It's taken four months, but the most comprehensive election audit in battleground Michigan's history is over. The bottom line: The certified presidential results were almost precisely correct, so President Biden undoubtedly deserved the 16 electoral votes he got.
The announcement Tuesday was not only a coda on one of the most intense battles in former President Donald Trump's war on democracy. It also was the prelude to efforts by the state's politically divided power structure to boost faith in the system with improvements in time for 2022.
Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said she would press the Republican-majority Legislature to require similarly extensive auditing of future statewide elections before the results are finalized. Last fall several lawsuits by Trump allies demanding such audits were rejected by courts.
Michigan was one of the focal points of Trump's efforts to reverse his defeat with lies designed to sow doubt about the result, especially the credibility of absentee vote totals, and his crusade gained alarming traction when GOP election officials balked at certifying the results in Detroit. The federal transition process was permitted to get started, with the formal recognition of Biden as the "apparent winner," only after the normally obscure Board of State Canvassers reversed course three weeks after Election Day and voted 3-0 to lock down the result.
Biden took the state by a clearcut 154,000 votes, a victory margin of 3 points. It was his most decisive victory in the five states that he took from Trump's 2016 win column. That result was affirmed by a statewide "risk-limiting audit" in which more than 18,000 randomly selected ballots from more than 1,300 jurisdictions were reviewed by local clerks.
The audits examined an equal number of ballots cast by mail and by machine, because the method for casting the 2.8 million votes statewide was almost exactly split. Among the findings was that the potential error in tabulating the absentee ballots Wayne County, which takes in Detroit, totaled 17 out of 174,000 submitted.
Polls nonetheless have shown that most Republicans in the state, and nationally, continue to profess distrust in the election results — and Trump continues to assert without any credible evidence that he was the rightful winner.
The audit result should eradicate "any rationale for continuing to question the integrity of the election and the validity of the outcome," Benson said. "Now it's up to every leader to acknowledge that truth."
While momentum is growing for newly restrictive voting rules in the GOP-run legislatures of several other hard-fought 2020 states — Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona most notably — Benson and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a fellow Democrat, are hoping to forge narrow compromises to preserve some of the election easements created last year because of the pandemic.
One proposal would allow the processing of mailed ballot envelopes to begin well before Election Day so that tabulating could get started soon after the polls closed. The record surge of absentee votes, and the prohibition on opening the envelopes and verifying signatures before Nov. 2, led to delays in results that fueled much of the misinformation and distrust in the process.
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.