In its 45-year history, the Federal Election Commission has had 31 commissioners — all but one of them white.
"Such homogenous senior leadership is not reflective of the diverse nation the FEC serves, and it is detrimental to the morale and effectiveness of the agency," more than five dozen agency staff members said in a letter Monday urging President Trump and Senate leaders to fix the problem.
They asked Trump to nominate and the Senate to confirm at least one person of color for the three vacancies on the commission, which has been essentially shut down for the past eight weeks for lack of a four-member quorum. That seems highly unlikely before the election, not only because partisan politics are intensified during the campaign but also because senators will be in town for only a few weeks before November.
Nonetheless, the unusual public complaint from the nonpartisan civil servants inside the ranks suggests just how beleaguered the government's principal campaign finance watchdog is these days — and how the nation's reckoning with systemic racism this year has taken root in most every corner of society.
This is the second time in a year the FEC has been unable to function for lack of a quorum. After Matthew Petersen resigned almost a year ago, the agency was in limbo for more than nine months until conservative Texas campaign finance lawyer Trey Trainor was confirmed in May. But fellow conservative Caroline Hunter resigned just a month later, leaving the FEC toothless once again.
The president immediately proposed as her replacement Allen Dickerson of the Institute for Free Speech, a campaign finance deregulation advocacy group, but the Senate has not touched the nomination. If he joined the panel, only one of the other two vacancies could be filled by a Republican. The law mandates a bipartisan split to make sure neither party can impose its campaign finance views on the other.
But political affiliation is not the only important factor to consider when choosing new commissioners, the 66 staff members — about one-fifth of the FEC workforce — wrote in the letter. Proper enforcement of campaign finance laws is informed not only by commissioners' legal training, they said, but also the members' different life experiences and perspectives.
"By excluding members of a wide swath of our country's population, the commission loses out on the perspectives of people from diverse communities," the letter states. "We make this call not to tip the balance toward any party or potential nominee but instead to rectify a historical blindness to the benefits commissioners of diverse backgrounds and experiences can bring."
While not named in the letter, Shana Broussard, a senior attorney at the FEC since 2015, would be a fine starting point to diversify the commission as its first Black member. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the committee that oversees the agency, have called for her nomination.
The only non-white member in FEC history was Ann Ravel, whose mother is Brazilian. She was a commissioner from 2013 to 2017 and is now running as a Democrat for the state Senate in California.
The letter was an outgrowth of a workshop on diversity, equity and inclusion the agency staff held this summer.
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.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.