Staggering corruption

During his first term Trump enriched himself (and his family) by cashing in on the presidency to an unprecedented degree, taking in $594 million in his first year in office, mostly from golf and real estate.

(All graphs in this section are from the New York Times report, “How Trump Is Getting Richer in Office.”)

Things looked dramatically different in the first year of his second go-round as president:

This came mostly from crypto deals:

The reporting from Andrea Fuller, Daniel Wood, and Ben Protess has all the dirty details. Fuller offers a video wrap up:

“Most other presidents in recent memory have gone out of their way to divest from anything that could pose a potential conflict of interest. But being back in the White House has brought a huge windfall for President Trump in a way that stands out from any other administration in recent history.”

It’s worse than a money grab

Senator Adam Schiff provided another take on Trump’s historic corruption (countdown from 10 to 1) in a speech on the Senate floor last week:

Schiff notes that the cost to the country is not just Trump lining his own (and his family’s) pockets: “When the president is fixated only on his family’s personal wealth, on the money he can make by abusing the power of his position, on his own vanity projects, gilding the White House, gilding statues and gilding a ballroom, he has very little time or inclination to address the problems facing ordinary Americans. They are mere afterthought, and the country suffers.”

Here’s a quick review of Schiff’s list:

Number 10: Trump licensing agreement overseas (and being beholden to foreign governments when making U.S. policy)

Number 9: Lawsuits against media (as the price of favorable policies, which don’t benefit the public)

Number 8: Suing social media platforms – Twitter, YouTube, Meta (collecting payoffs and squelching criticism)

Number 7: Handouts to the family, with Amazon’s multimillion dollar payment to Melania for a documentary about herself front and center (keeping Amazon in the good graces of the administration)

Number 6: The Trump memecoin, “a kind of a “joke” digital currency. But Trump still saw the opportunity for personal profit – about $635 million worth.
And the people on the other side of that trade? More than 810,000 of them have lost a combined two billion dollars. That’s 810,000 people that bought this memecoin, this Trump memecoin, mainly the president’s own supporters, lost money so the president could make hundreds of millions of dollars. ”

Worse yet: Trump auctions off presidential access to deep pocketed investors and calls off the law for fraudsters who funnel cash to Trump family businesses.

Number 5: “Number five is one of the most audacious schemes in presidential history: the gold-plated, gilded, and gaudy White House ballroom. The president has solicited ever-larger donations for this pet project – which now has a whopping price tag of $600 million.“

There are at least 37 big donors for the project. “Among them, Amazon and Apple and Google and Meta and Microsoft and Coinbase and Tether and Caterpillar and Lockheed Martin and T-Mobile. And more.
Of these corporate donors, two-thirds have been awarded federal contracts over the last five years – contracts worth $279 billion. And fourteen of them are either facing, or have had suspended, federal actions for violations of the law.“

And hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as well. Unmentioned by Schiff: there’s a no-bid contract for this project. And Trump is raiding the National Parks funding to pay for his White House renovations.

In the before days, there would be Congressional oversight and pushback. Not under this regime.

Number 4: “A $400 million luxury jet, “gifted” by the government of Qatar, to serve as Air Force One through the end of Trump’s term. 
And then? Transferred to Trump’s own museum foundation. His to keep!“

Again: this deal with the Qataris implies a foreign policy quid pro quo at the expense of our national security. And: taxpayers will shell out $1 billion to renovate the “free” plane.

Number 3: The corrupt deal with the huge national law firms that lacked the conviction to oppose his authoritarian designs (barely two months into his second term). As Schiff relates, nine firms pledged nearly a billion dollars of pro bono work. “Nine hundred and forty million dollars, extracted under threat.” The money didn’t go into Trump’s pockets; instead it was “redirected to causes he favors, surrendered by law firms who were afraid of what he might do to them if they refused.”

Number 2: “World Liberty Financial. The Trump family cash cow.
…
A single deal tied to a state-backed fund in the United Arab Emirates funneled $500 million into this venture. A single deal, made by a wealthy sheik who is also head of that country’s intelligence service. What could go wrong? And in return, they just got American made advanced AI chips, just like they wanted.“

Biance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, was instrumental in “settling a $2 billion investment from an Abu Dhabi state fund in the Trump coin” and Biance’s founder, convicted of money-laundering received a presidential pardon.

“The cost of this corruption? Crooked deals to benefit convicted fraudsters. U.S. foreign policy for sale to the highest gulf bidder. Less time, attention and resources of the country focused on bringing down your costs, improving your quality of life, bringing back prosperity to America.“

Number 1: The IRS “settlement” with Trump giving him more than $1.776 billion for a slush fund to pay off his supporters (such as the January 6 insurrectionists) and the promise of immunity for Trump and his family from future IRS audits (estimated benefit to the Trump clan: $100 million)!

A district judge voided the agreement, though it could rise from the dead in the next two and a half years. Meanwhile, Senator John Cornyn (a lame duck who lost his primary to a crooked Texas AG after Trump opposed his reelection) has derailed for a time the confirmation of Todd Blanche (Trump’s personal attorney responsible for the sham settlement) as Attorney General until the senator gets something-something-something in writing. This is an ongoing story (and Blanche could continue to serve as acting AG even if the Senate rejects his nomination).

Schiff’s estimate of the cost of this top ten list: Six billion dollars. $6,000,000,000.00

The United States of America has never seen anything like this. Nothing this brazen. Nothing even approaching this scale. And no one before like the grifter who resides in the White House today.

Or like the political party in league with him. No Congress so deferential to presidential corruption. No Supreme Court so willing to trash the Constitution in order to enable a lawless regime.

The Trump regime has weaponized federal funding to reward allies and punish political opponents. This is not exactly news for folks who follow such things, but two recent examples prove the point. In each case, the flagrant corruption is without precedent in the history of the American presidency.

Clean Energy Grants

First, Trump’s lawyers have confirmed in federal court the lies they’ve told to prop up their autocratic maneuvers in cancelling research dollars.

The Trump administration acknowledged in writing in a federal courtroom that cancellation of $7.56 billion in clean energy grants was based solely on partisan grounds.

In October 2025, the Energy department announced, “Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” This was a lie.

Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, gloated over the cancellations on X.

Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY.

The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA

— Russ Vought (@russvought) October 1, 2025

Every state on Vought’s list was carried by Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, a fact that Vought undoubtedly wished to convey back in October. Trolling the opposition party and its constituents is a MAGA specialty. Nonetheless, Vought’s boast bolstered the Energy Department lie — that “a thorough, individualized financial review” led to the cancellations.

In testimony before a Congressional committee last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright repeated the lie, denying in vulgar language that the cuts were political. “No decisions were made on politics. I keep hearing that charge. It’s bullshit. We’re going to say it a million times.”

But in a move that allowed DOJ to dodge discovery related to a class-action lawsuit filed by researchers at the University of California, the Trump folks changed their story last week. Government lawyers agreed in writing (with plaintiffs’ counsel) to a number of stipulations, among them:

9. DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State. DOE will not contend that it looked beyond the prime grantee(s) to consider the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries of the grant funds.
10. DOE accepts that the differential treatment resulting in the October 2025 termination of Blue State grants and the non-termination of non-Blue State grants was not based on a rational connection between the recipient’s location and/or place of performance and DOE’s past or current agency priorities.

If the grantee was in a Blue state, the grant was cancelled. There was no rational connection tied to the decisions; they were based solely on the political identity of the state (that is, led by Democrats). This conflicts with respect for the rule of law, trashes institutional evenhandedness, and harms the national interest because multi-billion dollar decisions matter.

Disaster Relief

In a second case a pattern has emerged: there is a huge disparity between Trump’s approval of disaster aid for Red states and Blue states. This has been evident for quite a while, since requests by governors and approvals by the federal government are public. As with the early and emphatic denials of partisanship in the cancellation of clean energy grants, the Trump administration denies any bias regarding disaster funding. From a PBS report (“Trump is taking longer to approve disaster aid and denying Democratic states more frequently”) two weeks ago:

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “there is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief.”

A more recent report (from Politico) Jackson uses almost the same words and adds to them:

That’s the story, but the facts are clear. And the White House has failed to address the sharp partisan disparity.

Politico’s E&E News reviewed 2,500 natural disaster declarations resulting in approval of disaster funding going back to 1979, when FEMA was created. Their report concluded, “President Donald Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

No other administration came close to funding approvals that revealed such a flagrant partisan divide. In Trump’s second term, only twenty-three percent of Democratic requests have been approved (compared to not quite 90% of Republican requests). In the chart below, the blue line represents states with a Democratic governor and 2 Democratic senators; the red line, a Republican governor and 2 GOP senators.

Politico’s report also revealed that when Trump has granted assistance to Blue states, he has taken longer to do so. Furthermore, in several denials of aid, Trump overruled the determination of federal officials:

President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.
…
Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February.

It stretches credulity to believe that the disparity is not deliberate. As Politico E&E News noted: “Trump has been openly partisan on social media about using disaster funding for political purposes. He has linked his decisions to grant aid with his electoral victories in Republican-led states.”

Over the past eighteen months, we have seen Trump turn the levers of power at his command into a personal weapon of revenge and extortion.

Red states are rewarded with federal funds, while Blue states are denied funding even when these decisions conflict with the laws passed by Congress. Trump has swept aside the rules and regulations in place to ensure the integrity of federal funding decisions in order to punish states that Kamala Harris won in 2024.

The outcome of such partisan corruption is outrageous — undemocratic and contrary to the rule of law. Moreover, this outrage is amplified by another disparity, as noted by a number of commentators.

“Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”Right now people in blue states are basically paying federal taxes as if they’re colonized territories of red states. www.politico.com/news/2026/03…

— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz.bsky.social) 2026-07-29T23:05:34.566Z

Blue states, primarily through the income tax, collectively pay more in taxes than Red states. This MAGA president is exacting revenge against the Blue states by denying them funding, while channeling their dollars to Red states. (California, home of more Democrats than any other state, which has the biggest gap between funds sent to the feds and funding sent back to the state, is still waiting for wildfire relief.

Corruption erodes democracy

The Trump regime is intent on imposing authoritarian rule on a nation with a rich democratic history. Before 2016, both major political parties were more or less in step regarding a range of guardrails that kept democratic governance on track. Both parties, for instance, respected election results even when faced with a loss.

No longer. And that change is among a host of additional changes inimical to democracy. In their analysis of democratic backsliding, Levitsky and Ziblatt focused on mutual toleration and institutional forbearance as critical to maintaining democracy.

Donald Trump has trashed both of these guardrails. Intolerant of dissent, he disparages his opponents as illegitimate. And rejecting forbearance, he has sought to wield power without restraint. We see this in the decisions canceling grants and approving disaster aid.

Anything goes. Or anything that he thinks he can get away with.

This is a threat to American democracy.

Less than a week after killing Lorenzo Araujo, ICE agents have killed another man. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year old Colombian immigrant working two jobs to support his partner and 3-year old daughter, was gunned down by ICE agents in Biddeford, ME.

Guerrero was in the U.S. legally; like Araujo, he was not being sought by ICE agents when they encountered him. Apart from a practice — shooting into moving vehicles — that is forbidden by most police forces (and by federal agencies), there is evidence that armed ICE agents lack the training and temperament to be patrolling American city streets. But they have been goaded on by a president, his most influential senior domestic advisor, and others in the Trump administration and in MAGA media into a crusade to rid the country of immigrants — legal or not. Trump and company have demeaned and slandered Immigrants, while glorifying militarized agents acting with impunity.

Lies come easily to these apologists of state violence. In the immediate aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, JD Vance posted on X that the agent who fired the fatal shot was protecting his own life “against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over.”

Every congressional democrat and every democrat who's running for president should be asked a simple question:

Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?

These people are going to try to arrest our law…

— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 8, 2026

On the same day, the White House quoted Vance saying:

I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president, & the entire administration stands behind them.
To the radical assaulting them, doxxing them, & threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.

STAND WITH ICE. pic.twitter.com/apkF4QC7bC

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 8, 2026

Enforce, that is, a twisted version of the law by a regime that despises constitutional limits, the preservation of individual liberty, and a nation that is enriched by immigrants and their children.

ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo last week as he drove to work. They shot him by firing into his van, describing him as an “illegal alien” who had “weaponized his vehicle.”

Araujo had lived and worked in the United States for 35 years, raising three sons with his wife. He ran a construction company and had no criminal record. Yes, he was undocumented. Is that grounds for being gunned down on a city street by masked federal agents?

We have heard the “weaponized his vehicle” rationale before. If true, it might justify shooting into a car. But past experience suggests that this is a lie. “In several instances … video evidence and testimony from witnesses contradicted the agency’s initial accounts, establishing that the officers were not in danger and, in some cases, acted as the aggressors.” No immigration agents have been charged in any of the previous fatal shootings.

The other three men in the vehicle have disputed the account given by federal authorities.

This is the tenth person to be shot and killed by ICE and Border Patrol in Trump’s second term “and the 17th Mexican to either be fatally shot by ICE or to die in ICE detention.” The latest shooting occurred as the Trump administration has doubled immigration arrest numbers (often by making arrests at immigration check-ins, nabbing folks following the law).

Third-country removals continue apace, while Americans who protest Trump policies are subject to threats and harassment in violation of the First Amendment.

There is no place for this in a free country. Judge for yourself.

Meanwhile, the number of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital has surged and the Pentagon announced that the troops would remain through the 2029 inauguration.

This ain’t the America most of us grew up with. Day by day, city by city, a federal occupying army is put into place, as our country creeps closer to being a police state at the hands of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, a corrupt wannabe strongman, is also a boastful, needy narcissist who fancies himself knowledgeable about all manner of things about which he knows next to nothing. He prizes the loyalty of sycophants, rather than the professional judgment of experts; self-serving transactional arrangements, rather than honest, aboveboard procedures; and getting his way in the moment, no matter the consequences to follow.

Each episode of the man’s redo of the Reflecting Pool has presented a multitude of critics with a welcome diversion from the MAGA rampage the country has experienced during Trump’s second stint in the White House.

Equally satisfying has been watching the MAGA media universe scramble to diminish and detract from the misadventure (led by Fox News Channel, which has run with the whining chyron, “Liberal Media Focused on a Pool Nobody Swims In“).

Sad.

As Trump wreaks havoc (an effort supercharged by the corrupt Roberts Court and enabled by a supine GOP Congress) in a wave of destruction of democratic institutions and of the liberties of Americans (both much more consequential than his trifling redecorating binge to self-sooth and his compulsion to place himself front and center at every opportunity), attention to the drama of the pool that nobody swims in has provided comic relief. The less consequential blunders, which exemplify the man’s cognitive limits and mental kinks, are not just easier to stomach; they allow for a measure of pleasure at watching Trump stumble.

Trump and acolytes put his name on the Kennedy Center and the United States Institute of Peace and his face on banners before the departments of Justice, Labor, and Agriculture, on national park passes, on commemorative coins, and more — with a $250 bill in the works. He gilds the White House with globs of gold to outdo Louis XIV and makes plans to erect a massive arch designed with an eye to France, not the American republic. And, of course, in a bitter testament to his wrecking ball presidency, he rips down the East Wing of the White House so he can build his ballroom. (His ballroom.) As redecorating goes, that’s more significant than his (temporary, correctable) blunders inflicted on the Reflecting Pool. The pool, with proper care, will recover, which leaves us free to delight, albeit fleetingly, in the ongoing spectacle.

The saga of the Reflecting Pool in brief.

On May 4, not for the first time, Trump boasted of his renovation of the Reflecting Pool:

This will last for at least 50 years. And you’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. You couldn’t, if you had a knife – I don’t want to give anyone ideas – if you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful. It is beautiful. Sealed. And I look at just one of the little pieces that they did to finish. It’s like a piece of glass. Beautiful color. Beautiful every – you could never get anything like this.

Three days earlier Trump, evincing evident enthusiasm for his project, posted an AI image of himself and several shirtless guys and a bikini-clad gal lounging in the dark blue (if not quite American Flag Blue) pool. Fun times. (How slender Trump appears; AI can be so flattering.)

On June 3, Trump announced the completed project on Truth Social and showed off a chart, “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.”

But, alas, not all was well.

Photo, CBC: “Trump spent $14M US to make reflecting pool look blue. Now the water is green.”

Photo, USA Today, “Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool paint peeling off: See images.”

The pool quickly turned green — the result of an algal bloom. And then the “American Flag Blue” sealant — Trump personally selected the color — started peeling off in chunks. These mishaps drew attention to the contractors chosen for the project. It turns out there was no competitive bidding for applying the sealant; instead, the Department of Interior awarded a no-bid $14.7 million contract to a company that had worked on pools at Trump properties.

The no-bid $1.7 million contract to install the water purification system went to Greenwater Services, affiliated with John J. Cafaro, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago neighbor, $255,600 donor to Trump’s 2020 campaign, and a man convicted of violating campaign laws and bribing a member of Congress.

John J. Cafaro, pictured with former cast member of “The Real Housewives of Orange Country,” who told TMZ that she doesn’t know Cafaro, but because he looked “funny,” like a villain out of central casting, she couldn’t resist the photo opportunity.

When asked about holding the contractors responsible, Trump waived this off, unconvincingly blaming vandals for slicing a 290-300 foot cut through the sealant.

Q: Are the contractors who did the initial work for the reflecting pool to blame for the condition of it?TRUMP: No no. We had vandalism. They went in there with a knife.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-22T20:19:29.130Z

(What started out as a 250 foot gash eventually reached 350 feet on Trump’s telling.)

Trump has suggested that there are photos of the vandalism, though they are as hard to come by as the millions of pages of Epstein files still hidden away.

Q: You mentioned that the Interior Dept has video of photos. We reached out to them & they haven't shared it w/ usTRUMP: They will share it. They've arrested I think 6 people on the reflecting pool. So, the reflecting pool looks fantastic. Somebody went in with a knife and cut it, a 350 foot slit

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-23T17:22:59.852Z

A search for other possible causes of the failures.

The president’s claims about damage inflicted by vandals have met with considerable skepticism, especially from folks who suspect that Trump’s no-bid selections are likely incompatible with merit-based results.

Since no convincing evidence has been provided (“Trump’s Unsupported Claims About Reflecting Pool Vandalism“), speculation has ensued about other possible causes of the peeling sealant and green algae.

Here are 2 possibilities to fill the gap in reliable information:

Hypothesis 1: driving a motorcade across the length of the pool could have damaged the sealant before it had set.

On May 7 — most of us learned of this much later — the president decided to check things out personally, so his motorcade (with, by my count, a dozen vehicles, including an MPDC escort trailing a UTV, a parade of black Cadillac and other SUVs, and the Commander-in-Chief’s armored vehicle — the Beast, which weighs in at an estimated 7 to 10 tons) rolled across the full length of the pool.

🚨 INCREDIBLE SCENE: President Trump just directed his motorcade straight into the drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for an up-close look at the ongoing renovation progress!

Trump wanted to personally inspect the major “American flag blue” resurfacing project — and the… pic.twitter.com/baHZItEEmu

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) May 8, 2026

Hypothesis 2: Primping for Trump’s UFC birthday party caused the explosion of algae in the pool, as the New York Times reported: “How the Reflecting Pool Turned Green: Missing ‘Bubblers’ and a Rush Job.”

Greenwater Services had installed enormous, unsightly nanobubblers enclosed within bulky black fences around the perimeter of the pool as a temporary measure to purify the water, which appeared dark blue. But the National Park Service ordered the machines removed just before Trump’s big day.

Photo from NYT.

By the time the nanobubblers were put back in place 36 hours later, the algae had begun to spread, turning the water green. No need to invoke vandals or “Radical Lunatics” (as the White House press release put it) to explain this fiasco. Simple ignorance and shortsightedness will do.

Metaphor and leading indicator

I’ll let the reader sort out whether a metaphor is to be found in the twisted saga of the Reflecting Pool, but I’ll turn to a possible foreshadowing.

I can’t be certain, of course, but as the Reflecting Pool story has unfolded, things have appeared to shift for Trump’s MAGA crusade.

Let’s review what we are seeing: public opinion surveys, the results of special elections since January 2025 and primary elections thus far in 2026, accumulating problems caused directly by Trump and his policies, and Trump’s inability to admit error and strategically change course.

Make no mistake: the best case scenario with two and a half years left in Trump’s second term is incalculable damage yet to come. This is inevitable.

But could Trump’s bungles and excuses in recent months suggest that his regime is headed for a significant fall? And that the country is headed toward a more sanguine, less Trumpian future?

In my view, as Americans have watched this play out — in tandem with a series of more consequential failures — the drama will cement an image of Trump that will not soon disappear. Many 2024 Trump voters have been burned. Those outside the MAGA tribe have learned a lesson about Trump. Trump’s Reflecting Pool comedy of errors and accusations is illustrative of a bigger picture.

Whenever Trump has an audience, his long digressions on the Reflecting Pool or the Triumphal Arch or his ballroom reveal where his interests lie. While he is bored by negotiations with Iran, he is engaged with his redecorating projects. He is energized by repairs to fountains across D.C., not so much by efforts to tame inflation. He and his family are getting rich; so what if working folks are having a tough time?

Trump’s comments yesterday regarding the bipartisan housing legislation just passed by Congress — “It’s a yawn” — are completely in character.

Q: Will you sign the housing affordability bill?Trump: It's a yawn. Just about everything is a big yawn

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2026-06-29T19:48:23.538930492Z

Trump’s Reflecting Pool follies are hardly, in themselves, significant. But they have occurred at a moment when the tide has begun to turn.

Small-d democrats, distressed by what we’ve experienced since January 2025, have reason to hope.

On the web this morning, Jamelle Bouie comments on “The Real Reason Trump Never Stops Talking About Voter Fraud.”

His commentary begins:

Donald Trump knew as well as anyone that he had lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. He knew there was no conspiracy to commit voter fraud — no mysterious mail ballots, no “illegal” voting, no suspicious activity in key swing states. When he told his supporters that the election had been “rigged,” he was lying.

Bouie notes that Trump’s VP, AG, director of national intelligence, White House attorneys, and others in the executive branch, as well as Trump campaign strategists and staffers advised him that there was no fraud. Joe Biden had won. And, indeed, Trump himself acknowledged as much behind the scenes.

This lie, often referenced as the Big Lie back in the day, has been extraordinarily effective as disinformation. Two-thirds of Republicans accepted the lie as true when his supporters rioted at the Capitol in January 2021 and in a January 2024 survey two-thirds of Republicans continue to accept it.

Trump is still at it. Claiming without a shred of evidence that elections are rigged whenever his opponents win.

WOW – Trump crashes out & cuts his interview w/ Welker short as she presses him on his lack of evidence for claiming elections are rigged"You're either crooked or you're stupid. I've had enough. Thank you darling," he tells her""I traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview," she pleads

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-07T14:50:42.139Z

Republican politicians (even those who know that Biden won in 2020) are willing to go along with Trump’s lies. Long before Trump, as Jonathan Chait noted six years ago, it has been an article of faith among Republicans that Democrats cheat at elections: “The Republican strategy has several sources of motivation, but the most important is a widely shared belief that Democrats in large cities — i.e., racial minorities — engage in systematic vote fraud, election after election.” Not just in 2020, but in elections whenever they take place. In that regard, Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments on the 2026 California primary represent a Republican platitude:

RAJU: But what evidence is there to prove the California election is rigged?MIKE JOHNSON: Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it's impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-08T19:56:22.798Z

It’s still a lie, but there is another claim embedded within the lie that Republicans lose because Democrats cheat.

Trump was lying when he asserted in 2020 and 2021 that the election was rigged, that there was systemic voter fraud. (As he continues to lie today.) “But,” Bouie writes, “Trump was also making a specific political claim.” That claim is that only Trump voters may legitimately cast ballots. Only Trump supporters are genuine Americans.

When Trump (and other Republicans) point to elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia and Michigan as rigged, Republicans focus on the cities — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, populated with people feared and despised by the MAGA base — where the rigging happens.

Republicans since Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and a multitude of talking heads on Rupert Murdock’s Fox News Channel have denigrated their political opponents as unworthy, illegitimate, as deserving of contempt. Decidedly not as equal participants in our American democracy.

This go-to approach justifies vilification at every opportunity, from JD Vance’s lie about Haitians in Ohio eating pets, which he rationalized as a way to garner media attention …

… to Stephen Miller’s puerile denigration of a Democratic senate candidate.

The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate. https://t.co/KaGDLn2naP

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 27, 2026

Bouie again:

“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.

This MAGA obsession lies behind so much of the Trump agenda: voter suppression, extreme gerrymanders, undermining the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, mass deportations, immigration confined to white South Africans, the executive order on birthright citizenship, and the vice president’s view of citizenship based on heritage and bloodlines, rejecting Lincoln’s vision (reflecting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence) of a democratic nation of equals.

The Roberts Court has, in a rush, offered “a series of major upheavals in the past month,” beginning with Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act while pretending not to, followed by a pair of quick shadow docket rulings (which cast aside the court’s Purcell principle that cautioned against changing voting rules close to scheduled elections) setting off a frenzied scramble in Republican states to create freshly gerrymandered districts, eliminating Black representation, before the states’ 2026 primaries.

Rick Hasen began a commentary (quoted above) on these judicial machinations with these words: “Over his two decades on the Supreme Court, United States Chief Justice John Roberts had consistently played the long game when it comes to the court’s weakening of voting rights. That was until the past few weeks.”

Hasen cites an op-ed he wrote in 2013 (after the Shelby County decision) to illustrate the chief justice’s pattern of playing the long game:

In an opinion brimming with a self-confidence that he hides behind a cloak of judicial minimalism, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a conservative Supreme Court majority in Shelby County v. Holder, cripples Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
The court pretends it is not striking down the act but merely sending the law back to Congress for tweaking; it imagines that Congress forced its hand; and it fantasizes that voting discrimination in the South is a thing of the past. None of this is true.
In the Shelby decision, we see a somewhat more open version of a pattern that is characteristic of the Roberts court, in which the conservative justices tee up major constitutional issues for dramatic reversal. First the court wrecked campaign finance law in Citizens United. On Tuesday it took away a crown jewel of the civil rights movement. And as we saw in Monday’s Fisher case, affirmative action is next in line, even if the court wants to wait another year or two to pull the trigger.

You can still count on the court’s pattern of pretending, imagining, and fantasizing without regard for what is true. That hasn’t changed. But, until recently, you could count on the chief justice’s drawing things out, signaling before pulling the trigger, playing the long game. “That was until the past few weeks.” Now the court is in a big hurry. Hasen continues:

The court did not have to proceed in such a hurried fashion. It could have waited to intervene in the Alabama case until the fall. It could have waited its typical 32 days for Callais to go into effect. It could have even held the case until the end of its term in late June or early July, when the primary season was over. It could have signaled, as the Supreme Court did in 1964’s Reynolds v. Sims, establishing the “one person, one vote” rule for state legislative districts, that because of “equitable considerations,” it would not be applying the new rule to the impending elections. It could have said that Purcell considerations militated against immediate change. Instead, the court’s conservatives have made an unusually mad dash toward radical change.

Why the rush?

Hasen offers three possible reasons. Although he offers them as either-ors, it’s easy enough to see each of them as factors motivating Roberts and his Republican colleagues.

First, pure partisanship. There is little doubt that the redistricting decisions (Callais and the shadow docket follow ups) will advantage Republicans and disadvantage Democrats in the 2026 and 2028 Congressional elections. (Yeah, but wouldn’t you expect Roberts to look a bit further ahead than a couple of election cycles?)

Second, motivated reasoning. In other words, the decisions advantage Republicans, but the Republican justices are not conscious of their gross partisanship. (Implausible? Maybe, maybe not. My first response to Alito’s declaration of historical progress in his Callais opinion — “And if, as a result of this progress, it is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination, that is cause for celebration.” — was: He’s trolling us! But other observers appear to accept this as what the man actually believes. It’s hard to doubt that the Republican justices are living in a bubble that could spark motivated reasoning.)

The third possibility: Roberts has decided it’s time to cut to the chase. Here’s how Hasen puts it:

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, not a 26-year-old staffer. 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. In the most important cases, the court is now splitting along not just ideological lines but party lines: All the conservative justices on the court have been appointed by Republican presidents, and all the liberals by Democrats.
Roberts well knows that Democrats and progressives are mobilizing against the court. The chief justice has complained about the public viewing the justices as political actors, but that is exactly what they are. People, including me, who had resisted Supreme Court reform, increasingly see it as the only way to save American democracy.

I wholeheartedly agree that Roberts “wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy.” It is possible that the other Republican justices forced the chief justice’s hand; there may have been a majority for this decision even without Roberts. Or perhaps Roberts would have done less slow-walking in previous years if the majority then had been less restrained.

Republican justices have constituted the Supreme Court’s majority for more than 50 years, but the confirmation of Donald Trump’s three nominees — after the Federalist Society’s vow of “no more Souters” — tilted the balance of the court dramatically.

Following Rucho v. Common Cause (2020), when two of Trump’s picks had been seated and Republicans constituted the 5-4 majority, the Callais decision this year, with an additional Republican joining the majority for a 6-3 victory, set off a furious scramble in Republican controlled statehouses to implement extreme gerrymanders of Congressional district maps. (State legislative maps and redistricting of localities will come next.)

The Roberts Court deliberately brought about this race to bottom, undermining fair representation and equality among voters. This was a choice. A partisan, political choice. Rucho and Callais taken together appear laser focused on impairing the Democrats’ prospects of winning elections at the federal, state, and local levels.

Add a third ruling, after the 6-3 Republican supermajority was in place: Trump v. United States (2024) was completely untethered from the Constitution or anything else that could possibly justify such a reckless decision. We have witnessed the results with Trump 2.

Each of these three decisions — and there have been a number of others — are fundamentally at odds with democratic principles. They are antithetical to American democracy. But never before fall 2020, with the confirmation of the third Trump justice, has the Republican majority on the Roberts Court been more powerful or more unaccountable. Playing the long game, holding back now, makes little sense. Never in the Trump era has an authoritarian victory been so close at hand.

While Democrats (some of them) have begun to realize that undoing these decisions and disempowering these justices are critical to winning elections, to regaining power, and to implementing public policies that the Roberts Court will not strike down, the Republican justices have done their best to diminish Democratic prospects and marginalize Democratic voters.

The Roberts Court, seeing an opportunity to secure a convincing and durable victory over opponents of a MAGA America, has no interest in restraint.

If you have 22 minutes and you’re curious, John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight” explains the shadow docket. Steve Vladeck, the man who wrote the book (The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic) recommends Oliver’s explanation.

Other than discovering that I’m apparently John Oliver’s son, @lastweektonight.com’s deep dive into the shadow docket is really quite good:www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKeq…

— Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T11:50:23.172Z

Plus: gerrymandering race to the bottom and the chief justice’s complaints that the court is misunderstood

On a related note, Professor Vladeck, a savvy court watcher, weighed in today (at One First) on the redistricting chaos the Supreme Court chose to unleash and the unconvincing insistence of the chief justice that the court is not political.

I really didn’t want to write about redistricting again, but events in the latter part of last week seemed to demand it. It’s not just the brazen racism we’ve seen in some of the state legislatures that are rushing to eliminate majority-minority districts (e.g., “y’all need to shut up, boy”), or the not-exactly-obvious reading of Virginia law that the Virginia Supreme Court adopted to nix Virginia voters’ attempt to belatedly redraw the Commonwealth’s congressional districts, but also Alabama’s … aggressive … requests for emergency relief to the U.S. Supreme Court to let it get out from under earlier district court rulings—including ones the Supreme Court affirmed on the merits—so it can re-draw its maps in time for this cycle.
All of this came the same week that Chief Justice Roberts, in remarks at the Third Circuit Judicial Conference, complained about the public perception that the Court is “political.” In his words, “I think [people] view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” Shortly after that, he added that the Court is “simply not part of the political process.”
Roberts may tell himself that the Court is not part of the political process, but the (growing) evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Indeed, the Court inserted itself into the midterm cycle—and set off this race to the bottom—knowingly (if not deliberately), both in what it ruled in Callais and in its willingness to issue the judgment immediately. That latter development was an unmissable signal that it was not averse to having this exact kind of chaos unfold on the ground—a point Justice Jackson made explicitly in her dissent from last Monday’s order. In her words, “as always, the Court has a choice.” By issuing the Callais judgment immediately, the majority “unshackles itself from [doctrinal] constraints . . . and dives into the fray.”
This, to me, is the key point: whatever one thinks of the ruling in Callais, the Court chose this chaos. And now that it is on the receiving end of applications from Alabama (and with an application from Virginia apparently on the way), to suggest the Court is not “part of the political process” is to deny the entirely obvious (and entirely predictable) consequences of the Court’s own behavior—not just in Callais, but before April 29 and since. Worse than that, all of these developments rather fatally undermine what I’d always understood to be the animating purpose of the so-called “Purcell principle”—which makes sense only as a strong norm against federal judicial intervention in the middle of election cycles. The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is. Either way, they don’t seem to mind the inconsistency—in a context in which it’s having the remarkably coincidental effect of benefiting Republicans.

Vladeck elaborates on these points and explains the Tim Robinson meme — image above — that inspired the title of his post at One First.

“I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides. I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, May 6, 2026

Come hell or high water in the Trump era the Roberts Court has almost always found a way to enable Donald Trump and advance the interests of the contemporary Republican Party. The 6-3 Republican supermajority has given us Trump v. United States (July 1, 2024) and Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), which, among a host of other decisions, have strengthened the evidence that the Republican justices have less fidelity to the Constitution than to a partisan agenda. The latter decision, the latest in a pattern, illustrates the Roberts Court’s hostility to the Reconstruction Amendments.

Of these amendments, Eric Foner has written:

 The 13th Amendment irrevocably abolished slavery. The 14th constitutionalized the principles of birthright citizenship and equality before the law. The 15th sought to guarantee the right to vote for black men throughout the reunited nation. All three empowered Congress to enforce their provisions, radically shifting the balance of power from the states to the nation.
The amendments had flaws. The 13th allowed involuntary servitude to continue for people convicted of crime, inadvertently opening the door to the creation of a giant system of convict labor. The 14th mandated that a state would lose part of its representation in the House of Representatives if it barred groups of men from voting but imposed no penalty if it disenfranchised women. The 15th allowed states to limit citizens’ right to vote for reasons other than race.
Nonetheless, the amendments should be seen not simply as changes to an existing structure but as a second American founding, which created a fundamentally new Constitution.

The majority on the Roberts Court is intent on clawing back what Congress intended in the post-Civil War era and again (as recently as 1982) what Congress intended following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the decision on April 29, the six Republican justices have succeeded in demolishing the VRA.

Louisiana v. Callais will have dramatic consequences going forward — eliminating Black representation in Congressional districts, state legislatures, and local governing bodies. In fact, dramatic changes are already taking place, as a number of Republican states rush to redistrict and disable Black voting strength before the November 2026 elections.

[“Deadline: White House,” July 1, 2024. Marc Elias begins speaking at the 8:27 mark]

On the day theTrump v. United States decision was handed down, Nicolle Wallace asked voting rights attorney and activist Marc Elias for his response, which is worth quoting in full:

I think that we run the risk even on a day like today of overly lawyering, legalizing what the Supreme Court has done.
Let’s be clear. As you know, you’ve heard they knew exactly what they were doing not just for the past but for the future. Donald Trump is campaigning on a platform of being a dictator for a day and of seeking vengeance against his enemies. And, you know, to do that he needs the support of a lot of people who are going to go along with him.
Well, what have those people who have gone along with him learned in the past couple weeks? Number one, that the U.S. Supreme Court was going to narrowly construe a statute that went after January 6 insurrectionists. Number two, the Supreme Court was going to let Donald Trump remain on the ballot. Number three, that the Supreme Court was going to give him basically absolute immunity, not just for what he did last time, but what he may do in the future. And that his pardon power is absolute.
So let’s be clear. It’s not just that the Supreme Court knew what it was doing with respect to the to the criminal cases that have been indicted. The Supreme Court knows what it’s doing with respect to empowering his attitudes and his impulses and those of his followers as we are four months from the next election, four and a half months from the next set of lawsuits, five months from the next insurrection at the Capitol, and then potentially four years of him seeking vengeance and misusing power to go after his political opponents and to prosecute his case against the American people.
It is a shameful day for democracy. The court has disgraced itself. And I’ll tell ya, everyone one of us needs to be steeled for a battle to stand up for the rule of law going forward.

Wallace followed up: “Can I just ask you one last question, Marc Elias. In your view, why?” His response:

Because they agree with him.
You know, one of the things that has always struck me as odd in this town is that people look at a bunch of justices and they say: Well, you know they all went to Harvard and Yale Law School. And they all went to the best colleges. And they send their kids to the same schools that our kids go to. And you know they enjoy a glass of wine with a crudité at a reception at the Supreme Court. And they wear robes and they speak in very flowery language. They’re just like us.
No. They actually believe that Donald Trump is the future of America. They believe that the flag should be flown upside down, indicating distress, when Joe Biden wins. They believe that Donald Trump as a strongman should have immunity.
And it’s time that, you know, people that are in the center, the center-left, the center-right, stop looking at justices and thinking, Well, they must share our value system.
They don’t share our value system. They share his value system.

We have no reason to doubt this assessment and every reason to believe that when we watch the Roberts Court, we understand exactly what it is doing. This court is making policy decisions based on partisan preferences. It is enabling an authoritarian Republican president. At the same time, it is disabling Democratic public policies (such as the Voting Rights Act).

The Roberts Court is relying not on the Constitution, not on originalism, not on conservative judicial principles (such as judicial restraint, adherence to precedent, or respect for the coequal branch of government established by Article I). These Republican justices are dedicated to boosting the MAGA political agenda, because they prefer an earlier America than the one we have lived in since the second founding. They are imposing their political preferences on the nation.

With last week’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais the six Republican justices on the United States Supreme Court wrung the life out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, killing off the protections it had offered minority voters.

Election maven Rick Hasen offered this assessment:

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been called “the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.” In fact John Roberts himself has made reference to this judgment. Quoting (in an internal memo during his service in the Reagan administration) a sentence of Section 2 of VRA, Roberts wrote: “This provision, which is an important part of what has been uniformly described as the most successful civil rights law ever enacted, is applicable nationwide.”

Voter suppression

Don Moynihan offers a graph that presents registration rates of Black and White voters in Louisiana from 1878 to 2010. As you can see, the most dramatic changes in Black voter registration occurred with the advent of Jim Crow and then with passage of the VRA.

Regarding the graph, Moynihan observes:

In a single image, it tells the story of political power and discrimination. Black voters had power, briefly, then it was taken from them. A series of policies that were more or less explicit in their discriminatory purpose worked as intended, disenfranchising Black voters, and some poor White voters along the way.
This ended with the Voting Right Act of 1965, which removed the ability of governments to put in place facially neutral but clearly discriminatory practices, and in doing so ratcheted up Black registration in Louisiana until it matched White voters. This effect was immediate and enduring across the South.

While violence and intimidation were widespread during the Jim Crow era ( just months before passage of the VRA the country witnessed the bloody clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge), election law was often enough to keep Black folks from registering. And note that the practices that disenfranchised Black voters during the Jim Crow era were represented as color-blind; in Moynihan’s words, they were “facially neutral but clearly discriminatory practices.” Poll taxes, literacy tests, exams assessing good character, property requirements, and so on were effective instruments in the hands of state officials who wished to preserve White rule.

The decades-long crusade of John Roberts

When a young John Roberts wrote the memo quoted above, he was the Reagan administration point person to defeat an amendment to the VRA. A 1980 Supreme Court opinion (City of Mobile v. Bolden), a 6-3 ruling with the Republican justices constituting the majority, had overruled an appellate court decision that the VRA rendered a gerrymandered district map (icing out Black representation) illegal. The SCOTUS majority, in overturning this decision, held that “action by a State that is racially neutral on its face violates the Fifteenth Amendment only if motivated by a discriminatory purpose.”

Congress, granted the power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by Section 2 of that amendment, did not agree. Roberts and the Reagan White House lost that battle. The 1982 legislation — passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President Reagan — clarified that states were prohibited from introducing voting procedures with discriminatory effect.

But Roberts stayed the course. It was his “life’s work,” as Hasen noted. The Roberts Court has chipped away at the VRA in decision after decision. Finally, more than four decades after that initial defeat, Roberts has finally succeeded in demolishing the VRA. Sam Alito wrote the 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, powered by the Republican supermajority on the court.

Elena Kagan dissents

In the opening paragraphs of her dissent (joined by justices Sotomayer and Jackson), Justice Kagan offers a hypothetical illustration to clarify what’s at stake:

Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional district in a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a rectangular State. The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White. And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans. The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last. The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.
That is racial vote dilution in its most classic form. A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—“cracked” is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence. Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests. Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice. Or, as this Court put it recently, the cracking makes “a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.”

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Cracking districts creates two tiers of voters. The first tier dominates the second. Votes cast by the dominate group count. Votes cast by the disadvantaged group are, as Kagan writes “by every practical measure, wasted.”

Cracking a district is simpler than ever before with today’s computers. Denying fair representation to Black voters — so their votes matter less than others’ — is a snap. Congress, Kagan continues, chose to remedy this inequality by passing the Voting Rights Act. And by renewing it again and again. Congress made such unfairly apportioned legislative districts illegal because of the sordid history of voter suppression.

Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely deprived African Americans of their voting rights. Through a seemingly boundless array of mechanisms—most of them facially race-neutral and among them the drawing of district lines—States either prevented Black citizens from casting ballots or ensured that their votes would count for next to nothing. The Voting Rights Act was meant as the corrective. And when this Court construed it too narrowly—insisting that a person suing under Section 2 had to prove discriminatory intent—Congress amended the law so that it turned solely on discriminatory effects. . . . And for 40 years now, this Court has recognized that language to encompass districting decisions that, in the way illustrated above, result in vote dilution—the “minimiz[ing]” of minority voters’ “ability to elect their preferred candidates.”
But no longer.

No longer. Not with the Roberts Court, especially not now that there is a Republican supermajority on the court.

The Republicans in power abhor multiracial democracy

The vision of the Roberts Court is at odds with the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and with the authority of Congress to pass legislation to enforce those amendments. This is a court that adamantly opposes multiracial democracy. The Republican justices prefer a return to an earlier time when the domination of White folks was unquestioned and the Black community was kept in its place. The court’s vision is akin to the Jim Crow era, which was ushered out by the civil rights revolution of 1960s America.

This Supreme Court majority is intent on turning back the clock, as implied by Donald Trump’s divisive invocation, Make America Great Again. This corruptly partisan majority has, often in brazen defiance of the Constitution and the rule of law, aggressively sought to impose its vision on the country.

John Roberts pledged at his confirmation hearing, “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

That’s hardly how things have worked out during his tenure as chief justice. Roberts has pushed the court toward the MAGA vision as much as the Republican justices in the majority have permitted him. The contrast between word and deed, especially during the Trump era, has been dramatic. Either Roberts was being disingenuous. Or he has had a massive change of heart since Ginsburg’s death, the unscrupulous maneuvers in the Senate, and the resulting 6-3 Republican supermajority (with no more Souters among them).

What was evident (though many observers deferred judgment of what they were witnessing in order to give Roberts and the Republican majority the benefit of the doubt) before 2020 — that partisan preferences, not the Constitution or the rule of law move these justices — has become unmistakable.

This is a court that is committed above all else to advancing the interests of the contemporary Republican Party. Disenfranchising Black voters is a priority of the national party in order to retain political power. The Roberts Court has proven willing, again and again, to enable the MAGA GOP in the quest for political domination.