Nicole Norman is a graduate student at Medill in the Politics, Policy & Foreign Affairs specialization. She covers the politics beat for Medill News Service. Norman received a B.S. in Journalism from Loyola Marymount University in the spring of 2023 and has interned at news organizations such as NBC and CNN
Juliann Ventura is a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a reporter at Medill News Service, where she covers social justice.
Voters in Virginia will have a chance to elect new lawmakers to all 140 seats in the General Assembly when they head to the polls today, potentially shifting control of the state legislature.
Virginia will vote under new district maps for the first time since redistricting reform was approved in December 2021. These new districts, which many experts say more fairly represent the population, have created new competitive districts that have the potential to affect the political power in the commonwealth.
Virginia’s state legislature is currently split, with Democrats holding the majority in the Senate and Republicans holding the governorship and the majority in the state’s House of Delegates. Republicans will be looking to flip the Democrat-controlled state Senate. If this happensit would be likely that conservative policies will be passed on issues like abortion and K-12 education. Conversely, if Democrats win more seats, Republicans will have a more difficult time passing conservative policies.
Voters approved the Redistricting Commission Amendment in 2020, which gave powers to a group of Virginia legislators and citizens, allowing them to draw the congressional and legislative districts.
Prior to the amendment, state legislators heavily gerrymandered the state in a manner that heavily favored incumbents of both parties and did not accurately reflect the state’s racial and political demographics.
“For our organization, we wanted communities to decide who their leaders are. Not the other way around,” said Brian Cannon, former executive director of OneVirginia2021, an organization that led Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting reform.
The Virginia Supreme Court appointed the two mapmakers, Sean Trende and Bernard Grofman, after the newly created redistricting commission failed to submit the maps by the deadline. The Republican mapmaker, Sean Trende, is a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, a political news company. The Democratic nominee, Bernard Grofman, Ph.D., is a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine. The maps were then unanimously approved by the State Supreme Court
Today, experts are mostly pleased with the new map. Dr. Sam Wang, founding director of the Electoral Innovation Lab at Princeton University, said that whichever political party receives more votes should end up with more seats in the legislature because there is no partisan lean on the map.
“In this case, the work of these two special masters, Grofman and Trende, created almost level playing fields for both Democrats and Republicans,” said Wang.
The Electoral Innovation Lab gave both legislative maps passing grades, judging based on partisan fairness, competitiveness, and geographic features. However, most seats will not be competitive.
“There are places in Virginia that are just 80% Republican or 80% Democrat and they should be that,” said Cannon. “It would be a gerrymander to artificially draw them to be some sort of fifty-fifty competition.”
However, experts have identified five Senate races and ten House of Delegates races that will be highly competitive. Experts hope that this will lead to a body of legislators that accurately represent Virginia.
“What you're going to see next week is probably– and I’m not even sure ‘probably’– almost guaranteed, will be the most diverse General Assembly ever elected in Virginia,” Cannon said. “And it will be elected for the first time under these new maps.”
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.