The most prominent conservative group pushing to overhaul election procedures during the coronavirus pandemic has expanded and refocused its campaign.
The targets of a new, $750,000 advertising blitz are 10 GOP senators. The group controls the fate of a proposed infusion of cash to pay for diversified voting options this year, mainly by accommodating an expected surge of absentee balloting.
Republicans for the Rule of Law has purchased three weeks of airtime on Fox News affiliates in their states and on Facebook, starting Wednesday, urging them by name to support funding in the next economic stimulus package.
At this point the GOP-led Senate has signaled it's not in any rush to respond quickly to the sprawling, $3 trillion measure House Democrats appear on course to pass within the week. It includes all $3.6 billion in election aid that good-government groups say is necessary to assure a safe and comprehensive presidential election — and that state election officials, from both parties, say must be provided relatively quickly if it's to get productively spent on time.
The group is an arm of an organization created by many of President Trump's most powerful critics on the right, dubbed Defending Democracy Together, which ran another wave of TV spots last week that targeted a more general audience.
The ad focused on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is airing nationally on Fox, MSNBC, CNN and several stations owned by the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting in addition to statewide in Kentucky, where McConnell faces a well-financed challenge to his bid for a seventh term this fall.
The new 60-second ads are identical, except for the call to action for the 10 senators, who are evenly divided in two camps.
Five are members of the committee that will write the Senate's counter-proposal to whatever the House passes, and will then be central to the negotiations over compromise spending levels: McConnell, Richard Shelby of Alabama, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Roy Blunt of Missouri and James Lankford of Oklahoma.
Blunt and Lankford were also central to getting an initial $400 million in election aid approved as part of the recovery package enacted in March. Blunt, who's also No. 4 in the GOP leadership, is a former chief elections official in Missouri, which has one of the strictest restrictions in the country on who may vote absentee — and where the state's conservative government has shown no interest in altering them.
The other senators are all in highly competitive races for re-election this fall, and polling in their states has shown lopsided and bipartisan support for expanded voting by mail: Martha McSally of Arizona, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
That public sentiment would seem to give GOP senators a solid rationale for backing the money. But they are being urged to resist it — at least in public — by the president, who on Twitter and at several coronavirus press briefings has alleged without evidence that widespread voting from home leads to widespread cheating and incubates organized fraud.
With or without the money, however, states are expecting a record use of absentee ballots this fall — because, even if stay-at-home orders are lifted, millions will conclude that avoiding local polling places is an easy call in a season when another wave of the Covid-19 outbreak is expected.
Just this week, for example, officials in Iowa announced that 356,000 people had requested and been sent absentee ballots for the June 2 congressional and legislative primaries. That is seven times the number that voted by mail in those primaries two years ago, and nine times the number from 2016 — even though the state was largely reopened for business two weeks ago.
Senator Ernst: Keep Our Elections Safewww.youtube.com
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.