intended as a stopgap, but it has increasingly functioned as a workaround.

This is where the constitutional vulnerability emerges. The Appointments Clause depends not only on formal rules, but on political actors choosing to enforce them. When that enforcement weakens, the distinction between temporary necessity and strategic evasion begins to collapse.

At that point, what appears to be administrative flexibility becomes something more serious: a slow-moving constitutional crisis.

The First Modern Ghost Cabinet

The modern ghost cabinet was employed by the first Trump administration from 2017-2021. No department illustrated the phenomenon clearer than the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Following the ‘resignation’ of Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in April 2019, the DHS entered an extended period of unstable and legally contested leadership. Acting officials cycled through the role, often under disputed authority.

In August 2020, the Government Accountability Office concluded that key figures, including Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, were serving unlawfully due to improper succession procedures. Federal courts later invalidated multiple policies they had issued—not based on the substance of those policies, but because the officials lacked legal authority to enact them.

The consequences were tangible. Immigration rules were voided. Administrative actions collapsed under legal scrutiny. Governance itself became less effective because the officials governing America’s national security did not have the constitutional authority to do so.

This was not an isolated issue. In President Trump’s first term, DHS was led by acting administrators for a majority of his time in office. But that flexibility came at a constitutional cost. Acting officials, by definition, lack the institutional legitimacy and independence that Senate confirmation provides, and it is a way President Trump has broken his end of the social contract with Americans, because acting cabinet secretaries definitionally serve at the pleasure of the president without the stabilizing force of congressional approval.

The Evolution of the Model

In President Trump’s second term, the structure of the ghost cabinet evolved rather than disappeared. Instead of relying solely on vacancies, the administration increasingly used what observers described as “multi-hatting”: assigning already-confirmed officials to serve simultaneously in multiple roles for which they had not been confirmed.

For instance, Marco Rubio was confirmed as Secretary of State on Inauguration Day, but he was subsequently named National Security Advisor, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and acting archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration. Cabinet members are being tasked with overseeing agencies far outside the scope of their original appointments.

Furthermore, the practice of utilizing temporary acting officials in top cabinet positions has recently resurfaced at the Department of Homeland Security. On March 5, 2026, President Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Following her ouster, Senator Markwayne Mullin was installed to serve as the acting DHS Secretary while his formal confirmation was pending, a role he filled until he was officially confirmed by the Senate on March 23, 2026.

The constitutional issue remains the same, however. Senate confirmation applies to specific offices, not to individuals in general. When an official confirmed for one role exercises the authority of another, the confirmation process is effectively bypassed. The mechanism is more complex than a vacancy. The outcome is indistinguishable.

A ghost cabinet does not require empty chairs. It requires only that authority be exercised without proper authorization. They are executive apparitions—wearing the skin of public servants, without ever earning the mandate.

Politically Sustaining the Ghost Cabinet

The persistence of a ghost cabinet cannot be explained by institutional design alone. It requires a political environment that tolerates, or even rewards, the erosion of procedural norms. This is where broader dynamics become relevant.

The concept of internalized political skepticism helps explain why such institutional degradation does not produce widespread backlash. When distrust in government becomes embedded in political identity, procedural violations are not necessarily perceived as problems. They are often interpreted as justified responses to a corrupt system.

Closely related is the corruption-immunity shield, a dynamic in which evidence of misconduct is reframed as persecution by hostile institutions. Under this logic, attempts to enforce constitutional norms are seen not as safeguards, but as partisan attacks.

Together, these forces create a permissive environment for executive overreach. The erosion of checks and balances does not trigger accountability because the legitimacy of those checks is itself contested. A ghost cabinet is not merely a legal phenomenon—it is a political one.

The Post-Election Pattern

Following the 2018 midterm elections, several high-level officials departed from the Trump administration within a short period, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. After the 2020 election, the pattern intensified. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was dismissed days after the election. Attorney General William Barr announced his resignation weeks later. Additional cabinet officials left in rapid succession around January 6th, 2021. According to NPR, at least a dozen officials were fired or forced out during the post-election purge in late 2020 and replaced by loyalists. In each case, Trump appointed acting officials to implement his political goals during periods of heightened instability.

These moments are not incidental. They reveal how electoral shocks can trigger executive reshuffling—especially under President Trump—creating conditions in which acting leadership becomes more prevalent.

My 2026 Midterm Ghost Cabinet Predictions

My most significant concern is not the political abuses of the past, but those that this pattern tells me are yet to come in Trump 2.0. If Republicans lose the Senate in the 2026 midterms and the president faces an oppositional Senate controlled by the Democrats in 2027, his incentive to quickly clean house of cabinet officials he suspects may disappoint him over the next two years will be too tempting to ignore. Like before, Trump will presumably fire several cabinet officials just like he did after poor election performances in 2018 and 2020. He will do this in the hopes that a lame-duck Republican Senate will hastily approve his nominees before Democrats make his nomination process much more difficult, and that voters will likely forget the implications of the political failures of restaffing his cabinet in 2026 when they return to the polls again two years later in 2028.

If this scenario comes to pass, a ghost cabinet of acting cabinet secretaries governing over the US at President Trump’s discretion will be a certainty. For how long? That, I’m not comfortable speculating on. Because if vulnerable and retiring Republican lame-duck senators are the ones Trump must rely on to pass his relatively unqualified cabinet nominees—likely after a poor midterm performance agitated by the president’s policies—they may not be in a friendly mood to approve nominations. If such a lame-duck Republican Senate were to come to pass and further fail to approve all of Trump’s cabinet appointees before the victorious Democrats retook the chamber, then the scenario of an unconstitutionally sustained ghost cabinet becomes a serious possibility.

A Slow-Moving Constitutional Crisis

A constitutional crisis does not always arrive in dramatic form. It can emerge gradually, through the accumulation of small deviations from established norms.

I believe ghost cabinets rise to the level of such a crisis.

No single acting appointment may break the system. No single vacancy may undermine the Constitution. But when temporary leadership becomes routine, when the American people’s democratic consent becomes optional in practice, and when oversight depends on political will that is no longer present, the decline of our democratic norms will surely lead to the decline of our democracy.

The Appointments Clause remains in the Constitution. Faded from standing the tests of time since its transcribing nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago, yet it remains there in the heart of our nation to this day. And its ultimate message remains as true today as it has been since our nation’s founding.

Strive for a more perfect union.

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March 16th, 2026

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On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a massive coordinated assault against Iran. U.S. officials reported that the American component alone carried out nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours, alongside simultaneous Israeli attacks, in what the two governments named Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion respectively. The targets included nuclear facilities, ballistic missile infrastructure, Revolutionary Guard bases, the Iranian navy, and the country’s top political and military leadership — including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the initial strikes.

In the weeks since, the official messaging hasn’t always held. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned publicly that “the war could be costly and long.” President Trump has repeatedly referred to “the war with Iran” in televised remarks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has pushed to rebrand the Pentagon back to its original name, the Department of War — has also described the conflict as a “war” without qualification. These aren’t slips. They’re senior officials saying the quiet part out loud: the legal fiction of the “operation” dissolves the moment anyone stops reading from the script.

By every substantive measure, they’re right. The U.S. and Israel are in a war with Iran.

And yet, as of mid-March 2026, neither government has formally, legally declared one. Neither has Iran, for that matter — though Tehran’s leaders have been considerably less subtle about saying so out loud. Understanding why these declarations haven’t happened — and why they almost certainly won’t — tells us something important about how modern democracies fight wars they don’t want to own.

The Reality on the Ground

The conflict didn’t begin in February 2026. It built for years through what security scholars call a grey zone conflict — activity “between peace and war” involving clandestine cyberattacks, assassinations, sabotage, and proxy operations that stop short of open battle. Israeli strikes in Syria, Iranian-backed attacks on U.S. forces across the region, covert operations on both sides: this was the shadow war that preceded the shooting war.

The war’s scale makes the legal ambiguity almost surreal. The two-state campaign involves sustained high-intensity bombardment, attacks on naval forces, deliberate strikes on political leadership, attempted closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the stated goal of toppling a sitting government. Legal scholars at the Israel Democracy Institute put it plainly: there is no doubt that Operation Roaring Lion constitutes an international armed conflict between two states under international law — a legal category that applies regardless of what Washington and Jerusalem choose to call it politically. Think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations have described the U.S. role in Epic Fury in similarly war-scale/interstate terms.

The question isn’t whether a war is happening. The question is why no one will say so officially.

How Israel Declares War —and What it Did (and Didn’t) Do

Israel’s quasi-constitutional framework for going to war is codified in Basic Law: The Government, specifically Section 40, sometimes called “Article 40 Aleph.” It requires a government or security cabinet decision before Israel may “start a war” or initiate a significant military operation that is, with near-certainty, likely to lead to one. That decision must then be reported to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Israel actually used this mechanism in October 2023. After Hamas’s attack, the security cabinet formally invoked Article 40 Aleph. The Prime Minister’s Office released a statement announcing that “the Security Cabinet approved the war situation… as per Article 40 of Basic Law: The Government.” Legal analysts across the spectrum treated this as Israel’s first formal declaration of war in roughly fifty years — since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

No analogous statement exists for Israels war with Iran. Israeli media reported that the political-security cabinet approved Operation Roaring Lion — possibly in a deliberately small group to prevent leaks — but no public document has emerged framing that decision as a formal war declaration under Section 40 against the Iranian state. Instead, Israeli official communications describe Roaring Lion as an “operation” conducted within an ongoing armed conflict. The government has issued “special home front situation” declarations under the Civil Defense Law, giving broad emergency powers for civilian protection, but that is a different legal instrument entirely. The spirit of Israeli Basic Law has arguably been satisfied; the transparency has not.

How the U.S. Declares War — And Why It Stopped

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war (Article I, Section 8). The president is commander in chief (Article II, Section 2), but the Founders’ intent was clear: initiating war was a legislative act. Congress has formally declared war eleven times, across five conflicts. The last declarations came in 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.

Since then, American troops have fought in Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1964–1973), the Dominican Republic (1965), Laos and Cambodia (1970–1971), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989–1990), Somalia (1992–1994), Haiti (1994–1995), Bosnia & Herzegovina (1995–2004), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq (2003–2011 and 2014–present), Libya (2011), Syria (2015–present), Yemen (2016–present), Niger (2017), and now Iran (2026). None of them with formal declarations of war.

The Iran war is the latest chapter in a long history of American undeclared wars: major conflicts fought at full war scale under a patchwork of presidential orders, preexisting Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs), and defense appropriations, while Congress largely watches from the sidelines. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was Congress’s attempt to reclaim some of that authority, requiring the president to notify lawmakers within 48 hours of introducing forces into hostilities and to withdraw them within 60–90 days absent congressional authorization. Presidents have complied with the notification requirement while consistently rejecting its authority to constrain them.

The Trump administration’s legal justification for Epic Fury rests on a two-part Office of Legal Counsel framework: the president may use force without Congress when it serves important national interests and when the scope of hostilities doesn’t rise to the level of “war” in the constitutional sense. Pro-administration lawyers argue that sustained airstrikes — even airstrikes aimed at regime change — fall short of that threshold without a large-scale ground deployment. Some Republican members of Congress, including Representatives Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson, have called this unconstitutional. Most GOP leadership has not.

Iran: “Full-Fledged War,” Without the Paperwork

Iran’s position is almost the inverse of the American one. Where Washington wages war while legally insisting it isn’t, Tehran insists it’s in a war while producing no formal legal act to codify it. In December 2025, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview published on Supreme Leader Khamenei’s official website that Iran is in “a full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe.”

Iranian leadership has used similar language repeatedly, with the president explicitly comparing the current conflict to the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s—a historical echo far darker than it first appears. During that war, the United States backed both sides at different moments: openly supplying Iraq with intelligence, agricultural credits, and military equipment while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, and covertly funneling arms to Iran through what became the Iran-Contra scandal.

Washington armed both combatants in a war that killed an estimated one million people. Decades later, the United States would go to war with Iraq — again without a formal declaration — destroying much of the very military infrastructure it had helped build. Now, in 2026, it is doing the same in Iran: striking weapons systems, bases, and military institutions whose origins trace, in part, to the same Cold War-era American foreign policy that once kept Tehran armed and fighting.

The United States has a long habit of arming today's enemy and bombing tomorrow's — and an equally long habit of doing so without asking Congress first.

There is no evidence that Iran’s parliament — the Majles — has passed a formal act opening a state of war, or that any procedurally grounded declaration analogous to Israel’s Article 40 decision or a U.S. congressional declaration has been issued. Iran’s constitution vests broad authority over war and peace in the Supreme Leader and the Supreme National Security Council, but neither institution has yet publicly produced a formal war declaration in the legal sense. What Iran has done is make the political characterization of war very loud while keeping the legal architecture vague. It is a mirror image, in its own way, of what Washington is doing: rhetoric at maximum volume, legal commitment at minimum exposure.

Conclusion: Ignoring Procedure to Protect Partisanship

The pattern across all three countries reveals the same structural logic: formal declarations of war carry political and legal costs that modern politicians are unwilling to absorb.

Political scientists call one part of this calculus audience costs — the domestic political price leaders pay when they put their name on a decision and it goes badly. A formal declaration of war on Iran in the U.S. Congress, or an explicit Article 40 decision against Iran in Israel’s cabinet, would sharply raise those costs. It would force politicians to own the war’s casualties, economic disruptions, and strategic risks in a way that amorphous “operations” do not. By fighting an undeclared war, leaders try to blunt the audience costs that come with putting “war with Iran” on an official record.

For Israel, a formal war declaration against Iran would clarify legal obligations, trigger more robust Knesset oversight, and foreclose the diplomatic flexibility of framing the conflict as an ongoing operation rather than a new war.

For the United States, a congressional declaration of war on Iran would require Congress to own the decision — its costs, its casualties, its consequences. In a polarized environment where most Republican leaders prefer to let the president act unilaterally and then react, a formal declaration is politically dangerous and legally unnecessary under current doctrine. Congress has become, in the language of war-powers scholars, a rubber-stamp legislature on matters of force: it funds the wars the executive starts, rarely moves to stop them, and almost never initiates them. The post-WWII consensus, hardened through Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and now Iran, is that presidents fight wars and Congress funds them.

Taken together, this is a textbook case of what scholars call executive aggrandizement in the war-powers domain: executives stretching their authority one “operation” at a time, while legislatures look on and the formal constitutional mechanisms for declaring war quietly atrophy. Each undeclared war sets a precedent for the next. Each time Congress fails to assert its authority, the president’s claim to act alone becomes a little more settled.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum warn that this shift has serious implications for democratic accountability. When executives define full-scale interstate campaigns as “operations,” they avoid the domestic political reckoning that formal declarations would demand — while soldiers, civilians, and oil markets bear the full weight of the consequences.

In 2026, the United States and Israel are in an international armed conflict with Iran. Everyone knows it. The legal scholars have named it. The headstones have confirmed it. No one will say so on paper. And that, increasingly, is just how modern wars begin.

Micah Allred is a politics researcher and journalist with an MA in Comparative Politics from American University. His work focuses on democratic institutions, disinformation, and political accountability.

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References

Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion

Fox News. “Trump tells Iranians the ‘hour of your freedom is at hand’ as US, Israel launch strikes against Iran.” February 27, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-tells-iranians-hour-your-freedom-hand-us-israel-launch-strikes-against-iran

Times of Israel (liveblog). “Trump official: US carried out 900 strikes during first 12 hours of Operation Epic Fury against Iran.” February 28, 2026. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-official-us-carried-out-900-strikes-during-first-12-hours-of-operation-epic-fury-against-iran/

Institute for the Study of War. “Iran Update Evening Special Report: February 28, 2026.” https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-evening-special-report-february-28-2026/

CSIS. “Operation Epic Fury and the Remnants of Iran’s Nuclear Program.” March 1, 2026. https://www.csis.org/analysis/operation-epic-fury-and-remnants-irans-nuclear-program

Reuters. “Iranian leader Khamenei killed in air strikes as U.S., Israel launch attacks.” February 28, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israel-us-launch-strikes-iran-2026-02-28/

RUSI. “Israel’s ‘Roaring Lion’: Military Target to Political Decision in Iran.” March 2, 2026. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/israels-roaring-lion-military-target-political-decision-iran

Operation Rising Lion and the 2025 Escalation

Al Jazeera Centre for Studies. “Twelve Days of Inferno: The Cost of Opening Pandora’s Box.” November 30, 2025. http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/analyses/twelve-days-inferno-cost-opening-pandora%E2%80%99s-box

JINSA. “Operation Rising Lion: Insights from Israel’s 12-Day War Against Iran.” January 27, 2026. https://jinsa.org/jinsa_report/insights-from-12-day-war/

Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Rising Lion’s Air Offensive: Part I.” March 12, 2026. https://www.fpri.org/article/2026/03/rising-lions-air-offensive-part-i/

Hudson Institute. “How Israel’s Operation Rising Lion Dismantled Iran from Within.” February 16, 2026. https://www.hudson.org/defense-strategy/how-israels-operation-rising-lion-dismantled-iran-within-case-study-art-deception

US Naval Institute Proceedings. “Iran–Israel Conflict: A Quicklook Analysis of Operation Rising Lion.” June 2025. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/june/iran-israel-conflict-quicklook-analysis-operation-rising-lion

Israeli Law: Basic Law: The Government, Article 40, and Operation Roaring Lion

Israel Democracy Institute. “Explainer: Operation Roaring Lion — A Special Home Front Situation.” March 1, 2026. https://en.idi.org.il/articles/63607

Israel Democracy Institute. “Who Can Declare War on Behalf of the Israeli People?” May 5, 2018. https://en.idi.org.il/articles/23444

IDF. “The Legality of Operation Roaring Lion.” March 3, 2026. https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/operation-roaring-lion/articles-operation-roaring-lion/the-legality-of-operation-roaring-lion/

JURIST. “Israel declares state of war over Hamas attacks.” October 9, 2023. https://www.jurist.org/news/2023/10/israel-declares-state-of-war-amid-hamas-attacks/

RBC-Ukraine. “Israel declares state of war for the first time in 50 years.” October 7, 2023. https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/israel-s-military-political-cabinet-supports-1696766864.html

Siasat. “Israel invokes Article 40 Aleph to declare war after 50 years.” October 7, 2023. https://www.siasat.com/israel-invokes-article-40-aleph-to-declare-war-after-50-years-2716436/

U.S. Constitutional War Powers, Undeclared Wars, and the War Powers Resolution

U.S. Senate. “About Declarations of War by Congress.” Updated 2024. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-of-war.htm

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. “Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force.” https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/d/declarations-war-authorizations-use-military-force.html

National Constitution Center. “Declare War Clause (Article I, Section 8).” https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/753

Cornell Legal Information Institute. “Power to Declare War | U.S. Constitution Annotated.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/section-8/clause-11/power-to-declare-war

Congressional Research Service. “The War Powers Resolution: After Twenty-Five Years.” https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL30308.html

U.S. Code. “50 U.S.C. Chapter 33: War Powers Resolution.” https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=%2Fprelim%40title50%2Fchapter33&edition=prelim

Lawfare. “The Underappreciated Legacy of the War Powers Resolution.” September 10, 2023. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-underappreciated-legacy-of-the-war-powers-resolution

University of Chicago Legal Forum. “War Powers and the Return of Major Power Conflict.” https://legal-forum.uchicago.edu/print-archive/war-powers-and-return-major-power-conflict

OLC Framework and Presidential Uses of Force

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel. “January 2020 Airstrike in Iraq Against Qassem Soleimani” (redacted opinion released 2021). https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-04/2020-03-10_soleimani_airstrike_redacted_2021.pdf

Lawfare. “OLC’s Meaningless ‘National Interests’ Test for the Legality of Presidential Uses of Force.” January 17, 2023. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/olcs-meaningless-national-interests-test-legality-presidential-uses-force

Lawfare. “Operation Epic Fury Puts Congress and the Constitution to the Test.” March 10, 2026. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/operation-epic-fury-puts-congress-and-the-constitution-to-the-test

Lawfare. “The Law of Going to War With Iran.” June 19, 2025. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-law-of-going-to-war-with-iran

Congress, GOP Debates, and Rubber-Stamp Dynamics

Fox News. “Bipartisan revolt targets Trump’s war powers after massive Iran strikes.” February 27, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bipartisan-revolt-targets-trumps-war-powers-after-massive-iran-strikes

Yahoo News. “Iran strikes highlight fractures in GOP ahead of war powers votes.” March 2, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/iran-strikes-highlight-fractures-gop-193344513.html

Fortune. “Congress realizes maybe it’s a bad idea to let presidents declare war on their own.” March 5, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/congress-war-powers-military-trump-iran/

Sen. Mike Lee. “Why I am fighting to end the rubber stamp for war.” September 21, 2021. https://www.lee.senate.gov/2021/9/from-start-to-finish-our-entire-experience-in-afghanistan-underscores-how-deficient-congress-has-been-in-this-arena

Iran’s Rhetoric and Absence of a Formal Declaration

JURIST. “Iran president declares ‘full-fledged war’ with US, Israel, and Europe.” December 28, 2025. https://www.jurist.org/news/2025/12/iran-president-declares-full-fledged-war-with-us-israel-and-europe/

Defense News. “Iran leader says country in ‘full-fledged’ war with US, Israel, Europe.” December 28, 2025. https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2025/12/29/iran-leader-says-country-in-full-fledged-war-with-us-israel-europe/

Associated Press. “Iran’s president says his country is in a full-scale war with the West.” December 27, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/iran-president-war-west-trump-netanyahu-2ef7a55988b80813f6913c8c1835322b

Politico. “Iran at war with the West and Israel, says Iran’s president.” December 27, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/27/iran-war-israel-trump-00706976

Grey Zone Conflict and International Armed Conflict

Australian Army’s The Cove. “What is Grey Zone Confrontation and Why is it Important?” July 17, 2022. https://cove.army.gov.au/article/what-grey-zone-confrontation-and-why-it-important

ICRC Law & Policy Blog. “‘Hybrid threats’, ‘grey zones’, ‘competition’, and ‘proxies’: When is it actually war?” January 15, 2025. https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2025/01/16/hybrid-threats-grey-zones-competition-and-proxies-when-is-it-actually-war/

Audience Costs, Democratic Accountability, and Executive Aggrandizement

Political Science Research and Methods. “The Accountability of Politicians in International Crises and the Nature of Audience Costs.” 2023. https://home.uchicago.edu/~sashwort/audience.pdf

Brookings Institution. “Democratic erosion: The role of executive aggrandizement.” March 3, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/democratic-erosion-the-role-of-executive-aggrandizement/

Democratic-Erosion.org. “Executive Power: The Growing Threat to Democracy.” April 22, 2025. https://democratic-erosion.org/2025/04/23/executive-power-the-growing-threat-to-democracy/

The New Yorker. “The End of Limits on a President’s Wars.” March 5, 2026. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-end-of-limits-on-a-presidents-wars

March 7th, 2026

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The Strategic Petroleum POLITICAL Reserve

Gasoline was above five dollars a gallon in California the morning President Trump boarded Air Force One, and a reporter asked him whether he planned to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). The United States and Israel had launched strikes against Iran six days earlier. Brent crude had surged from the high sixties into the low nineties in a single week—its highest point since 2023. American benchmark prices had jumped more than twelve percent. And the reserve meant to cushion exactly this kind of shock sat at roughly 415 million barrels, barely half its technical capacity.

Trump’s answer was breezy. “We’ve got a lot of oil,” he told reporters. “Our country has a tremendous amount. That’ll get healed very quickly.” He pointed instead to a Treasury waiver allowing India to keep buying Russian crude as a “stop-gap,” framing his response around backroom diplomacy rather than the 700-million-barrel system of salt caverns his government maintains for moments precisely like this one.

The moment crystallized something worth examining carefully. The United States did not stumble into a Middle East war with a depleted emergency stockpile through bad luck or unavoidable circumstance. It arrived there through a specific pattern of political choices—choices that look very different when set against how other major oil-importing democracies manage their own emergency reserves. That comparative political analysis transforms Trump’s handling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve from an isolated policy failure into something more troubling: a case study in how short-termist governance degrades national security in plain sight, over years, while politicians from both parties take turns blaming each other for the damage they share.

A Reserve Built for War, Drained for Politics

The SPR was created after the 1973 Arab oil embargo—a direct response to the strategic vulnerability of a country that could be brought to its knees by a supply cutoff it had no buffer against. At its peak in 2010 under President Barack Obama, it held approximately 726 million barrels. When Trump first took office in January 2017, it stood near 695 million. By the time he returned in early 2025, Biden’s record 180-million-barrel drawdown following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had pushed it down to roughly 395 to 400 million barrels—its lowest level since the 1980s. A year of modest repurchases nudged that figure up only to about 415 million barrels by the time U.S. bombs started falling on Iranian targets.

Trump had campaigned ferociously on this number. He attacked Biden for “draining” the reserve for political gain and promised to “fill it right to the top” if returned to office. What happened instead was a lesson in the distance between campaign rhetoric and governing reality. Aging salt caverns and surface infrastructure—damaged by the speed and scale of Biden’s drawdown—have required expensive repairs that the administration has funded only partially. Energy officials told Congress that returning the SPR toward full capacity would require billions of dollars and years of work. The political price of slow progress was low; the strategic price was deferred until the moment it wasn’t.

That moment arrived in early March 2026. And the president who once demanded Biden account for every barrel released now insists the reserve isn’t necessary—even as prices spike toward levels that squeeze working families and reshape the inflation picture heading into midterm season.

SPR Case Studies: Japan, China, the US, and the EU.

Japan: Technocratic Discipline in the World’s Most Vulnerable Importer

Japan imports more than ninety percent of its crude from the Middle East, with a large share transiting the Strait of Hormuz. It is, by any measure, more structurally exposed to a Persian Gulf war than the United States. Yet when Japanese refiners urged their government last week to release strategic stocks in response to rising prices and shipping uncertainty, the government’s response was deliberate and notably different in character from Washington’s. Officials emphasized that reserves exist for genuine supply emergencies, that any release would be coordinated with allies through the International Energy Agency, and that domestic price management was not the primary criterion for a drawdown.

That framing—technocratic, multilateral, criteria-bound—reflects how Japan has built its emergency stockpiling regime over decades. Decisions about reserves are heavily bureaucratized, insulated from electoral pressure by layers of ministry jurisdiction, and reinforced by IEA obligations that create external accountability. The politics are present; industries lobby, ministries compete for turf. But the public language of reserve management is supply security, not election math. No Japanese prime minister has run on a platform of filling the reserve “right to the top.”

The European Union: Supra-National Rules as a Check on National Politics

EU member states operate under two overlapping legal frameworks—IEA rules requiring ninety days of net import coverage and EU directives with their own monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. Many countries delegate reserve management to semi-independent agencies, deliberately placing the stockpile at arm’s length from elected governments. Germany (the EU’s manufacturing powerhouse) and Ireland (an island), for example, hold government or quasi-government crude stocks through entities whose mandates are specifically insulated from annual budget negotiations.

The European track record on major releases is telling. Coordinated IEA drawdowns during the 1991 Gulf War, after the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes, during the 2011 Libyan civil war, and in the 2022 Ukraine energy crisis were all motivated by physical supply concerns, not domestic political cycles. Politicization in Europe tends to manifest as delayed compliance or disputes over the fine print of international obligations—not as election-season price management or reserve levels that become talking points in partisan campaigns. The supra-national layer, for all its friction, functions as a guardrail.

China: Authoritarian Stockpiling and the Democracy Dilemma

China’s approach to strategic reserves is the most uncomfortable comparison for an American audience, precisely because it cuts against the assumption that democracy produces better governance. Since the mid-2000s, Beijing has constructed dozens of SPR sites and integrated the inventories of state-owned enterprises into a centrally controlled national reserves system. A 2025 law effectively conscripted commercial petroleum inventories into the national emergency architecture, imposing “social responsibility” obligations that give the party-state direct access to private company stocks in a crisis. Analysts believe China has used this system both to buy opportunistically during price dips and to hedge against the sanctions and supply disruption risks that come with its aggressive foreign policy.

The obvious costs are real: decisions are opaque, made within a tight party-state circle with no public debate or electoral accountability, and susceptible to the corruption and factional favoritism that shadows all Chinese state enterprises. Stockpiles can be used to favor certain industries, regions, or political allies, and no one outside the system will know.

China has built, maintained, and continued expanding a strategic stockpile in a coherent, goal-directed way over two decades. It did not drain reserves to manage domestic gasoline prices before an election. It did not treat the stockpile as a line item to raid for deficit reduction. It did not enter a high-stakes conflict in the world’s most important oil chokepoint with inventories at half capacity. That discipline is not incidental: a full strategic reserve buys Beijing the ability to sustain military operations and absorb a Western sanctions regime long enough to make a Taiwan contingency survivable—which is precisely the scenario American war planners are supposed to be preparing against.

The uncomfortable question the Chinese model poses for American policymakers is not whether to adopt authoritarian methods—obviously not—but whether a democracy that cannot commit to non-partisan reserve management is structurally capable of the long-term strategic discipline that energy security requires. The answer, based on the last decade, is not encouraging.

America’s World-Class Hardware, Increasingly Broken Governance

On pure engineering terms, the US SPR remains extraordinary. Its vast salt caverns can theoretically release four to four and a half million barrels per day—a throughput that dwarfs most of its peers. The physical infrastructure, when maintained, represents one of the most powerful emergency response tools in the history of mankind. What has failed is not the caverns. It is the institutional culture and political incentives that govern them.

Congress under both parties has treated the SPR as a fiscal piggy bank, mandating sales to generate budget revenue in ways that strip the reserve of its strategic purpose. The National Taxpayers Union estimates those mandated sales raised roughly eighteen billion dollars through 2025, while full restoration and infrastructure repair could cost even more. The Biden administration drew the reserve down aggressively in 2022—linked to the genuine supply shock of Russia’s invasion, but timed in ways critics credibly argued also served to blunt domestic inflation before a difficult midterm election. Trump attacked that decision as rank political abuse. He was not wrong. He then declined to rebuild what had been spent, resisted the fiscal and price-management costs of an aggressive repurchase program, and launched a war in the Persian Gulf while the reserve sat at 415 million barrels.

What makes this pattern particularly corrosive in the American context is that each side’s opportunism provides cover for the other’s. When Democrats drain the reserve for political ends, Republicans gain a talking point that justifies delay and under-investment. When Republicans refuse to rebuild it, Democrats can point to their own emergency as sufficient justification for the drawdown. The institutional guardrails that function in Japan and the EU—bureaucratic insulation, supra-national enforcement, and criteria-bound release rules—have no strong equivalent in Washington. The SPR sits exposed to whoever holds executive power and whatever the electoral calendar demands.

The result is a stockpile that functions less as a strategic petroleum reserve and more as a strategic political reserve: a pool of barrels that presidents can sell, threaten to sell, or promise to buy in ways that serve near-term political goals rather than long-term national security. That reframing is not rhetorical. It describes how the reserve has actually been used for the better part of a decade, by both parties, and it explains why the United States is having this conversation now, in the middle of a war, instead of before it.

Who Pays When the Reserve Is Thin

The distributional dimension of this failure deserves more attention than it typically receives. Gasoline prices are regressive. Lower-income households spend a substantially larger share of their incomes on fuel than wealthier ones do. When a government enters a foreseeable oil shock with thin reserves and then hesitates to use them, the costs fall hardest on those least equipped to absorb them. The family in the Central Valley paying five dollars a gallon to commute to work is not in the same position as the equity trader watching crude futures on a second monitor.

Major petroleum traders and producers, meanwhile, benefit from price volatility—their hedging desks and long positions often profit from exactly the kind of spike that pinches consumers. That asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects a political economy in which the concentrated interests that benefit from high prices have a durable influence over the policymakers who manage strategic reserves, while the dispersed interests harmed by thin stockpiles show up in approval ratings only after the damage is done. The failure to rebuild the SPR before a predictable war in the Gulf was not simply a technocratic misstep. It was a political choice about who bears risk when the strategy fails.

The Larger Pattern: Emergency Powers and the Personalization of Strategy

Energy policy tools—reserves, export controls, sanctions waivers, supply diplomacy—are part of a broader arsenal that recent presidents have increasingly managed through personal discretion rather than institutional rules. Trump’s Iran strategy illustrates how these instruments converge. The same presidency that unilaterally re-imposed and escalated sanctions, authorized offensive cyber and kinetic strikes, and now prosecutes an undeclared war, also decides whether to release or withhold 415 million barrels of emergency oil. When Trump describes his approach to the Strait of Hormuz situation as a matter of instinct rather than established protocol, he is describing something that scholars of democratic erosion have documented in other contexts: the replacement of rules-bound governance with personalized control over strategic assets.

That does not make the United States Iran or Hungary. Democratic resilience is real, and it encompasses forces—courts, opposition parties, a free press—that check executive power in ways those regimes cannot. But it does mean the SPR story is not isolated. It is part of a pattern in which strategic infrastructure that should function as a national asset, insulated from electoral incentives and personal preference, becomes an extension of one person’s political operation. Japan’s bureaucracy and the EU’s directives exist precisely to prevent that. The United States has let the equivalent guardrails erode, and a war in the Persian Gulf has exposed the cost.

Conclusion: The Receipt

The comparative picture is, in the end, both clarifying and damning. Japan—more dependent on Hormuz oil than America, with fewer domestic resources to fall back on—manages its reserves with more institutional discipline. The European Union enforces stockpile standards through supra-national accountability that elected governments cannot simply override for domestic convenience. Even China, for all the opacity and authoritarianism that makes its model unacceptable as a template, has built a coherent strategic reserve system that it has not drained for political purposes. None of these comparisons argue for copying what other countries do. They argue something simpler: that the United States, the wealthiest country on earth with one of the oldest and most sophisticated emergency stockpile systems, is capable of doing better than this.

Trump spent two years attacking his predecessor for draining the reserve, promised to fill it to the top, failed to do so, and then launched a high-risk war in the world’s most important oil chokepoint while the reserve sat at barely half capacity. Now, with prices surging and American families paying the difference at the pump, he declines to use what little buffer remains—while insisting, from Air Force One, that everything will get healed very quickly.

The receipt is in. The reserve is at 415 million barrels. Brent is in the low nineties. Gas is above five dollars in California. And the president who promised to fill it right to the top is explaining, with characteristic confidence, why none of that is his problem.

It is precisely his problem. It became Trump’s problem the moment he chose war over preparation. And the families paying five-dollar gasoline to commute to jobs in the freshly redistricted Central Valley will remember the price longer than he will.

Micah Allred is a politics researcher, political journalist, and former AmeriCorps Disaster Corps Project Lead with an MA in Comparative Politics from American University. His work focuses on democratic trust, disinformation, and institutional breakdown in the U.S. and comparative democracies.

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References

ABC / AP News, “Oil prices are soaring, but Trump is downplaying the need to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” March 7, 2026.
https://apnews.com/article/oil-prices-crude-brent-iran-ecab41ec6a365e58282f4cfbab62a9ff​

Council on Foreign Relations, “How Does the U.S. Government Use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?” January 10, 2023.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-does-us-government-use-strategic-petroleum-reserve​

Department of Energy, Office of Petroleum Reserves, “SPR Quick Facts” and “History of SPR Releases.”
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/opr/spr-quick-facts​
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/opr/history-spr-releases​

EIA, “U.S. Ending Stocks of Crude Oil in the SPR (Thousand Barrels).”
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W​

EIA, “Global oil markets,” Short‑Term Energy Outlook, March 2026.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php​

Enerdata, “China accelerates expansion of its strategic oil reserves.” October 12, 2025.
https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/china-accelerates-expansion-its-strategic-oil-reserves.html​

ERIA, “Oil Stockpiling and Emergency Response Cooperation of East Asia.” 2016 and follow‑up report.
https://www.eria.org/research/oil-stockpiling-and-emergency-response-cooperation-of-east-asia​
https://www.eria.org/RPR-FY2014-32.pdf​

European Commission / Eurostat, “Emergency oil stocks statistics.”
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Emergency_oil_stocks_statistics​

Forbes, Robert Rapier, “No, Former President Trump Did Not Fill The Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” April 1, 2022.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/04/01/no-former-president-trump-did-not-fill-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve/​

Goldman Sachs, “How Will the Iran Conflict Impact Oil Prices?” March 2, 2026.
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/how-will-the-iran-conflict-impact-oil-prices​

IEA, “The IEA Response System for Oil Supply Emergencies.”
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/09/f3/IEA%20Response%20System%20for%20Oil%20Supply%20Emergencies%202012.pdf​

National Taxpayers Union Foundation, “Politics Drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Reforms Can Refill It Without Soaking Taxpayers.” February 9, 2025.
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/detail/politics-drained-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve-reforms-can-refill-it-without-soaking-tax​

OECD / IEA, “Oil Supply Security: Emergency Oil Stockholding.”
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2001/02/oil-supply-security_g1gh1a6b/9789264188464-en.pdf​

Oxford Economics, “Iran and the Strait of Hormuz: risks to global energy prices.” February–March 2026.
https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/iran-and-the-strait-of-hormuz-risks-to-global-energy-prices/

PolitiFact, “Donald Trump wrong that Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been filled.” March 30, 2022.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/apr/01/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrong-strategic-petroleum-reserve-has/​

PolitiFact, MAGA‑Meter, “Fill up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” July 6, 2025.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/maga-meter-tracking-donald-trumps-2024-promises/promise/1685/fill-up-the-strat​

Resources for the Future, “A Primer on Oil Price Shocks Past and Present.” May 20, 2010.
https://www.resources.org/common-resources/a-primer-on-oil-price-shocks-past-and-present/​

Trading Economics, “Brent crude oil” and “U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude stocks.”
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/brent-crude-oil​
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/strategic-petroleum-reserve-crude-oil-stocks​

U.S. Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, Sen. John Barrasso, “Biden’s Political Abuse of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” September 26, 2022.
https://www.energy.senate.gov/2022/9/icymi-barrasso-op-ed-biden-s-political-abuse-of-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve​

Columbia SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy, “Rethinking the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” 2018.
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/CGEP_Rethinking_the_Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_June2018.pdf

AP / Reuters / Bloomberg coverage of Japan:
Bloomberg, “Japan Oil Refiners Ask Government to Tap Strategic Reserves.” March 5, 2026.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-05/japanese-oil-refiners-ask-government-to-tap-strategic-reserves​
Yahoo Finance summary, “Japanese Refiners Urge Government to Release Strategic Oil ...” March 5, 2026.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/japanese-refiners-urge-government-release-153000265.html​

Energetic and democracy‑backsliding background:
American Progress, “These Fossil Fuel Industry Tactics Are Fueling Democratic Backsliding.” December 4, 2023.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/these-fossil-fuel-industry-tactics-are-fueling-democratic-backsliding​
Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Democracy Emergency Coming From the Oil and Gas Industry.” September 24, 2025.
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/democracy-emergency-fossil-fuel-industry

March 5, 2026

DOGE really was efficient—just not in the way President Donald Trump and Elon Musk promised. If you stop listening to the branding and look at the sequence of events, what DOGE optimized wasn’t “government performance” but the time gap between a presidential whim and any mechanism that could stop it.

Fire before the court injunction can be filed.
Defund before the external review can begin.
Weaken accountability before it can catch up.

If DOGE had been honest, its mission statement would have simply been: “Reduce the time it takes to do things the normal system would pause, study, or block.”

What DOGE Was Built to Do

In theory, the Department of Government Efficiency was the fiscally minded wing of MAGA. Trump created it by executive order on his first day back in office, folding it into the existing U.S. Digital Service and pitching it as a cross-government project to modernize IT, slash regulations, and cut waste. Musk, cast as its public face, talked about finding as much as $2 trillion in savings. Allies echoed the number thoughtlessly.

In practice, watchdogs and reporters describe something closer to a roaming demolition crew wrapped in management-consultant jargon. DOGE teams embedded at agencies across government—Treasury, Social Security, DHS, USAID, NASA—often without normal vetting and with sweeping access to internal systems. Decisions were green-lit at the White House and pushed through before internal lawyers or courts could assess their legality.

DOGE operated in the slipstream of Project 2025, the blueprint for dismantling the administrative state by concentrating power in the presidency and purging civil servants not deemed ideologically reliable. Its first blows landed on oversight offices, civil-rights divisions, and inspectors general—precisely the structures designed to catch waste, fraud, and abuse.

A February 2026 House Oversight Democrats report called DOGE “nothing short of a disaster” that undermined agency missions, damaged public services, and cost Americans billions in waste and degraded capacity. That is one kind of efficiency: breaking things faster than anyone can document, challenge, or reverse the damage.

Fire Before the Injunction

Normal democratic policy change is slow by design. An administration announces a rule. Agencies draft justifications. Stakeholders comment. Courts review. Congress holds hearings. That lag exists so people who may be harmed have time to react.

DOGE treated that lag as an opportunity window. Where most administrations announce and then execute, DOGE executed and dared anyone to catch up. Career officials were fired or reassigned—especially in environmental enforcement, civil-rights offices, and regulatory shops—before unions, inspectors general, or congressional committees could respond. By the time anyone mobilized, the brain drain had already happened: oversight positions vacant, institutional memory gone, the people most able to object either departed or sidelined.

Reports from agencies including NASA and SSA described DOGE-backed teams hollowing out inspector-general offices, compliance units, and internal ethics teams under the banner of “streamlining.” Once those guardrails weakened, future misconduct became harder to detect and slower to correct.

“What Elon and His Group of Geniuses Have Found is Unbelievable” - Trump

President Trump once said, “What Elon and his group of geniuses have found is unbelievable.” He was right. While DOGE claimed to be cutting waste, its most public artifact, the “Wall of Receipts” on doge.gov, was collapsing under its own fabrications.

Reporters from CBS, the Times, PBS, and NPR dug through the contracts and found that the headline savings were built on typos, misread spreadsheets, and deliberate double-counting. The single most embarrassing example: an ICE-related contract listed as an $8 billion cut turned out to be an $8 million agreement. Someone had slipped in three extra zeros. Even after the error was flagged, the corrected math still didn’t save what DOGE claimed.

Similar errors ran throughout the ledger—triple-counted contracts, theoretical contract ceilings treated as real money saved, COVID-era health agreements credited with $6.4 billion in savings when only about $165 million in committed funds remained unspent.

NPR found that DOGE's early claim of $55 billion in savings rested on $16.5 billion in itemized contracts that, when checked against federal databases, yielded around $2 billion in anything verifiable. Politico's analysis of nearly 10,100 contract terminations put the real figure even lower, about $1.4 billion, less than five percent of what DOGE had claimed. PBS put it plainly: the Wall of Receipts was a public ledger of misleading and incorrect claims. Which made one thing hard to ignore: DOGE had spent months insisting that sloppy government accounting could only mean fraud and abuse. Turns out they were just dreamboarding.

Beyond bad accounting, DOGE crossed legal lines. DOJ filings in a lawsuit brought by AFSCME revealed that DOGE staffers working inside the Social Security Administration had moved sensitive personal data, including Social Security numbers, onto unauthorized third-party Cloudflare workspaces, outside normal government security protocols. The Trump administration was forced to admit that earlier court declarations about DOGE’s access to SSA records had been incomplete.

More alarming still: watchdogs have since uncovered evidence, still being litigated as of this writing, that a DOGE staffer signed an agreement with an outside partisan advocacy group to cross-reference that SSA data against state voter rolls in an attempt to challenge election results in targeted states. The through-line back to Trump's long-debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen is not subtle. Five years after courts, election officials, and Trump's own Justice Department rejected that claim in every venue it was tested, DOGE was quietly using Americans' personal Social Security data to re-litigate it through the back door. The data DOGE insisted it needed to "stop fraud" was, apparently, being lined up to challenge voters' eligibility—before the public even knew the breach had happened.

The Fort Knox Audit: Information Warfare as Efficiency

The Fort Knox “audit” is the purest expression of DOGE’s logic.

Trump and Musk loudly questioned whether the gold at Fort Knox was actually there, echoing conspiracy theories that America’s gold had been stolen by previous Democratic presidents, and promising a live-streamed walkthrough. The reality is boring: Treasury and Mint reports show Fort Knox holds roughly 147 million troy ounces of gold, with additional reserves at West Point and Denver.

But you don’t need an actual audit to accomplish DOGE’s goals. You only need the announcement. “DOGE to audit Fort Knox” generates headlines, feeds public suspicion about basic fiscal facts, and casts Trump and Musk as brave outsiders challenging a corrupt establishment. When the promised audit quietly fizzled—and it did, never mentioned again after the initial fanfare—the spectacle had already done its work. The suspicion lingered, the experts looked defensive, and the conspiracy has not been mentioned by the Trump administration in nearly a year.

The efficiency here wasn't forensic accounting. It was information warfare: inject doubt where there was none, claim victory over an imaginary obstacle, and disappear before anyone checked the math.

Dismantle, Then Disappear

DOGE’s vanishing act was among its most sinister moves— which, given everything else in this piece, is saying something.

By late 2025, DOGE was being wound down months before the end of its 18-month mandate. Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, told reporters that DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore as a centralized entity — even though eight months remained on the original timeline. In the same breath, officials assured everyone that DOGE’s “principles” and “methods” would live on inside more conventional-sounding offices like OPM and OMB.

The brand retired before formal oversight could tally what it had done. The functions — accelerated purges, centralization of control, contempt for process — simply diffused into places where they’d be harder to trace and harder to name.

This was Project 2025’s design all along, dressed up in the costume of a tech efficiency squad: not one flashy task force, but a broad reconfiguration of the civil service built to outlast any single executive order. DOGE tested how thoroughly a small, tightly controlled group could tear the wiring out of federal oversight institutions — just to see how long it would take before anyone could turn the power back on.

Efficiency Toward What?

In technocratic language, efficiency is neutral. A process is efficient if it minimizes cost and delay between input and output. DOGE laregly took that neutrality and bent it toward a partisan end.

It was efficient at turning presidential grievances into policy shocks—firings, funding cuts, rule suspensions—faster than courts or Congress could mobilize. It was efficient at disabling the oversight tools that might have documented and reversed those shocks. And it was efficient at altering the functionality of federal institutions: once agencies were hollowed out, experts gone, data migrated, and contracts terminated, restoring capacity will cost far more than destroying it had.

On the DOGE train, “efficiency” always ran in one direction: toward a MAGA class that moves faster than accountability.

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References

Associated Press. “Trump Wants to Know if There’s Gold in Fort Knox. (There Is).” AP News, 19 Feb. 2025,
https://apnews.com/article/fort-knox-gold-reserves-elon-musk-338bebb56885c142feaa0ff383c9ba37.

Center for American Progress. “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency.” 4 Mar. 2025,
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-destroy-the-u-s-system-of-checks-and-balances-and-create-an-imperial-presidency/.

CBS News. “DOGE Team’s ‘Wall of Receipts’ Shows Errors in Tallying Billions in Savings.” CBS News, 18 Feb. 2025,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-shows-errors-tallying-billions-in-savings/.

Democracy Forward. “Democracy Forward Demands Documents in Continued Fallout from Bombshell Department of Justice Filing on DOGE Data Misuse.” Press release, 21 Jan. 2026,
https://democracyforward.org/news/press-releases/democracy-forward-demands-documents-in-continued-fallout-from-bombshell-department-of-justice-filing-on-doge-data-misuse/.

Democracy Forward. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) et al. v. Social Security Administration et al. Key filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 2025–2026,
https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/AFSCME-v-SSA_28j-Dkt-62.pdfand
https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/American-Federation-of-State-County-and-Municipal-Employees-AFL-CIO-et-al.-v.-Social-Security-Administration-et-al.-No.-25-1094.pdf.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).” Britannica.com, 21 Feb. 2026,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Department-of-Government-Efficiency-United-States.

International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE). “New Report from House Oversight Democrats Highlights Costly DOGE Efforts to Harm Federal Workers and Undermine Democracy.” 12 Feb. 2026,
https://www.ifpte.org/news/new-report-from-house-oversight-democratsnbsphighlights-costly-doge-efforts-to-harm-federal-workers-and-undermine-democracy.

National Public Radio (NPR). “What Has DOGE Done in Trump’s First 100 Days?” Morning Edition, 27 Apr. 2025,
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/28/nx-s1-5377445/doge-musk-trump-100-days.

National Public Radio (NPR). “Study: 14 Million Lives Could Be Lost Due to Trump’s USAID Cuts.” Goats and Soda, 1 July 2025,
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths.

NBC News. “USAID Cuts Could Lead to 14 Million Deaths over the Next Five Years, Researchers Say.” NBC News, 29 June 2025,
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/usaid-cuts-lead-14-million-deaths-five-years-researchers-say-rcna216095.

Newsweek. “DOGE Is Dead: What Did It Actually Save?” Newsweek, 23 Nov. 2025,
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-is-dead-what-did-it-actually-save-11097551.

NextGov. “Democratic Report: DOGE Is Risking Americans’ Data by Operating Outside Federal Law.” NextGov, 24 Sept. 2025,
https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2025/09/democrat-report-doge-risking-americans-data-operating-outside-federal-law/408515/.

Politico. “Just How Much Has DOGE Exaggerated Its Numbers? Now We Have Receipts.” Politico, 12 Aug. 2025,
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract-claims-savings-inflation-00498178.

Rasella, Davide, et al. “Impact of USAID Funding Cuts on Global Mortality: Projections to 2030.” The Lancet, vol. 406, no. 10451, 1 July 2025. Summary and press materials at Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal),
https://www.isglobal.org/en/-/mas-de-14-millones-de-muertes-prevenibles-de-aqui-a-2030-si-continuan-los-recortes-a-la-financiacion-de-usaid.

The Hill. “House Democrats Accuse DOGE of ‘Breaking the Government’.” The Hill, 13 Feb. 2026,
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The Regulatory Review. Goodwin, Kate. “The Administrative State in a Project 2025 World.” The Regulatory Review, 2 Dec. 2024,
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White House. “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.” Executive Order, 20 Jan. 2025,
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Washington Post. “USAID Cuts May Cause 14 Million More Deaths in Next Five Years, Study Finds.” The Washington Post, 1 July 2025,
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February 28th, 2026

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The Rise of the Political Landlord

Donald Trump has effectively declared himself the political landlord of nations he has never set foot in — and is actively trying to acquire more.

In Gaza and Venezuela, he has bypassed the messy, “forever war” vocabulary of democracy-promotion and nation-building in favor of something more familiar to his background: a hostile corporate takeover. By building parallel political systems that concentrate authority in Washington while outsourcing day-to-day administration to vetted local managers, Trump is pioneering a 21st-century repertoire of “remote work” — governing through oil charts, drone feeds, and executive fiat. In Greenland, he has told the world that American ownership of the island is “psychologically needed for success,” a phrase that has never appeared in any known foreign policy doctrine but would fit comfortably on a real estate developer’s motivation board.

The Trumpian world order is, at its core, a property portfolio. Each entry in the portfolio has its own acquisition strategy: Venezuela, the hostile takeover; Gaza, the receivership of a territory rendered uninhabitable and then offered financial “stability;” Greenland, the attempted purchase of an unwilling seller. And now, as of this week, Cuba — eyed as a “friendly acquisition” of a distressed asset whose owner has simply run out of options. In this world order, sovereignty isn’t surrendered to a flag. It is surrendered to a balance sheet.

There is a word for the kind of local administrator who collaborates with an occupying power to govern a population that never chose them. The word is quisling. It comes from Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who ran his country as a Nazi puppet during World War II. It has since passed into the language as a generic term for someone who collaborates in the subjugation of their own people. The word hangs over Gaza and Venezuela in ways that the architects of Trump’s foreign policy would prefer not to examine — and it will hang over whatever arrangement eventually emerges in Havana and Nuuk, if the landlord gets his way.

Gaza’s Ambiguous Ground: A Vacancy the Landlord Could Exploit

Gaza is not a sovereign state. It is occupied Palestinian territory, formally part of the broader “State of Palestine,” whose sovereignty is recognized by more than 130 United Nations member states but not by the major Western powers, including the United States. Israel has controlled Gaza’s borders, airspace, and coastline since 1967, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice, and the United Nations all affirm that it remains occupied territory under international law. In other words, Gaza entered 2025 as a place that the world acknowledged existed but could not agree belonged to anyone — which is, in the vocabulary of real estate, a title dispute waiting to be exploited.

Under the criteria of the Montevideo Convention, the foundational international document defining statehood, Gaza lacks the capacity to enter into relations with other states and has no internationally recognized government. Hamas governed it in practice; no one recognized Hamas as a legitimate government in law; and after October 7th and the Israeli military campaign that followed, Hamas’s physical capacity to govern collapsed entirely. What remained was rubble, 1.8 million displaced people, and an international legal vacuum. For a landlord looking to acquire distressed property, the title was, effectively, clear.

That legal limbo is what makes Trump’s receivership model operationally viable even as it violates the spirit of every relevant democratic principle and UN resolution. You cannot hand a territory back to its people if, in the eyes of the acquiring power, it never legally belonged to them in the first place.

The Board of Peace: Management Appointed, Not Elected

The 20-point “peace plan” did not create a sovereign Palestinian state. It created a U.S.-designed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza — a 14-member committee that is nominally “Palestinian,” led by professional technocrats like Ali Shaath, but operates under the total veto power of a Washington-led Board of Peace. The distinction between those two sentences is the entire argument.

The Board of Peace represents a radical departure from the post-1945 international order. Unlike the United Nations, which at least nominally recognizes the agency of the governed, the Board is a “pay-to-play” coalition. It is anchored by UN Security Council Resolution 2803, but traditional liberal internationalist powers like Germany and Switzerland have been sidelined as “observers.” Membership is reserved for those putting up reconstruction cash or contributing troops to the International Stabilization Force. The result is a governing body whose composition was determined not by democratic legitimacy or international law, but by their willingness to cut a check to Trump. Palestinians are treated not as political agents but as tenants in a building they no longer own, overseen by local managers whose primary job is to ensure the reconstruction proceeds according to a timeline set by a New York real estate developer who has never walked the streets he now administers.

The model is consistent across all the landlord’s properties. The local administrator is never chosen by the population being governed. In Venezuela, Trump dismissed María Corina Machado — an opposition leader with a 72 percent approval rating inside her own country — as someone who “doesn’t have the support or the respect” to lead, then installed an interim government of Washington’s choosing. In Cuba, the Florida exile community is being positioned as the “minority shareholders” in the island’s future, promised a return on properties seized decades ago, despite having no democratic mandate from the Cubans still living there. In each case, the local manager’s legitimacy flows entirely from the landlord’s appointment, not from the people below.

The administrators serving under these arrangements are, in the most clinical sense of the word, quislings: not necessarily venal or personally willing, but structurally compromised. Their authority is borrowed from the power that installed them. And borrowed authority, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, is the most fragile kind — serviceable for managing a reconstruction timeline, catastrophic for building anything that lasts.

Venezuela: Evicting Maduro

In Venezuela, the landlord model dispenses its technocratic veneer entirely. There is no Board of Peace, no 14-member committee, no nominally local administrator given a title and a press release. On January 3rd, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference following the U.S. military seizure of Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that the United States would simply “run the country until we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” He offered no timeline, no legal framework, and no definition of what “judicious” might mean to a nation of 30 million people that had just watched its president abducted by a foreign military. The message required no translation: this property is now under new management.

The MAGA base received it as the ultimate “America First” victory, and the rebranding is worth examining carefully because it reveals the landlord model’s most powerful political feature. Trump did not claim to be spreading democracy — a framing his own voters have spent a decade learning to distrust. He claimed to be recovering assets.

By seizing direct control over Venezuelan oil production and exports, Trump framed the operation not as regime change but as an eviction and receivership: a bankrupt estate, long past due on its debts to American businesses, finally brought to account. The oil would pay for the wall. Gas prices would fall. The eviction was a business necessity. Policy analysts across the ideological spectrum described it as an illegal war of aggression under international law. The president called it overdue collections.

What the rebranding conceals is the nature of the debt itself. The nationalization of American oil infrastructure under Hugo Chávez in the early 2000s is the historical grievance Trump invokes to justify the operation — the original lease violation, so to speak. But Maduro did not nationalize those utilities, he ruled a country that had done so decades before he seized power—and with a very different economy. The same way a new tenant inherits the terms of a lease they never signed. Under the landlord’s logic, it doesn’t matter. The property is liable. And its tenent was evicted.

In mid-February 2026, Trump told reporters he planned to make a personal visit to Venezuela — a victory lap in a country his administration had bombed and likely bribed into compliance. It would be the first visit by an American president since 1997. If he goes, he will tour it the way a landlord tours a distant property: inspecting the curb appeal, noting what needs renovation, satisfying himself that the manager on the ground is keeping the place “his” assets in order. The people who live there will not be seriously consulted about the random inspection, no more than they were cosnulted about their presidents eviction.

The “Friendly Takeover”: Cuba as a Distressed Asset

The terminology Trump used on February 27th was not accidental. In the world of private equity, a “friendly takeover” has a precise meaning: it occurs when a target company’s management, facing total insolvency and with no viable alternatives, agrees to be acquired by a larger firm rather than resist and be dismembered. The “friendly” part is not an act of generosity. It is a description of the target’s capitulation. The acquirer has simply made resistance more expensive than surrender.

Cuba’s path to that moment has been methodical. The fuel blockade — further tightened after the seizure of Venezuelan oil removed Havana’s last reliable energy lifeline — has been doing the work that sanctions and blockades alone can not. Washington is not waiting for Cuba to democratize. It is waiting for Cuba to run out of options, at which point the island’s asking price will have reached zero. “They have no money. They have no anything right now,” Trump noted, with the clinical detachment of a vulture capitalist surveying a foreclosed hotel. He was not describing a crisis. He was describing a buying opportunity.

Under the direction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio — whose political career was built in part on the loyalties and grievances of the Cuban exile community in Florida — the administration is not demanding a democratic transition so much as a liquidation preference. The goal appears to be a restructuring in which Cuba’s emerging private sector, the pymes, are positioned as the new regional managers, while American firms secure what amounts to a ground lease on the island’s infrastructure. The exile community, promised restitution for properties seized more than sixty years ago, functions in this arrangement as the minority shareholders being made whole by the acquisition. It is a settlement of historical accounts dressed as foreign policy.

The “friendly” part of the takeover is, in the end, simply the choice given to the occupant: sign the lease peacefully or face eviction forcefully. What distinguishes Cuba from Venezuela is not the nature of the pressure being applied but the volume at which it is delivered. Venezuela got bombs. Cuba is, so far, getting a managed hostile takeover of its entire economy. The outcome the landlord is seeking in both cases is identical — a compliant local administration, access to strategic assets, and a population that has been given no meaningful say in any of it.

The Tenants Who Don’t Count

The clearest window into the landlord psychology is not the policy architecture. It is the language.

On January 26, 2025, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters that Palestinians should be moved to Egypt and Jordan to “just clean out” the enclave. You do not “clean out” people. You clean out a property — a storage unit, a foreclosed apartment, a condemned building whose previous occupants are now someone else’s problem. Then, at a February 4th press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump announced that the United States would “own” Gaza and envisioned replacing its 1.8 million Palestinian residents with “the world’s people.” He shared an AI-generated video on Truth Social depicting himself dancing on a reimagined Riviera-style Gaza beachfront, a giant golden Trump statue looming over the coastline. The rubble and the dead had been removed from the frame — literally, digitally, and in every way that the landlord’s vision required.

In Venezuela, the logic of displacement works differently but arrives at the same destination. The justification for removing Maduro was not, ultimately, that he was a dictator — the United States has tolerated far worse for far longer when the balance sheet was favorable. The justification was the debt: the nationalization of American oil infrastructure under Hugo Chávez, decades prior, recast as an unpaid utility bill still attached to the property. That Maduro did not nationalize those assets, that he inherited a country whose prior government had made those decisions before he held power, was treated as irrelevant. In the landlord’s accounting, the building is liable regardless of who currently lives in it. The eviction proceeds.

What unites Gaza and Venezuela — and what will unite whatever arrangement eventually emerges in Cuba and Greenland — is the treatment of civilian populations as variables to be managed rather than people to be governed. They are the existing tenants: inconvenient, expensive, and not party to any of the deals being negotiated on their behalf. When a president describes millions of people as material to be “cleaned out,” when he replaces a living devastated city with an AI-generated resort with a golden statue of himeself, when he dismisses a legitimately elected opposition leader because she complicates the transition timeline, my landlord metaphor is no longer doing figurative work. It is a clinical description of Trump’s operating logic.

The people in these territories did not choose this. They were not consulted. They are not legitimately represented on the Board of Peace, not present at the Geneva negotiations, and not part of the Cuba restructuring conversations happening in Washington and Miami. They are, in the fullest sense of the term, the tenants who don’t count: present on the land, absent from the ledger.

The Board of Profits: Treaty Burns, Peace Terms, and Investment Returns

The most jarring aspect of this new style of rule is not its audacity. Audacity can be accidental, impulsive, the byproduct of a temperament that doesn't recognize its own recklessness. What is on display here is something more deliberate. The systematic blurring of public policy and private equity is not hidden — it is structural, built into the Board's membership, the reconstruction contracts, and the investment portfolios of the men writing the peace terms. The brazenness is not a flaw in the design.

It is the blueprint.

Begin with the Board of Peace itself, which looks less like a diplomatic body and more like a corporate board of directors operating with staggering conflicts of interest and no meaningful disclosure requirements. Jared Kushner, through his firm Affinity Partners, is heavily backed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — the same regional powers that are the primary funders of the Gaza reconstruction plan his former father-in-law designed. At Davos, Kushner unveiled a $30 billion “master plan” for Gaza that pitches the territory not as a site of self-determination but as a future regional economic hub for high-end real estate and technology investment. The people who once lived there are not part of that vision. They are, at best, the labor pool.

Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management and developer Yakir Gabay occupy similar positions: both are members of or closely affiliated with the constellation of investors circling the reconstruction economy, with firms positioned to compete for the contracts that the Board itself will authorize. This is not an incidental conflict of interest. It is the architectural design. When the people setting the peace terms are also holding the investment portfolios, “stability” becomes a code word for protecting the return on investment, and “reconstruction” becomes a synonym for development rights.

The same logic applies, more nakedly, to Venezuela. The seizure of Venezuelan oil infrastructure is not a side effect of the operation. It is the point of the operation. A country’s sovereign energy resources, seized without compensation and administered by Washington, is the landlord model in its most elemental form: the asset generates income for the owner, not the occupant. Trump promised his base that Venezuelan oil would pay for the border wall and lower domestic gas prices — repackaging imperial extraction as a consumer benefit, the geopolitical equivalent of a landlord charging tenants for repairs to a building he just took by force.

What makes this moment historically distinctive is that the landlord himself is also a shareholder. According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth increased by an estimated $3.4 billion in 2025 alone — a single-year gain that approaches the combined inflation-adjusted wealth accumulated by all 44 of his predecessors during their time in office. His financial portfolio, heavily concentrated in crypto ventures and licensing deals whose values track closely with his regulatory decisions, means that the president of the United States has a direct personal financial interest in the stability, investor confidence, and deregulatory environment that his own foreign policy is designed to produce. The Board of Peace is not just a vehicle for his allies to profit. It is an extension of a presidency that has become, in itself, a revenue-generating asset.

The self-dealing cycle is not approaching completion. It is already complete.

The Absentee Landlord’s Eyes: Drones, Data, and Deals

The landlord has never walked the streets of Gaza City. He has never been to Caracas, Nuuk, Tehran, nor Havana. He has issued no public statement indicating familiarity with the geography of any of these historic places beyond what appears on Fox News.

Distance is maintained through what might be called a digital panopticon: a regime of drone feeds, AI-driven targeting systems, and threat matrices that reduce living societies to dashboards. The governed are not known — they are monitored. The distinction matters enormously, because governing people you know requires accounting for their humanity, while managing data points on a screen does not. Gaza’s Lavender AI targeting system — which the Israeli military used during the campaign to generate kill lists at a rate and scale no human review process could match — is the clearest illustration of what dashboard governance looks like at its most extreme: a population rendered as a dataset, with lethality as the output variable.

By the time the Board of Peace was constituted, at least 55,000 Gazans had reportedly been killed. More than 92 percent of Gaza’s residential buildings had been damaged or completely destroyed. The United Nations estimated the total rubble at around 60 million tonnes. Reconstruction costs were projected to exceed $70 billion — likely the largest post-war rebuilding effort since World War II. Washington provides the surveillance architecture that now monitors the survivors of that campaign. The International Stabilization Force provides the boots on the ground. The Board of Peace provides the investment framework. None of these structures were designed with meaningful Palestinian input, and none of them require it to function.

That is precisely the point.

A significant portion of that destruction was enabled by American weapons. Throughout the conflict, the United States continued supplying Israel with munitions — bombs, artillery shells, and precision-guided systems — even as the casualty toll climbed and international bodies warned of conditions amounting to collective punishment. Trump is now the architect of a peace plan to rebuild what American weapons helped reduce to rubble, administered by a board populated with investors positioned to profit from that reconstruction. The distance between the policy and its human consequences is not incidental. It is load-bearing.

In Venezuela, the same blueprint operates at a different scale. Trump views a nation of 30 million people through oil production charts and threat matrices. Dashboard governance makes the moral calculus easier: a shattered public health system in Caracas does not appear on an oil chart, so it does not register as a problem. A landlord’s obligation ends at the property line. What happens inside the unit — the conditions the tenants are actually living in — is the local property managers concern concern, not his, as long as the rent arrives on time.

Empire Without Oversight: The Doctrine Nobody Voted For

These are not twin experiments anymore. It is a real estate portfolio — and the portfolio is still expanding.

In Gaza, the Board of Peace is anchored in a UN resolution rather than a U.S. treaty, allowing the executive branch to commit to a multi-decade governance arrangement without a Senate vote. In Venezuela, the military operation proceeded without congressional authorization, in open defiance of the War Powers Resolution. In Greenland, the administration has probed arrangements for “sovereign control” over pockets of Danish territory without any public legislative debate. In Cuba, a restructuring of an entire nation’s economic and political future is being negotiated through the Florida GOP donor class, not through Congress. In each case, the White House has acted as though foreign territory were an executive asset — something the president can acquire, manage, and perhaps someday divest, entirely independent of the normal checks of democratic governance.

The pattern is not a series of exceptions. It is a doctrine.

The geopolitical implications extend well beyond any single case. If Trump can constitute a Board of Peace to administer occupied territory, Russia has a ready-made template for formalizing its governance structures in eastern Ukraine — complete with a UN resolution anchor, a local technocratic committee, and international investors buying into the reconstruction economy. If the United States can seize a nation’s oil infrastructure as a “receivership,” China has a precedent for doing the same with maritime resources in the South China Sea, rebranded as “stabilization” and “debt recovery.” The Board of Peace model does not belong to American exceptionalism. Trump has not just broken the rules of the post-1945 international order. He has published the new rulebook, and every authoritarian government with territorial ambitions is currently reading it.

The historical record of this kind of imperial administration offers little comfort. The Ottoman millet system, the British Mandate, the League of Nations trusteeships — each promised stability and delivered resentment. The populations governed without their consent typically do not, over time, become grateful. Historically, they often become the next generation’s freedom fighters, insurgents, and in the vocabulary of the powers that administered them, terrorists. The landlord model has been tried before, under different names and with different investment vehicles. It has never produced the stability it promised, because stability built on the exclusion of the governed is not true stability.

It is worth noting where the model reaches its explosive conclusion, because the transition is as revealing as the model itself. In Gaza and Venezuela, the landlord sought a managed portfolio; in Iran, he has opted for a total liquidation. On February 28, 2026, the 'maximum pressure' of the conference table was replaced by the 'Epic Fury' of a joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign. No longer content with a 'friendly takeover' or a technocratic committee, the administration has launched major combat operations with the stated goal of regime change.

Faced with a property he could not safely lease or leverage, the Landlord has moved from acquisition to liquidation. In this light, Trump’s appeal to the Iranian public to ‘seize control of your destiny’ is the ultimate scorched-earth gambit: if the asset cannot be folded into the portfolio, it must be stripped and devalued until it is useless to his competitors. The selection criterion is now unmistakable: any nation that cannot be managed must be neutralized. Sovereignty has been replaced by a global ‘show cause’ order, where the penalty for non-compliance may be structural annihilation.

The Cuban case is the clearest proof of concept precisely because it is the most openly transactional. By treating a 67-year-old geopolitical stalemate as a bankruptcy restructuring, the administration has telegraphed to every struggling nation in the hemisphere that their sovereignty is only as secure as their credit score. The leader of the free world has been replaced by a Chairman of the Board who views the globe as a map of distressed properties, waiting for the right moment to consolidate the block. The old vocabulary of American foreign policy — democracy promotion, human rights, the rules-based international order — has not been abandoned so much as archived. It served its purpose when the United States needed ideological cover for its power. The current administration has decided the cover is no longer necessary.

The danger is no longer just 'over there'; it is a domestic contagion. When a president asserts that the acquisition of Greenland is 'psychologically needed for success' or treats the Iranian public as a distressed asset to be 'seized,' he is signaling a total break from the post-1945 democratic order. He has ceased to be a public servant and has become a global proprietor. These precedents—governance by dashboard, authority by appointment, and the erasure of legislative oversight—are a roadmap for the dismantling of the Republic from within. The Landlord does not distinguish between a 'vetted local manager' in Gaza and a handpicked loyalist in Washington. In his portfolio, the occupant’s consent is always secondary to the owner’s whim.

His own citizens are not far behind. We are, as Trump sees it, his tenants.

[Authors Notes: I've never felt the need to include an author's note before, but this article has a story. I wrote the first version two days ago around Gaza and Venezuela. The next day, Trump announced he wanted a "friendly takeover" of Cuba, which meant a full day of rewrites to include Cuba and Greenland. I planned to do one final review this morning before publishing — and woke up to news that we had begun bombing Iran. That's three days of the news validating the thesis in real time, each morning delivering a new case study before I'd finished writing about the last one. I started this piece thinking the landlord metaphor was a useful analytical frame. By the end I was wondering whether it was a metaphor at all.]

References

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February 26, 2026

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Abstract

This comparative political analysis examines the divergent standards applied to peaceful political protests by the MAGA Movement. By analyzing historical parallels to the Civil Rights era, contemporary anti-protest legislation, and polling data on electoral trust, I argue that the movement employs a “moving goalpost” of legitimacy—one that systematically pathologizes non-disruptive symbolic speech as anti-American while rationalizing physical incursions and political violence as patriotic resistance. Drawing on the concept of Internalized Political Skepticism (IPS), developed in my series “Naming the Democratic Breakdown,” this analysis explores how identity-based distrust enables supporters to simultaneously condemn peaceful protest and sanctify insurrectionary acts, all within a framework of content-dependent legitimacy that privileges the movement’s preferred hierarchy of civil rights over broader human rights claims. The result is not mere hypocrisy. It is a coherent, if unspoken, political project: the functional elimination of legitimate dissent for anyone outside the movement.

The Moving Goalpost of “Peaceful”

In America’s populist discourse, the definition of “peaceful protest” has undergone a radical and asymmetric transformation. The MAGA Movement routinely lectures progressive opponents on protesting “the right way.”

Upon closer inspection, that standard defines “right” as something close to “invisible.”

The paradox is precise: a movement that demands peaceful methods simultaneously seeks to outlaw the most peaceful forms of symbolic expression, while rationalizing actual political violence as a defensive necessity. Protesters who block roads are labeled insurrectionists. Athletes who kneel in silence are accused of desecrating the flag. Yet protesters who breach the United States Capitol, break windows, and assault law enforcement officers are described by the same critics as patriots engaged in legitimate resistance. No consistent principle is operating here. This reflexive filter defines the legitimacy of any act of dissent not by its character, but by who is performing it, and on whose behalf. To see how this works in practice, it helps to trace its historical lineage, its legal expression, and the psychological logic that makes the double standard feel coherent rather than hypocritical.

This is not a novel political maneuver. It has a history, a mechanism, and a name. Understanding all three is a prerequisite for defending democratic legitimacy in an era when the rules of protest are being rewritten in real time.

The empirical foundation of this argument is not difficult to establish. American National Election Studies data show that after 2020, only approximately 38 percent of Republican respondents trusted the vote count, compared to nearly 75 percent of Democrats—a gap that did not close as the claims driving it were systematically refuted in over sixty courts of law. This structural trust asymmetry is not background noise. It is the precondition for everything else examined here. A movement that does not believe the system is legitimate does not operate by the system’s rules—including the rule that says political opposition must be expressed through lawful means.

The Historical Mirror: From “Trespassing” to Traffic Laws

During the Civil Rights era, white southern officials rarely argued that Black Americans had no right to protest. Instead, they argued that protesters were breaking the law: trespassing on private property, disturbing the peace, blocking traffic, and failing to disperse. The lunch counter sit-ins were framed not as First Amendment expression but as violations of property and business rights. The Freedom Riders were cast not as citizens exercising constitutional rights, but as outside agitators, frequently attributed to “communist influence,” and disrupting otherwise harmonious local communities. This rhetorical move was effective precisely because it appeared to make no racial argument at all. It spoke only of law, order, and procedure.

The contemporary parallel is structurally identical. Since 2017, and accelerating sharply after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, more than forty states introduced or passed legislation specifically targeting protest tactics. These laws created criminal penalties for blocking highways, elevated certain forms of trespassing to felonies, and—most notoriously—provided civil immunity to drivers who struck protesters with their vehicles. The “hit and run protection” laws, passed in Oklahoma, Iowa, and elsewhere, do not mention race. They mention traffic. They are written in the language of public safety. But their targeting is precise: they were introduced in direct legislative response to the tactic of road blockades used by BLM protesters and climate activists. Just as the vagrancy statutes of the Jim Crow era were race-neutral on their face and racially operative in their application, these laws suppress specific political content while maintaining the fiction of neutral enforcement.

The “outside agitator” trope has survived the same translation. Where 1960s officials blamed “paid communist agitators” for local unrest, today’s MAGA rhetoric attributes spontaneous protest to “Soros-funded operatives.” The function is identical: to deny that the people protesting have genuine grievances, to delegitimize the movement by severing its claimed connection to a real constituency, and to relocate the source of disruption from the political system to a shadowy external actor. Once protesters are reframed as mercenaries rather than citizens, the content of their protest can be safely ignored.

Pathologizing Symbolic Speech

The most revealing test of the MAGA protest standard is not how it responds to disruptive protest but how it responds to protest specifically designed not to be disruptive. The treatment of purely symbolic acts—flag burning and the kneeling gesture popularized by Colin Kaepernick—exposes the goalpost’s location with unusual clarity.

Flag Burning

Flag burning is constitutionally protected political speech. The Supreme Court established this twice—in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990)—with majorities that included both conservative and liberal justices. Despite this settled legal history, Donald Trump called in 2016 for flag burners to face jail time and the revocation of their citizenship. He raised the issue again after his 2016 election victory in a Truth Social post. These statements are meant to communicate that the legal protection of an act does not confer its political legitimacy, and that a movement with sufficient power may yet still revisit that protection later. The flag is not a legal object. It is a loyalty and values-based object. Burning it is not a crime, but it is considered heresy by some. And heresy, in this framework, requires a different kind of response than ordinary lawbreaking.

Kneeling During the Anthem

The kneeling controversy is even more instructive because the gesture was designed with extraordinary care to be as inoffensive as possible. Kaepernick adopted it specifically on the advice of a veteran, Nate Boyer, who suggested kneeling rather than sitting as a gesture of respect for military service while still signaling dissent. The protest was silent, non-disruptive, and conducted on private property during private employment. It was, by any procedural standard, the ideal form of peaceful protest—the same kind of unobstructive acts the MAGA Movement rhetorically professes to prefer.

Trump’s 2017 response was to call protesting players “sons of bitches” and publicly demand their termination. The NFL, under significant political and commercial pressure, subsequently imposed rules penalizing on-field protest. The goalpost had moved again: not from violent to nonviolent, but from offensive to inoffensive. The objection was no longer to the method but to the message—specifically, to the implicit claim that Black Americans face systemic mistreatment by institutions the movement views as legitimate and benign.

The standard revealed itself: peaceful protest is acceptable if it protests nothing that matters to the MAGA Movement.

Internalized Political Skepticism and the January 6th Paradox

The most glaring contradiction in the MAGA protest standard is the treatment of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. To help better understand this, I’ve developed an analytical framework in my series “Naming the Democratic Breakdown” centered around my original political science term: Internalized Political Skepticism (IPS).

IPS describes a durable, identity-based disposition of distrust toward democratic institutions—one that persists not because evidence supports it but because it has become constitutive of political identity. Once political skepticism of democratic institutions becomes internalized, factual refutation does not disconfirm beliefs; it reinforces them. An institution that insists it is legitimate is, to the high-IPS individual, simply an institution with something to hide. This is not irrationality. It is a coherent epistemic system with its own internal logic, organized around two interlocking assumptions developed in my research.

The first is the opposition-dominance assumption: the belief that leaders who aggressively confront perceived institutional corruption possess greater legitimacy than those who operate within democratic institutions they view as captured by political opponents. Under this assumption, deference to institutions is not civic virtue—it is complicity. The willingness to reject official outcomes matters more than any evidence supporting them. January 6th, in this framework, was not a riot. It was a performative act of defiance: a declaration that the movement would not be bound by the outcomes of a system it had already determined to be rigged.

The second is the corruption-immunity shield: the rationalization of misconduct by preferred leaders as either a fabrication by hostile institutions or a necessary moral compromise required to fight a corrupt system. This mechanism explains why the same individuals who demanded maximum sentences for Black Lives Matter protesters—many of whom were charged with misdemeanors—simultaneously advocated for the pardon of rioters convicted of assaulting police officers with flagpoles. The action is not being evaluated on its merits. It is being evaluated on its political valence. Violence in the service of the movement is not violence. It is resistance. Together, these assumptions create a world in which breaking windows at the Capitol can feel morally cleaner than silently kneeling during the anthem—because the former defies a corrupt system while the latter questions a sacred institution the movement believes it must defend.

Qualitative research at January 6th vigils and in interviews with participants and supporters documents this reframing with remarkable consistency. Core participants described themselves not as rioters but as “martyr[s]” and “patriots” acting against a “Deep State.” Sentencing statements from convicted rioters frequently expressed not remorse but grievance—the language of people who believed they had been prosecuted for righteousness. Multiple defendants invoked the language of the American Revolution. Several compared themselves to Rosa Parks. The corruption-immunity shield was not a talking point provided to them by political elites. It was a worldview they had internalized, and it was fully operative on the day they entered the building.

The paradox dissolves once IPS is applied. The same movement that labels a silent kneel an act of desecration and a road blockade an act of insurrection views the storming of the legislative branch of the federal government as a legitimate, even heroic, act of political expression. The distinction is not between peaceful and violent. It is between threatening the movement’s interests and defending them. This is what the goalpost actually measures.

The Hidden Hierarchy: Whose Rights the Framework Counts

The conflict over what counts as “peaceful” protest is not just about tactics or even institutions. It is also about which rights, and whose rights, are treated as weighty enough to justify coercion or even violence. Across ideologies, there is a rough consensus that some level of force is acceptable when “fundamental” rights are under assault. But movements differ sharply over which rights meet that threshold—and which people are imagined as their rightful bearers.

For the MAGA movement, policies such as mass deportations are frequently framed as necessary to defend the civil rights and security of American citizens: the right not to compete with unauthorized workers, the right to safety from allegedly criminal outsiders, and the sovereignty right of a nation to determine the terms of its own membership. In practice, however, those same policies routinely trample the human rights of immigrants and asylum seekers who lack equivalent civil protections inside the United States. From within the movement, using state power aggressively against those immigrants does not feel like “violence” so much as self-defense. The asymmetry is not incidental to the policy. It is its precondition.

This rights hierarchy feeds directly into the protest double standard. Road blockades against police brutality or fossil fuel extraction are seen as illegitimate not only because they are inconvenient, but because they assert a vision of rights—Black communities’ rights against state violence, future generations’ rights against climate catastrophe—that the movement does not prioritize. What emerges is a standard of content-dependent legitimacy (CDL): political acts are judged primarily by the substance of the rights they invoke and the identities of those claiming them, rather than by whether they are peaceful or lawful in any procedural sense.

With CDL, a physical breach of the Capitol undertaken to “defend” the allegedly violated rights of “real Americans” can be experienced as justified, even sacramental. Both sides believe they are defending fundamental rights, but the ones that they espouse to prioritize, civil rights or human rights, can and often do come into conflict with one another.

The Functional Purpose of the Double Standard

It is tempting to analyze the MAGA protest double standard as mere hypocrisy—an inconsistency that, once exposed, embarrasses its adherents. This misreads its function. The double standard is not an accident. It is an unshameable political tool, and it works.

Democratic systems depend on a shared understanding that political opposition can be expressed without penalty—that dissent is legitimate by definition, regardless of its content, provided it operates within certain procedural limits. The MAGA protest framework systematically dismantles this understanding by making legitimacy content-dependent rather than process-dependent. Protest is not legitimate because it is peaceful. It is legitimate only if it protests things the movement finds acceptable. Consequently, peaceful dissent directed at those institutions is stripped of its status as protest and recoded as disorder, ingratitude, or disloyalty.

MAGA’s legislative record reinforces this reading. Anti-protest laws targeting road blockades, pipeline protests, and critical infrastructure demonstrations are not neutral tools for enforcing public order. Their passage was coordinated, in many cases, by ALEC-affiliated organizations with ties to fossil fuel industries and private prison corporations. The legal apparatus of protest suppression was built by the same coalition that benefits from preventing the protests it suppresses. This is not a conspiracy. It is a straightforward alignment of political and economic interests, operating through legislative channels—which is to say, operating through the system, while simultaneously denouncing others for failing to do the same.

The asymmetric losers’ consent data quantifies the downstream effect. When roughly 38% of one party’s voters trust the vote count while 75% of the other party’s voters do so, the two sides are no longer operating within a shared political reality. Losers’ consent—the willingness of the losing side to accept electoral outcomes and work within the system until the next election—is foundational to the democratic social contract. IPS predicts that once this consent collapses on one side and does not recover, the legitimacy standards applied to political actions within existing institutions will also diverge.

Conclusion: Naming What the Goalpost Is Actually Measuring

The MAGA movement’s approach to protest does not merely reflect a double standard. It reflects a coherent, if rarely articulated, theory of political legitimacy—one in which the propriety of an act is determined not by its method but by the content of the rights it claims to defend and the identities of those asserting them. In this framework, “peaceful” is not a neutral description. It is a partisan label attached to in‑group resistance and stripped from out‑group dissent.

This matters because the democratic bargain does not function on those terms. The right to dissent is valuable precisely because it does not depend on the approval of those being dissented against. A standard of “acceptable protest” that expands to accommodate political violence when the aggression is performed by the right people, then contracts to exclude peaceful dissent performed by the wrong people, is not a standard at all. It is a mechanism for control—and a mechanism for enforcing a hierarchy of whose claims to rights are allowed to register as legitimate grievances rather than disorder.

Internalized political skepticism helps explain why this content-dependent legitimacy regime is so durable. Supporters who have internalized distrust toward democratic institutions do not experience the double standard as a contradiction—they experience it as justice. The system is corrupt. Their side is fighting it. Fighting a corrupt system looks different from submitting to it. The goalpost has not moved. It was never where their critics thought it was. What external observers interpret as hypocrisy is internally processed as consistency within a moral universe where institutional opposition is itself evidence of virtue.

Protecting democratic legitimacy in this environment requires something harder than exposing the inconsistency. Inconsistency, for high-IPS populations, is not damning. It is expected of a movement fighting against the rules of a rigged game. What is required instead is a defense of process itself as a value independent of outcome—the argument that the rules governing how we contest power matter more than whether we win or lose any particular contest, and that no group’s preferred catalog of rights authorizes abandoning those rules wholesale. That argument is increasingly difficult to make in a political environment where one side has concluded that the contests themselves are fraudulent.

Analyzing the dynamic is not sufficient. But it is necessary. A double standard that goes unnamed masquerades as principle. Once named, its internal logic made explicit, its hierarchy of rights surfaced, and its historical lineage traced, it can be recognized for what it is: not a theory of peaceful protest, but a theory of whose protest—and whose claims to rights—is permitted to mean anything at all.

Both sides believe they are defending fundamental rights. But the civil rights they prioritize for citizens can and often do conflict with the human rights of outsiders, and content-dependent legitimacy resolves that conflict in favor of the in-group.

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References

American National Election Studies (ANES). 2020; 2024. ANES Time-Series Studies. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan and Stanford University.

Anderson, Christopher J., André Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Ola Listhaug. 2005. Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Druckman, James N., et al. 2013. “Competing Political Persuasion Experiments over Time and Channels.” American Journal of Political Science 57 (2): 449–59.

Hasen, Richard L. 2022. “Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections.” Harvard Law Review Forum 135: 265–83.

Kunda, Ziva. 1990. “The Case for Motivated Reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin 108 (3): 480–98.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.

Norris, Pippa. 2014. Why Electoral Integrity Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taber, Charles S., and Milton Lodge. 2006. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 755–69.

U.S. Department of Justice. 2023. January 6th Investigation: Status Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

Uscinski, Joseph E., and Joseph M. Parent. 2014. American Conspiracy Theories. New York: Oxford University Press.

Weyland, Kurt. 2009. “Populism and the Politics of Resentment.” Penn State International Affairs Review 8 (1): 19–27.

Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

February 23, 2026

Three Ways Trump Broke the Rules

President Donald J. Trump's fixation on acquiring Greenland is more than a real estate gambit or geopolitical miscalculation. It is a dangerous template for executive overreach — one that will haunt the Republican Party for decades after Trump leaves office. While his recent pivot to a negotiated "framework" with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has temporarily quieted tensions, the legal and political precedents his pursuit established carry consequences he will never be forced to reckon with personally. Trump is nearly 80 years old and halfway through his final term.

But the GOP is everlasting. Therein lies the rub.

Trump’s Greenland overtures have exposed three critical vulnerabilities that will outlast his presidency.

1. The first is strategic: the NATO alliance — a Republican foreign policy cornerstone since its founding — has been destabilized by credible doubt about America’s commitment to Article 5, its collective defense guarantee.

2. The second is constitutional: executive powers expanded under Trump do not expire with him, and a future Democratic president will inherit every precedent his administration normalized.

3. The third is institutional: the Republican Party has demonstrated that it can articulate limits on its own leader’s behavior, but it cannot enforce them — even when that leader subverts widely popular and longstanding GOP doctrine.

The Ratchet Republicans Built

Trump's Greenland strategy rested on three forms of executive overreach that together challenge the separation of powers. The first was the implicit threat of military action against Denmark. That threat violated Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which courts have long held to be part of the "supreme Law of the Land" under Article VI of the Constitution — meaning any attack on Greenland would, by definition, constitute an attack on a NATO ally. Had Trump followed through on his repeated flirtations with invasion, he would have shattered the legal and moral authority anchoring eight decades of American foreign policy.

The second overreach involved weaponizing emergency economic powers. Trump threatened tariffs of 10 percent on eight European countries, escalating to 25 percent by June 1, unless Denmark agreed to sell Greenland — justifying the coercion through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 statute designed to address genuine national security crises, not territorial acquisitions.

Under established international law, using economic coercion to acquire another country’s territory is categorically forbidden. The Supreme Court settled the underlying legal question in February 2026, ruling 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs — with two of Trump’s own appointees, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, joining the majority. That decision has profound implications for the Greenland threats specifically, stripping the administration of its primary legal instrument for economic coercion.

Trump’s third overreach is the most constitutionally audacious: attempting to acquire foreign territory by executive agreement rather than through an Article II treaty ratified by a two-thirds Senate supermajority. Every major U.S. territorial acquisition — from the Louisiana Purchase to Alaska to the Danish West Indies — followed that treaty path. If a Republican president can shrug off that constitutional requirement to grab land today, a future Democratic president will shrug off these and other treaty constraints tomorrow.

You cannot turn the treaty and war powers of the American Executive Branch into a ratchet that only ever screws one direction.

Trumps Fracturing of the GOP over Greenland

The Greenland episode revealed that significant portions of the GOP retain institutional commitments that transcend loyalty to Trump. Within days of the president’s initial statements, prominent Republicans nationwide broke ranks in striking terms.

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina declared that military action would be an “unprecedented act of strategic self-harm” benefiting “Putin, Xi, and other adversaries” intent on dividing NATO. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called it an “especially catastrophic act of strategic self-harm” that risked “incinerating” the alliance. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska countered that “Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset.” Representatives Blake Moore of Utah and Mike Turner of Ohio issued similar warnings about a potential NATO “civil war,” while retiring Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska went furthest of all, suggesting that unauthorized military action could warrant impeachment — even with GOP backing.

These are not isolated voices. But their dissent illuminates a troubling truth: even confronted with a constitutional crisis, the Republican Party cannot impose concrete consequences when its leader subverts the party’s own agenda. No war powers resolution was filed before Trump stepped back. The party demonstrated that it can articulate limits. It has not shown it can enforce them.

The American Public Sees What Republicans Won’t Say

The polling on Trump’s Greenland policy has been consistent and unsparing — even among Republicans. A CNN/SSRS poll found that 75 percent of Americans oppose U.S. attempts to take control of Greenland, including majorities of self-identified Republicans. A Reuters/Ipsos survey found that only 17 percent approve of Trump’s acquisition efforts, while nearly half disapprove outright. Fewer than one in ten Americans support using military force to seize a NATO ally’s territory. Navigator Research finds that Americans across party lines view the fixation as a distraction from kitchen-table concerns and a violation of foundational U.S. values.

What voters grasp, and what Republican leaders are reluctant to say aloud, is that the United States already has everything it needs from Greenland. The 1951 defense agreement and its 2004 amendment reaffirm Danish sovereignty, incorporate Greenland’s self-governance, and guarantee U.S. access to key military facilities — all without owning a square mile of territory or risking a single American life.

That political reality will arrive at the ballot box in November 2026. Republican candidates in competitive districts cannot campaign on defending Trump’s unilateral Greenland ambitions. Senators facing reelection in swing states cannot explain why their president’s fixation on an allied territory justified threatening NATO’s cohesion. The party’s problem is not that Trump appears to have abandoned the pursuit. It is that the pursuit itself — conducted so publicly and so aggressively — has rebranded the GOP as willing to discard institutional rules and treat democratic allies as real estate.

Trump is a capable salesman. His pitch for Greenland, to Denmark, to NATO, and to the American public, has been a failure by any measure he would recognize.

The Precedent That Haunts Traditional Conservatism

Here is the trap that should alarm conservatives as much as liberals: if Trump can unilaterally declare a national security emergency to acquire Greenland, what prevents a future Democratic president from doing the same?

Consider a scenario that grows more plausible by the month. A Democratic president wins in 2028 and, drawing on executive powers expanded by Trump and affirmed by justices Trump himself appointed, declares an international climate emergency and moves to nationalize fossil-fuel infrastructure. Or determines that dependence on OPEC nations poses a sufficient national security threat to justify 50 percent tariffs — defending, in the administration’s framing, America’s economic independence, environmental health, and clean-energy sector from foreign extraction.

The legal arguments a future Democratic administration could plausibly advance are not far-fetched. A determined solicitor general could argue that the president cannot allow China and Europe to outpace the United States in clean energy manufacturing — an industry now essential to economic independence and national security. Or that the president cannot stand by while unallied petrostate nations, such as several notable OPEC memberstates, extract American wealth, undermine the domestic clean-energy sector, and compromise public health. These are not yet Democratic policy positions. But every expansion of executive authority Trump normalizes makes them more legally viable for whoever sits in the Oval Office next.

Our constitutional structure was designed precisely to prevent this kind of executive acceleration. Treaty ratification requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority. Military action requires congressional authorization. Those guardrails exist because the founders understood that powers granted to one president are inherited by all of them. Trump’s willingness to bypass those constraints, and his party’s demonstrated inability to stop him, has quietly eroded the barriers Republicans will one day desperately want restored.

The stakes extend beyond procedural machinery. As the Brown Undergraduate Law Review noted, Trump’s expansion of executive power — compounded by the Supreme Court’s broad grant of presidential immunity in Trump v. United States(2024) — has repositioned the presidency as a vehicle for implementing any agenda a sitting president deems necessary, regardless of constitutional boundaries. When that presidency passes to a Democrat, Republicans will inherit every precedent they declined to challenge.

The Ally Problem

Trump’s second instinct after being rebuffed was to threaten tariffs on Denmark, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany for supporting Greenland’s democratic autonomy. That weaponization of trade policy against treaty allies — now ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump — quickly revealed the price of abandoning institutional rules. Traditional alliances rest on a shared assumption that the rules will be followed even when leaders change. That assumption is now compromised in ways that will not be easily repaired.

Former White House officials and diplomats have warned that the Greenland episode is accelerating a broader erosion of American credibility. Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, framed the stakes plainly on NPR: when the United States walks away from commitments to allies, it destroys the trust underpinning an international order that America spent eight decades building. Smaller nations are already looking toward other great powers for security guarantees, and the dollar’s reserve-currency status — which depends on confidence in American commitments — faces quiet but compounding pressure.

The consequences are already visible. The European Union froze a tentative trade agreement with the United States partly because Trump’s threats made further economic concessions politically untenable for European lawmakers. Germany and France have explored invoking the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument against the United States — a mechanism originally designed to defend Europe against Chinese economic aggression, now being considered against America.

The Question Republicans Must Answer

Trump has claimed victory, announcing a “framework” with NATO that purportedly permits greater U.S. military presence in Greenland. But the details remain opaque, Greenland’s Prime Minister appears not to have been consulted, and Greenlandic and Danish voters were given no voice in the matter. The agreement appears to formalize arrangements already guaranteed by the 1951 defense treaty — repackaged as a modern deal to spare Trump the appearance of political defeat.

This points to the final Republican vulnerability, and perhaps the most durable one: the party has lost the ability to reliably distinguish between bluster and genuine danger, between negotiation and constitutional violation. In place of that judgment, it has substituted blanket deference to Trump’s presumed negotiating instincts — applied uniformly across policies regardless of their complexity, legality, or consequences for the country. That is not a governing philosophy. It is an abdication of one.

The credibility gap that deference has created will burden Republican candidates in every election cycle until the party can offer voters a credible promise to enforce constitutional limits on executive power — a promise made nearly impossible by Trump’s well-documented willingness to exact political retribution against Republicans for even temporary dissent.

The Greenland episode will not be Trump’s last assault on constitutional guardrails. It is, however, the clearest recent demonstration that the Republican Party lacks both the inclination and the institutional courage to defend the conservative principles it spent decades claiming as its own.

Their failure will reverberate with voters for generations.

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References

Agiesta, Jennifer, and Ariel Edwards-Levy. “75% of Americans Oppose US Attempting to Take Control of Greenland, CNN Poll Finds.” CNN Politics, 15 Jan. 2026, www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/politics/greenland-cnn-poll.

Colangelo, Anthony J. “Constitutional Limits on Extraterritorial Jurisdiction: Terrorism and the Intersection of National and International Law.” Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, 2007, pp. 121–201.

Daalder, Ivo H., et al. “The Greenland Episode Must Be a Lesson for Europe and NATO.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 22 Jan. 2026, carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/01/greenland-trump-europe-nato-fallout-davos.

Emanuel, Rahm. Interview with Steve Inskeep. Up First, NPR, 22 Jan. 2026, www.npr.org/2026/01/22/nx-s1-5685069/rahm-emanuel-on-2026-midterms-and-politics-in-the-trump-era.

Fine, Randy. “Congressman Fine Introduces Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act to Strengthen U.S. National Security and Put Our Adversaries on Notice.” U.S. House of Representatives, 12 Jan. 2026, fine.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=118.

Gomez, Jimmy. “Rep. Jimmy Gomez Introduces Bill to Block Any U.S. Effort to Invade or Annex Greenland.” U.S. House of Representatives, 12 Jan. 2026, gomez.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=5905.

Gould, Joe. “Why the US Can’t Legally Target Greenland Over Tariff Disputes.” Defense News, 22 Jan. 2026.

Inuit Circumpolar Council. “Alaskan Inuit Stand United in Support of Greenland.” Press release, 20 Jan. 2026, iitc.org/alaskan-inuit-stand-united-in-support-of-greenland/.

Ipsos. “Americans Oppose Using Military Force to Take Possession of Greenland.” Ipsos, 14 Jan. 2026, www.ipsos.com/en-us/americans-oppose-using-military-force-take-possession-greenland. [Preferred primary source over the Reuters wire report.]

Jain, Navyaa, and Maia Eng. “Unchecked and Unchallenged: Trump’s Expansion of Executive Power.” Brown Undergraduate Law Review, 30 Mar. 2025, www.brownulr.org/blogposts/unchecked-and-unchallenged-trumps-expansion-of-executive-power.

Jensen, Mikkel Barr. “Greenland and US Annexation Threats: Mapping the Legal Questions.” Verfassungsblog, 12 Jan. 2026, verfassungsblog.de/greenland-and-us-annexation-threats/.

Kaplan, Fred. “Trump’s Greenland Obsession Could Destroy NATO.” Slate, 15 Jan. 2026.

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026). Decided 20 Feb. 2026. [This is the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It is referenced in the body of your article but was missing from the original reference list. Full opinion available at supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf.]

Lowell, Michael. “Can Trump Legally Apply Tariffs on US Allies Over Greenland?” Peterson Institute for International Economics, 20 Jan. 2026, piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/can-trump-legally-apply-tariffs-us-allies-over-greenland.

McConnell, Mitch. Floor Speech on Greenland. U.S. Senate, 8 Jan. 2026.

Navigator Research. “Americans Don’t Want Greenland, They Just Want Lower Costs.” Navigator Research, 15 Jan. 2026, navigatorresearch.org/americans-dont-want-greenland-they-just-want-lower-costs/.

O’Hanlon, Michael. “Trump Can’t Annex Greenland Without Congress.” Washington Post, 21 Jan. 2026, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/21/trump-greenland-annex-congress/.

Reuters/Ipsos. “Just One in Five Americans Support Trump’s Efforts to Acquire Greenland.” Reuters, 14 Jan. 2026, reuters.com/world/europe/just-one-five-americans-support-trumps-efforts-acquire-greenland-reutersipsos-2026-01-14/.

CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies). “Greenland, Rare Earths, and Arctic Security.” CSIS Brief, 7 Jan. 2026, www.csis.org/analysis/greenland-rare-earths-and-arctic-security.

The Atlantic. “The Rumbles Within Trump’s GOP.” The Atlantic, 23 Jan. 2026, theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/01/trump-gop-greenland-pushback/685740/.

The Fulcrum. “Trump, Greenland, and the Alarming Silence in Congress.” The Fulcrum, 20 Jan. 2026, thefulcrum.us/ethics-leadership/trump-greenland-proposal.

The Hill. “What Trump’s Risking in the Row Over Greenland.” The Hill, 26 Jan. 2026, thehill.com/opinion/international/5703677-trump-greenland-geopolitical-impact/.

The New York Times. “Some Republicans Begin to Echo Trump’s Case to Acquire Greenland.” The New York Times, 20 Jan. 2026, nytimes.com/2026/01/20/us/politics/republicans-trump-greenland.html.

The Washington Post. “Republicans Push Back on White House Military Threat Toward Greenland.” Washington Post, 8 Jan. 2026, washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/01/08/republicans-trump-greenland/.

TIME. “Republicans Break Ranks With Trump Over Greenland Threats.” TIME, 6 Jan. 2026, time.com/7344316/republicans-break-ranks-with-trump-over-greenland-annexation-threat/.

Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___, 144 S. Ct. 2312 (2024).

U.S. Congressional Research Service. “Greenland: U.S. Policy and Background.” CRS Insight IN12643, Jan. 2026, congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN12643/IN12643.1.pdf.

U.S. Department of State. Agreement Between the United States and Denmark Regarding Greenland, 2004, state.gov.

USA Today. “With Trump-NATO Deal, Is Republicans’ Greenland Headache Over?” USA Today, 25 Jan. 2026, usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/01/25/trump-greenland-republicans-nato-deal-fallout/88316464007/.

Weber, Manfred. Statement on EU-US Trade Deal and Greenland. European People’s Party, 20 Jan. 2026.

February 21, 2026

A Disciplined Democratic Dissent

On April 21, 2026, Virginia voters will likely consider House Joint Resolution 4, a constitutional amendment that would allow the Democratic-controlled General Assembly to redraw the state’s congressional districts mid-decade. This move would bypass the traditional post-census cycle, arriving just in time to reshape the 2026 midterm elections. Although a lower court recently struck the measure down as unconstitutional, the state’s high court will soon decide if this partisan maneuver reaches the ballot.

I am a registered Democrat. I hold a master’s degree in comparative politics from American University. I grew up in California, where most of my immediate family — all registered Republicans — still live. I have family in Texas and Oklahoma, two of the most aggressively gerrymandered states in the country, and I currently reside in Virginia (Princeton Gerrymandering Project, 2021; Texas Tribune, 2025). I understand the political stakes of this ballot measure better than most.

I will be voting no.

What the Party are Asking Democrats to Discard

In 2020, Virginia voters approved Amendment 1, a bipartisan constitutional measure establishing a 16-member redistricting commission — composed equally of legislators and citizen members — to draw the state’s congressional and legislative maps. It was a genuine reform victory, the kind of hard-won institutional progress the anti-gerrymandering movement has spent decades fighting for (Levitt, 2026).

The commission failed to reach its required supermajority in its first cycle, and so the Virginia Supreme Court, using bipartisan special masters, drew the maps that govern our congressional districts today. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which generates roughly one million simulated district maps per state as a fairness baseline, graded the resulting congressional map an “A” in partisan fairness, describing it as “quite balanced,” with competitive outcomes possible for either party (Princeton Gerrymandering Project, 2021). That is the same hard-won map Virginia Democrats are now likely to throw away.

Today, Virginia is represented in the House of Representatives by six Democrats and five Republicans, who were elected to represent Virginia’s 6,386,759 registered voters. Based on modeled data, this population is estimated to include approximately 1.8 million Republicans and 3.1 million Democrats.

Translating that into percentages, this means Democrats currently comprise about 48.5% of the state’s voting population, yet their voting bloc is represented by 54.5%of the state’s congressional seats. Meanwhile, Republican voters comprise roughly 28.2% of Virginia’s voting population, and their voting bloc holds 45.5% of the state’s congressional seats. While these numbers suggest a tilt toward the major parties, when accounting for the state’s 1.1 million independent and unaffiliated voters (roughly 17.2%), the current 6-5 split emerges as a remarkably balanced example of a well-functioning representative democratic system.

HJ 4 would amend the Virginia Constitution to permit the legislature to discard those maps and draw new ones before 2026 based on partisan advantage. Virginia Democrats are now asking voters to dismantle the same democratic institution they only just recently helped strengthen.

The Function of Voting Districts

Lost in this debate is a question that sounds obvious but carries enormous weight: what is a congressional district’s actual purpose?

The answer is not a partisan question; it is a functional one.

Congressional districts exist to group people who already share a world: common infrastructure, geography, economies, and civic institutions. These are realized through a shared collective stake felt in the same local victories and losses. This shared reality ensures that voters’ seats in the national legislature are held by people who genuinely understands and advocates for their communities' specific needs.

The phrase “communities of interest” is not mere policy jargon to be discarded by politicians or the judiciary. It is the operational definition of fair representation in a functioning democracy.

The Brennan Center for Justice describes gerrymandering’s two core techniques as “cracking” (splitting communities of voters across multiple districts so they are too small to elect their preferred candidates anywhere) and “packing” (concentrating those same voters into as few districts as possible so their political power is nullified everywhere else). Both techniques accomplish the same fundamental thing: they fracture the representative relationship between a member of Congress and the people in the communities they are supposed to serve (Brennan Center, 2025). American voters in New Orleans, Oklahoma City, rural Maryland, and every major city across Texas should not be lumped into districts with communities hours away—whose lives rarely intersect with theirs—simply because the dominant political party in the state finds it mathematically preferable.

I believe partisan gerrymandering is, at its core, a human rights issue.

Democracy is not merely a constitutional right: it is a human right. Fair representation is the operational foundation of that right. When we gerrymander congressional districts, we are not bending the rules of a political game. We are depriving Americans of their most fundamental democratic function: the right to be governed by someone who genuinely represents their community.

As President Barack Obama said at his State of the Union address in 2016:

“We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around.”

You Don’t Have to Share a Perspective to Share a Government

I grew up a Republican in Los Angeles, California—heavily shaping my early political identity. That identity reached a breaking point in 2015 when Donald Trump won the Republican presidential primary.

I left the party that year and registered as an independent because I could not reconcile a glaring paradox: that a party claiming to value ethics, moderation, and honesty had rallied behind a man who infinitesimally exceeded the very qualities I had been raised to detest in the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations. For me, leaving wasn’t merely a political shift, it was an act of intellectual consistency in the face of a Republican Party that had abandoned its prophesed standards.

By President Trump’s first year in office in 2017, I had registered as a Democrat. My academic training in comparative politics at American University, combined with a life spent crossing political, geographic, and cultural lines, has blessed me with an increasingly rare capability in American politics: the genuine ability to understand where people on both sides are coming from, because I have studied and lived as both of them.

I have studied and experienced the full spectrum of echo chambers, propaganda, and false sense of community that has defined American political life over the last two decades. That is why I would never, in good conscience, deprive my fellow Americans of their democratic rights to benefit myself politically — no matter the cause.

The California Republicans whose congressional representation Governor Gavin Newsom just diluted through his own state’s redistricting push? Some of them were me. Looking back, I may have been uninformed, but I was no less deserving of a voice. As an adult exercising the freedom to make honest mistakes while finding a political identity, my enfranchisement should not have been circumvented in the process.

To support diluting their representation now, simply because I have changed my party, would be the greatest political hypocrisy of my life.

“Trump Started it,” is a Lame Excuse for Disenfranchsement

I want to be direct about the opposing argument, because it deserves honest engagement. President Trump triggered this national crisis by lobbying Texas and other Republican-controlled states to conduct mid-decade redistricting, a highly irregular partisan maneuver designed to maximize Republican House gains before the 2026 midterms (Brennan Center, 2025). The Brennan Center estimates that maps used in the 2024 election already produced a net 16 fewer Democratic or Democratic-leaning districts than a fair baseline would have yielded (Brennan Center, 2025).

Governors like Newsom framed their response as reluctant self-defense, arguing they could not “unilaterally disarm” while the opposing political party redrew national electroal maps (CalMatters, 2025). That framing is not wholly irrational. I even agree with the underlying premise: if Republicans shift the House far enough through gerrymandering before 2026 and Democrats do not respond in-kind, Republicans may retain their congressional majority and block any serious federal oversight of the Trump administration.

I don’t want that any more than my fellow Democrats do.

But I refuse to sacrifice my love for democracy to save her. Especially when the math hardly justifies it in practice. Even if Democrats gerrymander their way to a House majority in 2026—defying even steeper odds to flip a Senate map structurally weighted against their incumbents—they would remain far from instiutionwide power. Even in the realistically best case electoral scenerio for Democrats, they’d still run headfirst into the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster theshold, as well as President Trump’s veto power. Overriding that veto requires a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers, a hurdle that renders the partisan gains of a redrawn map largely symbolic in a legislative sense.

When measured against the enduring structural guardrails of our federal system, the actual policy upside of a gerrymandered majority is far more limited than advertised. As recent history should reminds us, no investigation’s outcome is guaranteed simply by gaining committee control—regardless of how obvious a case’s credibility may seem to its supporters. Sacrificing institutional integrity for the sake of partisan congressional oversight, especially when independent media and opposition scrutiny already provide a baseline of accountability, is a gamble with overpromised returns.

Meanwhile, the costs are concrete and lasting: the weakening of independent redistricting commissions that Democratic Party-led reformers spent decades building, the permanent normalization of mid-decade redistricting as a partisan weapon, and the erosion of the very public trust that future reform depends on. A YouGov survey conducted in August 2025 found that 69% of Americans believe partisan district-drawing should be illegal, and 75% called it a major problem—up from 66% just three years earlier (Missouri Independent, 2025). That is the coalition that wins the long game. Gerrymandering in California, Virginia, Maryland and beyond throws it away.

Governors Who Forgot For Whom They Govern

California Governor Gavin Newsom, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott were elected to faithfully govern their states, yet all have seemingly subordinated the democratic rights of their own constituents to their party’s national agenda. Abbott’s legislature redrew maps designed to maximize Republican congressional gains. Newsom and Spanberger’s bypass their respective independent redistricting commissions through a statewide ballot measure. Ultimatlety asking their Democratic supporters to dismantle the same electoral protections we’ve spent generations building (CalMatters, 2025).

These governors’ politics and the ways they lobbied for and enacted gerrymandering legislatively are by no means equivalent. But their abdication of duty to the citizens under their jurisdiction, the people they swore to faithfully represent, is something I measure by an equal standard.

The clearest repudiation of this logic came not from Democrats, but from Republican state senators in Indiana. In December 2025, the Indiana Senate voted 31-19, with 21 Republicans joining all 10 Democrats, to reject Trump’s redistricting demands (Indiana Capital Chronicle, 2025). Republican state Sen. Spencer Deery said his opposition was driven by conservative principles and that he would fight federal bullying of state government “with my last breath.” If Republican state lawmakers in a Trump-dominated state can draw that line against their own national party, Virginia Democrats can draw it too.

Don’t Burn the Map to Warm the Party

Consider the electrol case espoused by suporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin for a moment. Not as a foreign policy abstraction, but as an illustration of something that should make every American uncomfortable.

Putin’s grip on Russia does not depend entirely on stuffing ballot boxes. It depends on something more insidious: curating the entire system so thoroughly that the outcome is effectively decided before anyone votes. A May 2024 survey by the Levada Center, Russia’s most internationally respected independent polling organization, found that Putin commanded durable majority support in reported presidential vote choices even without overt fraud (Levada Center, 2024a; Levada Center, 2024b). A foreign policy analyst put it plainly in March 2024: “Putin has reason to hope he will win the election without fraud” — the system had simply been built to produce that result (Liik, 2024).

I have heard this perspective echoed by Russian friends in the past: a shared belief that Russian elections are corrupt—yet still—that Putin and his party would likely retain power even if they weren’t. That combination—acknowledged corruption alongside genuine, if manipulated, popularity—is precisely what reinforces such a seemingly hopeless system. Political scientist Rustam Galyamov, writing in the Journal of Democracy, argues that the Kremlin holds elections not because they mean anything, but because the appearance of a legitimate vote manufactures a social consent that raw power alone never could (Galyamov, 2024).

Gerrymandering works by exactly the same logic. You still vote. Your ballot is still counted. But the map, drawn with surgical computer precision by the politicians in power, have already determined how your vote is allowed to influence their govenrment. The Supreme Court said as much in Rucho v. Common Cause, acknowledging in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles,” then ruling that federal courts could do nothing about it (Brennan Center, 2025). That contradiction should disturb every American who believes their vote is what it says it is.

I’ve spent my adult life moving across the political spectrum: Republican, independent, Democrat, and across the country. What that journey taught me is that America’s democratic strength has never come from winning by any means necessary. It comes from collectively upholding our highest shared values, those of freedom from tyranny, economic independence, strong democratic institutions, and every persons right to the pursuit of happiness.

I left the Republican Party when it could no longer justify its actions to my conscience; I do not intend to leave the Democratic Party over this. Instead, I will vote my conscience this April. I will vote for the communities of Virginia and for the bipartisan institution our citizens built together in 2020. I will vote for the integrity of my current party, the redemption of my former one, and for a straightforward principle that the people should elect their represtatives, not the other way around. In doing so I believe I am honoring my community, my conscience, and my country — even at the short-term cost to my political party.

I will do so with my head held high.

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REFERENCES

Brennan Center for Justice. “Gerrymandering Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, updated Aug. 9, 2025, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained.

CalMatters. “California Republicans React to Newsom’s Redistricting Move.” CalMatters, Aug. 2025, calmatters.org/politics/2025/08/california-republicans-newsom-redistricting-texas/.

Galyamov, Rustam. “Why Does the Kremlin Bother Holding Sham Elections?” Journal of Democracy, 18 Mar. 2024, www.journalofdemocracy.org/elections/why-does-the-kremlin-bother-holding-sham-elections/.

Indiana Capital Chronicle. “Senate Republicans Reject Trump’s Plea for Gerrymandered Maps.” Indiana Capital Chronicle, 11 Dec. 2025, indianacapitalchronicle.com/2025/12/11/senate-republicans-reject-trumps-plea-for-gerrymandered-maps/.

Levada Center. “Election.” Levada Analytical Center, 20 May 2024, www.levada.ru/en/tag/election/.

Levada Center. “Mass Assessments of the Past Presidential Elections.” Levada Analytical Center, 23 May 2024, www.levada.ru/en/2024/05/24/mass-assessments-of-the-past-presidential-elections/.

Levitt, Justin. “Virginia.” All About Redistricting, Loyola Law School, updated Feb. 2026, redistricting.lls.edu/state/virginia/.

Liik, Kadri. “Expert: Putin Has Reason to Hope He Will Win the Election Without Fraud.” ERR News, 10 Mar. 2024, news.err.ee/1609278072/expert-putin-has-reason-to-hope-he-will-win-the-election-without-fraud.

Missouri Independent. “As Democrats Fight Fire with Fire, Gerrymandering Opponents Seek a Path Forward.” Missouri Independent, 22 Aug. 2025, missouriindependent.com/2025/08/22/as-democrats-fight-fire-with-fire-gerrymandering-opponents-seek-a-path-forward/.

Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “Redistricting Report Card.” Princeton Electoral Innovation Lab, gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/.

Texas Tribune. “Texas Congressional Maps: How Gerrymandering Affects Voters.” Texas Tribune, 5 Dec. 2025, texastribune.org/2025/08/21/texas-redistricting-congressional-map-texans/.

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Modern democracies aren’t just shaken when people lose trust in institutions. They’re shaken when people become convinced those institutions already belong to the enemy.

Opposition-dominance assumption is a term for a specific way of seeing the political world: the belief that courts, media, bureaucracies, election administrators and even nominally allied elites are structurally controlled by the opposing political camp. Under this assumption, any institutional action that disadvantages “our side” is presumed to be partisan aggression—not neutral enforcement of rules.

This belief is more than just cynicism. It’s the cognitive defense mechanism of an irrational political belief system altering electoral perceptions of who truly holds institutional power. Once this belief settles in, practicing democracy is no longer merely a function of disputing policy within institutions. It is wielded as a tool to dispute the legitimacy of the institutions themselves.

Defining Opposition-Dominance Assumption

Opposition-dominance assumption (ODA) can be defined as:

A structural belief that key political institutions are captured by the opposing camp, such that any institutional decision harmful to one’s preferred leader or party is presumed to be partisan aggression rather than neutral enforcement.

Several features follow from this definition:

• It is structural, not just episodic: people are not just angry at one ruling or one scandal; they think “they run everything.”

• It is asymmetric: it applies primarily when institutions act against one’s own side, while favorable rulings are treated as rare exceptions or temporary victories—regardless of any evidence of nonpartisan or bipartisan institutional functionality.

• It is pre‑emptive: motivated reasoning is used to deny legitimacy before evidence is evaluated, because the perceived institutions are treated as extensions of the enemy camp, not as referees.

Think of ODA as a lens that converts everything institutions do into hostile acts. When courts, agencies and media all reach the same conclusion, that agreement doesn't signal credibility or scientific consensus. It signals coordination.

The more bodies that align, the more obvious the conspiracy appears.

Intellectual lineage: What ODA Builds On

Research on affective polarization shows that partisans in the United States increasingly like their own side and dislike the other side, treating out‑partisans as socially distant and morally suspect. This is rooted in partisanship as a social identity, not only in policy disagreement.

Lilliana Mason’s work on “mega‑identities” argues that racial, religious and cultural identities have sorted into partisan camps, turning partisanship into an all‑encompassing social identity that structures how people think about themselves and their opponents. Under these conditions, losing to the other party can feel like an existential loss, not a normal alternation of power.

ODA takes this affective and identity-based hostility and gives it a concrete institutional map. If the other side is viewed as dangerous and immoral, it is a short step to believing that the institutions that keep producing “their” victories must be under their control.

The hostile media effect describes the tendency of committed partisans to view the same neutral news coverage as unfairly biased against their own side. Gunther and Schmitt show that when people evaluate mass media with broad reach, they often perceive coverage as slanted against them, even when content is balanced.

ODA generalizes this logic from media content to the institutional field as a whole.

Instead of “this network is biased,” the claim becomes “the whole system is against us.” Where hostile media research focuses on perceptions of coverage, ODA focuses on perceptions of structural capture.

Conspiracy Theories, Deep State Narratives and Institutional Trust

A growing body of work links conspiracy beliefs to declining institutional trust and, in some cases, to support for political violence. Political psychology research finds that:

• Conspiracy beliefs flourish in climates of uncertainty and can significantly depress trust in political institutions.

• Belief in conspiracy theories is positively associated with support for political violence and legitimation of violent protest.

“Deep state” narratives in the U.S. claim that unelected security and bureaucratic elites secretly steer policy, often against the elected government. Historical analysis suggests these narratives are fueled by state secrecy and perceptions of unaccountable power.

From Skepticism to Structural Capture

Many citizens in modern democracies are skeptical of institutions. They may think courts are too political, the media is sensational, or that bureaucrats are unresponsive or incompetent. That is skepticism about performance.

Under ODA, skepticism hardens into a theory of control: these institutions are not just imperfect, they are controlled by the other side. Outcomes become predictable: if a court, agency or media outlet rules against “us,” that confirms enemy dominance. If it rules in favor, that is treated as an exception, a tactical retreat, or that it’s only because the evidence was “overwhelming,” making the specific case “too big to rig.”

The key moves are:

• Preclassification: institutions are mentally sorted into “ours” and “theirs,” with most high‑salience arbiters placed in the “theirs” category.

• Reinterpretation: adverse outcomes prove capture; favorable outcomes functionally prove nothing.

• Insulation: evidence of neutrality is rendered implausible in advance, because neutral actors are presumed impossible in a captured system.

Connection to Internalized Political Skepticism and Corruption Immunity Shield

Opposition-dominance assumption builds on two related dynamics: internalized political skepticism and corruption immunity shield.

Internalized political skepticism describes the absorption of distrust into one’s political identity. It is not episodic doubt about particular decisions, but a durable orientation in which suspicion toward institutions becomes the default interpretive posture. In that framework, citizens assume that democratic procedures are routinely distorted, self-serving, or insincere, even absent case-specific evidence. Opposition-dominance assumption represents a further structuring of that posture. Rather than viewing the system as generally flawed or corrupt, citizens assign control of it to a specific or generalized partisan adversary. Under ODA, that generalized skepticism is selectively activated in cases where institutional outcomes conflict with one’s political preferences, reinforcing the presumption of adversarial control.

Corruption immunity shield operates at the elite and candidate level. It describes the process by which supporters reinterpret credible allegations against a favored leader as evidence of persecution rather than wrongdoing. ODA supplies the structural justification for that reinterpretation. If institutions are presumed captured by the enemy, then investigations, indictments, or adverse rulings cannot be neutral acts of accountability. They are recoded as partisan aggression. The leader is insulated not because evidence is weak, but because the adjudicating institutions are presumed illegitimate.

These three concepts don't just form a progression—they create a self-reinforcing system:

• Internalized political skepticism establishes baseline distrust, making citizens receptive to claims that institutions are fundamentally broken.

• Opposition-dominance assumption channels that skepticism into a specific theory of partisan control, identifying who supposedly owns the broken system.

• Corruption immunity shield then weaponizes both dynamics to protect favored leaders, reframing accountability as persecution.

Each concept strengthens the others: when leaders denounce investigations, it deepens internalized skepticism; when institutional consensus emerges, it confirms opposition dominance; when evidence of misconduct surfaces, the shield converts it into proof of coordinated attack. The result is a closed loop where ordinary democratic correction becomes impossible—not because information is absent, but because the entire accountability infrastructure is presumed illegitimate from the start.

Institutional Consensus as Evidence of Coordination

Under standard democratic theory, convergence across multiple institutions is supposed to reassure the public. When courts, independent agencies, election administrators and mainstream media (aka the fourth estate) all affirm that an election was fair, that consensus is meant to stabilize legitimacy.

Under ODA, convergence can have the opposite effect. If people already assume structural capture, cross‑institutional agreement simply shows that “they” are all in on it. The more authoritative bodies that echo the same message, the more coordinated the perceived “coverup” appears. This dynamic helps explain why fact‑checking, independent audits and multi-pronged legal scrutiny so often fail to persuade hardened skeptics of election or corruption claims.

The problem is not the absence of information—it’s the prior belief about who controls the information system.

The United States After the 2020 Election

Following the 2020 U.S. presidential election, dozens of lawsuits alleging widespread fraud were filed and overwhelmingly rejected by state and federal courts—including by judges appointed by both parties and President Trump himself. Republican state officials in key battlegrounds certified results, and federal agencies described the election as secure. Yet Trump’s belief in a “stolen” election became entrenched in the Republican Party’s base.

This persistence is hard to explain by misinformation alone. But it’s easier to comprehend when presented with evidence that Trump’s constant reinforcement of ODA led many of his supporters to believe that:

• Federal agencies, mainstream media and big tech platforms were already captured by liberal elites.

• Courts and election officials—even Republicans—were compromised, cowardly, incompetent, or “in on it.”

In that context, institutional consensus from authoritative agencies against fraud claims functioned as evidence of coordination, not reliability or independence. Audits of undesirable electoral outcomes showing consistent results becomes further evidence of the complexity of the political oppositions collusion, not as the product of tireless independent professional and academic consensus.

President Trump’s “deep state” rhetoric further reinforced this mindset by casting the national security and federal bureaucratic apparatus as a permanent, unelected adversary embedded within the state. Research repeatedly shows that such conspiracy narratives are associated with lower institutional trust and can, in some contexts, correlate with support for political violence.

Populist Democracies Under Strain

Similar patterns appear in other democracies where populist or authoritarian‑leaning leaders face scrutiny:

• In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro and his allies framed the electoral tribunal and the Supreme Federal Court as politically motivated enemies, especially after he was banned from office and later convicted over J6-style coup‑related charges.

• In Hungary and Turkey, critics and international organizations have documented executive moves to weaken judicial independence and media pluralism, while leaders depict domestic courts and foreign institutions like the EU as parts of a unified “globalist” or “foreign” front against the nation.

In all these cases, supporters are encouraged to view adverse rulings and critical coverage not as the work of independent institutions, but as attacks by a hostile establishment aligned with domestic or foreign enemies.

Left and Right Variants

ODA is not inherently right‑wing. Left‑wing movements can also develop structural capture narratives, for example by asserting that courts, central banks, mainstream media and international institutions are irrevocably captured by capital or imperial interests. One clear example of ODA’s presence in American political-left can be found in their views of the federal judicial system. Many liberal Americans view the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative supermajority as structurally biased toward whites and economic elites. Frequently rendering perceptions of the courts decisions inherently suspect before they're even announced.

Other Historical Echoes of Opposition-Dominance Assumption

ODA‑like assumptions are not new. Earlier eras of democratic crisis show similar patterns of institutional recoding.

• Weimar Germany: Radical actors on both right and left denounced parliamentary parties, courts and the civil service as tools of a corrupt “system” that had betrayed the nation, while the “stab‑in‑the‑back” myth framed defeat in World War I as the result of treachery by internal enemies embedded in state and political institutions.

• McCarthy‑era United States: Anti‑communist campaigns depicted the State Department, universities, Hollywood and even the veterans as riddled with subversives, suggesting systematic enemy penetration of key institutions.

• Cold War and anti‑imperialist contexts: In various Latin American and post‑colonial settings, courts, central banks and media outlets were portrayed by some actors as mere extensions of foreign powers or domestic oligarchies, rendering domestic institutional decisions suspect as products of external control.

In each case, institutional consensus could be framed as collusion among captured bodies, not as a sign that neutral procedures were working.

Why Opposition-Dominance Assumption Matters for Democratic Backsliding

ODA fills a conceptual and empirical gap between broad institutional distrust and formal democratic erosion. Researchers often distinguish between:

• Specific support: satisfaction with particular decisions or performances.

• Diffusive support: general attachment to institutions and regime principles.

ODA adds a third layer: structural capture belief. Here, citizens are not only unhappy with outcomes or skeptical of performance; they are convinced that “the other side” has taken over the referees—to interpret the rules and manage their application.

That belief has several implications:

• Collapsed losers’ consent: if the enemy runs the institutions, losing cannot be legitimate by definition.

• Resistance to correction: reports, audits, and rulings become further evidence of the complexity of the corruption and the reach of its colluders—not as persuasive evidence.

• Incentives for elite norm-breaking: politicians who attack institutions are rewarded for “fighting back,” while those who defend institutional autonomy risk being branded traitors.

Democratic backsliding research shows that modern autocrats often erode checks and balances gradually through legal means. ODA explains why large segments of the public may tolerate or even cheer those moves: if institutions are already captured, hollowing them out or packing them can be framed as a necessary liberation.

Link to Conspiracism and Political Violence

Recent work finds that conspiracy beliefs are consistently and positively correlated with support for political violence, and in some cases with self‑reported violent behavior. Conspiracy narratives that scapegoat out-groups, frame threats as imminent and are endorsed by trusted elites are especially likely to be associated with violent attitudes.

ODA helps clarify this pathway. When citizens believe that official institutions are run by malevolent forces, and that those forces cannot be dislodged through normal politics, the perceived payoffs of institutional channels fall while the perceived legitimacy of disruptive action rises. The ground is prepared for arguments that “the system” must be confronted a-democratically, including through intimidation, insurrection or targeted attacks on officials.

How to Study and Measure Opposition-Dominance Assumption

Because ODA is a specific kind of belief about institutional structure, it is amenable to empirical study. Researchers can adapt items from work on institutional trust, hostile media perceptions and conspiracism, then tailor them to capture structural partisan control. Examples might include:

• “Most major institutions in this country are controlled by people who hate what I stand for.”

• “When courts, the media and government agencies agree on something, it usually means they are coordinating against people like me.”

• “Even leaders from my own party who defend the system are probably part of the problem.”

These items can be combined into an ODA index and tested against outcomes such as:

• Willingness to accept election losses.

• Support for expanding executive power at the expense of courts, legislatures, and the media.

• Endorsement of political violence or harassment of officials.

Experimental Designs

Experiments can probe how people with high versus low ODA respond to institutional consensus. For example:

• Present respondents with scenarios in which multiple institutions endorse the same finding (e.g., “three independent courts and a bipartisan commission all find no significant fraud”).

• Measure whether high‑ODA respondents are more likely to interpret consensus as proof of bias or coordination, rather than as increased credibility.

Such work would connect ODA directly to observed reactions under controlled conditions.

Cross‑National Comparisons

Cross‑national surveys and case studies can test whether ODA:

• Is higher in countries or subgroups exposed to strong populist anti‑institutional rhetoric.

• Predicts openness to backsliding, such as support for court‑curbing, media restrictions or emergency rule.

• Interacts with media systems and social media use, in line with research showing that conspiracy beliefs and social media dynamics jointly shape institutional trust.

Implications for Democratic Practice

Recognizing ODA has practical consequences for those trying to shore up democratic resilience. Transparency and accountability remain essential. But when large segments of the public assume institutions are captured, more reports and more evidence do not automatically restore trust. Indeed, they can reinforce suspicion if every evidentiary report is assumed to come from a perceived out-group body.

This does not mean abandoning evidence. It means pairing evidence with efforts to change who is seen as speaking and on whose behalf. That includes:

• Cross‑partisan elite signaling: leaders across the spectrum publicly defending institutional autonomy even when it hurts their own side.

• Intra‑party discipline: parties sanctioning members who delegitimize neutral institutions for short‑term gain, instead of rewarding them with attention and promotions.

Institutional Design and Communication

Media and institutional design choices can also blunt ODA:

• Reducing administrative fragmentation and clarifying chains of responsibility in election administration can limit the fog that conspiracy narratives exploit.

• Investing in institutional communication that explains procedures in plain language, and that visibly includes diverse voices, can weaken the sense that institutions belong to one camp only.

Norms of Political Argument

Finally, political and civic actors need a vocabulary to distinguish between:

• Legitimate structural critiques of bias, inequality and elite power, which are necessary in any democracy.

• Blanket claims of capture that deny the very possibility of neutral arbitration and treat any adverse outcome as illegitimate by definition.

Naming opposition-dominance assumption is one way to draw that line. It allows journalists, scholars and citizens to say, in effect: “This is not just ordinary criticism of institutions. This is a claim that the entire field has been seized by the enemy, and it carries specific risks for how democracy can correct itself.”

Conclusion

Opposition-dominance assumption crystallizes a pattern visible across recent democratic crises: when citizens become convinced that referees aren’t simply fallible but owned by the other team, every whistle sounds like sabotage.

But ODA doesn’t operate in isolation. It functions as the central mechanism in a self-reinforcing system of democratic breakdown. Internalized political skepticism creates the baseline distrust that makes citizens receptive to claims about institutional capture. Opposition-dominance assumption gives that distrust a target, identifying which partisan enemy supposedly controls the system. Corruption immunity shield then weaponizes both dynamics to protect favored leaders, converting accountability into persecution. Each element strengthens the others in a closed loop that renders democratic correction nearly impossible.

By connecting research on affective polarization, hostile media perceptions, populist style, conspiracy belief and democratic backsliding, this framework offers a way to understand not just individual failures of trust, but how those failures combine into systematic democratic erosion.

It helps explain why institutional consensus so often fails to persuade: because convergence is read as coordination. Why accountability mechanisms get reframed as partisan warfare: because the institutions delivering accountability are presumed illegitimate. And why democracies can lose their self-correcting capacity long before formal collapse: because the entire feedback loop between evidence, institutions and public trust has been functionally severed.

Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward rebuilding democratic resilience. But recognition alone won’t fix the system. That requires confronting the reality that, once citizens internalize the belief that institutions belong to the enemy, more transparency and more evidence won’t automatically restore trust. Rebuilding that immune system won't happen overnight or by happenstance—it will require deliberate strategy, careful institutional design, and the discipline to start from first principles.

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References

Allred, Micah. 2025. “Internalized Political Skepticism: When Distrust Become Democratic Identity.” Substack. https://substack.com/@micahblakeallred/note/p-184062488?r=623izf&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

Allred, Micah. 2026. “Corruption-Immunity Shield: When Accountability is Recast as Persecution.” Substack. https://substack.com/@micahblakeallred/note/p-184687178?r=623izf&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

Bermeo, Nancy. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 5–19. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1771758539?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals

Boer, Diana, Silvia Mari, Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Ahmet Suerdem, Katja Hanke, Gary Brown, Roosevelt Vilar, Michal Bilewicz“Conspiracy Theories and Institutional Trust: Examining the Role of Social Media.” Political Psychology 43, no. 2 (2022): 277–296. https://pure.psu.edu/en/publications/conspiracy-theories-and-institutional-trust-examining-the-role-of/

Electoral Integrity Project. 2020. “Electoral Backsliding.” Electoral Integrity Project.​ https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/electoral-backsliding

Enders, Adam M., et al. 2024. “The Relationship Between Conspiracy Theory Beliefs and Political Violence.” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/enders_conspiracy_theory_beliefs_political_violence_20241212.pdf

Gendler, Naomi. 2024. “State Secrecy Explains the Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theory.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/state-secrecy-explains-the-origins-of-the-deep-state-conspiracy-theory/

Gunther, Albert C., and Kathleen Schmitt. 2006. “Mapping Boundaries of the Hostile Media Effect.” Journal of Communication. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2004.tb02613.x

Iyengar, Shanto, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood. “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3394075

Kahan, Dan M. 2017. “Misinformation and Identity-Protective Cognition.” Yale Law School Public Law. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Misconceptions,-Misinformation,-and-the-Logic-of-Kahan/4485b22f4d13b167e35ea4cf5a272d6d88396feb

Levendusky, Matthew S. 2019. “Review of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, by Lilliana Mason.” Public Opinion Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2019): 475–477. https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/83/2/475/5513886?login=false

Mason, Lilliana. 2018. “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/83/2/475/5513886?login=false

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. “The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation.” Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. https://psi424.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Moffitt,%20The%20Global%20Rise%20of%20Populism%20_%20Performance,%20Political%20Style%20(Stanford%20University%20Press).pdf

Tokaji, Daniel P. 2024. “Democratic Backsliding: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions?” New York: Academy of Political Science. https://academic.oup.com/psq/pages/democratic-backsliding-causes-consequences-and-solutions?login=false

Vegetti, Federico, and Levente Littvay. 2021. “Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Attitudes Toward Political Violence.” Italian Political Science Review 52, no. 1 (2022): 18–32. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/italian-political-science-review-rivista-italiana-di-scienza-politica/article/belief-in-conspiracy-theories-and-attitudes-toward-political-violence/89835D7B5CD9036BC8717E484D5F4C0B

February 6th, 2026.

On January 29, President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury Department—his own executive branch agencies—over leaked tax returns. The legal claim immediately exposes a glaring contradiction: Trump is now defending as confidential the exact same documents he dismissed as “totally fake news” and “fabricated” back in 2020.

The Leak That Started It All

The story begins with Charles Edward Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton who made headlines for orchestrating one of the most significant breaches of taxpayer privacy in American history. Between 2018 and 2020, Littlejohn stole and leaked tax records belonging to at least 405,427 taxpayers—including billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—to The New York Times and ProPublica. He pleaded guilty and received a five-year prison sentence in 2024.

Yet Trump’s lawsuit ignores the hundreds of thousands of other victims. Instead, it focuses narrowly on his own financial information, seeking a minimum of $10 billion that would come directly from taxpayer coffers and flow into the president and his family’s pockets.

The $750 Question

At the center of Trump’s legal claim lies an uncomfortable truth about his tax history. His attorneys now assert he paid “tens of millions” in taxes—a statement that demands scrutiny.

According to The New York Times’ September 2020 reporting on the leaked documents, Trump paid exactly $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017. He paid zero federal income tax in 10 of the 15 years examined, primarily by reporting financial losses that exceeded his earnings.

When Trump claimed in October 2020 that he had “prepaid tens of millions of dollars,” he was referring to estimated quarterly payments—standard practice for self-employed individuals and independent contractors. These payments included payroll taxes and household employment taxes, not federal income tax. To put this in perspective, Americans earning under $40,000 typically pay more in annual federal income tax than Trump did.

The $750 figure represents Trump’s Alternative Minimum Tax calculation for 2017. After reporting a net loss of approximately $12.8 million—$15.3 million in business losses against $7.5 million in income—and applying roughly $7.4 million in general business credits, the IRS minimum tax requirement left him with a $750 liability.

An Unprecedented Conflict of Interest

The lawsuit creates what may be the most significant conflict of interest in American legal history. A sitting president is suing his own government, demanding his own administration pay him $10 billion. The Justice Department, which Trump controls through his political appointees, must legally defend the very agencies he’s attacking.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also serves as acting IRS commissioner, signed off on canceling contracts with Littlejohn’s former employer just days before the lawsuit was filed.

This isn’t Trump’s first attempt to extract money from federal agencies. In October 2025, he filed an administrative claim seeking $230 million from the Department of Justice for damages related to federal investigations. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, any settlement would be paid from federal funds—effectively allowing the president to pocket taxpayer money.

A Question of Proportionality

The $10 billion demand raises eyebrows when compared to congressional allocations for actual federal security or privacy breaches. Trump’s claim dwarfs settlements in major data breaches affecting millions of Americans, suggesting the amount reflects political calculation rather than genuine economic harm.

Littlejohn’s legal team argued that his actions, while criminal, were motivated by concerns about systemic inequality visible in tax records showing billionaires paying minimal taxes on enormous incomes. The irony is stark: Trump now claims to be victimized by the disclosure of information he previously insisted was fake—information showing his minimal federal tax burden—as the basis for demanding taxpayers pay him $10 billion.

Even Republican Senator Ron Johnson acknowledged the ethical complexity, stating that while the IRS “deserves to be sued” over the breach, he questioned whether American taxpayers actually “have $10 billion” for Trump.

The Core Contradiction

The fundamental problem is impossible to resolve: Trump cannot simultaneously dismiss the tax documents as fabricated while demanding $10 billion for their unauthorized disclosure. The legal claim depends entirely on the validity of those very same documents.

Either the documents are authentic—confirming what the Times reported about minimal federal income tax payments—or they’re fabricated, as Trump previously claimed, making the entire lawsuit baseless. Trump is attempting to have it both ways: using government power to increase his personal wealth based on a leak of information he insists was never accurate in the first place.

The president is now asking American taxpayers to pay him billions for the exposure of tax returns he says don’t reflect reality. It’s a logical impossibility dressed up as a legal claim.

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Works Cited

NBC News. “Trump sues IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion over leaked tax records.” Jan. 29, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-sues-irs-treasury-department-10-billion-leaked-tax-records-rcna256626​

CNBC. “Trump, two sons, Trump Org sue IRS, Treasury for $10 billion over tax records leak.” Jan. 29, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/trump-sues-irs-and-treasury-for-10-billion-over-leak-of-tax-records.html​

Politico. “IRS: Contractor leaked more than 400k returns.” Feb. 25, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/25/irs-contractor-leaked-hundreds-of-thousands-of-returns-00205980​

Democracy Docket. “Trump and sons demand $10 billion payout in new lawsuit against IRS.” Jan. 29, 2026. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-irs-treasury-department-tax-record-10-billion-lawsuit/​

The New York Times. “Trump Paid $750 in Federal Income Taxes in 2017. Here’s the Math.” Sept. 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html​

BBC. “Donald Trump ‘paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.’” Sept. 27, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54319948​

CNBC. “Trump says he ‘prepaid’ his taxes. So do millions of other Americans.” Oct. 23, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/trump-says-he-prepaid-his-taxes-so-do-millions-of-other-americans.html​

Urban Institute. “Tax Fairness: President Donald Trump, A Case Study.” Oct. 12, 2020. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103051/tax-fairness-donald-trump-a-case-study_1.pdf​

The New York Times. “Trump Paid $750 in Federal Income Taxes in 2017. Here’s the Math.” Sept. 29, 2020.​

The Wall Street Journal. “Trump Lawsuit Against IRS Puts Him on Both Sides of the Same Case.” Feb. 1, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/trump-lawsuit-against-irs-puts-him-on-both-sides-of-the-same-case-116cfa2d​

ABC News 4. “President Donald Trump sues IRS, Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department for $10 billion over tax return leak.” Jan. 29, 2026. https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/president-donald-trump-sues-irs-internal-revenue-service-and-treasury-department-for-10-b​

The Independent. “Why Trump’s $230 Million Claim Exposes a Gap in Settlement Rules.” Nov. 12, 2025. https://www.independent.org/article/2025/11/12/trump-230-million-claim-settlement-president/​

Democracy Docket. “Trump and sons demand $10 billion payout in new lawsuit against IRS.” Jan. 29, 2026.​

Zetter Zeroday. “Booz Allen Tech Contractor Took IRS Job Specifically to Leak Trump’s Tax Records.” Jan. 26, 2026. https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/booz-allen-tech-contractor-took-irs-job-specifically-to-leak-trumps-tax-records/​

Benzinga. “Ron Johnson Says IRS ‘Deserves To Be Sued’ Over Leaked Trump Tax Returns, But Prefers A Probe Instead.” Jan. 31, 2026. https://www.benzinga.com/news/politics/26/02/50290184/ron-johnson-says-irs-deserves-to-be-sued-over-leaked-trump-tax-returns-but​

A version of this article first appeared in Our National Conversation on January 14th, 2026.

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China’s trade dominance rests fundamentally on a “low labor rights” economic model that systematically suppresses labor costs, environmental protections, safety standards and worker rights to maintain artificial price competitiveness (Autor et al., 2016). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intentionally constrains independent worker organizations, enforces wage suppression, imposes restrictions on labor mobility and entrepreneurship, and tolerates widespread forced labor and human rights abuses, all to sustain export advantage (U.S. Department of State, 2023). To properly address the foundational issue of these international trade disputes, the United States must reframe its trade war with China as a campaign for international labor rights.

The ongoing rivalry between the U.S. and China has been framed almost entirely as a trade war—a contest over tariffs, deficits and national pride (Bown & Kolb, 2020). What is actually unfolding is a labor war between fundamentally different political and economic systems, and by refusing to name it as such, the U.S. is missing a major opportunity, economically and in terms of long-term national security, to not only change our trading relationship with China but to change China’s trading practices universally to benefit the laborers the CCP claims to represent (Farrell & Newman, 2019).

At its core, the U.S.–China conflict is not about what Americans pay more for consumer goods or trade imbalances (Bown & Kolb, 2020). It is about whether democratic societies can remain competitive while enforcing labor protections, environmental standards, and human rights, when authoritarian systems can suppress wages, restrict organizing, subsidize favored industries, practice political nepotism and absorb economic losses without personal accountability. China’s advantage is not simply efficiency or scale, but the political capacity to direct labor and coordinate capital in ways democracies cannot and should not emulate (Farrell & Newman, 2019).

President Donald Trump frames the trade war as retaliation for unfair trade practices, intellectual property theft, and imbalanced trade deficits (in manufacturing, while conveniently ignoring our surplus in services). Those concerns are real, but the strategy that followed emphasized spectacle over structure (Bown & Kolb, 2020). Tariffs were imposed inconsistently and irrationally, allies were alienated instead of cooperating to combat China, and the underlying moral argument of the abuse of labor rights that fuels China’s economy and is the foundation from which all our other trade issues arise remains underdeveloped (Farrell & Newman, 2019). Rather than presenting the conflict as a defense of democratic labor norms, Trump reduced it to a nationalist standoff, one that oscillates between threats and praise depending on markets, headlines, or personal relationships—with little to show for it (Bown & Kolb, 2020).

That framing squanders a powerful coalition-building opportunity (Farrell & Newman, 2019). A labor-centered approach would align the U.S. with labor unions, environmental advocates, European democracies and even Chinese workers themselves (European Commission, 2021). The list of their grievances, and the issues the U.S. must help the Chinese working class address, is long: unsafe conditions, political repression, discrimination, forced labor in specific regions and supply chains, excessive hours, inadequate pay, limited vacation time, restricted upward mobility shaped by region and political status and little meaningful legal recourse (USDS, 2023).

Communities hollowed out by offshoring are told to celebrate cheaper goods while absorbing long-term job losses and declining civic stability (Autor et al., 2016). Without a clear moral explanation for why certain industries deserve protection or reinvestment, industrial policy appears arbitrary or corrupt. A labor-centered narrative connects trade policy to lived experience, clarifying that the goal is not isolation, but fair competition between systems operating under comparable social and economic constraints (Farrell & Newman, 2019). Until the U.S. clearly articulates the conflict as a war for domestic labor policy changes in China, policy will continue to look reactive rather than strategic, defensive rather than values-driven, and overlook the foundational issue of America’s trade issues with China over the last century (Bown & Kolb, 2020).

Reframing the China trade war is not about being softer or tougher on Beijing (Bown & Kolb, 2020). It is about connecting and negotiating with the true power in China: its one billion laborers (International Labour Organization, 2022). Democratic societies cannot and should not compete on who can suppress labor more effectively (Farrell & Newman, 2019). They must compete on innovation, productivity, legitimacy, and shared prosperity (Martin, 2010). In this regard, American and Chinese laborers share a remarkable amount in common for the things they want in life, a list of aspirations that has become collectively known as the American Dream (Tobón, 2013). Naming the conflict as a campaign for labor rights allows democracies to defend their values without apology and to explain why certain economic tradeoffs are not only necessary but justified (Freedom House, 2023).

The missed opportunity is not merely economic. It is political. A labor-centered framing could unite progressives concerned with workers’ rights, moderates focused on national resilience, and conservatives who support challenging China’s increasing global influence.

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Works Cited

Autor, David, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson. 2016. “The China Shock: Learning From Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade.” Annual Review of Economics 8: 205–240.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-economics-080315-015041

Bown, Chad and Melina Kolb. 2020. “Trump’s Trade War Timeline: An Up-to-Date Guide.”

Peterson Institute for International Economics. https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/2018/trumps-trade-war-timeline-date-guide

European Commission. 2021. Trade Policy Review: An Open, Sustainable and Assertive Trade Policy. Brussels, Belgium. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:5bf4e9d0-71d2-11eb-9ac9-01aa75ed71a1.0001.02/DOC_1&format=PDF

Farrell, Henry and Abraham Newman. 2019. “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.” International Security 44(1): 42–79.

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/isec_a_00351

Freedom House. 2023. Freedom in the World 2023. Washington, D.C. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/FIW_World_2023_DigtalPDF.pdf

Martin, R. L. (2010). Trade, innovation, and prosperity (Working Paper No. 14). Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity. https://rogerlmartin.com/docs/default-source/default-document-library/wp14_trade-innovations-and-prosperity.pdf?sfvrsn=96310182_0

Tobón, Natalia. 2013. “Pursuing the Chinese Dream.” Americas Quarterly, July 18, 2013.

A version of this article first appeared in Our National Conversation on January 20th, 2026.

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The summers before the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election will be one of the most consequential political moments Gen Z and millennials ever face. We need two modern Freedom Summers where volunteers from safe blue states volunteer to travel to deep red states to register voters, provide community aid, and explain democratic rights, face to face.

Social media activism is saturated. Institutions are strained. If democracy is going to hold, it will be because people showed up where it is weakest, not where it is easiest.

Freedom Summer in 1964 sent just over a thousand mostly white college students into Mississippi to work alongside Black organizers who had already been risking their lives for years. Together they helped about 17,000 Black Mississippians attempt to register to vote, even though registrars under Jim Crow actually added only around 1,600 of them to the rolls. The campaign also launched more than 40 Freedom Schools that educated thousands of kids and adults in Black churches and community centers across the state. The raw numbers were modest. The impact on national consciousness and on the Voting Rights Act was not.

The Democratic Party must recreate this bold strategy with a Freedom Summer 2.0.

To have any chance at an unshakeable House majority and 60-seat Senate majority, the Democratic Party must develop a bold Red State strategy for 2026 & 2028. Freedom Summer 2.0 has to think at a different scale and under very different conditions. Instead of the Jim Crow South, the battlefield is an entire map of gerrymandered districts, razor‑thin presidential margins, and millions of disillusioned nonvoters from Florida to Alaska.

The question I keep coming back to is simple:

If tens of thousands of people from safer, bluer places spent their summers knocking doors and building relationships in the country’s most under‑organized corners, how many votes could they realistically move—and where would that effort flip outcomes?

What follows is a rough, conservative answer.

It’s built on three assumptions:

1. We anchor everything in what field experiments and past campaigns have actually achieved.

2. We accept that volunteers are human: they get tired, they get lost, they have awkward conversations, and half their shifts go sideways.

3. We focus on federal power—presidency, Senate, and House. Freedom Summer 2.0 is not about telling Arizona or Alabama how to run the towns that out-of-state volunteers just arrived in. It’s about whether we collectively get a functioning democracy, a sane national government, and a national infrastructure, tax code, and social safety net that favor the neediest over the richest Americans.

The states I’m looking at are a deliberately broad mix of purple, red, and deep red states. Some are swing states that require obvious attention, some are red states with serious potential for expanding the Democratic Party base, and others are deep red states where electoral suppression and uncontested races can no longer go unchallenged:

Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Maine, Alaska, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, Montana, Tennessee, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

What One Summer Volunteer Can Actually Do

Campaigns love to tell volunteers that “every door you knock is a vote.” The political science literature is less romantic but more useful.

For two decades, researchers like Donald Green and Alan Gerber have run randomized field experiments on voter turnout. Their core finding is that high‑quality, face‑to‑face canvassing—especially with low‑propensity voters who already lean your way—can raise turnout among the people you actually reach by a few percentage points. A landmark set of experiments in New Haven found in‑person canvassing increased turnout by roughly 7 percentage points among registered voters contacted, while phone calls and direct mail had much smaller effects. More recent meta‑analyses suggest that in real‑world conditions, especially in high‑salience elections, the boost is more often in the 2–4 point range.

Now layer on what we know from how modern campaigns actually run. In a presidential year, a motivated, trained volunteer who treats this as their full‑time summer job might be able to:

• Knock doors or make calls several days a week.

• Have a few dozen meaningful conversations per shift (not just lit drops).

• Log, very roughly, 800 to 1,200 real contacts over a season when you factor in missed houses, no‑answers, and burnout.

If you combine those pieces and stay conservative, the math for a full‑summer Freedom Summer 2.0 volunteer looks like this:

• They have about 1,000 meaningful conversations in the course of a summer—some in person, some by phone, some by text.

• They focus those conversations on low‑propensity voters who already lean Democratic or are persuadable.

• Their work, combined with follow‑up texts and mail closer to Election Day, produces a 2–3 percentage‑point increase in turnout among the people they contact.

A 2–3 point increase among 1,000 targeted voters is 20–30 additional ballots cast that otherwise wouldn’t have shown up. Add in a smaller number of actual new registrations (which matter most in places like Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, where registration rates lag the national average) and some persuasion on genuinely conflicted independents, and a fair working range is:

Each full‑summer Freedom Summer 2.0 volunteer can realistically “net” somewhere between about 20 and 40 votes.

That range assumes competent training, smart targeting, and a program that doesn’t just throw volunteers out with clipboards and hope for the best. It also assumes we aren’t counting every friendly conversation as a converted voter. This is the conservative baseline I use for everything that follows.

Once you accept that each properly deployed volunteer is worth something like 20–40 net votes over the course of a summer and the rest of the cycle, the basic formula per state is straightforward:

Number of volunteers needed ≈ Votes needed to flip ÷ Net votes per volunteer

For the presidency, the best proxy for “votes needed to flip” is the 2024 presidential margin in that state. For Senate races, the presidential margin tends to overstate the difficulty a bit, and for House races it can overstate it a lot, but as a starting point it’s better than wishful thinking.

The real question is: how many net votes do they represent, and how many summer volunteers would it take to erase those margins if everything else stayed equal?

The Closest States: Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Maine

Start with Nevada. In 2024, Trump beat Harris there 50.6% to 47.5%, a bit more than a three‑point margin in a state where roughly 1.5 million people cast presidential ballots. Three points in that ballpark is on the order of 45,000 votes.

If each full‑summer volunteer nets 20–40 votes, then, in the most mechanical sense, closing that margin purely via turnout and registration would take:

• Around 2,250 volunteers at 20 votes each.

• Around 1,125 volunteers at 40 votes each.

Realistically, you never get pure isolates like that—some of the people you mobilize are already in the habit of voting, some counties are better organized than others—but as an order of magnitude, one to two thousand serious summer volunteers in Nevada is not a fantasy number. It’s what it would take to meaningfully compete with the right’s advantage there.

Pennsylvania is bigger and closer. Trump’s 50.4% to 48.7% result translates to a margin of about 1.7 percentage points in a state where more than 7 million people cast ballots. 1.7 percent of 7 million is roughly 120,000 votes. Run the same division:

• At 20 net votes per volunteer, you’d need around 6,000 full‑summer volunteers to erase that gap.

• At 40 net votes per volunteer, you’d need around 3,000.

Those volunteers would not all be in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. They’d be spread through the Lehigh Valley, the small cities, the exurbs, the places where marginal, disillusioned Democrats and left‑leaning independents have been drifting out of the electorate while older, whiter conservatives keep voting every cycle.

Michigan and Georgia have similar dynamics. In Michigan, Trump’s 49.7% to 48.3% is a 1.4‑point edge. In Georgia, 50.7% to 48.5% is a 2.2‑point edge. In raw‑vote terms, those are tens of thousands of ballots, not hundreds of thousands. Again, running the math at 20–40 votes per volunteer gets you into the range of low thousands of intensive volunteers per state to make up the difference—on top of everything campaigns and local groups are already doing.

North Carolina and Arizona are harder, but not yet hopeless. North Carolina stayed in the Republican column with Trump taking 51.0% to Harris’s 47.8%. That’s a margin of a little over three points in a state with about 5.5 million presidential voters—on the order of 180,000 votes. Arizona was rougher: 52.2% to 46.7%, a 5.5‑point gap.

For North Carolina, the conservative math says:

• Around 4,500 volunteers at 40 net votes each to fully erase that presidential margin.

• Around 9,000 at 20 net votes each.

The catch, and the opportunity, is the Senate map. In 2026, North Carolina has an open Republican Senate seat because Thom Tillis is retiring. Maine has Susan Collins on the ballot again. Alaska has a Class II GOP senator up as well. Those are not states where Democrats start as favorites, but they are states where a Freedom Summer‑level volunteer infusion—thousands of people over multiple seasons—truly could make the difference, especially if national politics shifts against Trump in his second term.

Maine is a useful example in the other direction. At the presidential level it has been reliably blue statewide, with Republicans only winning the more conservative 2nd district. A Senate race there won’t be decided by 200,000 votes. It may be decided by something like the margin in Susan Collins’s last race in 2020: 8–9 points on a small electorate. In a place like Maine, a few hundred to a thousand full‑summer volunteers, deployed intelligently and in coordination with local organizers, can very plausibly represent the decisive edge in a close race.

If Freedom Summer 2.0 can put the lion’s share of its most intense volunteers into this band of states—Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Maine—it’s operating in the terrain where each person’s work has the highest return.

The Big Red States: Texas, Florida, Iowa, Alaska, Nebraska, and Friends

Then there are the big red‑tilting states where the 2024 presidential margins were real, but so are the pools of unseen voters.

Texas first. In 2024, Trump carried the state 56.3% to 42.4%. That’s not the 5‑ or 6‑point gap a lot of national Democrats still have in their heads from 2018 and 2020; it’s closer to 14 points. In a state with roughly 11.4 million presidential voters, a 14‑point gap is about 1.6 million votes.

Take the conservative 20–40 votes per volunteer range and divide into 1.6 million:

• At 20 votes each, you’d theoretically need about 80,000 full‑summer volunteers to erase the statewide presidential margin.

• At 40 votes each, you’re still talking around 40,000.

That’s simply not realistic as a 2028 goal. Even if every progressive organization in the country got on the same page, nobody is fielding 40,000 full‑summer out‑of‑state volunteers into one state.

But that doesn’t mean Freedom Summer 2.0 should write Texas off. It changes the mission. Instead of “flip Texas for president in 2028,” it becomes:

• Flip or defend dozens of House and state‑legislative seats where the margins are much smaller.

• Narrow the statewide gap enough that Republicans have to spend serious money defending their dominance.

• Build the long‑term Latino, youth, and suburban organizing infrastructure that could make Texas truly competitive in the 2030’s, especially if Trump’s economic and immigration policies sour more of the state’s diverse working‑class voters on the GOP.

Florida sits in a similar bucket. Its trajectory over the last three cycles has been steadily redward, with Republicans now routinely winning statewide by high single‑digit margins. The Cuban‑American and older white vote in South Florida are entrenched in their preferences. But Florida also has a huge and under‑organized bloc of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central American, and Black voters across the I‑4 corridor and north Florida, and some of the lowest registration rates in the country when you look at the share of all adults registered.

Iowa, Alaska, and Nebraska tell the same basic story in smaller fonts. Iowa’s presidential margin is now deep red, but it still has competitive House seats when the wind is blowing against Republicans. Alaska is structurally red, but a quirky ranked‑choice system has already sent Democrat Mary Peltola to Congress twice—who is now running for the Senate. A fractured Republican Party could plausibly lose a Senate race there in 2026 if Democrats can unite independent-minded Alaskan voters and progressives against the Trump Administration and its allies in Congress. Nebraska overall is crimson, but its 2nd Congressional District around Omaha has now voted blue for president twice in a row.

In these places, the math on fully flipping the statewide presidential line by turnout alone just doesn’t add up. But the math on tipping one or two House seats, or poaching a Senate seat under the right conditions, absolutely does. A Freedom Summer 2.0 that can put thousands of full‑summer volunteers, plus a much larger halo of remote volunteers, into these states can still change who sits in Congress and how many resources Republicans have to spread across the map.

The Deep Reds: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Utah, Montana

Finally there are the places where, if you run the same “margin divided by 20–40 votes per volunteer” formula, the result is effectively “no plausible number.”

Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, parts of South Carolina and Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Utah, and Montana are states where presidential margins are often 20 points or more and turnout gaps are brutal. In some of them, there are actually more Democrats than Republicans (and more women than men) on the registration rolls. Older white voters have realigned to the GOP without changing their old party labels, while Black, Latino, Native, and poor white voters experiencing internalized political skepticism have been pushed to the margins or given up of the democratic process.

In those places, the job of Freedom Summer 2.0 is not to pretend that even 5,000 volunteers will flip the state blue in one cycle. It’s to admit that statewide victory there is a long‑term project and focus on the pieces that are actually in reach:

• Building turnout and political confidence in under‑represented communities—especially the Black Belt of the Deep South and Native communities in places like Montana and Oklahoma.

• Flipping or at least seriously contesting congressional districts that have been effectively uncontested fiefdoms for decades.

• Recruit and train local candidates and organizers, register voters, assist local nonprofits and environmental organization, and advocate for fair congressional redistricting maps so that statewide races in the late 2020’s and 2030’s don’t look as hopeless as they do today.

A few hundred to a thousand full‑summer volunteers in a state like Mississippi, Alabama, or Louisiana—living with host families, working directly with local Black‑led organizations, churches, and civic groups—can start to change participation and expectations in a way that doesn’t show up immediately in the presidential map, but absolutely changes people’s real relationship to national politics.

This is where the original Freedom Summer is the most instructive. SNCC and the other organizers leading that project did not go into Mississippi thinking they could win statewide power in one election. They went in to demonstrate demand for the vote, create new institutions, and drag the gap between American ideals and American reality onto the front page. Freedom Summer 2.0 has to treat deep‑red states with the same long‑term seriousness, not as charity cases or props.

Federal Power, Not Paternalism

One of the most important guardrails for a project like Freedom Summer 2.0 is about restraint. This should not be a parade of people from New York, California, and D.C. flying into Texas, Utah, or Oklahoma to tell residents how to run their states. Most of the time, it should not be telling them how to run their cities or counties either with the notable exception of enfranchisement.

The emphasis needs to stay very clearly on federal power and basic democratic participation.

That means conversations about:

• Who writes the federal budget and sets national health care, wage, and tax policy.

• Who confirms the judges and justices who will be ruling on abortion bans, labor rights, and civil liberties for the next thirty years.

• Who gives orders to ICE and Border Patrol—and whether those orders involve family separation, mass workplace raids, depriving citizens and immigrants of due process, and targeting long‑time residents and mixed‑status families.

• Who decides on war, peace, and America’s adherence to human rights.

People in Alabama and people in Oregon pay the same federal taxes and live under the same Supreme Court and immigration agencies. They have every right to be part of national organizing projects that care about their voices. Freedom Summer 2.0, if it’s worth doing, is about making sure they are actually heard in those fights, not about lecturing them on their school boards from far away.

Practically, that means out‑of‑state volunteers show up to: listen, register, answer questions, offer rides, chase mail ballots, and back up locally led campaigns and organizations. It means targeting their field work around federal races and democratic participation, not dropping into statehouse fights that local people haven’t invited them into. And it means being honest with volunteers that some of the most important work they’ll do—teaching a young person in Mississippi how to navigate voter ID rules, or helping a family in rural Oklahoma figure out where to vote after a polling place closure—will never trend on Twitter nor immediately flip a state.

Where to Find Volunteers

One of the biggest untapped pools for Freedom Summer 2.0 is exactly where I’m sitting: blue‑state, college‑educated Democrats who are suddenly unemployed or under‑employed because federal hiring has frozen and whole layers of the public‑sector pipeline just evaporated.

The numbers are not small. As of late 2024, about 67 million adults 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree or higher were in the labor force, and roughly 1.7–1.9 million of them were unemployed at any given time, an unemployment rate of about 2.6–2.8% for that group.

At the same time, around 22–24% of all U.S. adults have a bachelor’s as their highest credential, and the share is even higher among working‑age adults. Pew estimates that voters with at least a bachelor’s degree are more Democratic than Republican overall—roughly 55% of them identify with or lean toward Democrats, compared to about 42% for Republicans, with post‑graduates even more solidly Democratic.

If you mash those datasets together, you get something like 900,000 to 1.1 million unemployed college‑educated adults who are likely Democrats or Democratic‑leaning at any given time. Factor in that recent graduates have an even higher unemployment rate—about 5.3% for recent college grads and a much higher under‑employment rate by late 2025, according to the New York Fed—and you start to see a national talent pool easily in the low millions of people who are at least temporarily “off the treadmill” and politically disillusioned.

The question is how to activate that specific slice directly. The answer is to stop treating them as generic “volunteers” and start treating them as short‑term democratic contractors.

The Democratic Party and its allies have the data to find them: voter files already include party registration and education in many states; commercial data vendors can flag “open to work” and unemployment indicators; college career platforms like Handshake and alumni networks in blue states can be targeted with explicit Freedom Summer 2.0 fellowships. A feasible, honest package for someone like me—college‑educated, job‑hunting, based in a blue metro—would look like $500–$800 per week for 8–10 weeks, plus housing in the target state (through homestays, dorms, or church basements) and paid travel. Call it roughly $4,000–$8,000 total compensation for a full summer of field work, framed as a contract position or fellowship that can be listed on a résumé and backed by serious letters of recommendation.

If even 5–10% of that million‑person unemployed, college‑educated Democratic pool says yes to that kind of offer over the next two summers, Freedom Summer 2.0 suddenly has 50,000–100,000 trained, angry, available people who can afford to spend a season in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Mississippi helping empower disenfranchised Americans decide their own futures.

So What Does “Enough” Look Like?

If you add up the rough ranges above, a Freedom Summer 2.0 that wants to be genuinely consequential by 2028 looks like this:

• Tens of thousands of full‑summer volunteers, not hundreds. Something like 30,000 in 2026 and 50,000 or more in 2028 is ambitious but within the range of what we’ve seen in past cycles when you combine the efforts of groups like Swing Left, Sister District, NextGen America, UNITE HERE, Indivisible, and others.

• Tens of thousands of remote volunteers doing phone‑banking, text‑banking, research, and translation from home, so that not every ounce of work depends on housing and feeding people across the country.

• A realistic state strategy that pours the densest concentration of volunteers into the states where a few thousand people can flip outcomes—Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Maine—while still seeding future wins and basic democratic capacity in Texas, Florida, and the deep reds.

Under conservative assumptions, each full‑summer volunteer is worth 20–40 net votes if they are properly trained, targeted, and supported. That is not magic. It will not, by itself, overcome a historic economic crisis, a catastrophic war, or a complete meltdown in candidate quality.

What it can do, if enough people decide that doomscrolling is not enough, is move margins at the scale that actually decides modern American elections. In Nevada, that might mean one to two thousand relentless, sweaty, exhausted volunteers spread across two summers. Across the deep South, it might look like a few hundred people in each state, some of them sleeping on church floors, some of them living with host families, most of them quietly rebuilding the habits and expectations of democratic participation.

Freedom Summer 1964 did not flip Mississippi. It did not make Jim Crow dissolve overnight. What it did was reveal, in the most public way possible, that Black Mississippians wanted the vote badly enough to risk everything for it—and that white America was willing to look away until its own children went South and to protest and die alongside them.

Freedom Summer 2.0 won’t, on its own, fix voter suppression, gerrymandering, or a captured Supreme Court. But if this generation is serious about not letting American democracy slide quietly into permanent minority rule, it will have to learn the same lesson those volunteers did: there is no substitute for showing up where democracy is weakest—and staying longer than is comfortable.

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Works Cited

American Presidency Project. “Election Results: National Popular Vote and State-by-State Totals.” University of California, Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections

Ballotpedia a. “Alaska Senate Election, 2026.” Ballotpedia. https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_Alaska,_2026

Ballotpedia b. “Maine Senate Election, 2020: Results.” Ballotpedia. https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_Maine,_2020

Cervantes Institute. “The Hispanic Vote in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections.” Instituto Cervantes, 2024. https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/95_en_the_hispanic_vote_in_the_2024_u.s._presidential_elections.pdf

Cook Political Report. “2026 Senate Race Ratings.” The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/senate-race-ratings

Florida Department of State, Division of Elections. “Voter Turnout Reports.” Florida DOS Elections. https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/data-statistics/

Gerber, Alan S., and Donald P. Green. “The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.” American Political Science Review 94, no. 3 (2000): 653-663. Summary available at Yale ISPS. https://isps.yale.edu/research/data/d001

Legal Defense Fund. “60 Years of Freedom Summer.” NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 2024. https://www.naacpldf.org/freedom-summer/

NextGen America. “2022 Youth Vote Plan.” NextGen America, 2022. https://nextgenamerica.org/docs/2022youthvoteplan.pdf

Daniller, Andrew, Ted Van Green, Hannah Hartig, and Scott Keeter. 2023. “Voter Turnout in U.S. Elections, 2018–2022.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/

Montellaro, Zach. 2024. “2024 Arizona Election Results.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/2024-election/results/arizona/

Montellaro, Zach. 2024. “2024 Nevada Election Results.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/2024-election/results/nevada/

Montellaro, Zach. 2024. “2024 Pennsylvania Election Results.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/2024-election/results/pennsylvania/

Shepherd, Steve. 2024. “2024 Presidential Election Results Hub.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/2024-election/results/

ScienceDirect. “A Meta-Analysis of Voter Mobilization Tactics by Electoral Salience.” Electoral Studies, overview. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261379418303573

Sister District Project. “Our Impact: 90,000 Volunteers and State Legislative Wins.” Sister District. https://www.sisterdistrict.com/our-impact

SNCC Digital Gateway. 2014. “Freedom Summer Overview.” SNCC Digital Gateway, Duke University. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedom-summer/

Swing Left. “2020 End of Year Impact Report.” Swing Left, 2020.

https://swingleft.org/p/2020-impact

UNITE HERE. 2022. “Largest Canvass Operation in NV, AZ, and PA Sees Path to Victory vs. MAGA Republicans.” Unite Here! https://unitehere.org/press-releases/largest-canvass-operation-in-nv-az-and-pa-sees-path-to-victory-vs-maga-republicans/

U.S. Census Bureau. 2023. “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2022.” Current Population Survey, U.S. Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-586.html

Zinn Education Project. 2010. “Freedom Summer Resources and Teaching Guide.” Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/freedom-summer/

This article first appeared on Our National Conversation, January 21st, 2026.

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Lost in the chaotic public debate surrounding President Donald Trump’s ego-driven obsession with taking Greenland is the question: What can the average American do to help Greenlanders in their hour of need?

What started as an offhand “real estate” fantasy has hardened into a multi‑track campaign to carve out a territory on an inhabited Arctic island that has already voted (twice) for self‑government and a legal path to full independence (Denmark, 2009; Danish Prime Minister’s Office, 2024). This is not just about changing a map, but about whether the United States will openly embrace 19th-century-style conquest, whether we still respect our friends, NATO, and basic treaty law, and whether everyday Americans are willing to let one man’s imperial nostalgia for the terrors of Manifest Destiny overthrow the democratic will of 57,000 Greenlanders. Thankfully, Americans have multiple lawful means for pursuing our objections.

TRUMP’S GREENLAND OBSESSION

Aides from President Trump’s first term described his fixation on Greenland as so unserious that they tried to laugh it off or steer him toward a saner Arctic policy (NBC News, 2026). In an interview with The New York Times, Trump returned to the idea, dismissing the existing 1951 defense agreement with Denmark—which allows the U.S. to operate Thule Air Base in northern Greenland—as inadequate because Trump claims “ownership is very important” and that it is “psychologically needed for success” (The New York Times, 2026; U.S. and Denmark, 1951).

What once sounded like an obnoxious sketch on Saturday Night Live has since turned into an obnoxious diplomatic project. Reporting from The Washington Post in January 2026 showed Trump officials probing a deal to grant the U.S. “sovereign control” over pockets of Greenlandic territory for bases (Washington Post, 2026; Shaheen and Murkowski, 2026). In other words, even if Denmark kept nominal sovereignty on paper, there would be U.S.-run enclaves on Greenlandic soil where Greenlandic law, rules, and local authorities would be shut out.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this month, Trump claimed he had a “framework” agreement on such bases and called the U.S. “stupid” for supposedly giving up Greenland after World War II (BBC, 2026). Fact‑checkers pointed out that this history exists only in his imagination: in 1941 the U.S. signed a defense agreement that explicitly affirmed “the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark over Greenland,” even as U.S. forces operated bases there under Danish authority (U.S. and Denmark, 1941).

Trump promised in Davos that he would not take Greenland through military force (BBC, 2026). But that reassurance rings hollow coming from a man with a history of betraying the deals he recently swore by, such as the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USCMA, 2020). If the message of Trump’s Davos speech did not destroy the last shreds of his credibility with Europeans, his lack of attention to details was sure to: he confused the name of “Greenland” with “Iceland” multiple times in the same speech, and told the largely German-speaking Swiss audience that, if not for America, “you’d all be speaking German” (NBC News, 2026).

GREENLAND BELONGS TO GREENLANDERS

In 1979, Greenlanders voted for Home Rule, taking control of internal administration and social policy. In 2008, they voted by a 75 percent majority on a nearly 72 percent turnout to adopt the Self‑Government Act, which expanded their authority over natural resources, recognized Greenlandic as the official language, and, crucially, codified that any decision on independence from Denmark “shall be taken by the people of Greenland” and must be endorsed by both the Greenlandic parliament and a Danish vote (Denmark, 2009; Library of Congress, 2019).

Successive Danish prime ministers have said publicly that Greenland’s future “belongs to the people of Greenland,” and current law frames the kingdom’s relationship with Nuuk as a partnership between equals, not a colonial chain of command (Danish Prime Minister’s Office, 2024). When Trump insists that the U.S. must now “own” Greenland, he is not just insulting Denmark; he is trying to overturn two democratic referendums and a hard‑won autonomy arrangement negotiated over decades.

Greenlandic and Inuit leaders are not shy about saying so. Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, responded to Trump’s latest demands by saying there is “no such thing as a better colonizer” and rejecting “the premise that you can buy and sell peoples” (Inuit Circumpolar Council, 2026). Greenland’s prime minister has been equally blunt: neither Denmark nor the U.S. will decide Greenland’s future. Greenlanders will—and they “will not be colonized a second time” (Al Jazeera, 2026; NBC News, 2026).

SO WHAT CAN YOU ACTUALLY DO?

Start with Congress. There are already bills on the table that would slam the door on Trump’s more extreme plans.

The NATO Unity Protection Act, led by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Lisa Murkowski, would prohibit the Pentagon and State Department from spending money to “blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control” over any NATO ally’s territory—explicitly including Greenland (Shaheen and Murkowski, 2026). The Greenland Sovereignty Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Jimmy Gomez, would cut off funding for any attempt to invade, annex or otherwise acquire Greenland without the consent of Denmark and Greenlanders (Gomez, 2026). Amendments from Sen. Ruben Gallego and others would bar the use of force against Greenland without explicit congressional authorization, reinforcing the War Powers Resolution’s limits (Shaheen and Murkowski, 2026).

Call both of your Senators and your House member, whose contact information can be found on Congress.gov utilizing your zip code. Tell them, in plain language, to co‑sponsor these bills and to publicly oppose any “framework” that changes Greenland’s status without a Greenlandic referendum and Danish approval. Tell them you oppose bills like the “Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act,” which would authorize the president to take “whatever steps necessary” to annex Greenland (Fine, 2026).

Second, amplify Greenlandic and Inuit voices rather than speaking over them. Share statements from the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Greenland’s government and diaspora organizations that have organized “Hands off Greenland” protests from Nuuk to Copenhagen (Inuit Circumpolar Council, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026). Treat Greenlanders as the primary witnesses on what this crisis means, not as props in a U.S.-Europe drama.

Third, support Greenland’s autonomy and economy on its own terms. That can mean donating to Indigenous rights and Arctic climate groups that work directly with Greenlandic communities, buying Greenlandic seafood or handicrafts through reputable importers, and, if you have the means, visiting Greenland as an ethical tourist—staying in locally owned lodging, using Greenlandic guides and respecting fragile ecosystems (PBS, 2026; CSIS, 2026). The more economically self‑reliant Greenland becomes, the easier it is for its people to say no to foreign coercion.

Finally, push back on the imperial framing in your own conversations. Trump’s appeal here depends on what I call a corruption‑immunity shield: a cognitive defense mechanism in which supporters of a political leader reinterpret credible evidence of that leader’s misconduct as illegitimate attacks from hostile institutions. The more we normalize the idea that buying and selling people is just another “deal,” the more we erode the line between a flawed democracy and something darker.

Greenland belongs to Greenlanders.

That should not be a radical or unpatriotic statement. The real test now is whether Americans are willing to defend that principle—not just in op-eds and social media posts, but in phone calls, protests and votes—before Trump’s imperial fantasy becomes yet another precedent that both parties will come to regret.

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Works Cited

Al Jazeera. 2026. “‘Hands off Greenland’: Thousands Join Protests Amid Trump’s Takeover Threats.” Al Jazeera, January 17, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/17/thousands-join-hands-off-greenland-protests-amid-trumps-takeover-threats

BBC News. 2026. “Fact-checking Donald Trump’s Davos Speech.” BBC News, January 21, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c301jgd1qj6o

CNN/SSRS. 2026. “75% of Americans Oppose US Attempting to Take Control of Greenland.” CNN Politics, January 15, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/politics/greenland-cnn-poll

CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies). 2026. “Greenland, Rare Earths, and Arctic Security.” CSIS Brief, January 7, 2026. https://www.csis.org/analysis/greenland-rare-earths-and-arctic-security

Danish Prime Minister’s Office. 2024. “Greenland.” Statsministeriet (Prime Minister’s Office, English portal), December 17, 2024. https://english.stm.dk/the-prime-ministers-office/the-unity-of-the-realm/greenland/

Denmark. 2009. Act on Greenland Self-Government (Act No. 473 of 12 June 2009). English translation. Ministry of Justice. Copenhagen, Denmark. https://english.stm.dk/media/4vgewyoh/gl-selvstyrelov-uk.pdf

Fine, Randy. 2026. “Congressman Fine Introduces Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act to Strengthen U.S. National Security and Put Our Adversaries on Notice.” Press release, U.S. House of Representatives, January 12, 2026. https://fine.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=118

Gomez, Jimmy. 2026. “Rep. Jimmy Gomez Introduces Bill to Block Any U.S. Effort to Invade or Annex Greenland.” Press release, U.S. House of Representatives, January 12, 2026. https://gomez.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=5905

Inuit Circumpolar Council. 2026. “Alaskan Inuit Stand United in Support of Greenland.” Press release, Inuit Circumpolar Council Alaska, January 20, 2026. https://www.iitc.org/alaskan-inuit-stand-united-in-support-of-greenland/

Library of Congress. 2019. “Greenland’s National Day, the Home Rule Act (1979), and the Act on Self-Government (2009).” In Custodia Legis (Law Library of Congress). https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2019/06/greenlands-national-day-the-home-rule-act-1979-and-the-act-on-self-government-2009/

Navigator Research. 2026. “Americans Don’t Want Greenland, They Just Want Lower Costs.” Navigator Research memo. https://navigatorresearch.org/americans-dont-want-greenland-they-just-want-lower-costs/

NBC News. 2026. “Denmark Incensed by Trump’s Push for Greenland.” NBC News, January 18, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/make-america-go-away-denmark-incensed-trumps-push-greenland-rcna254541

PBS NewsHour. 2026. “Here’s Why Trump Says the U.S. ‘Needs’ Greenland for Arctic Security.” PBS NewsHour, January 6, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/heres-why-trump-says-the-u-s-needs-greenland-for-arctic-security

Reuters/Ipsos. 2026. “Just One in Five Americans Support Trump’s Efforts to Acquire Greenland.” Reuters, January 15, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/just-one-five-americans-support-trumps-efforts-acquire-greenland-2026-01-15/

Shaheen, Jeanne, and Lisa Murkowski. 2026. “Ranking Member Shaheen Pushes for Congress to Prohibit Taking Greenland by Force or Coercion.” Press release, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, January 20, 2026. https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/dem/release/ranking-member-shaheen-pushes-for-congress-to-prohibit-taking-greenland

New York Times. 2026. “Trump Addresses Venezuela, Greenland and Presidential Power in Wide-Ranging Interview.” The New York Times, January 8, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html

U.S. Department of State. 2004. “Denmark (Greenland) (04-0806) – Agreement Amending and Supplementing the Agreement Between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Denmark Relating to the Defense of Greenland.” Treaty text, August 6, 2004. https://www.state.gov/04-0806/

U.S. Senate Historical Office. 2025. “The Senate Approves for Ratification the Louisiana Purchase Treaty.” U.S. Senate: Art & History, June 17, 2025. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/treaties/senate-approves-louisiana-purchase-treaty.htm

United States and Denmark. 1941. Agreement Relating to the Defense of Greenland (U.S.–Denmark, April 9, 1941). In United States Statutes at Large 55:1245–1248. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-55/pdf/STATUTE-55-Pg1245.pdf

United States and Denmark. 1951. Agreement Between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Denmark Concerning the Defense of Greenland (April 27, 1951), as amended. U.S. Department of State Treaty Series. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/den001.asp

U.S. Trade Representative. 2024. “United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA).” Office of the United States Trade Representative. Accessed January 26, 2026. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/united-states-mexico-canada-agreement.

YouGov/Ipsos. 2026. “American Knowledge About Greenland Varies, but Very Few Support a Military Takeover.” YouGov/Ipsos survey brief, January 19, 2026. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53917-american-knowledge-greenland-varies-few-support-military-takeover

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This article first appeared on Our National Conversation, February 1st, 2026.

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President Donald Trump’s financial trajectory during his second term has sparked questions about the most unprecedented accumulation of presidential wealth in American history. According to a New York Times investigation, Trump personally gained approximately $1.408 billion in 2025, his first year back in office (New York Times Editorial Board, 2026). Forbes reported his net worth jumped from roughly $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by year’s end, a gain of around $3.4 billion (Alexander, 2025a). This single-year increase approaches—and by some measures may exceed—the combined net worth of every other U.S. president while in office.

To contextualize this figure, Our National Conversation compiled published estimates of all 44 presidents’ net worth during their time in office, adjusted for inflation. The combined total reaches approximately $2.7 billion, near the feasible higher-end of Trump’s 2025 gains (McIntyre et al., 2016). The comparison reveals not just Trump’s extraordinary wealth accumulation but also illuminates how dramatically presidential financial profiles have evolved across American history.

Presidential Net Worth Estimates While in Office (1789-2025)

• George Washington (1789-1797): $525 million. Virginia plantation owner with 8,000 acres at Mount Vernon, hundreds of enslaved people producing tobacco, grain and whiskey (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• John Adams (1797-1801): $19 million. Successful law practice and inheritance; married into the wealthy Quincy family (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809): $212 million. Inherited 3,000 acres and enslaved people; built 5,000-acre Monticello plantation (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• James Madison (1809-1817): $101 million. Virginia’s largest landowner; owned 5,000-acre Montpelier estate (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• James Monroe (1817-1825): $27 million. Married a wealthy wife; sold Highland plantation (3,500 acres) to pay debts after leaving office (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• John Quincy Adams (1825-1829): $21 million. Inherited father John Adams’s land holdings (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Andrew Jackson (1829-1837): $119 million. Married into slaveholding wealth; owned 1,050-acre Hermitage plantation in Tennessee (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Martin Van Buren (1837-1841): $26 million. Career attorney and politician; owned 225-acre Lindenwald estate in New York (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• William H. Harrison (1841): $5 million. Married judge’s daughter; inherited 3,000 acres; owned Indiana estate. Died in office insolvent (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• John Tyler (1841-1845): $51 million. Inherited 1,000-acre tobacco plantation; bought Sherwood Manor (1,600 acres). Died in debt after the Civil War (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• James K. Polk (1845-1849): $10 million. Born to a plantation family; earned income as Speaker and Governor (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Zachary Taylor (1849-1850): $6 million. Inherited family lands; profited from land speculation and warehouse leasing (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Millard Fillmore (1850-1853): $4 million. No significant inheritance; founded college (now SUNY Buffalo); owned New York house (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Franklin Pierce (1853-1857): $2 million. Farming family; career attorney; owned New Hampshire property (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• James Buchanan (1857-1861): Under $1 million. Farming family origins; lifelong public servant; owned modest Pennsylvania farm (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865): Under $1 million. Log-cabin origins; lawyer for 17 years; owned a small Illinois home (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Andrew Johnson (1865-1869): Under $1 million. Tailor’s son; owned a small Tennessee home; career politician (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877): Under $1 million. Lost fortune in business; lived on general’s salary; war memoirs later earned family money.

• Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881): $3 million. Attorney and Ohio governor; owned a 10,000-square-foot home on Spiegel Grove estate (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• James A. Garfield (1881): Under $1 million. Humble Ohio beginnings; long House career; owned a small Mentor, Ohio property (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885): Under $1 million. Collector of Customs in New York in the 1870s (lucrative position); owned a Tiffany-furnished townhouse (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Grover Cleveland (1885-1889, 1893-1897): $25 million. Lawyer and Buffalo mayor; married a wealthy wife; sold New Jersey “Westland Mansion” estate (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893): $5 million. Attorney with no inheritance; high-paid international law career; owned a large Indiana home (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• William McKinley (1897-1901): $1 million. Working-class roots; 30-plus years in public office; went bankrupt in the 1893 panic (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909): $125 million. Born wealthy (trust fund); owned Sagamore Hill estate on Long Island (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• William H. Taft (1909-1913): $3 million. Married into money; successful lawyer, Supreme Court Chief Justice; earned from law career and investments (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921): Under $1 million. Little inherited wealth; Princeton president’s salary; stroke in office ended career (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Warren G. Harding (1921-1923): $1 million. Fortune by marriage (wife was a bank heiress); owned an Ohio newspaper (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929): Under $1 million. Small inheritance; earned from autobiography and syndicated column (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Herbert Hoover (1929-1933): $75 million. Mining engineer/executive fortune; made a large fortune overseas in mining (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945): $60 million. Inherited Roosevelt family wealth; owned 800-acre Springwood estate.

• Harry S. Truman (1945-1953): Under $1 million. Modest income (haberdasher); saved small sums from a $12,000 annual salary (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961): $8 million. Career Army general; bought farm near Gettysburg; earned from memoirs and speeches (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• John F. Kennedy (1961-1963): Approximately $1 billion. Heir to a vast fortune (father Joseph Kennedy was extremely wealthy) (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969): $98 million. Built wealth via 1,500-acre Texas ranch, radio and TV stations, banks (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Richard Nixon (1969-1974): $15 million. No inheritance; made money from post-presidency book deals and Frost interviews (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Gerald R. Ford (1974-1977): $7 million. Post-presidency income from book deals and board memberships (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Jimmy Carter (1977-1981): $7 million. Born to a peanut farm; became wealthy from speaking fees and approximately 30 published books (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Ronald Reagan (1981-1989): $13 million. Former actor and TV host; owned real estate; earned from autobiography and GE spokesperson contract (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• George H.W. Bush (1989-1993): $23 million. Son of wealthy Prescott Bush; made money in oil and banking; owns 100-plus- acre Kennebunkport estate (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Bill Clinton (1993-2001): $70 million. No inheritance; post-office riches from books and speeches (e.g., $15 million advance on “My Life”) (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• George W. Bush (2001-2009): $35 million. Inherited Texas oil wealth; sold Texas Rangers stake (approximately $15 million profit); earned $7 million advance on “Decision Points” (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Barack Obama (2009-2017): $7 million. Earned $15.6 million in book royalties (2009-2017); Netflix and Spotify deals added millions (Forbes estimated $70 million in 2024) (McIntyre et al., 2016).

• Joe Biden (2021-2025): $7 million (2026 estimate). Career politician with pensions and real estate (Jakiel, 2026).

So the combined net worth of all 44 presidents, excluding President Donald Trump, is estimated at around $2.7 billion (Jakiel, 2026; McIntyre et al., 2016).

Trump’s Estimated 2025 Net Worth Increase

According to Forbes, Trump began 2025 with an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion and ended the year with $7.3 billion (Alexander, 2025c). Roughly $2 billion of that increase came from crypto-related ventures, including the launch of a Trump-branded memecoin, token sales through World Liberty Financial, and involvement in a stablecoin enterprise (Alexander, 2025a). An additional $410 million was attributed to a rebound in licensing and management deals, while $470 million came from the dismissal of a major fraud judgment that had previously deflated his net worth (Alexander, 2025b).

These breakdowns are based on reported estimates drawn from observable transactions, public filings, and market valuations, but they still depend on subjective valuation judgments (Alexander, 2025a). While it is clear that Trump profited by at least $1.4 billion since returning to office (NYTEB, 2026), the true total could be higher or lower depending on how unrealized crypto gains and opaque private deals are ultimately valued or disclosed.

Historical Analysis and Implications

When compared to the combined $2.7 billion adjusted net worth of all 44 predecessors, Trump’s reported single-year profit of $1.408 to $3.4 billion is likely just below the total wealth accumulated by all previous U.S. presidents during their respective terms (McIntyre et al., 2016; Alexander, 2025c). It is certainly less than Trump’s own net worth upon resuming office in 2025, estimated at $3.9 billion, and likely amounts to less than half of his current net worth, which stood at $7.3 billion by year’s end (Alexander, 2025c).

The comparison highlights how presidential wealth patterns have evolved. George Washington’s $525 million and Thomas Jefferson’s $212 million represented fixed assets: land, enslaved people, and plantation holdings, accumulated over decades (McIntyre et al., 2016). Twentieth-century presidents like Herbert Hoover and the Roosevelts entered office with established fortunes built through business ventures and inheritance, rather than public service salaries (McIntyre et al., 2016).

Modern presidents such as Clinton and Obama typically enriched themselves after leaving office through book deals and speaking engagements, creating a semblance of separation between power-holding and wealth accumulation (McIntyre et al., 2016). By contrast, Trump’s 2025 wealth surge concentrated in volatile assets: cryptocurrency holdings, meme coins and shares in Trump Media, is unprecedented in the historical or modern presidency (Bennett, 2025).

The 2025 windfall effectively rebranded Trump financially, replacing the majority of his net worth from a real estate empire he spent five decades building to a crypto-centric portfolio assembled in months (Alexander, 2025a). It also coincided with mounting questions about pardons issued during Trump’s presidency. Approximately one in five of Trump’s non-January 6th pardons went to individuals or associates who made substantial contributions, ranging from $800,000 to $6 million, to Trump’s political action committees and campaign funds, according to Forbes investigations (Durkee, 2026). Though no criminal charges have resulted, Justice Department investigators documented offers of “substantial political contributions in exchange for presidential pardons,” with total documented donations linked to clemency decisions reaching tens of millions of dollars.

Whether this represents innovation in executive compensation or a warning about unchecked conflicts of interest remains contested. What cannot be disputed is its historical anomaly: no previous president has been proven to have directly profited from mixing office holding and private ventures at this scale while serving in American history.

While Trump, his family, and Administration officials have denied conflicts of interest, the timing between regulatory approval and profitability remains difficult to ignore. Whether Trump favored deregulation because he believed in cryptocurrency’s promise or because he had financial stakes in its regulatory outcome is a question central to evaluating presidential accountability.

The mathematical reality is stark: Trump’s 2025 earnings rival, and by some calculations may exceed, the combined net worth of every other U.S. president who served before him; a consolidation of presidential wealth without historical precedent.

Works Cited

Alexander, Dan. 2025a. “Crypto Now Accounts For Most of Donald Trump’s Net Worth.”
Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/06/12/crypto-now-accounts-for-most-of-donald-trumps-net-worth/

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January 20th, 2026

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Democracies don’t fail because elected officials turn corrupt. If they did, no democracy would be left standing.

They fail when corruption stops carrying consequences. When a leader’s loyalists cease to recognize misconduct as wrongdoing at all. In a healthy democracy, credible evidence of abuse prompts outrage and accountability. Under what can be called a corruption-immunity shield, the same evidence deepens personalized political loyalties and confirms preconceived notions about the supposed corruption of the opposition and of core institutions.

Defining the Corruption-Immunity Shield

A corruption-immunity shield is a cognitive defense mechanism in which supporters of a political leader reinterpret credible evidence of that leader’s misconduct as illegitimate attacks from hostile institutions. Instead of functioning as an alarm, such evidence is reframed as proof of persecution by a “corrupt establishment.” Investigations, indictments, scandals, and even legal penalties are not seen as enforcement of democratic norms, but as institutional warfare by courts, prosecutors, and nonpartisan media organizations. In this logic, the problem is never what the leader has done; the problem is that these corrupt institutions (aka “they”) dared to investigate him at all.

Crucially, this is not about corruption being invisible. It is about corruption being reframed as virtue. The more proof surfaces, the more it feeds a persecution narrative. In the eyes of fervent supporters, each allegation confirms that their champion is an embattled outsider fighting a wicked system on their behalf. Evidence that would normally trigger doubt instead becomes fuel for loyalty.

Trump’s Indictments, Conviction, and the Shield

The United States in the post-2020 era offers a vivid case. Donald Trump lost re-election in 2020 and then faced an unprecedented wave of legal scrutiny: two impeachments, and four criminal cases that initially totaled 91 felony counts across New York, federal courts, and Georgia, covering allegations from falsifying business records to obstructing justice and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.

By any traditional standard, these well-documented accusations—and eventually, a criminal conviction—should have shattered his standing. On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the New York hush-money case. A snap YouGov poll the same day found that 50% of Americans agreed with the verdict, while 30% disagreed. Yet nearly 80% of Americans said the conviction did not change their vote intentions: 46% were already opposed to Trump and remained so, and 32% already supported him and continued to do so. Only 5% reported switching from supporting Trump to opposing him because of the verdict, while 3% moved in the opposite direction.

Among Republicans, the shield was even more durable. A June 2023 Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after Trump’s federal indictment found that 81% of self-identified Republicans believed the charges were politically motivated. A separate YouGov poll showed that 79% of Republicans believed Trump should not be convicted in the hush-money case, even before the verdict. After the conviction, most Republican voters said the verdict would not change their support for him.

Perhaps most revealing is what happened to institutional trust. Before the hush-money verdict, Republicans and Democrats expressed somewhat similar levels of confidence in jury trials. Immediately afterward, partisan attitudes flipped sharply. After the verdict, 78% of Republicans said the prosecution, trial, judge, or jury had been unfair. The institution responsible for finding facts did not merely lose legitimacy among Trump’s base—it was reclassified as part of the “corrupt system” persecuting their champion. In short, even a criminal conviction—arguably the strongest possible formal signal of wrongdoing—was absorbed into the persecution narrative rather than accepted as proof.

This is the corruption-immunity shield in its mature form: legal peril and even a guilty verdict become rallying cries, not cautionary tales. Trump himself leaned into this dynamic, telling supporters at rallies, “They’re not indicting me, they’re indicting you. I just happen to be standing in their way,”—turning personal accountability into a shared grievance.

When Scandals Used to End Careers

This response marks a sharp break from an earlier era in American politics. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, serious scandal often ended—not boosted—political careers. Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, after the Watergate tapes and the “smoking gun” evidence convinced even Republican leaders that he had obstructed justice; facing almost certain impeachment and removal, his party abandoned him. Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973 after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges stemming from a bribery and kickback scheme during his tenure as governor of Maryland.

The contrast with Trump is stark. Where earlier scandals punctured credibility, Trump’s legal troubles have become central to his political brand. Allegations of wrongdoing do not weaken his bond with loyalists; they prove, in their eyes, that he is the victim of a corrupt establishment determined to crush their movement.

A Global Pattern: Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Berlusconi

Trump’s case may be the most familiar to Americans, but similar shields have formed around other populist or authoritarian-leaning leaders.

In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro was accused of systematically undermining the 2022 election results and encouraging efforts to overturn the outcome, culminating in the January 8, 2023 storming of government buildings in Brasília. Brazil’s electoral court banned him from running for office until 2030 for election abuses, and on September 11, 2025, the Supreme Court convicted him on multiple charges, including plotting a coup and participating in a criminal organization, sentencing him to 27 years and three months in prison. Bolsonaro has consistently called the investigations and the trial a “witch hunt” and a politically motivated effort to silence him. Many of his supporters have echoed that narrative, framing the judiciary and the Supreme Court—not Bolsonaro—as the true threat to democracy, and staging protests against the justices rather than the alleged coup plotters.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years fighting three major corruption cases, charging him with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, including allegations of receiving roughly $300,000 in luxury gifts and trading regulatory favors for favorable media coverage. Netanyahu has cast the entire process as an “illicit attempt” by a left‑leaning alliance of politicians, prosecutors, police, and media to remove him from power for ideological reasons, and his allies frequently describe the proceedings as a judicial “coup d’état” by unelected elites. A large segment of Israeli society now views the courts with suspicion, treating Netanyahu’s legal troubles as evidence of his importance: if the establishment is so determined to take him down, he must be doing something right.

Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi arguably pioneered this style of immunity shield in the 1990s and 2000s. Over his career he faced some 35 criminal cases—including allegations of tax fraud, bribery, and witness tampering—and was convicted only once in a final verdict, for tax fraud in 2013. Throughout, Berlusconi claimed he was the victim of politically motivated persecution by “communist judges” and rogue magistrates. By persuading his supporters that the judiciary was merely a weapon in the hands of his enemies, he repeatedly bounced back from scandals that would likely have ended other leaders’ careers, returning to office and maintaining a major party as a pillar of Italy’s right.

Across these cases, the pattern is consistent. Faced with credible accusations of wrongdoing, the leader and his camp rarely engage with the evidence: they attack the arbiters. Allegations of corruption are not rebutted point-by-point; they are absorbed into a pre-existing story about persecuted patriots besieged by villainous institutions.

How the Shield Forms: Internalized Political Skepticism

A corruption-immunity shield does not emerge overnight, nor is it simply a product of blind fanaticism. It takes root most readily in societies where distrust of institutions has already been deeply internalized as part of political identity. What can be called internalized political skepticism is a durable, identity-based distrust towards electoral institutions that persists after misinformation triggers have faded.

This prior institutional skepticism provides the fertile soil in which a corruption-immunity shield can grow. If citizens already assume that “the press lies,” prosecutors are partisan, and a “deep state” is real, then any accusation against their chosen leader slots neatly into that worldview. Without such prior skepticism, supporters might still feel partisan loyalty, but blatant misconduct would be harder to dismiss outright. Once skepticism toward official information is ingrained, however, each new allegation of corruption simply reinforces the conviction that “the system” is out to get “our side.”​

Several ingredients typically interact to harden the corruption-immunity shield:

• Repeated elite cues: Political leaders and aligned media figures broadly insist that “the media lies,” judges are “corrupt,” and elections are “rigged.” Over time, these claims erode the credibility of watchdog institutions and help transform distrust into an identity marker of being on the “inside” of the social movement.​

• Fragmented information environments: Partisan media ecosystems, algorithm-driven echo chambers, and closed messaging apps amplify persecution narratives and filter out corrective information, reinforcing identity-protective cognition in which people selectively accept or reject facts based on group alignment rather than accuracy.​

• Perceived grievance and marginalization: Groups that feel culturally threatened or politically sidelined are more likely to embrace stories of a scheming establishment. A leader who says “the establishment hates me because it hates you” offers both an explanation for their frustrations and a flattering moral identity as embattled truth-tellers.​

All these forces accumulate over years. At first, a scandal might cause some discomfort or doubt. But if the leader brazenly dismisses each allegation as a “hoax” and faces no real disavowal from the base, supporters learn to do the same. Each successful deflection hardens the shield. Eventually it becomes self-sealing: new evidence of misconduct simply confirms the belief that powerful institutions are unfairly sabotaging the leader and, by extension, those who support him. Renouncing the leader would then feel, for many, like betraying their own identity. At that point, empirical accountability is effectively nullified.​

Accountability Breakdown in Democracies

The democratic dangers of this phenomenon are difficult to overstate. Modern democracy rests on the principle that leaders can be checked and peacefully removed when they violate public trust. Elections, independent courts, legislative oversight, and investigative journalism form a web of accountability that deters would-be autocrats and crooks. The corruption-immunity shield tears holes in that web.

If a large enough bloc of citizens refuses to believe inconvenient truths, a politician can evade consequences simply by denying everything and vilifying the arbiters of fact. In the U.S., Trump’s continued popularity among Republican voters—even after felony conviction—helped intimidate many GOP elites into silence or active defense of him, despite the gravity of his legal troubles. Fearful of alienating the Republican base, even rival 2024 presidential candidates echoed “weaponization of federal law enforcement” narratives instead of insisting on accountability. Over time, this dynamic can enable leaders to entrench loyalists in key positions, further weakening independent oversight.

This is not mere partisan forgiveness or “lesser-evil” reasoning, which exists in all democracies. A corruption-immunity shield represents an inversion of accountability: wrongdoing is not just excused, but celebrated if it offends the perceived establishment. Breaking norms becomes proof of courage, and evading the law is recast as clever defiance of a corrupt system. When a leader can openly joke at rallies that criminal indictments are politically beneficial, drawing laughter, applause, and increased approval ratings, the ordinary relationship between evidence, accountability, and belief has been flipped on its head.

Backsliding Without a Coup

Democratic backsliding research has shown that many modern democracies erode gradually, not through dramatic coups but via incremental norm-breaking, partisan capture of institutions, and declining trust. Scholars tracking this phenomenon have documented how elected leaders in countries such as Hungary and Turkey have used formally legal tools, institutional manipulation, and propaganda to hollow out checks and balances while maintaining elections and constitutional facades

A robust corruption-immunity shield accelerates this process. In Russia and Turkey, state-aligned media have long portrayed opposition figures, journalists, and civil society organizations as traitors or foreign agents; corruption charges against incumbents are dismissed by supporters as smears by hostile outsiders. In newer democracies such as Hungary, leaders accused of undermining judicial independence or media freedom routinely frame EU criticism as bullying by globalist elites, rallying their bases against “Brussels” rather than addressing the allegations.

The logic is consistent: if my leader is accused, that accusation itself proves the accuser’s evil. As trust in institutions decays, formal procedures—elections, court rulings, investigative reports—lose their corrective power. Democracy continues in form, but its immune system fails. The body politic can no longer reliably detect and reject the infection of corruption.

Connecting the Dots: A Broader Framework

The corruption-immunity shield is closely intertwined with other mechanisms of democratic breakdown. Prior institutional skepticism lays the psychological groundwork by normalizing deep distrust of institutions. Asymmetric losers’ consent—when one side repeatedly refuses to accept electoral defeat as legitimate—further corrodes democratic norms. And what might be called an opposition-dominance assumption—the belief that nearly all institutions have been captured by the opposing camp—feeds the impulse to treat any action by those institutions as inherently illegitimate.

Together, these dynamics create a larger pattern:

• Citizens come to believe that their side can never legitimately lose, only be cheated.

• Any investigation or prosecution of their leaders becomes, by definition, a partisan attack.

• Evidence of corruption no longer prompts course correction, but deeper entrenchment.

In such an environment, democracies can “forget” how to correct themselves long before they formally collapse. A country may still hold elections and convene courts, but if large segments of the public and political elite refuse to accept unfavorable outcomes, the system’s self-healing capacity is gravely weakened.

Why Naming the Shield Matters

Giving these dynamics names is not an academic indulgence; it is a necessary step toward countering them. The term “corruption-immunity shield” may be new, but its effects are visible in headlines almost daily. Naming it helps clarify what separates ordinary partisanship from something more dangerous: a state in which facts about corruption are systematically repelled rather than considered.

Recognizing that “simply revealing the truth” is not enough is uncomfortable, but essential. Investigative journalism, court cases, and watchdog reports remain vital, yet information alone cannot puncture an identity-based shield and may even reinforce it. This suggests that pro-democracy actors need strategies that address underlying grievances and group identities, not just the factual record.

Such strategies might include:

• Supporting trusted voices within skeptical communities who can challenge persecution narratives from the inside.

• Rebuilding civics education and media literacy so that fewer citizens slide into total cynicism about all institutions.

• Re-establishing cross-partisan norms: political leaders must be willing to denounce corruption on their own side, not only across the aisle.

The corruption-immunity shield is potent, but not inevitable. It is a learned way of seeing the world, and what is learned can, in principle, be unlearned. The warning, however, is clear: democracies can lose their ability to heal themselves long before they formally die. When internalized political skepticism erodes trust, and the corruption-immunity shield reframes accountability as persecution, democracies edge toward a critical failure of their immune system. Recognizing this pattern is the first step toward rebuilding the antibodies of accountability before it is too late.

Micah Allred is a politics researcher, political journalist, and former AmeriCorps Disaster Corps Project Lead with an MA in Comparative Politics from American University. My work focuses on democratic trust, disinformation, and institutional breakdown in the U.S. and comparative democracies. My Substack publishes original political analysis, creative writing, and entrepreneurial ideas. I’m actively seeking paid work in political journalism, research and analysis, policy communications, startup/entrepreneurship, and adjacent writing or consulting roles.

Your subscriptions and donations make my independent journalism possible and help keep costs down for new subscribers. If you appreciate my work and see its value in our political discourse, please become a paid subscriber and spread the word!

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On January 20, 2025, in one of his first acts as president, Donald J. Trump signed sweeping pardons and commutations for approximately 1,500 individuals convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack. The scope was staggering. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, serving 18 years for seditious conspiracy, walked free. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, facing 22 years, received a full pardon that same night. Even those convicted of assaulting police officers—captured on video beating law enforcement with flagpoles, hockey sticks, and chemical sprays—had their sentences erased.

Trump framed his decision as correcting a “grave national injustice” and beginning a process of “national reconciliation.” But to the protesters I interviewed outside the D.C. jail three months earlier, this wasn’t mercy. It was vindication.

“Trump will win, and he’ll pardon us,” Brandon Fellows had told me in October at Freedom Corner, his confidence bordering on prophecy. “They can’t do anything now,” he declared to The Washington Post hours after the pardons were announced. “This is true freedom.”

In that moment, Fellows captured something essential about the January 6 movement that many observers missed. These weren’t criminals seeking forgiveness. They were believers awaiting validation. And on January 20th, they got it.

The Machinery of Mass Clemency

The pardons moved with remarkable speed. Within hours of taking the oath of office, Trump had signed orders affecting more individuals than any single act of presidential clemency in American history. More than in his entire second presidency. To understand the scale: this exceeded Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon of Vietnam draft evaders, Jimmy Carter’s clemency for draft resisters, and every other modern presidential pardon combined.

The Justice Department had spent three years and unprecedented resources prosecuting what it called the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. More than 1,000 defendants faced charges ranging from misdemeanor trespassing to felony seditious conspiracy. Federal judges, many appointed by Trump himself, handed down sentences after reviewing mountains of evidence: videos, social media posts, testimony from officers who were beaten and traumatized.

Yet Trump faced no meaningful institutional resistance. Vice President J.D. Vance had quietly suggested during the transition that only non-violent offenders would receive clemency. Republican lawyers floated the idea of a DOJ review board to evaluate cases individually. But Trump, as always, chose the path that maximized his political power without regard for precedent, process, or posterity.

The pardons passed through no official review. No consideration of individual culpability. No distinction between those who walked through open doors and those who smashed windows, beat police, and coordinated tactical assaults on the building. It was blanket absolution, delivered with the stroke of a pen.

Predictions from Freedom Corner - Analyzed

In October 2024, standing outside the D.C. jail, the January 6 defendants I interviewed made predictions. Some proved remarkably accurate. Others collapsed into fantasy almost immediately.

They predicted Trump would win the 2024 election. He did, decisively.

They predicted Kamala Harris (or Joe Biden, or some shadowy “leftist cabal”) would attempt to “steal” the White House. This never happened. Harris conceded gracefully the night of the election. Biden served out his term and participated in the peaceful transfer of power. The conspiracy that animated so much of their rage turned out to be pure fiction.

They predicted that Trump would pardon most of the J6ers—but not all of them. Even Brandon Fellows, a now proudly pardoned J6er, and Micki Witthoeft, mother of Ashli Babbitt, cautioned against pardoning alleged “undercover FBI” agitators and those who were “just there to cause trouble.” But ultimately, they got more than what they even asked for. President Trump pardoned every J6er, without regard for even internal warnings from J6ers of informants and troublemakers.

This selective vindication reveals something crucial about what I term internalized political skepticism: a durable, identity-based distrust of democratic institutions that persists regardless of evidence. When J6 supporters are proven right (Trump wins, keeps his promise), it confirms their worldview. When they’re proven wrong (no Democratic coup materializes), they simply move to the next conspiracy. The underlying disposition—that official sources cannot be trusted, that institutions are fundamentally corrupt—remains unshaken.

Fellows exemplified this pattern perfectly. He told me in October that Democrats would “try and steal it” and that if they did, Americans should “grab your guns, and this time do a REAL insurrection... hide your face, arm yourselves, and don’t bring your phones.” When Trump won legitimately and Harris conceded, Fellows didn’t reconsider his premise. Instead, he pivoted immediately to celebration and plans to continue organizing.

This is not cognitive dissonance. It’s something more fundamental: a belief system in which opposition to institutional authority is inherently more legitimate than working within it. Trump’s victory didn’t prove the system works. It proved that Trump, the outsider challenging that system, was powerful enough to overcome it.

The Numbers: Unpopular, But Effective

By any measure of public opinion, the pardons were deeply controversial. A January 2025 survey by the States United Democracy Center found that 66% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 offenders, while only 16% supported it. Even within Republican circles, the move generated quiet discomfort. Senator Mike Rounds warned it could hurt the party with suburban swing voters who hadn’t forgotten the violence of that day.

But Trump wasn’t governing for 66% of Americans. He was governing for the MAGA base—and for them, the pardons were transformational.

This reveals a fundamental miscalculation by Trump’s critics, and even some of his supporters. They treated the pardons as a legal or moral question: should these people go free? But for Trump, it was always a question of power and loyalty. Would Trump determine that mass pardons would maximize support from his base and fury from his political opposition?

The answer, delivered emphatically on January 20, 2025, was yes.

The Loyalty Contract

Trump’s relationship with the January 6 defendants operates less like traditional politics and more like a protection racket. You fight for me; I protect you. You take risks on my behalf; I eliminate the consequences.

This transactional loyalty was tested repeatedly during the prosecutions. Under the Biden DOJ, some defendants expressed remorse at sentencing, perhaps hoping for leniency. A few denounced Trump, claiming they’d been misled. But Fellows notably refused to play that game. He remained defiant throughout his trial, earning extra jail time for contempt after repeatedly calling the proceedings a “kangaroo court.”

His bet paid off.

Once Trump secured the presidency, any veneer of contrition from other defendants evaporated. Some hadn’t actually been sorry—they’d been strategic. Now, with pardons secured, they could return to their original posture: righteous, unrepentant, vindicated.

Those who during the 2024 campaign projected their morality onto Trump, predicting that he would not pardon violent offenders, are now working overtime to rationalize their miscalculations. This dynamic creates what I call the corruption-immunity shield: a belief system where supporters rationalize their political leader’s misconduct as either fabricated by hostile institutions or as necessary compromises to fight a corrupt system.

The implications are stark. Future activists considering extra-legal action now have a template: if your cause aligns with Trump’s interests, and if he’s in power, accountability can be erased. This isn’t the rule of law. It’s rule by loyalty.

The Precedent: Normalizing Political Violence

Controversial presidential pardons are not unprecedented: Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, and Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden. But those cases, however controversial, involved individual acts of clemency based on specific circumstances.

Trump’s January 6 pardons are categorically different. They represent blanket forgiveness for collective political violence aimed at overturning an election. Some argue the closest historical parallel might be President Andrew Johnson’s broad amnesty for Confederate soldiers after the Civil War. While it was meant to heal a nation divided after years of brutal civil war, it nonetheless enabled the rollback of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow.

I would argue the closest historical parallel took place several years after Johnson, when Ulysses S. Grant pardoned Ku Klux Klan members in 1873. After initially prosecuting over 600 Klan members under the Ku-Klux Act of 1871, Grant pardoned virtually all convicted Klan members and suspended prosecutions for roughly 1,200 additional cases. Grant claimed he was “hoping” pardons would “gradually encourage obedience to the law,” but the result was the opposite. The pardons signaled, then as they do now, that the federal government would forgo defending our democratic system in favor of temporary political benefits.

Historian Nicole Hemmer warned that by pardoning violent insurrectionists, Trump was “legitimating the insurrection and signaling to supporters that there will be no price to pay for pro-Trump political violence” going forward. Legal scholars echoed this concern. The message to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose leaders orchestrated much of the January 6 violence, was unmistakable: your tactics work, and we will protect you.

Compare this to how other democracies handle political violence. In established democracies, accountability for attacks on government institutions is typically swift and severe, precisely because the precedent matters. Turkey’s drift toward authoritarianism accelerated after Erdogan pardoned loyalists involved in suppressing dissent. Russia’s descent into autocracy was marked by Putin’s protection of security forces who committed abuses.

The pattern is consistent: when leaders signal that violence in their name will be forgiven, violence tends to escalate.

Elite Validation and Institutional Collapse

One week after the pardons, Representative Lauren Boebert gave several recently freed January 6 defendants a personal tour of the Capitol. The symbolism was impossible to miss: individuals who had been convicted of crimes in this building, some for assaulting the police who guard it, were now welcomed back as honored guests by a sitting member of Congress.

For Capitol Police still processing the trauma of that day, Boebert’s tour was devastating. But for the January 6 movement, it was something else entirely: elite validation.

In my research on cross-border political diffusion, I found that conspiracy theories and anti-democratic narratives gain traction most rapidly when amplified by political elites. When leaders signal that a fringe position is legitimate, their followers internalize it as mainstream. In Canada, the absence of elite figures echoing U.S. election-fraud claims helped contain their spread. In the United States, the opposite occurred.

Trump isn’t just a former president offering clemency. He is the sitting president, backed by a Republican Party that has largely endorsed or remained silent about his actions. When he declares January 6 defendants “patriots” and “political prisoners,” he’s not offering a fringe opinion. He’s establishing official policy.

This elite cueing operates at multiple levels. At rallies throughout 2024, Trump regularly invoked Ashli Babbitt’s name, calling her death at the hands of Capitol Police a wrongful killing. He recorded video messages for January 6 defendants, reassuring them of his support. He even featured the “J6 Prison Choir”—defendants calling in from jail to sing the national anthem—at his campaign events.

Each of these acts sends a clear message: your cause was just, your actions were justified, and I will protect you.

The Institutional Damage

Beyond the individual pardons, Trump’s actions inflicted significant damage on federal institutions. Dozens of Justice Department prosecutors who had worked on January 6 cases—many assigned through no initiative of their own—found themselves reassigned or forced out in the new administration’s early weeks. The DOJ even scrubbed public webpages that had documented the Capitol riot cases, erasing the institutional memory of the largest criminal investigation in American history.

For rank-and-file FBI agents and federal prosecutors, the message was demoralizing: years of work, nullified by political calculation. Will agents pursue politically sensitive investigations as aggressively in the future, knowing their work could be voided if the perpetrators’ party retakes power? Will they investigate powerful political figures during election years, potentially risking careers they spent years building?

These aren’t hypothetical concerns. They’re rational calculations by civil servants watching institutional norms collapse in real-time.

The judiciary, too, faced implicit repudiation. Federal judges—including many Trump appointees—had carefully weighed evidence, heard testimony, and handed down sentences based on the severity of each defendant’s actions. Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, called January 6 “a singular threat to the republic.” Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, described it as an attack on democracy itself.

Their judgments, collectively representing hundreds of hours of careful legal reasoning, were dismissed wholesale. The implicit message: judicial independence matters only when it produces outcomes the executive prefers.

The Unanswered Questions

As the first anniversary of the J6 pardons approaches, several questions hang in the air.

Will the pardoned defendants stay quiet, grateful for their freedom? Or will they organize, emboldened by their vindication?

Will Republican primary voters continue to reward candidates who embraced the new J6 narrative?

Will the media’s ongoing coverage of the pardoned harden existing partisan divisions, or will it force some Trump supporters to finally reconsider their position?

And most critically: what happens in the 2026 midterm elections, when these newly freed defendants participate in their first election cycle since January 6, 2021?

The pardons weren’t just about freeing 1,500 people. They were about establishing a principle: in Trump’s America, political violence in service of his power would be forgiven, celebrated, and potentially encouraged.

In the next installment of my “Fear and Loathing at the D.C. Jail” series, I’ll examine what the pardoned January 6 defendants have done in the year since their release: who they’ve become, what they’re organizing, and what their plans are for the 2026 midterms and beyond.

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January 9th, 2026.

Democracies don’t usually collapse because citizens stop voting.
They collapse because citizens stop believing that voting means anything—and keep voting anyway.

Internalized political skepticism is a durable, identity-based disposition in which citizens come to distrust democratic institutions and official information as a matter of who they are politically, rather than what they have learned from evidence. Once internalized, skepticism toward elections, courts, media, and governance does not fade when facts are presented or when political conditions change. It persists, hardens, and begins to organize how people interpret politics itself.

This phenomenon helps explain one of the central paradoxes of contemporary democracy. Citizens continue to vote, follow political news, and participate in civic life, while simultaneously believing the system is corrupt, illegitimate, or rigged against people like them. This is not apathy. It is not disengagement. It is participation without trust, a far more destabilizing condition.

The United States after the 2020 election, provides the clearest case. More than sixty court challenges to the official election results failed. Republican election officials across the country certified the results. Independent audits and recounts upheld vote totals. Federal election security agencies and international observers called the election secure. Yet years later, belief in a stolen election remains dominant among Republican voters. Crucially, that belief did not decline as the original claims faded from headlines. Confidence in vote counting collapsed and then stabilized at a permanently lower level. The trigger was temporary. The skepticism was not.

This persistence exposes the limits of how political science and journalism typically explain democratic distrust. Misinformation suggests that false beliefs endure because people lack correct information. Motivated reasoning explains how partisans filter evidence defensively. Political cynicism captures suspicion toward politicians’ motives. Institutional distrust measures declining confidence in government. Each framework captures part of the picture. None explains why distrust becomes durable, resistant to correction, and embedded in political identity itself.

Internalized political skepticism fills that gap. It describes a shift from doubting a claim to doubting the legitimacy of knowledge produced by democratic institutions altogether. At that point, factual refutation no longer functions as persuasion. It functions as a threat.

Once skepticism becomes identity-based, it begins to generate its own logic. If an election is lost, that loss confirms corruption. If an election is won, the victory proves the system was overcome despite corruption. If courts reject fraud claims, the judiciary is implicated. If media fact-checks those claims, journalism becomes suspect. Evidence does not disconfirm the belief. It is absorbed into it.

This dynamic overlaps with another original concept I’ve developed, asymmetric losers’ consent, which describes how democratic legitimacy erodes when only one side of the political spectrum systematically rejects election outcomes in a functional democratic system. In healthy democracies, losers’ consent fluctuates but rebounds. In systems affected by internalized political skepticism, consent collapses on one side and does not return, even when political fortunes improve. The result is not polarization in the traditional sense but a structural legitimacy gap.

The mechanism by which skepticism becomes internalized is psychological rather than informational. Exposure alone is not enough. The narrative must resonate with existing grievances, whether economic, cultural, or status-based. When a claim explains why the system feels unfair, it sticks. Over time, skepticism becomes explanatory rather than situational. It stops being about one election and starts accounting for broader feelings of social exclusion and cultural loss. Eventually, rejecting the belief would require dismantling a core political identity. At that point, skepticism ossifies.

This is why fact-checking so often fails. It assumes the problem is knowledge. Internalized political skepticism reveals the problem is identity. Corrective information delivered by authoritative institutions can even backfire, reinforcing distrust by activating identity-protective reasoning. The more the institution insists it is legitimate, the more suspect it appears to those who have internalized skepticism toward it.

One of the most overlooked aspects of this phenomenon is that it does not respect national borders. My comparative research on cross-border political diffusion suggests that American election denial narratives partially spread into Canada despite Canada’s stronger electoral institutions and higher baseline trust. The outcome was not mass Canadian election denial. It was selective skepticism. Among anglophone Canadians with heavy exposure to U.S. political media, trust in Canadian elections declined and remained lower even in the absence of domestic fraud claims or elite-level challenges. Francophone Canadians, operating in a separate media ecosystem, showed no comparable shift.

This pattern illustrates another original concept, institutional filtering in political diffusion, which refers to how domestic institutions and media environments shape whether imported political narratives are amplified, muted, or transformed. Strong institutions can dampen the spread of distrust, but they cannot fully prevent internalized skepticism from forming among receptive subgroups. Psychological identification travels faster than institutional failure.

The implications for democratic resilience are unsettling. Internalized political skepticism suggests that democracies face a permanence problem. Unlike temporary trust shocks, identity-based distrust does not automatically resolve with better performance, greater transparency, or improved communication. Once skepticism is internalized, it becomes self-sustaining.

This also helps explain why accountability increasingly fails to discipline political leaders. Another original term I will explore in a future article, the corruption immunity shield, describes how supporters with high internalized skepticism reinterpret evidence of misconduct as proof that institutions are targeting their leader. Investigations strengthen loyalty. Indictments confirm persecution. Norm-breaking signals authenticity. Without internalized political skepticism, such behavior looks illegitimate. With it, defiance becomes virtue.

None of this means democratic collapse is inevitable. Internalized political skepticism requires specific conditions. Repeated elite-level attacks on institutions. Weak or fragmented media environments. Absence of cross-partisan norm enforcement. Exposure without countervailing cues. Most importantly, it requires time.

The lesson is not that trust can never be rebuilt. It is that prevention matters more than correction. Once skepticism becomes identity, democracies are no longer arguing over facts. They are negotiating competing realities.

Internalized political skepticism is not the moment democracy ends. It is the moment democracy forgets how to believe in itself.

In the coming weeks, I will introduce and develop additional original terms that map this process more precisely, including opposition dominance, asymmetric losers’ consent, and the corruption immunity shield. Each describes a different mechanism through which modern democracies erode without formally collapsing.

Naming these dynamics is not only an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for defending democratic legitimacy in an era where distrust has learned how to survive the truth.

By Micah Blake Allred.

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Where the Right Meets the Night

Note: The interviews and reporting for this article were conducted in the final days before the 2024 presidential election. This is the first time the piece has been published.

As Election Day loomed, a crowd of protesters gathered nightly outside the D.C. Jail, their attention fixed firmly on the upcoming presidential contest. November 5th marked what they called “judgment day.” It would be the 827th night in a row that they had come here to support the prisoners still held for their roles in the January 6th, 2021, Capitol riots—and to honor those who died that day.

They met every night from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at what they had affectionately named Freedom Corner, wedged between the D.C. Jail and Congressional Cemetery (now also a private dog park). Surrounded by a skyline of abandoned buildings, with streets lined with barricades on either side to protect protestors from anti-protestors from one another. Behind these barriers stood the D.C. police, nearly one for every two protesters, with half as many patrol cars.

The public had heard plenty about the philosophies and conspiracies embraced by the political right, but less about their concrete political expectations. What were their actual predictions for the 2024 election? Freedom Corner had become ground zero for America’s mounting political anxieties. Here, paranoia and patriotism, Christianity and conspiracy, fear and loathing all collided in a nightly spectacle of defiance aimed at their perceived oppressors. As Election Day drew nearer, tensions reached their zenith. The protesters believed the outcome would determine not only the fate of the January 6th defendants—but the fate of the nation itself.

Vigils, Visions, and Vengeance

“Trump will take it back,” said Brandon Fellows, a daily protest attendee, self-proclaimed former Abercrombie model, and former J6 inmate. According to the D.C. Attorney General’s office, Fellows was convicted after representing himself in court for illegally entering the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He was also sentenced to an additional six months for contempt after repeatedly referring to the proceedings as a “kangaroo” and “Nazi court.” On the day of the riot, he wore a fake beard, a knight’s helmet-style hat, sunglasses, and carried a flag and a trash can lid to use as a makeshift shield. Upon entering the Capitol, he hotboxed the office of Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon with other rioters.

“Trump will win, but Democrats will try and steal it. If they do steal it, grab your guns, and this time do a REAL insurrection! But do it right this time: hide your face, arm yourselves, and don’t bring your phones… But hope not, because if Trump loses—legit or not—we are taking back power,” Fellows said.

Since his release from prison after nearly three years, Fellows claimed he now resided in a modern high-rise apartment overlooking the Capitol. Funded by anonymous political benefactors who, he says, see value in keeping him close to the action and promoting his political rhetoric. Fellows' concerns about voter fraud in 2024 were echoed by other protestors, including Sherri Hafner, the group’s unofficial coordinator when Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Micky Witthoeft, was absent. Hafner, a 12-year military veteran, warned that a loss for Trump could mean harsher treatment for January 6th prisoners. “If Kamala wins, the Constitution will be null and void,” she said.

Among the protestors I interviewed, there was near-universal agreement that their fight would grow significantly more difficult under a Democratic administration. However, when asked if they supported a blanket pardon for all January 6th defendants, should Trump return to office, many hesitated. “Some prisoners were there for the wrong reasons, and they deserve to face justice,” Hafner said. While most attendees supported clemency for the majority of J6 participants, they claimed that others—whom they believed to be FBI informants or members of ANTIFA—deserved to remain behind bars for their alleged sabotage.

When I asked Fellows what he thought about the October presidential polls, he responded, “I like them more now than I did in 2016 or 2020,” though his tone betrayed some uncertainty. Still, his instincts weren’t entirely off. At that point in the cycle, Trump was polling better than he had during either of his previous campaigns, with the electoral college essentially a toss-up. In the prior two elections, FiveThirtyEight’s final polling averages underestimated Trump’s performance by 1.9% in 2016 and 4% in 2020. Given the polling site's 95% accuracy range—and its historical tendency to undervalue Trump’s support—his odds in the battleground states were stronger than many Democrats wanted to believe.

Brandon and several of the regular J6 protesters didn’t see themselves merely as symbols of defiance—they saw themselves as reserve officers awaiting the signal for an inevitable upheaval. Sherri, who served in Desert Storm in the 1990s, told me she views her presence at Freedom Corner as a continuation of her fight against tyranny—only this time, on American soil.

The anger of these protesters, once targeted at the elites they believed had rigged the system, had seemed to gradually morph into a wholesale rejection of the very democracy they claimed to be defending. Their evolving definition of “freedom” sounded less like a civic value and more like a return to Darwinian order, where the strong dominate the weak in a free market of force.

Many election deniers who once claimed their movement was about transparency and truth were now calling for censorship, surveillance, and sweeping power grabs. According to USA Today, out of the 62 lawsuits Trump filed to overturn the results of the 2020 election, 61 were unsuccessful. In many cases, the rulings were delivered by judges Trump had appointed or by courts that refused to even hear his appeals.

The J6 protesters’ unwavering belief in Trump’s infallibility stood out as a glaring exception to their stated opposition to authoritarianism. In their imagined vision of justice, true fairness would be defined by mass pardons for violent offenders, the use of military force on U.S. soil against perceived “internal enemies,” the gutting of federal institutions, and the prosecution of Trump’s political rivals. Many seemed to believe that the only way to defeat a supposed authoritarian regime was to install one of their own.

It’s impossible to ignore the irony: the protesters’ anti-authoritarian rhetoric often culminated in the call for a different kind of authoritarianism, one that would bend America to their will under the guidance of their chosen billionaire messiah.

Mickey Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt—who was shot and killed by Capitol police during the January 6th riot—had become the public face of this now years-long nightly “vigil.” Publicly, she advocated civil political discourse, a stance that occasionally put her at odds with more radical members of the protest, including Fellows. One can only assume that this divergence in rhetoric is a direct result of her personal experience with J6: she knows, more than most people in America, the terrible personal cost of political violence.

The protest at Freedom Corner had not gone uncontested. Patricia Eguino, the current Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for D.C.’s District 6C06, and frequent counter-protester, was the only one to challenge the J6ers on that night. Armed with a bullhorn and siren, Eguino shouted slogans such as “FUCK YOU FASCISTS” and “TRAITORS” at the protestors. After a tense introduction, she informed me she tried to attend at least once a month to publicly express he views that the J6ers were not just a threat to her hometown, but to the nation. “They don’t believe in democracy, and they want to burn this country down,” Eguino said. Despite her aggressive tactics, the protestors responded with a calm indifference. I asked Sherri after our interview if she had any message for Eguino, whom I was interviewing next. Hafner simply replied, “Oh Lord, tell ‘em Jesus loves ‘em.” The ferocity of the counterprotestor—and the soldier-like stoicism of the J6 protesters’ responses—seemed to forebode the dark political calculations to come.

Twilight of the Election?

Around 9:00 PM, after a full night of livestreaming calls with inmates to discuss the election, one of the protesters flashed a blinking flashlight towards the jail. The J6 inmates inside flickered the lights in their cells on and off in recognition. Upon this confirmation, the J6 protestors outside linked arms and sang the National Anthem in unison with those inside the jail.

As the vigil closed for the night, the protestors chanted out in unison: “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! VOTE!” Signaling their determination to see their cause through to the election and beyond. As November 5th approached, Freedom Corner would soon find itself at a crossroads, where the protesters' world hinged on an electoral Rubicon moment that would either validate their struggle or condemn them to four more years of screaming into the wind. They waited patiently, armored in faith and a sense that no matter the result, the battle would not end there. Their fight for America, whatever version of it they held sacred, was about to commence in earnest.

Alea iacta est,

Micah Allred

J6 protestors singing the National Anthem in unison with inmates inside the D.C. Jail at the end of the nightly vigil. Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Micky Witthoeft, can be seen third from the left in a black J6 shirt. Danish filmmaker Helle Fuglsang can be seen third from the right wearing yellow. Brandon Fellows, the former J6 inmate, can be seen second from the right in a black, red and white jacket. - Photo by Micah Allred.

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