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.
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.