New Guardrails Must Be Enacted to Defend Democracy Against a Future Trump-like Dictatorship

But we’re now living in a time of unprecedented attacks against democracy, our Constitution and the rule of law by the Trump administration, which clearly has executed an authoritarian and fascist, I would say agenda to remove all checks and balances on executive power to impose a dictatorship. We have the military now being deployed to U.S. cities, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. with threats by Trump to send the National Guard to other cities across the country, mostly minority-majority cities. So this certainly has a racial character as well.

We have a mass secret police force now in ICE that acts as Trump’s personal enforcers, abducting non-citizens and citizens alike without due process. We’re witnessing rampant corruption on a scale unlike anything seen in modern American history. And all this while the Republican Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court act as a rubberstamp to enable Trump’s authoritarian rule as Republican legislators slash social safety net programs. I think $1 trillion was taken out of Medicaid, Medicare and the SNAP food and nutrition program. There’s really not enough time in this program to list all the attacks on our democratic institution. But Brett, I wanted to start out our conversation by getting your overview of what we’ve been witnessing take place in the U.S. over the first seven and a half months of this second Trump regime.

And you provided a good list to add a few of the just unbelievable things that he has done in the last seven months. And Donald Trump is guilty of so many unconstitutional and unlawful actions that it’s staggering. He refuses to spend money appropriated by Congress, which is Congress’s power. He has removed heads of independent agencies who are protected by law from summary firings. He’s fired civil servants without cause, including Jan. 6 prosecutors who put violent criminals who attacked the Capitol in jail. He’s dismantled federal agencies without any legal basis for doing so.

And as you said, he’s called up the National Guard on very thin pretexts to terrorize U.S. citizens, stop and arrest citizens and lawful residents without due process. He sent ICE agents with masks, without badges or identification to raid businesses and communities across the country. He’s investigating political enemies. He’s threatening the broadcast licenses of institutions like ABC and NBC in violation of the First Amendment.

And as you said, he’s siphoning billions of dollars to his family businesses. Forbes estimates that Trump’s worth has more than doubled to more than $5 billion as of just the past year. Qatar is sending him luxury jets, the Saudis, the Qatar, the Emirates. They’re investing in Trump businesses. India, Vietnam and Qatar are planning to build Trump golf courses all in a fairly desperate and transparent attempt to bribe Donald Trump and his administration.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court — which is three of the justices were appointed by him and the other three conservatives are aligned with him — are continually enabling this assault on our democracy and the rule of law rather than just to take one example, rather than strike down the blatantly unconstitutional order to deprive Americans of birthright citizenship as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The Supreme Court condemned the district judges for doing their job, didn’t condemn Trump, went after their own judges in their own Article 3 branch of government who were stopping the assault on our rights.

Just today, the Supreme Court blessed Donald Trump’s use of ICE to stop people at random in LA for being Latino. The guidance to ICE is to stop people who speak Spanish, who look Latino, who are working in low wage jobs and detain them. Now that is a fairly clear violation of the Fourth Amendment and in an emergency ruling with barely any explanation, the Supreme Court said, “Go ahead.” So we have to be alarmed. We should be alarmed. It just doesn’t mean that we have to give up.

But in addition to the militarization of our cities, the redistricting fight right now is I think one of the clearest ways that Donald Trump is trying to subvert the will of the voters and hold onto power in 2026, even if the majority of American people vote against him.

This is kind of a flashback to what he did on Jan. 6 where he tried to hold onto power despite the outcome of an election, and he is doing it because he knows his agenda, as you mentioned, is making life worse for Americans, cutting healthcare, cutting Medicaid, cutting food stamps and food assistance from people all to pay for billionaires tax guts, and corporate tax guts is so unpopular that he knows he has to rig the system in a pursuit to hold onto power.

So he has demanded that Texas, Missouri, Indiana and other Republican states engage in really unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to redraw their maps. And most of the time they are looking at Democrats in the House of representatives who are black or Latino and saying, we are going to put them out of a job. We are going to make it harder for black Americans to elect a black Democrat to represent them. We’re going to make it harder for Latinos to represent somebody to represent them in Congress.

So in these states—and Texas has already done it—they are redrawing maps in an extraordinarily partisan way to cut representation the Republicans in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott, rather than focusing on flood relief and the actual issues affecting Texans prioritized, put this first and said, “I’m not going to do flood relief until I do a partisan redraw for Donald Trump.”

He’d rather do Donald Trump’s dirty work than help the people of Texas. So they passed a map that would create five new GOP seats before the 2026 midterms. And this comes despite sustained pressure from Texans themselves, almost unanimous opposition in the testimonies before the legislature so that the new maps will be not 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats out of that state to Congress, but 30 Republicans and 8 Democrats in a state that is 45 percent Democrat to only get 20 percent of the seats.

That is what you do if you want to rig the maps. You want to avoid accountability and you’re scared that people are going to hold you accountable in the elections next November. And the exact same thing now is happening in Missouri and Indiana where the legislators there are so scared of Trump and the base that they’re going to do his bidding rather than what the people in their state want. They’d rather do and protect D.C. politicians than provide healthcare or services, combat crime, provide disaster relief or any of the other agenda items that the people of Missouri or Indiana or in Texas actually need.

Trump has issued executive orders over recent months to eliminate mail-in and absentee ballots and another order to require voters to present passports or birth certificates in order to vote. It’s interesting that Trump always says the quiet part out loud. After his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, he was very upfront about saying that Vladimir Putin, certainly a despot and a dictator, gave him advice and his advice was to get rid of mail-in ballots. So there you go. I mean it’s hard to interpret where this advice came from and what it’s designed to do, but I would ask you about your concern related to the kind of standard types of voter suppression that Republicans have been up to for a good number of years beyond the concern that the US military could get involved in somehow disrupting or changing the outcome of the 2026 election.

Most of them are not moving, and sometimes he has already said, “Oh, I’m actually going to have to go to Congress for some of these” because he realizes how illegal they are. And take when he said, “I’m going to get rid of vote by mail,” they’ve floated an executive order. They got a lot of pushback from groups and from advocates and experts. And then about a week later, the press secretary said, “Actually, we’re going to have to go to Congress for this because the president does not have constitutional authority over our elections.” And there’s a few other things. Some of these executive orders are trying to get at voter data or voting machines at the state level. And for the most part, states are responsibly not replying and not abiding by these so-called orders. The data that voters give to their local boards of elections are protected by state and federal data privacy laws.

The First Amendment, privacy protections also apply to your right to vote and to associate with a party. The 10th Amendment protects state sovereignty and against federal encroachments. And so some of these are all very concerning. We all have to fight back, but this is one of the areas in which the sustained grassroots opposition is working and people need to double down and keep pressuring Congress and their leaders at the state and local level and a federal level to fight back because the Save Act, which is his federal attempt to impose a requirement that everybody provide a passport or birth certificate passed the Republican House, but it is stalled in the Senate and it doesn’t look like it’s moving and it will not move so long as Stand Up America and other advocates are fighting against it. A lot of these things are going to run up against just simple legal requirements that they are unconstitutional or illegal and grassroots pressure and expert pressure because they are a fairly blatant attempt to rig the elections ahead of 2026 so that Donald Trump can avoid accountability.

The Big Beautiful Bill is wildly unpopular. Yes, they’re going to try to sell it, but the latest polling shows over 60 percent of Americans disapprove of that bill and Trump’s approval rating is sinking like a stone. His policies, the slashing of healthcare and food assistance to give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations, it’s unpopular. It’s jacking up costs for everybody, and it’s making life worse for ordinary people.

Now, as you mentioned, the Big Beautiful Bill cuts healthcare from 15 million Americans and food assistance from 4 million, and it increases the deficit by $5 trillion all to pay for big tax cuts for the wealthy. And since the passage of that, we’ve seen every major national poll showing Democrats with an advantage on a generic congressional ballot. Trump knows he can’t hold on the power with those kinds of numbers, so he’s trying to rig the system with redistricting and other things. He’s running scared because he’s afraid a future Congress could act as a check on him, a real check on him and his unpopular agenda and demand accountability. And why else would he be changing the rules if he wasn’t worried about losing?

I’d also say the amount of grassroots pressure that we’re seeing since Trump’s second inauguration. We’ve seen some of the highest levels of grassroots activism in our organization’s eight-year history, and that’s encouraging. New people are coming out every day against what’s happening. They’re alarmed. Yes, the Democratic base or the progressive base is still engaged, but we’re also seeing apolitical people.

I don’t know if you see this where you are, but I am seeing apolitical people that I live around in my neighborhood, in my town suddenly woken up and alarmed by what’s happening. It’s reflected in the fact that 55 percent of Americans now disapprove of him, his approval rating is at a record low, lower than Obama, lower than Biden, lower than anybody else in this point in the presidency,

High housing costs are continuing high, grocery costs are continuing, high gas costs because of his pro- corporate agend. He’s attacking institutions that we took for granted, universities, businesses, the NIH, the CDC. Raids on businesses by ICE, often with business leaders who may have supported Republicans or Trump in the past, but are now alarmed that masked, no-identity agents are running into their businesses and deporting or detaining people who’ve been part of the community for decades.

And the use of the National Guard is also alarming to a lot of people. It’s not limited to just L.A. and D.C. It’s now coming for a town near you. And it’s not only an infringement on your basic rights and freedoms as an American, but it’s an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to distract us from the real issues. He’s spent over $120 million in California. He’s spending a million dollars a day in D.C. for this political theater. Money that could be used to pay for actual community policing to make streets safer, could pay for public school teachers, nurses, housing for people, rural hospitals. None of that is popular and that’s why he is trying to rig the system.

They’re siding with him time and time again in an extremely political manner, usually through speedy emergency opinions that are barely opinions at all. It’s like a one-sentence thing. The lower courts are surprisingly speaking out for the first time ever this week, you heard district court judges speaking off the record about how alarmed they are by the Supreme Court abandoning them and issuing decisions in an emergency docket way. And that means we need real ethics reform, binding code of ethics in the Supreme Court. It means we need term limits and we may need to think about expanding the number of justices on the court to restore some semblance of balance because this court is more out of whack with where the American people are than any time in living memory. It also means not just ending partisan gerrymandering, but getting money out of politics. It means reducing the powers of the presidency that Trump is exploiting day in and day out.

Some of these loopholes that he’s finding in the National Guard and allowing the military to be used on our streets in endless national emergencies where he can bomb, as you mentioned, Venezuelan boat or other places under an emergency power that Congress has no check on, that he can’t stop spending money that Congress appropriated because that is Congress’s power. And so it has to be comprehensive. And if we let that opportunity go by again, we could be right back here where we’re having the same kinds of conversations because some unscrupulous politicians and either political party are exploiting the legal loopholes to pursue an unlawful, unconstitutional agenda and getting barely any pushback from the courts and institutions that are meant to protect our rights.

And then in your local communities, meet the other organizers in your area to speak out. Authoritarianism thrives on silence and acceptance and fear, so speak out in any way that you know how. Speak to members of your community, your church, your school, speak to your neighbors. Go online and speak out. Submit letters to the editor. Go out and march. There’s going to be a march on Oct. 18, but there’s going to be continued actions over the next few months, and so it’s really important to get involved. You can go to standupamerica.com to learn more and to get involved. And thank you for speaking out and not showing fear in the face of this administration. We’re all in this together.