Cortrumption

Democracy is about voters picking their politicians, not politicians picking their voters. Trump’s corruption is already off the scale, monetizing the White House for personal gain in plain sight for himself and his family, but even this pales in the presence of his corruption of the democratic process. Yes, gerrymandering of Congressional districts (constituencies) in the US is a long-standing ‘we pick our voters’ habit, but it has become the least of what Trump is doing and might do to avoid defeat in November – a defeat which, if elections were free and fair in the US, would wipe out the GOP, and therefore Trump’s tyranny, as thoroughly as they should be wiped out. But Trump is not one to let his tiny white-knuckled hands off the levers of power if he can help it. And help it he can and is.

In the ‘redistricting war’ – redrawing districts to gerrymander an electoral advantage – the GOP has already achieved a 10 seat advantage over the Democrats despite the latter’s attempts to counter them by playing the same game, as in California. But this is not nearly enough for Trump. Let’s consider a partial list of his other moves.

He has degraded the capacities of the Election Assistance Commission and the Federal Election Commission. Enabled by the Supreme Court’s June decision (in Trump v Slaughter) empowering him to do so, he removed all the members of the former, closing down its job of apportioning funds on a bipartisan basis to states for the election process, maintaining national mail voter registration, testing and certifying voting systems, and guiding election officials on best practice. The Commission is in shut-down; Trump could appoint new commissioners pledged to decertify voting machines, which his election-denier supporters keenly want to happen because, as one said, it would be ‘game over’.

The White House described Trump’s move as ‘safeguarding elections from fraud and abuse’. In light of the fact that the exact opposite of whatever Trump and his epigones say about anything is true, there you have one major step towards making the midterms resemble any tin-pot dictatorship ‘election’ (the kind where the sitting strongman gets 98% of the votes).

Meanwhile the Federal Election Commission has been left inquorate, though it was already a tainted body, supposed to monitor violations of election finance law but even when quorate hampered by political disagreements among the members (it is putatively bipartisan) and accused of sometimes creating First Amendment problems by aggressive interference.

Now add Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to the office of Director of National Intelligence with a specific brief to focus on election security issues – not what the agency normally does. Pulte has no intelligence background; he is a GOP-partisan businessman with a history of targeting Democrats as when he was in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. ‘Pulte’s new role as DNI has been celebrated in right-wing media as part of a larger plan by election deniers to subvert the midterm elections’ says MediaMatters (10/7/26).

Trump has tried to control the mail-in voting process by creating a national database of voter registration and blocking the US Postal Service from carrying ballots in any state that does not comply with the requirement to submit its voter rolls to it. His move was blocked by a federal judge, but Trump is escalating the case and it remains to be seen what his appointees on the Supreme Court will say before November. They did, however, recently annoy him mightily by allowing ballots that arrive after polling day to be counted.

The ‘most powerful voter suppression tool in generations’ (CNN), the SAVE America Act, aimed at using the recently revamped immigration database to ‘check the accuracy of voter rolls’ by verifying the immigration and citizenship status of individuals, was blocked by the delightfully-named federal judge Sparkle Sooknanan because it threatens to disenfranchise voters and – as he puts it in his 75-page decision – ‘knowingly tramples on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens’ (NBC News). Again, Sooknanan’s endeavour awaits the fate of the Supreme Court. One of the provisions of the SAVE Act threatens to disenfranchise women whose married names do not match the names on their birth certificates: women lean Blue, and tens of millions of them would be disenfranchised by such a move.

The threat of stationing ICE agents – these being the folk who gun people down in the street – to polling stations as an intimidatory measure, is on the cards. ‘Blue states’ have exerted themselves to protect their elections from federal intervention and to bar federal enforcement agents from attending polling stations, but what else Trump might do is still an open question.

Optimists in the US point to the fact that states are in control of the election process, and historically have done the job well, prompting the head of the Centre for Election Innovation and Research, David Becker, to say that he does not think Trump’s efforts will undermine the process. But Trump, an out-of-control man-baby whose reaction to frustration of his efforts to have everything his way – as witness, among many other instances, his inability to accept losing the war he started with Iran – is unpredictable. Suspending the elections, for example by declaring martial law, would be wholly in character; who would be surprised?

It is an ill wind indeed that blows no-one any good. Trump’s wrecking-ball activities have exposed the flaws and weaknesses of the US system, and it is inevitable that a post-Trump order, provided that it is not a MAGA-continuation tribute act, will have to engage in serious reforms. These are long overdue, but Trump is like the sewage in the Thames that at last prompted the British parliament, overwhelmed by the stench, to fund a drainage system for the city back in the 1850s. What will happen domestically in the US will resemble what is already happening internationally; US ‘allies’ and trading partners are already busy looking elsewhere, the US has lost is status as a world hegemon, mistrusted and contemned, and the rise of China has been boosted by Trump’s degrading of the US position.

John Stuart Mill and nineteenth century British constitutional theorists all noted that the ‘sovereignty of Parliament’ doctrine meant that (in the words of one of them) if Parliament decided that all blue-eyed babies should be killed at birth, that would be the law and there would be no appeal from it. But, they said, this would never happen – the absolute power of Parliament would never be exercised for ill purposes – because MPs were ‘decent chaps’. Well: a constitution that depends on good manners and self-restraint is a pretty shaky thing – worse when, as in Britain, the uncodified constitution consists in ‘understandings that no-one understands’. But even a codified and explicit constitution is vulnerable to indecent and boorish handling. Trump illustrates this perfectly. This is not an argument against constitutionalism, but an argument for a living constitution which learns from experience – not from fashion or whim, egomania and appetite, ignorance and stupidity, but from history.

That is one of the biggest lessons Trump is teaching the US and the world right now. The American people, however, have a yet bigger lesson to teach: that in defiance of every attempt to steal their voices and votes, democracy can work. Despite every provocation, average Americans have not armed themselves with pitchforks and stormed the White House. (Preparing for that eventuality, because that is what a person like Trump expects, the White House’s front door is – as it happens – currently being fortified.) Instead they are preparing to vote in November. This is one of the most consequential midterm elections in the country’s history – and it is not merely a domestic matter, but an international one. Trump has to be brought to heel, his administration disinfected of people qualified only by their slavish service to Trumpian whim, Congress restored to its proper role, and the US cleared of the poisonous fog of lies under which it currently chokes. That is what the November vote is about – and the rest of us, looking on agape at the chaotic situation Trump has wrought, wish we had a vote in that election too.