A familiar strategy among authoritarian leaders is unfolding in the United States. In that strategy, strongmen are willing to subject themselves and the political parties they lead to electoral accountability only if they are sure of what the results of elections will be.
Around the world, they have shown themselves to be both determined and skillful in that endeavor. Their tactics are numerous and often inventive.
Sometimes they smear or jail political rivals. Sometimes they tried to intimidate supporters of opposition parties to keep them from showing up at the polls and registering their preferences. Sometimes they try to change the laws governing elections in a way that favors them and their parties.
This playbook helps explain why President Trump has asked the state of Texas and other red states to redraw their congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election. He wants them to do what they can to ensure that Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives before any votes are cast.
But no matter what happens in Texas or anywhere else, the president and his MAGA allies will come out winners. Win or lose in the effort to get that result, they will have succeeded in further shaking the confidence of Americans in elections, the key pillar of democratic political systems.
That has been part of their strategy for a long time. The redistricting/gerrymandering ploy is just its latest iteration.
Let’s start by understanding the way partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts works. Legislators in Texas and other states know that it can be achieved, YouGov’s Alexander Rosell Hayes explains “through the simultaneous practices of packing and cracking: packing or cramming supporters of one party into a few districts that vote overwhelmingly for its candidates, while favoring the other party by cracking or spreading its supporters across many districts that just barely give its candidates a majority.”
In this way, “state legislators can give one party a far greater share of seats than its share of votes.”
This is not something that governors would be trying to accomplish this year, but for the president’s intervention. As the Texas Tribune reports, “Before he called lawmakers back to Austin to redraw Texas’ congressional maps, Gov. Greg Abbott was initially resistant to the plan pushed by President Donald Trump’s political team to pick up new GOP seats through a rare mid-decade redistricting….Then, Trump placed a call to Abbott during which they discussed redistricting. The governor subsequently agreed to put it on his agenda for the special session.”
Abbott, the Tribune continues, “justified the redistricting by saying it was needed to address ‘constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice’ about the current maps, which were drawn in 2021 and are the subject of an ongoing court challenge.” The governor has also said that people who voted for President Trump in 2024 should have the opportunity in 2026 to make sure that they elect representatives who will back his agenda.
“This is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come,” Pritzker said Sunday night.
Democrats are not taking this lying down. They understand the stakes.
As Illinois Governor JB Pritzker puts it, “This is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”
They are hatching their own plans to gerrymander in states they control, and I am glad they are doing so. But I think the president and his MAGA allies have much to gain, no matter how the redistricting drama plays out.
They will win because the very public battle in which political leaders of both parties tinker with voting districts to gain partisan advantage will further erode the public’s already shaken confidence in our electoral system. That can only strengthen the forces who want Americans to think that the system is rigged, that votes don’t get counted correctly, and that elections don’t matter in shaping what the winners do when they take power.
Evidence of diminished confidence in elections is plentiful. For example, in October 2024, “the share of Americans who said they were very confident in their 2024 general election vote counting as intended was (just) 43%.”
Confidence increased a bit after the election because, unlike 2020, there were few claims about election fraud or other irregularities. But, looking at it over time, a 2024 Report of the American Bar Association Task Force for American Democracy found “reduced confidence in recent elections.”
They argue that “Voter confidence is disproportionately dependent on their in-person experience at the polls…. Likewise, ‘confidence that one’s own vote has been counted typically outpaced confidence in the counting of the nation’s votes by approximately 40 percentage points over the past two decades.’”
In addition, the ABA says, “voter confidence is consistently higher among members of the winning party.”
Still, last year, large majorities of both parties did not think that the opposing party was “committed to making elections fair.” Trump supporters were “more likely to say that the Democratic Party is not at all committed (47%) than Harris supporters…(were) to say this about the GOP (39%).”
Gerrymandering makes this situation worse.
A YouGov survey conducted at the beginning of this month found that “many Americans don’t know a lot about gerrymandering.” However, “when it is described, large majorities view it as unfair (76%), a major problem (76%), and something that should be illegal (69%).”
Indeed, “Most Americans prefer for the districts in their state not to give an advantage to either party (67%), and few would support gerrymandering even if it countered partisan redistricting in Texas (24%) or California (19%).”
Trump’s involvement underscores the immense power he holds over Texas Republicans. It shows how far the president will go to protect his Washington trifecta that has handed him sweeping legislative wins, even if that means irritating those who are voting to approve his agenda in Congress.
In a 2021 survey, ”Nearly 9 in 10 voters oppose(d) the use of redistricting in a manner that aims to help one political party or certain politicians win an election.”
How happy are those people likely to be as a gerrymandering spectacle unfolds and is given great prominence in news reports and social media?
And we know that gerrymandering reduces turnout in elections.
Writing in 2019, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan explained that “partisan gerrymanders…(have) debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.” She concluded that they “imperil our system of government.”
That is why the president likes them and why, no matter what Texas or other states do, he will have succeeded in delivering another blow to the cause of democracy.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.