Coronavirus continues to roil the country's elections — not only in states where elections have taken place, most notoriously in Wisconsin, but also in those where voting hasn't happened yet.
A federal judge has ordered Wisconsin's results kept under wraps until next week, to allow ballots mailed in the final hours to arrive and get counted. So for now the focus after Tuesday's chaotic primary is on why so many of those envelopes didn't get to people's houses in time.
Meanwhile, at least five states are making plans to further delay or modify their primaries in hopes the voting can be free of masks and rubber gloves. And election officials in Georgia faced new complaints about their plans for making voting easier in the state's primary.
These are the latest developments:
Wisconsin
In the weeks leading up to the primary, when in-person voting looked like it would be on again and off again too many times to count, nearly 1.3 million absentee ballots were requested, according to the Wisconsin Election Commission.
Voting rights groups said the main complaint at polling places were from legions of people who said they felt compelled to venture out to vote because the ballots they'd asked for never showed up.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday night that their return had to bear an Election Day postmark at the latest. The justices reversed a lower court decision that said, because of the delays in fulfilling such a huge and late-peaking flood of requests, voters could fill out their ballots after Tuesday so long as the paper made it to election offices by Monday.
The Milwaukee Election Commission plans to seek a formal Postal Service investigation into what happened to absentee ballots that failed to reach voters, according to executive director Neil Albrecht. He said Wednesday the commission noticed a pattern where absentee ballots mailed out by the city on March 22 or 23 never arrived. He did not have exact numbers.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Election Commission head Meagan Wolfe also said her agency was going to look into the same issue. She guessed that the problem was one of data entry.
Georgia
The American Civil Liberties Union and the group Black Voters Matter filed a lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of voters demanding that the state pick up the cost of postage to return absentee ballots.
The suit argues that the cost to voters to pay for postage amounts to a poll tax, which is illegal. It also argues that requiring people to leave their homes to buy stamps will expose them to the virus. Georgia's delayed primary is scheduled for May 19.
In addition, officials announced that about 60,000 voters received absentee ballot request forms with the wrong return mail or email address. Election officials said the absentee ballot requests will be delivered to their correct destinations, even if voters send them to the erroneous pre-printed addresses.
Delayed primaries
With their party's presidential nomination no longer being contested, Democratic governors in five states on Wednesday made plans to delay, cancel or alter the rules for their primaries.
In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam pushed back the state's congressional primaries by two weeks, to June 23.
In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills signaled congressional and legislative primaries would be delayed five weeks, to July 14.
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy postponed congressional primaries by five weeks, to July 7, and said he was considering an all-mail primary.
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he was suspending the excuse requirements for obtaining absentee ballots for the June 23 primaries for Congress and the Legislature.
In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont signaled he would take the advice of Secretary of State Denise Merrill, who called for the cancellation of the already-postponed-once June 2 presidential primaries now that both President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are running unopposed for their nominations. Primaries for Congress and the General Assembly are not until Aug. 11.
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.