Thompson, a Republican, has served in the Georgia Senate since 2013.
During the first seven months of the year, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, I have seen a common trend across the country: government mandates limiting Americans' choices in every corner of our lives.
Justified or not, the lockdowns drastically limited where we could shop, where we could eat, where we could worship and the jobs we could be paid for.
Today, all 50 states are in various stages of reopening, and I am proud to represent voters in Georgia, where we were one of the first to return to some semblance of normalcy. Yet despite this early loosening of restrictions, our state is under a new threat that would limit another of our precious freedoms: how we cast our ballots in the presidential election in November.
Multiple lawsuits are exerting enormous pressure on judges and elected officials to vastly expand mail-in voting in Georgia while closing polling places — ostensibly to encourage as many mailed ballots as possible.
The premise is fundamentally flawed. Make no mistake: Our electoral institutions here in Georgia are already set up to operate in a pandemic like this one. These efforts would fundamentally transform them, eliminating the safeguards we need to protect the legitimacy of our election.
Georgia has a no-excuse absentee system in place, whereby any voter who chooses can request that a ballot be mailed to them through a request form. That form asks voters for their full name, address, birth date, an ID number and a signature. That information is verified against the voter's registration on file before the ballot is sent. The ballot itself has a return envelope with a line for a signature. The signature is compared against the one on the application, again checking for a match before counting the ballot.
In Georgia's electoral system, voting absentee is one choice for all voters. If voting in person is preferred, that is also our choice, and we have taken enormous steps to make the elections of 2020 the safest and most hygienic in history. Just a few measures include social distancing, face masks or shields, hand sanitizer, gloves and disposable marking devices for every voter. The list goes on.
It is safer to go to the polls this year, if you choose to do so, than it is to go to the grocery store.
But the culmination of these lawsuits is not to improve the electoral system we already have, but to fundamentally alter it. As we have seen in California, Nevada, Maryland and New Jersey, the goal is to send every name on the registration rolls a blank ballot — and then to allow third parties, even campaign staff, to collect them.
A lawsuit filed by the New Georgia Project, together with former Hillary Clinton attorney Marc Elias, specifically advocates for party operatives to be lawfully allowed to go door-to-door to collect completed ballots or "help" voters fill them out, a recipe for influencing voters' choices.
Polling place closures simply require more voters to participate in this system.
For evidence, consider the primary season. So many polling places were closed during the June 9 primary that each one would need to accommodate approximately 10,000 voters. The problems were especially obvious in minority communities, since Hispanic voters are three times less likely to vote absentee — and Black voters half as likely — as white voters. Georgia voters waited in line at polling places for up to five hours.
Mayors and other local officials bargained that voters would choose to vote absentee, and they made the corresponding decision to close polling places rather than develop innovative solutions to keep them staffed and open. These decision-makers did not take into account the Postal Service delays, the deluge of request forms at the Board of Elections, or the valued tradition of voting in-person on Election Day. We will never know how many voters were simply disenfranchised two months ago — either because they never received the ballot they requested or they felt compelled to drop off a very long line and walk away.
In other words, our primary proved it: Moving to primarily mail voting disenfranchises voters.
With so many safety protocols at polling places, and so many conspicuous issues with blank ballots reaching real voters, it's no wonder voters trust the traditional system of in-person voting more than the trial-and-error system of voting through the mail. Our priority must be creating a system that allows as many people as possible to vote safely and securely. For Georgia, that means keeping our established system of no-excuse absentee voting and in-person voting in place.
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.