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.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.