Two veteran U.S. lawmakers recently issued a warning to Americans that their country is undergoing what they describe as a slow-motion dismantling of democracy—not a traditional coup carried out suddenly with tanks in the streets, but an incremental concentration of power in Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidency. The warning issued in the form of a memo titled, “The Rolling Coup,” was written by former Democratic Rep. Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri in the House from 1977 to 2005 and served as House Majority Leader and Timothy Wirth, a Colorado Democrat who served in the House and later as a U.S. senator from 1987 to 1993.
These two retired centrist politicians argue that seemingly separate actions—including the National Security Presidential Memo-7 directive targeting ideological enemies as domestic terrorists; expanded FBI investigations and prosecution of perceived political enemies; enormous increases in ICE prison capacity; assertions of presidential immunity; and authority to deploy military forces domestically together form an apparatus that could be used to suppress peaceful political protest and interfere with the outcome of the 2026 midterm election.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with journalist and author Sasha Abramsky, whose recent Nation magazine column titled, “The Warning America Can’t Afford to Ignore,” discusses the importance of Rep. Gephardt’s and Sen. Wirth’s warning about the most significant threat posed to American democracy since the U.S. Civil War. Sasha Abramsky’s latest book is titled, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah, I mean, this started circulating in mid-June and it was a document that these two very, very senior political figures, neither of whom are sort of known for their hyperbole, had written and started circulating in D.C. and then within the world of journalism. And it was a warning that the things Trump was doing constituted a slow moving coup d’etat. There wasn’t a coup d’etat in the sort of traditional sense where one day you wake up and there are tanks in the streets, but it was a slow moving coup d’etat which was attacking basic pillars that allow the democracy to function. So Trump’s takeover of regulatory agencies; his takeover of ombudsman agencies; his stacking of traditionally nonpartisan agencies with hyper-MAGA loyalists; his attacks on the voting system; his attacks on the U.S. Postal Service—that all of these things were happening basically in broad daylight. But because they were happening sort of scattershot individually, a lot of people weren’t putting the dots together.
What Wirth and Gephardt said was, look, let’s look at this in its entirety. And if you look at it in its entirety, what you see is an authoritarian power grab. What you see is a deeply insecure president who’s fearful that he and his party are going to be suffering electorally in November and who are doing everything they can to preempt that by sowing chaos, sowing discord and using that chaos as an excuse to do these emergency interventions. And I think everything they’ve warned about in June, if you fast-forward two months later, it’s starting to come true. You look at the round-the-clock tweets and social media posts that Trump is putting out attacking the democracy, the system of voting, attacking the integrity of the electoral process, doing everything he can to sow doubt and discord about the elections. That’s fundamentally un-American. I mean, if America means anything, it is a story of expanded access to political participation.
In zigs and zags, it hasn’t been this sort of one directional thing, but if you look at the entirety of the 250-year history, it has represented a unique expansion in political participation, much of it in the last 40, 50, 60 years with the Voting Rights Act. And Trump is doing everything he can to roll back that expansion. We talk about him rolling back the Great Society in the 1960s. Now we’ve started seeing his assault on programs from the New Deal from the 1930s. We’re seeing attacks on regulatory agencies that go back to the progressive era in the early 20th century and now we’re seeing attacks on voting rights that go back to the post-Civil War period. So if you look cumulatively, what you’ve got is an American government with the ambition—they may not have the power—but have the ambition to roll America back to the pre-Civil War era.
Now that’s just absolutely stunning to get your head around, but that’s what Wirth and Gephardt are warning about.
SCOTT HARRIS: Sasha, just one last question that could be a program unto itself. If we survive the coming Trump coup attempt, it seems like there’s an urgent priority need to repair our broken democratic system to rebuild the guardrails to protect democracy that Trump has methodically and systematically crushed one by one. I’m not sure the Democrats are up for that, but that to me should be one of the campaign promises if they win control of the House and Senate. Let’s repair democracy that would benefit everybody, all parties.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Absolutely. Look, I’m not a Democratic party strategist, I’m just a writer, but if I were a strategist, I would be running an election campaign saying, “Look, when we come into power, we will expand the Supreme Court to 15. We will dilute the power of these six Troglodite Supreme Court justices who are coming up with one manufactured legal rationale after another to expand Trump’s power. We will find a way to reform the Electoral College so that the popular vote winner nationally becomes the precedent like in every other modern democracy.
We will find a way to restructure the U.S. Senate because at the moment, those half million people in Wyoming send two senators to D.C., just like the 40 million people who live in California, which means Wyoming has 80 times the Senate representation per person that California has. Again, that’s completely antithetical to modern understanding to democracy. If I were a strategist, I would say we are going to resurrect and reestablish the structures of the Voting Rights Act because it was an absolute scandal to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, and we’re going to ban political gerrymandering and undo the mid-decade gerrymanders that Trump ordered Republican state governments to do, especially in the South. There are many, many things that can be done to repair the American democracy. All of these should be on the Democratic party slate.
For more information, visit Sasha Abramsky’s website at sashaabramsky.com.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Sasha Abramsky (29:25) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack or social media, subscribe here.
