A right-leaning group that focuses on cleaning up voter registration rolls has sued Detroit election officials after identifying more than 2,500 dead people who are registered to vote.
More than half the people identified by the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation have been dead longer than a decade, nearly 900 have been dead more than 15 years more than 300 for greater than 20 years. The group even found one registered voter with a birth date listed as 1823, before Michigan became a state.
In addition, foundation researchers discovered what appeared to be duplicate and triplicate registrations for individuals, using different addresses.
The suit claims the city has violated the National Voter Registration Act by failing to properly maintain the voting rolls.
Such poorly maintained lists undermine the integrity of the elections in the city, the suit alleges. It asks the court to find the city in violation of federal law and mandate that Detroit develop and implement a list maintenance program.
The number of improper names on the Detroit rolls represents only a fraction of the total count of registered voters. The lawsuit claims 500,000 were registered in the city in 2016, but those are not the most recent figures. The broader Wayne County elections office says 473,000 were registered for the 2018 midterm. And the foundation has been criticized previously, for what some liberal groups believe is misleading fearmongering that in turn creates a genuine opportunity for voter fraud.
Christian Adams, the general counsel for the foundation, was appointed to President's Trump short-lived and controversial Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was set up to look at Trump's claims of voter fraud in the 2016 election. It was disbanded after just a few months without delivering any results.
In the Detroit case, the group purchased the city's voter registration list and cross-checked it against a Social Security database listing people who have died. They then double-checked against published obituaries.
The group repeatedly brought its findings to the attention of Detroit election officials but says the city did not take any steps to clean up the voting rolls.
Conservative groups around the country have argued in recent years that the inclusion of ineligible voters on registration lists creates an opportunity for voter fraud. Liberal groups and Democrats have responded that this is a red herring and that there have been only a handful of examples in recent history where someone voted by taking on the identity of another person.
But claims of widespread in-person voter fraud and associated fears been used in recent years to push for more rigorous voter identification laws. Liberal advocacy groups believe those laws act to suppress turnout, particularly among minorities.
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.