Opdycke is president of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization. Gruber is the organization’s senior vice president.
Since the beginning of the year, legislation has been introduced in Missouri, New Hampshire, Idaho and Wyoming to close primaries outright or further restrict the ability of independent voters to participate. All four bills have been introduced by legislators loyal to former President Donald Trump, who formally endorsed the Wyoming legislation on Feb. 17. Other states are considering similar changes.
Trump and his acolytes are keenly aware that control of the mechanisms and rules of elections are a crucial component of influencing outcomes. Because the United States is one of only a handful of Western democracies with partisan election administration, they are working every angle: support secretaries of state and appointing local/state boards of elections and boards of canvassers loyal to their agenda; driving efforts to audit and overturn the 2020 results, as in Wisconsin; supporting and/or initiating voter suppression measures to depress turnout in Democratic Party strongholds. Now they are setting their sights on controlling who can and cannot vote in GOP primaries.
Trump wants closed primaries. That’s how he gets his people elected, and that’s how he regains power. Democratic Party leaders are unable or unwilling to stand up for the principle that publicly funded elections should be open to all voters because they themselves prefer to control who can and cannot vote. In fact one of the few reforms both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy oppose are nonpartisan open primaries that allow every voter to participate on equal footing. “This is not a reform. It is terrible,” Pelosi said in 2018. That’s now stopping them from engaging an emerging, and highly destructive, Trump tactic to solidify minority rule by closing primaries and electing even more partisan actors who support his agenda.
This is a dangerous situation.
There is broad recognition that partisan gerrymandering has helped consolidate Republican control in red states — particularly over state government. To be sure, Democrats have been guilty of their own share of gerrymandering, most recently and egregiously in New York. Far less appreciated, and equally consequential, is that many of these Republican-dominated states have a combination of nonpartisan registration and/or open primaries that allow broad participation. With the Republican primary the only election that matters in these states, such rules have helped blunt an even more partisan slide.
That could change very fast. We have a former president with a ruthlessly efficient team of strategists, operatives and allies working to influence or manipulate every kernel of the election code they can get their hands on — nothing is sacred, nothing is out of bounds. And we have an opposition force that stands up for fairness in some traditional arenas, but not others. They fight tooth and nail to prevent restrictions on early or mail-in voting in areas where they compete, but sit silent while the GOP attempts to disenfranchise a third of all voters in Wyoming and Idaho.
Controlling the rules of primary elections is an efficient way to affect voter suppression. But the Democratic Party is compromised by its own partisanship, limited in vision by its own self interest. Over the years, dozens of resolutions to change party rules and open primaries have failed. In 2020 alone they were defeated in Florida and New York without so much as a floor vote.
We are in a pickle. So what do we do?
Two leaders offer inspiration as to a way out of this mess, one a Democrat and one a Republican. Jane Kleeb is the chair of the Democratic Party of Nebraska. She led an effort to open up Democratic state and federal primaries and she made it stick. Kleeb is the rare Democrat who insists that the Democratic Party needs to stand up for the voting rights of all — even people who don’t want to join the party. The other is Arnold Schwarzennegger. While governor of California, Schwarzennegger fought to enact nonpartisan primaries and nonpartisan redistricting. It wasn’t just that he won these reforms. It was how he won them. He insisted, in every speech, at every rally, that the political parties should not be in charge of the process, and that democracy doesn’t work unless it puts all voters first.
Make no mistake, Trump and his allies have their sights on the rules of primary elections. Let’s learn from Kleeb and Schwarzennegger, and fight to give every American full and equal access to them.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.