Minnesota has agreed to abandon two of its most unusual and harsh election rules, which have restricted help for people casting ballots — the freshest victory in the barrage of voting rights litigation in this year's battleground states.
The state laws at issue bar candidates from helping others vote and say that no one else may help more than three people complete in-person or absentee ballots in any election. With the lawsuit settlement, announced Tuesday, Arkansas will be the only other state with such strict limits on providing voting assistance.
The intent of Minnesota's law was to prevent campaign operatives from manipulating the votes of elderly, disabled and non-English-speaking voters. But the suit argued the statute was a direct violation of the Voting Rights Act, which says voters needing assistance have the right to choose whomever they want, and denied voters their political and free speech rights under the federal and state constitutions.
Three years ago, a federal appeals court struck down, for similar reasons, a law in Texas requiring language interpreters at the polls to be registered voters in the county where they were offering aid.
The new settlement was in a suit filed in February by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of four Hmong-Americans. The principal plaintiff was Dai Thao, a St. Paul city council member running for mayor in 2017 faced charges for helping a neighbor, a Hmong woman who had trouble seeing, both translate and complete her ballot. The charges were ultimately dropped.
The Twin Cities has the nation's largest Hmong population. And almost 11 percent of Minnesotans have a disability that could lead them to seek help voting, the ACLU said.
A similar claim had been brought a few weeks earlier by the Democratic congressional campaign committees, a piece of the party's broad array of nearly two-dozen suits hoping to get rules that potentially suppress the vote relaxed before November. The Republicans are fighting many of them, but now their defense in Minnesota is moot.
But the partisan fight continues in a second Minnesota suit, a challenge in federal court to the state's laws about the order in which each party's candidates are listed on the November ballot.
The Democratic nominee has carried Minnesota in 11 straight elections, but President Trump came within 2 points (45,000 votes) last time and has vowed to go hard after the state's 10 electoral votes this fall.
Two of the state's top elected Democrats, Secretary of State Steve Simon and Attorney General Keith Ellison, were technically in charge of defending the assistance restrictions but said after the settlement was announced that they were thrilled to see the provisions abandoned.
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.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.