Killing Democracy—And Not Bothering to Hide It
The assault is happening in plain sight, from the Epstein case to Texas reapportionment to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We talk a lot about failing institutions. But you know what matters more? People. Because people create new institutions, like the Washington Litigation Group, a new legal nonprofit designed to fight the Trump administration in court:
The new group aims to bring appellate expertise to the very beginning of a client’s case, an approach that its founders say will improve the odds of making a successful argument before the Supreme Court.
It’s a game plan straight out of the Big Law playbook. But when many large firms receded from this type of work to avoid drawing Mr. Trump’s wrath, it created a void.
As one of the first institutions founded in opposition to Trumpism, we at The Bulwark welcome new members to the extended family. In troubled times, it’s inspiring to see people uniting to do what’s right, whether filing a lawsuit or becoming Bulwark+ members. Happy Monday.
Democracy Dies in Daylight
by William Kristol
In the last few days, it seems as if we’ve reached a new stage in the attempted authoritarian takeover of American democracy. It’s not just that the multi-faceted assault on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society has picked up steam—though it has. It’s that the assault, from our own government, now proceeds so openly and unashamedly.
Once, if there were bad economic statistics, the president and his supporters tried to spin them. Now the president and his supporters simply deny them. And those who produced them are punished. And so President Trump fires, with no pretense of real cause or justification, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a career civil servant who has supervised a host of other career civil servants in producing these statistics, as they have for decades. And he brazenly lies in accusing her and a host of other civil servants of “rigging” their findings.
This is part of a broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard—using the resources of the federal agencies they direct—have taken the lead in this. But they are only the tip of the Trump spear.
Once, if a president or his subordinates wanted to cover up a problem, even a crime, they made labored efforts at obfuscation and concealment. Coverups were, as the term implies, pursued under the cover of darkness. That’s why the Washington Post, with the experience of Watergate in mind, came up at the beginning of Trump’s first term with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But that slogan applies to a different era.
Now Ghislaine Maxwell, one of two organizers of a massive and horrendous child sex trafficking ring of which Donald Trump appears to have had considerable contemporaneous knowledge, meets with the deputy attorney general of the United States—who had previously been Trump’s private lawyer—and the White House openly embraces it. A week later, contrary to the normal rules for a prisoner convicted of her crimes, Maxwell is transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” facility. This was presumably as a down payment on not spilling the beans about Trump, and perhaps as an interim step on the way to a pardon. This coverup is happening in broad daylight.
Once, state legislators redistricted congressional seats every ten years, after the constitutionally mandated census. These reapportionments were often accompanied by gerrymandering. But, with a notable exception, the partisan power grabs were at least adjacent to a regular and lawful process. They were at least somewhat constrained by calendars and custom.
Now the governor of Texas has decided, at the public urging of the president of the United States, to have his state legislature carry out a gerrymander mid-decade, so as to try to preserve a Republican majority in the House of Representatives for the final two years of Trump’s term. And it seems other red states will follow.
There is no pretense here other than