At least 119 forged voter registration applications have recently been filed in one central Florida county, and an employee of an organization promoting President Trump's re-election has been charged for allegedly submitting 10 of them.
The case is a rare instance of readily apparent voter fraud, a problem that Republicans across the country maintain is widespread but that Democrats disregard as vastly overstated.
Officials in Lake County, a reliably Republicans suburb west of Orlando, said that Cheryl Hall had been charged with 10 felonies — at least six alleging she switched Democratic and independent voters to be registered Republicans without their consent — but that sheriff's investigators had linked her to all 119 of the falsified forms.
Hall was a part-time employee of Florida First, a voter registration group funded mainly by the pro-Trump America First Policies, which has vowed to spend $20 million signing up conservatives to vote in Florida, the nation's most populous purple state, and three other potential November battlegrounds: Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
The fraud came to the county's attention last month when voters started complaining they had been notified their party affiliation had changed — even though they had never made such a switch. Several were Democrats planning to vote early in the presidential primary.
Many of the larger group of forms, which were all stamped with Florida First's return address, had incorrect addresses, birth dates, and Social Security and drivers' license numbers that were flagged as wrong by the county election database.
"It has absolutely nothing to do with party politics," Alan Hays, a Republican who is the county supervisor of elections, said in announcing the charges Thursday. "If you're misbehaving, I'm going to call you on it."
Meanwhile, in the Southwest
The Republican-led Arizona Senate, meanwhile, is expected to clear legislation this week to create an election fraud hotline, allow police into polling places and give GOP Attorney General Mark Brnovich more authority to investigate alleged election crimes. The measure could become law before the state presidential primary, which like Florida's is March 17, but if not by the time the state's 11 electoral votes are hard fought this fall. Democrats say there's no evidence of fraud in the state and that police in polling places will scare voters away.
And in Texas, Republicans are arching their eyebrows at a report from a conservative news site, The Texan: Hervis Johnson, the Houston man who gained global notoriety for waiting six hours to vote on Super Tuesday, was not supposed to have a registration card for another four months, when his probation ends for a 25-year-old second-degree burglary conviction.
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.