DOES TRUMP WANT TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS OR THROW THEM? OR BOTH?

What is President Trump doing in anticipation of the midterms? On the one hand, he and his fellow Republicans on the bench are obviously trying to steal them for the GOP. The Supreme Court opened the door to eleventh-hour gerrymandering in the South, while right-leaning appointees on the Virginia Supreme Court blocked a gerrymander that would have aided Democrats. Meanwhile, Trump has pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, strong-armed Democratic governor Jared Polis of Colorado until he offered clemency to electoral criminal Tina Peters, and now is dangling a slush fund before anyone who might want to riot in response to Democratic wins in November.

But on the other hand, he seems to be doing everything he can to handicap his party's chances in the midterms. Punchbowl tells us:

With less than 24 weeks until Election Day, President Donald Trump seems almost maniacally focused on doing and saying things that could harm Republicans’ chances of keeping their House and Senate majorities in November.

With voters saying they’re frightened by high prices and disappearing healthcare coverage, Trump is building a new billion-dollar White House ballroom and asking for taxpayer money to secure it. His administration announced Monday that it was setting up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of “weaponization and lawfare” under the Democrats, a move that shocked even Republicans.

As gas prices skyrocket due to the unpopular war in Iran, Trump says it’s a “very small price to pay” as long as he believes the conflict is proceeding to his liking.

He's alienating Senate Republicans -- and possibly putting a key seat at risk -- with his decision to endorse Ken Paxton rather than John Cornyn in the Texas Senate race, as The New York Times notes:

Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican whose independent streak has often angered the president, said that she was “supremely disappointed” by Mr. Trump’s decision.

Then she went a step further, saying that the president’s endorsement of Mr. Paxton, a scandal-plagued conservative firebrand, could cost Republicans what had been considered a safe Senate seat.

“I think that this puts that seat in jeopardy,” she told reporters.

Punchbowl points out that this also about campaign cash:

... GOP senators privately griped about Trump forcing out one of their most prolific fundraisers; Cornyn has raised more than $400 million for Republican candidates and incumbents over his long Senate career. Many saw the episode as Trump once again using Senate races to advance his personal goals at the expense of the GOP majority....

So on the one hand, Trump seems ready to cheat or strong-arm his way to victory in the midterms. He might even send troops to polling places to make that happen. But he doesn't seem to want to win the midterms through legitimate means: advancing popular policies, maintaining party unity, and so on.

Does this make sense? I think it does to Trump.

I think Trump wants to win, but he wants to win his way: brutally. He always wants to project "strength," which, to him, means breaking the rules and getting away with it. He's happy when he gets away with violating (or doing an end run around) the law, and he's also happy when he breaks the laws of politics and wins. (That pretty much describes his own political career since he announced his candidacy in 2015.)

And even though he'll happily engage in felonious conduct or instigate mob violence in order to win the midterms, I'm not sure winning is as important to him as fighting -- specifically, fighting dirty -- and surviving after acting recklessly. At that point, even if he loses, he can blame other people who were "very unfair" to him, while enjoying the thrill of surviving his own recklessness.

I'm haunted by something Tucker Carlson said in his recent New York Times interview. Carlson says he tried to dissuade Trump from invading Iran, and Trump waved him off:

He felt he had no choice and he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is.

And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is. That's Trump's belief in the Power of Positive Thinking. It's also his accurate assessment of the course of his life. When he said this to Carlson, he'd done so many ill-conceived things, from the bad deals that led to his first bankruptcies to the incompetence that led 81 million Americans to vote for his not particularly inspiring opponent in 2020, and then to January 6 and his theft of presidential papers and a host of other actions that would have sunk anyone else. And he was still standing. He was president again. You can't blame the guy for thinking he has life's cheat codes.

On some level, I think he knows he's a colossal fuck-up -- but he also knows that he's gotten away with being a colossal fuck-up all his life. I think he gets off on that idea: that he fucks up, but (as he might put it) he fucks up "very strongly," in an aggressive, intimidating way, and it all works out for him. That's what he wants out of the midterms: he wants the feeling of being a vicious aggressor, and he wants to survive if he can't win. But whether he's consciously aware of this or not, he'd rather lose as a thug than win shrewdly -- as long as he can keep going, even in defeat.

MAKE TRUMP'S CORRUPTION A KITCHEN-TABLE ISSUE (updated)

I keep thinking about something Hakeem Jeffries said late last month:

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Sunday said Democrats will not focus on impeaching President Trump if they regain a majority in the lower chamber after midterm elections.

When asked if impeachment was a top priority, Jeffries said “of course not” during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living,” the House minority leader added.

In other words, We're not getting distracted by calls for impeachment -- we're focused on ordinary Americans' finances. To be fair, this approach appears to be working: Democrats now have a 7.2-point lead on the generic congressional ballot, according to Real Clear Polling. In the new New York Times poll, that lead is 50% to 39%.

But this story makes me think that Democrats could sell impeachment as a pocketbook issue:

The Justice Department on Monday announced that it would create a new $1.776 billion taxpayer-backed fund that could pay out money to people — including President Trump’s allies and supporters — who think they were wronged by the department under previous administrations.

This amount of money -- $1.776 billion -- is about $5 for every person in America. That's not a life-changing amount of money for most people, but it still sounds like a big outlay, at a time when Americans feel that they're hurting. I've always believed that most Americans don't do any kind of mental arithmetic when they hear about government expenditures, so critics (usually Republicans) can easily get them angry about government outlays that might even be in the six-figure or five-figure range -- in other words, less than a penny per person in America. This is a lot more money.

If I were leading the Democrats, I'd be denouncing this corruption and linking it to Americans' financial pain: You're struggling, and Trump is using your tax dollars to pay himself and his alllies. Especially when this is just one element of Trump's campaign to enrich himself using the power of the presidency. David Rothkopf writes:

... the president has, throughout his time in office, engaged in thousands upon thousands of stock trades that appear to cash in on unique knowledge he had as president or of actions he intended to take. His sons run companies doing multimillion-dollar deals with the Pentagon and with governments worldwide seeking Trump’s favor.

Trump has accepted aircraft, donations to projects designed to glorify him, golden statues, bitcoins, and cash from suckers eager to buy up Trump swag. Trump phones, Trump watches, and the branding rights to Trump Airport in West Palm Beach are part of his scheme. It looks like the “Trump Presidential Library” may well include a hotel where people can pay to honor Trump in the way that means the most to him: with cash that ends up in his bank account.

Where is the money that the U.S. made from selling oil we stole from Venezuela? Who controls the billions that have been allocated from the U.S. Treasury and governments worldwide to the Board of Peace for Gaza? How many times has Trump sold pardons or lifted regulations or prosecuted or persecuted the innocent in exchange for campaign contributions?

I think Democrats should draw up articles of impeachment focused on this monetary corruption, and every Democrat in Congress should sign on as a sponsor. I think Democrats should introduce a bill preventing any outlay from that $1.776 billion fund, or even establishing an office to pay the money out, and every Democrat in Congress should sponsor that bill as well. I think they should link anti-corruption to a focus on Americans' financial woes.

Obviously, none of this can pass now. Obviously, an impeachment is likely to fail in the Senate even after the midterms. But putting Democrats on record as anti-corruption -- and Republicans in Congress on record as pro-corruption -- would send a message.

At the very least, I think Democratic campaign ads that alternate images of high gas prices with headlines about how much richer the Trump family has become since he returned to office would be powerful. Make Americans think about his finances when they think about their own.

*****

UPDATE: They're not linking it to the economy, but this is a start:

Important: Dems will seek to force Republicans to vote on a bill blocking Trump's illegal $1.8 billion slush fund, Rep Jamie Raskin tells me. Dems will use discharge petition. Hakeem Jeffries is supportive of Raskin's efforts, I'm told. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/2106...

[image or embed]

— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) May 19, 2026 at 1:08 PM

HOW BAD IS TRUMP'S HEALTH?

Late Saturday afternoon, within the space of twenty-eight minutes, Donald Trump posted these three images on Truth Social:

Trump's Truth Social feed generally includes attacks on political enemies, promotions of pet Trump projects, and hyperbolic proclamations of his own magnificence -- but these posts seem different. They seem like Trump's attempts to persuade Americans -- and himself -- that he's supernaturally healthy, as if he's concerned that Americans won't believe he is ... or as if he doesn't believe he is.

I think Trump is self-soothing here. I think he's lying to himself.

As The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire notes, Trump has been under quite a bit of medical scrutiny lately:

The White House announced this week that Trump will undergo a medical and dental checkup on May 26, which will be his fourth publicly disclosed doctor’s visit in his second term. (He has also had two dental visits in Florida.) Last year he had an annual physical in April 2025, and then what the White House described as a “routine yearly checkup” in October. Across his terms, Trump has bragged repeatedly about acing multiple cognitive tests, a boast that only raises more questions.

On those dental visits, HuffPost notes:

The White House has its own dental suite. Which raises the question of why Trump would schedule routine appointments elsewhere if they’re actually routine.

Lemire wonders why we're not focusing on Trump's apparent frailty the way we focused on Joe Biden's. I know many of you think it's because the media hates Democrats and protects Republicans. I think the media feels it displays its independence when it attacks Democrats and shows its lack of bias when it cossets Republicans, and I think that's part of the problem. But I think Lemire is close to the truth here:

... as Trump himself grows older—traveling less, switching to more comfortable shoes, and seeming to nod off during meetings—his age isn’t getting the same kind of scrutiny.

I have long thought that a reason for that is the president’s sheer size. Trump stands 6 foot 3 and, according to his most recent physical, weighs 224 pounds (yes, questioning that number is a legitimate thing to do). He is a big presence in any room, as opposed to Biden, who grew visibly thinner as he got older, adding to the appearance of frailty. Trump is also LOUD; Biden’s voice was frequently reduced to a gentle whisper. And Trump has the gift of omnipresence. His genius is in capturing attention. Biden’s public schedule grew sparse, and he actively avoided generating news; Trump holds multiple events in front of the press nearly every day. He fills Americans’ TV screens and social-media feeds seemingly nonstop, with an almost-unspoken message: How could he be fading if he’s everywhere?

I think it's not just that Trump is bulky and loud, while Biden increasingly seemed thin and whispery. I think it's also the fact that Biden struggled to finish some of his sentences, and Trump just plows on. As I wrote just after the 2024 election:

... Joe Biden ... frequently stops speaking while he gropes for the right word or phrase. Trump just keeps going until his sentences and anecdotes end somewhere, then he looks pleased with himself and moves on. I think millions of people think he sounds like a normal guy on a talking jag, not like a dementia patient....

And Trump's sentences frequently end with him hurting people. Decent Americans (as opposed to Republican voters) find that repellent, but it's still a power. What we notice -- and this, of course, shows up in his deeds as well as his words -- is that Trump clearly retains the power to cause pain.

Here's a recent example:



He's asked, “Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of the war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now? We're still seeing gas prices soaring.” He snaps back:

We're fixing up the reflecting pond to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and you say, "Why are you fixing it up?" Because you can understand dirt maybe better than I can, but I don't allow it.

This is one of the worst reporters. She's with ABC fake news and she's a horror show. She's saying, "Why would you bother fixing this up?" Why would I bother taking eleven or twelve truckloads of filth out of the water in front of the Lincoln Monument? That's what made our country great. Beauty made our country. People made our country great. A question like that is a disgrace to our country. Any other questions?

Beauty made our country great? This makes no sense! What does it even mean?

But the words just keep coming, and a person who doesn't think very hard about what Trump is saying can come away with the impression that the reporter (a Black woman, of course) really must be unpatriotic and have an unacceptable tolerance for "dirt" and "filth."

This isn't a thoughtful repsonse, but it still stings. I'll believe he's really losing it when he launches into one of these attacks and freezes up, unable to summon up the next nasty word he wants to say. I look forward to that the day, the day he tries to slip the verbal shiv in but can't manage to do it. I hope it happens.

Maybe he's experiencing some form of dementia. But for now, his words, even when they're incoherent, have power. And that's primarily why he's not judged the way Biden was, even though he's probably in terrible physical health, and he knows it.

TRUMP'S POWER IN PRIMARIES IS A GIFT TO DEMOCRATS, IF THEY'LL USE IT

Let's assess where we are.

Approximately 60% of the country despises Donald Trump. That's a very solid majority in a country that's been seen as 50%/50% for most of this century. The people who hate Donald Trump are the normal people. "Donald Trump is a terrible president" is largely an agreed-upon fact in America.

But a relatively small percentage of the country -- less than 40% -- worships the ground Trump walks on and will do anything he tells them to do:

For the second time this month, Republican primary voters sent a message about the price of defying the president, this time by retiring Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The outcome in Louisiana on Saturday followed losses by a group of Indiana state lawmakers whom the president targeted for political payback. And it arrived just ahead of another big test on Mr. Trump’s retribution tour: a House primary in Kentucky on Tuesday.

Cassidy finished third in a four-way race. He didn't even make it to a top-two runoff. That's how loyal the freaks and weirdos of the MAGA cult are to Trump. In Kentucky on Tuesday, they'll defeat Thomas Massie, on behalf of a president 60% of America hates.

This is an opportunity for Democrats to start saying what they should have been saying for years: not "Trump is bad," but "The entire Republican Party is bad."

Over clips of news stories about Trump's successful campaigns of revenge against Republican dissenters, Democrats can say:

Tired of Trump? Don't expect Republicans to do anything to help. Republicans can't. If they challenge Trump, their political careers are over.

This is where I'd like to see Republicans represented as a crowd of non-player characters saying what actual Republicans in Congress have effectively been saying for the past year and a half:

And while the message that follows this might be hard to craft -- many Democrats haven't exactly been brave anti-Trump warriors -- this is a good setup for a Democratic challenger who promises to fight. Incumbents, meanwhile, can say, We want to fight Trump, but first we need to change control of Congress.

This isn't the full message I want to hear from Democrats. The Republican Party is bad and was bad long before Trump. It's bad in many ways that have nothing to do with Trump. (For instance, Trump isn't the one removing Roots from school libraries in Knox County, Tennessee. That was based on a state law passed in 2022, when Trump was out of office.)

But it would be a start. Democrats could attack all Republicans as Trump bootlickers knowing that Trump is massively unpopular and that hating Trump is America's default mode now. Eventually they need to say that Republicans are massively out of step with normal Americans -- on taxation of the rich, on healthcare, on the minimum wage, on abortion. But they can begin here.

NO, DEMOCRATIC SUPPORT FOR PLATNER IS NOT A MIRROR IMAGE OF REPUBLICAN SUPPORT FOR TRUMP

In a New York Times discussion between two liberal graybeards, E.J. Dionne and Robert Siegel, their young right-wing interlocutor, Sarah Isgur, wags a finger at Democrats while pretending to wag a finger at both parties:

Isgur: ... David French wrote this in The New York Times — I thought the piece was brilliant — that this idea that Democrats are going to get behind Graham Platner, a guy in Maine, who, until quite recently, had a Nazi tattoo — an S.S. tattoo — and has said horrific things about women and sexual assault, because that’s the way that we have to fight Donald Trump. That’s the way we can win, by being more like Donald Trump. It’s just a sad statement, I think, on 2026 midterm politics that, again, I hope the ship is turning, maybe slowly, where the Graham Platners and the Republican equivalents lose.

What Isgur doesn't say, perhaps because she's in denial, is that "the Republican equivalents" of Trump are pretty much the entire party. Hatred, especially hatred for Democrats and groups who are acceptable to bash, is Republicans' default mode now.

America goes two ways.

Option A: Muslims and globalists institute THEIR laws on our society.

OPTION B: Christian men stand up and take their country back.

I’m going with option B. pic.twitter.com/sLpGNv2qnY

— Rep. Andy Ogles (@RepOgles) April 20, 2026

Isgur guilt-trips Dionne into more or less agreeing with her that Democrats support Platner because they believe that sometimes you need a bad person to take on a bad enemy:

Dionne: I want to go to your point about the Democratic image. Democrats are getting behind Graham Platner because they see a Democratic majority in the Senate as the only way to check Trump.

Isgur: Right, because it’s about power, not about principle, not about character. Well, it is about principle on some issues. All the things they said — that Republicans shouldn’t support Donald Trump because there were things more important than power — all went out the window the second someone dangled the Senate majority in front of them.

Siegel: You have Platner as a virtual David Duke on the ticket.

Dionne: Yeah. And I don’t think that’s fair to Platner, but I think the Democrats are saying, “This is a crisis election. We need a majority no matter what.”

That's not what Democrats who support Platner are saying, because Platner is not a Democratic Trump. I'll explain below.

Here's the David French column Isgur is citing. French cites the skeletons in Platner's closet, which are very real: the Nazi death's-head tattoo, the online remarks arguing that some women are complicit in their own rapes and that Black people are bad tippers, and so on. These are bad. If you can't possibly support Platner because of this history, I understand.

But Platner is not running as that guy. He's running as a person who has stopped being that guy. You can conclude that the reformed version of Platner is phony, and that he hasn't really grown or changed, but his supporters believe, or want to believe, that he has changed. They're supporting the person he's been on the campaign trail, not the person he was when he got that tattoo and said those offensive things. They're not consciously voting for a bad guy. They're voting for a guy they think is good now.

Platner hasn't said offensive things since he started his campaign. His supporters are backing the Platner they see on the campaign trail now. Trump, by contrast, has continued to say and do extremely offensive things since he took that escalator ride in 2015. His supporters back that Trump.

French says that Platner's voters are just like Trump supporters:

I know exactly where this process leads. For the past 10 years and counting, I’ve had a front-row seat at the festival of rationalization that’s turned the Republican Party into a Trump cult of personality.

The slide begins when you tell yourself that the stakes are just too high for normal politics. Of course I wouldn’t support this candidate in better times. But now? American democracy is at stake.

Is that what Trump voters have been saying? Nope. They support him precisely because he demonizes immigrants, Muslims, liberals and other political opponents, the media, women (especially Black female reporters) who challenge him ... the list goes on. Trump's voters find his hatred invigorating because they share it. Platner's voters find the hatred he's expressed in his past problematic, but want to believe it's behind him now.

If Democrats were becoming like Republicans, there'd be a wave of Graham Platners across the country. But name another Democrat in a key race who has a long history of offensive statements. James Talarico? Roy Cooper? Mary Peltola? Sherrod Brown? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. By contrast, there are Trump-like candidates running all over America on the GOP line: Tommy Tuberville, Ken Paxton, Paul Le Page, and a host of incumbents (Randy Fine, the aforementioned Andy Ogles, etc.). Trumpism is the lingua franca of the GOP.

Platner's supporters wish he didn't have that baggage. Trump's supporters don't even see his baggage as baggage. It's a feature, not a bug. That's the difference between the two parties.

ATTACK THE ATTACKERS

You should read a piece at The Farce headlined "How AI Plans to Buy 2026" just so you know how much money the tech Nazis plan to spend in an effort to buy control of America, and also to know what they really want (a dystopia for us, a utopia for them). What they want is bad for the rest of us, and they're largely getting their way.

But I don't believe that the tech Nazis are invincible. This apparently worked, but its success wasn't inevitable:

In 2024, advisers to [Elon] Musk ran a $45 million false-flag campaign so precise in its cynicism that it deserves to be described slowly and disdainfully. Muslim voters in Michigan received pro-Israel ads designed to look like Harris campaign materials. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania received the opposite message from the same shop. Young liberals got videos about how Harris had betrayed the progressive movement. Working-class white men in the Midwest got warnings that Harris would institute racial quotas and take away their Zyn pouches. Four brand names, zero common origin, one coordinating strategy. They called it “false positives” internally. The goal was not persuasion. It was subtraction — push enough Democratic-leaning voters into confusion, disgust, or exhausted abstention. Harris dropped eight million votes from Biden’s 2020 total. Trump gained fewer than two million. The election was decided, as the architects intended, by subtraction.

Kamala Harris's campaign raised more than a billion dollars. If this worked, it worked because not enough of that money was devoted to countering campaigns like it.

A nimbler Democratic campaign would have seen this messaging in real time and would have engaged in counter-messaging. The deployment of contradictory messages to Muslims and Jews offers a perfect example of how Harris's people could have countered this: by letting the targeted groups know what the other groups were seeing, by identifying the evil billionaire messengers, and by linking them to Harris's opponent.

It might be hard to do this for every message, but discovering and exposing the overall scheme -- or even just pointing out that unidentified Trump allies with lots of money were simultaneously accusing Harris of contradictary offenses -- would have weakened the potency of the messages.

In Chicago-area Democratic congressional primaries earlier this year, AIPAC ran stealth campaigns, as The Washington Post reported:

Democrats in [Illinois] say they have seen an influx of ads focusing on issues ranging from immigration to health care by groups named Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now. None of the ads mention Israel, and none of the groups are publicly affiliated with AIPAC. But the ads benefit candidates favored by AIPAC donors....

Elect Chicago Women uses a mail vendor that shares identifying information with a mail vendor used by AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project. UDP’s vendor for phone banking also has the same address as the vendor listed by Affordable Chicago Now.

Two candidates in the primary in the 9th district of Illinois, Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh, called AIPAC on its secret spending. They finished first and second. The intended beneficiary of AIPAC's campaign, Laura Fine, finished third. That's how you do it: you make the people running the attack ads the issue.

I'm seeing this in my congressional district now. Alex Bores, a state legislator, used to work for Palantir, but is now a critic of Big Tech and a supporter of tech regulation. As Wired notes,

Bores is a vocal proponent of rigorous AI regulation and cosponsored New York’s RAISE Act, which became law in 2025 and requires major AI firms to implement and publish safety protocols for their models, among other guardrails.

Early in the campaign, I began receiving a lot of mailers attacking Bores for his past work in tech. The mailers were financed by Big Tech itself -- the tech Nazis were trying to keep a tech critic out of Congress by pretending to be tech critics themselves.

It's backfiring. Bores is now a leading candidate in the race, in large part because voters know that Big Tech is attacking him. As Bores told Wired,

I literally just came from a call with a tenant leader. It was about housing policy. It had nothing to do with AI. This leader said, “I started paying attention to your campaign because of all these ads.”

... They've been wonderful partners in raising up the issue of AI regulation and AI safety.

You can't stop stealth attack ads and disinformation -- and of course some candidates will be overwhelmed by big money. But if you've got the money -- as Harris did (and as does Bores, who was quite well paid when he was in tech), you should be able to attack the attackers.

The Farce story also tell us:

A rural organizing group found 58 percent of rural voters already believe Democrats are the most corrupt party. AI does not need to create that belief. It scales it with a hundred variations of the same message, each calibrated to a distinct psychological profile, none traceable to a common origin, arriving faster than any correction can travel.

Have Democrats ever considered trying to make the case that Republicans are the most corrupt party? I say this all the time: Democrats seem to believe that it's unseemly to say, "The other party is bad and we're better." Democrats will attack Trump, and individual Democrats will attack their oppponents in a campaign, but the GOP as a party always seem to be off limits. That's crazy! You're a politcal party in a two-party system! You can say categorically that the other party is bad!

Attack politics, AI-enabled or not, can hurt Democrats. But it doesn't need to be fatal.

THE SUPREME COURT SEEMS TO BE LEARNING FROM TRUMP THAT INCREMENTALISM IS FOR LOSERS

Rick Hasen notes that there was a time when the John Roberts Supreme Court seemed to be gutting the Voting Rights Act slowly:

In 2009 ... Roberts wrote an opinion in the Northwest Austin case that raised questions about Section 5’s continuing constitutionality but ultimately punted on the question.... it took another four years, and another round of redistricting after the 2010 census, for Roberts to lead the court in the Shelby County v. Holder case to strike down the existing preclearance regime. In that opinion, Roberts not only assured readers that things had changed in the South; he pointed to Section 2 as an alternative means of providing protection to minority voters on a national basis.

The Court "whittled away" at Section 2, Hasen says, for another decade, but he relied on it in a 2023 case:

Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh then joined with the court’s liberals in the 2023 case Allen v. Milligan in holding that Alabama’s failure to draw a second Black opportunity congressional district violated Section 2.

But under similar circumstances in Louisiana v. Callais, Roberts and the rest of the Republicans on the Court have now made it impossible to use Section 2 to preserve Black voters' right to elect officeholders of their choice. And now the Court seems to be in a rush to implement this ruling:

First, the court agreed to issue its final judgment in Callais quickly, leapfrogging over the normal period when parties could seek Supreme Court rehearing. This ruling sent a signal that Louisiana had the green light to cancel its already ongoing primary election period and schedule a new House primary election using a map that eliminated a Black opportunity district. Then, in ongoing litigation out of Alabama, the court lifted a stay that was preventing the state from redrawing its congressional districts for the rest of the decade.

The Roberts Court played the long game with respect to the Voting Rights Act. Prior to that, it played the long game with respect to Roe v. Wade. Why?

I think the Court's Republicans believed that the most effective way to build their Republican utopia was to do it slowly, in ways that would escape detection by both normie voters and unimaginative journalists. Sure all those angry, bitter Democratic partisans would say that the Court is run by Republican hacks acting as unelected legislators in robes, but the vast majority of Americans wouldn't pay much attention.

But now the Court's Republicans seem to be rushing to implement their agenda. Why? Hasen has a few theories:

First, and most crassly, these decisions could have been motivated by partisanship.

Well, duh. Of course.

Second, even if not consciously biased in favor of Republicans, the conservative justices could be the victims of motivated reasoning: They see the risks of changing election rules at the last minute much more clearly when Republicans are hurt than when they are helped.

That's a charitable view. See theory #1.

Third, perhaps John Roberts sees the court as running out of time, and he wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy. He’s a 71-year-old chief justice now.... The Supreme Court’s rulings in cases ranging from abortion to presidential immunity to the power of the government to fight climate change are growing increasingly unpopular....

Roberts well knows that Democrats and progressives are mobilizing against the court.

"Running out of time"? Sure. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas are all in their seventies. These are bucket-list projects for them.

Are they trying to nail down their agenda ahead of a backlash? Maybe. They might believe that Democrats are serious about Court expansion, age limits, or limiting the Court's jurisdiction. Democrats might be able to get some of this done if they win a 2028 trifecta. (I'll believe it when I see it.)

But I also think the Court's Republicans are looking at Donald Trump and thinking, Why the hell are we trying to sneak everything under the radar? The lesson the Roberts Court's majority and many other Republicans can learn from Trump is: Just do whatever you can get away with, while being perfectly frank about the baseness of your motives. You might get pushback, and there might be moments of public outrage, but you'll be able to get away with a lot, and quite a bit of it will be all but irreversible.

The Court's Republicans still aren't quite ready to openly acknowledge that they're doing what they're doing on behalf of their party, the way Trump does when he calls for gerrymandering or the SAVE Act or an end to mail voting, but they're learning from Trump that moving fast and aggressively allows you to break more things than playing the long game. And they're doing it.