Profound election complications have been averted in Wisconsin thanks to its judicial system, an exception to the trend of court decisions making voting during the pandemic more problematic in presidential battlegrounds.
Wisconsin's Supreme Court, which pushed the state's election toward fresh chaos last week, reversed course on Monday. The justices ruled the Green Party's ticket will not appear on the ballot, meaning more than a million vote-by-mail packets can be distributed and won't be delayed by a massive and expensive reprinting — and that thousands more ballots already delivered won't need to be replaced.
While the decision was an unexpected judicial victory for the cause of a smooth and comprehensive election despite the coronavirus — the good-governance movement's overriding objective for the year — it was a defeat for a long-term goal of many of those same democracy reformers: breaking the two-party duopoly, which is behind so much governing dysfunction, by propping up independent and outsider campaigns.
So far Green nominee Howie Hawkins, a retired Teamster, and running mate Angela Walker have qualified for the ballot in only about half the states, meaning they are mathematically out of the running. But their progressive presence is nonetheless concerning to Democrats, who worry the Greens could take enough votes away from Joe Biden in a few tossup states to provide President Trump a narrow path to victory. For the same reason, law firms and donors aligned with the GOP have been working to get the Greens more ballot access.
Green candidate Jill Stein took 31,000 votes in Wisconsin in 2016, when Trump secured the state's 10 electoral votes by less than 23,000 votes.
The high court ruled 4-3, with the justices deviating slightly from their usual lockstep party-line votes in election cases. One Republican, who had joined the all-GOP majority that called a halt to the ballot printing Thursday, joined the three Democrats in deciding Hawkins and Walker had waited too long to file their appeal. The state Elections Commission denied them placement on the ballot four weeks ago because of address discrepancies on their petitions.
Reversing that decision now, the court said, would cause "confusion and undue damage to both the Wisconsin electors who want to vote and the other candidates in all the various races on the general election ballot."
The decision signaled a similar fate for another outsider appealing his exclusion from the ballot, rapper Kanye West.
The ruling also means that the local clerks who run elections across the state can meet Thursday's state deadline for beginning to send out mail-in ballots, and Saturday's federal deadline for sending them to Wisconsinites overseas or in the military.
Applications have already been received from three of every eight voters in the state — more than 1 million in total, smashing Wisconsin's records for absentee voting. At the time the court put a hold on the process, packets of ballots and return envelopes had already been prepared by local clerks to fulfill more than a third of those requests, at least 378,000, the Wisconsin Election Commission estimated. At least 75,000 had already gone out the door.
Local election administrators had flooded social media with worry that they would not be able to find printers, let alone the money to pay them, had the high court ordered all new ballots that included the Hawkins-Walker ticket.
Monday was also the first day when local officials in another battleground, Pennsylvania, would normally be allowed to send out absentee ballots. But they could not, the state said, until there's resolution of lawsuit in which the Democrats are arguing against putting the Green candidates on the ballot. They will also be left off the ballot in Montana after Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan denied their appeal Monday night.
The surprise vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court came from Brian Hagedorn, who had been counsel to the previous governor, Republican Scott Walker.
While he unexpectedly reversed the course of what had looked, as recently as Thursday, like a totally partisan legal dispute, two other court decisions with partisan overtones that have restricted voting in other swing states in the past week look highly unlikely to be reversed in the seven weeks before Election Day.
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that an estimated 774,000 Floridians who have completed felony sentences will have to pay fines and fees before being allowed to vote. The decision reversed a lower court ruling that said the state's law to that effect, enacted after a referendum in 2018 returned the franchise to most people with serious criminal convictions, was akin to an unconstitutional poll tax.
And another federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a state law in Texas that allows no-excuse voting only for people older than 65, which the Democratic Party argues is illegal age dicrimination against younger voters.
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.