August 21, 2025
Yesterday, Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives approved a new map redrawing congressional districts to switch five seats from Democratic control to Republican. Now the Texas Senate will take it up. President Donald Trump demanded the new map because with popular support for his administration plummeting, he is worried about facing voters in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas Republicans are quite open that they launched a rare mid-decade redistricting simply to maximize their partisan gain. Although people of color are driving Texas’s population growth, the new maps put the vast majority of electoral power in the hands of white Texans.
Last night, just before midnight, Trump cheered on the Texas Republicans and called for Florida, Indiana, and other states to do the same thing. He also called for Republicans in the state legislatures to “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING” and “go to PAPER BALLOTS before it is too late.” “If we do these TWO things,” he wrote, “we will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over. God Bless America!!!”
The president of the United States is openly admitting that his party cannot win a free and fair election.
Instead of appealing to voters with popular policies, he is calling for rigging our elections so that his party cannot lose. This appears to have been the plan all along. In July 2024, Trump told an audience of evangelical Christians that if they voted for him in November, “in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."
Republicans have put their thumb on the scales of the nation’s election machinery for years, suppressing Democratic voting and gerrymandering the states to make it harder to elect Democrats than to elect Republicans. Now Trump has come right out and admitted that leaders understand they cannot win without jiggering the system to create what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elections are held because leaders want the legitimacy of an election, but the competition is so unfair the outcome is pretty much preordained.
But after decades of trying to protect democracy by reinforcing democratic norms, Democrats and their allies appear to be willing to fight fire with fire. Democratic lawmakers in California responded to the Texans’ power grab by redrawing their own congressional districts to act as a counterweight to the Texas plan.
Today the California legislature passed two measures to send to voters the question of whether to redistrict the state temporarily to offset the new Texas map. The urgent measures received the required two-thirds majority to pass, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed them into law this evening. He also declared that the state will hold a special election on November 4 for voters to weigh in on whether to adopt the new maps temporarily to neutralize the Texas Republicans’ power grab.
Republicans are now openly rigging the system—itself a profound attack on our democracy— for a leader whose mental acuity is slipping and whose association with convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein has weakened his support even among his base.
On the right-wing Todd Starnes Show today, Trump upped the number of wars he claims to have solved to ten, three more than the seven he has been claiming. “We ended seven wars,” he said. “Probably more than that. You know, I will, they wrote an article that they gave me three additional ones that I ended without even knowing it, but you know I saw things were going bad and it looked like it was going to go bad and it could’ve been, it could’ve been ten.”
For all that the president calls himself the peace president and seems so desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize that he brought it up with Norway’s finance minister in a cold call about tariffs in July, he is increasingly turning to the use of the military.
In February, Trump designated certain Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a designation normally applied to groups that use violence for political ends, like al-Qaeda. On August 8, in the midst of the deep furor after the Wall Street Journal reported that he was named in the Epstein files, Trump secretly signed a directive to use military force against those cartels. Now it appears the U.S. is moving military personnel toward Mexico and Venezuela.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has been working with the U.S. to combat drug trafficking and has rejected the use of the U.S. military in Mexico. Scholar of military law Geoffrey Corn told Kevin Maurer and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone that the government’s designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations does not authorize the use of force. For that, he said, “[y]ou have to make a credible argument that the U.S. faces an armed attack.”
Corn, who directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech School of Law, told Dan Gooding and Jesus Mesa of Newsweek: “Absent Mexican consent, any military action in Mexico will be condemned, I believe justifiably, as an act of aggression in violation of the most basic provision of the UN Charter and customary international law.” Experts add that strikes on Mexico would do little to stop the flow of drugs over the border and would increase violence in the region, intensifying pressure for the U.S. to provide asylum for migrants fleeing the country.
On Monday, August 18, Steve Holland of Reuters reported that three U.S. destroyers, the USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson, were being deployed to Venezuela as part of the effort to combat cartels. On Tuesday, when a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about those ships, with 4,000 Marines on board, she said that Trump “is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice. The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel and [Venezuelan president Nicolás] Maduro, it is the view of this administration, is not a legitimate president. He is the fugitive head of this cartel who has been indicted in the United States for trafficking drugs into the country.” She did not take any further questions.
Trump could just release the Epstein files.
That issue is not going away. Social media users continue to hammer on it, and on Monday the House Oversight Committee began to hear testimony from those it subpoenaed after Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to force chair James Comer (R-KY) to do so. Former attorney general William Barr, who was in office when convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in his cell in 2019, testified behind closed doors. The Department of Justice was supposed to begin handing over documents from the Epstein investigation on Tuesday but missed that deadline. Now it says it will hand them over beginning tomorrow.
According to Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post, Comer said that Barr had been “very transparent” and that he had never seen any evidence that Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes. Of the document release, he said: “I appreciate the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and efforts to provide the American people with information about this matter.”
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida today prohibited Florida officials from incarcerating any more detainees at the immigrant detention center in the Everglades that supporters have called “Alligator Alcatraz.” The government’s lawyers said the facility housed people only temporarily, so stopping the arrival of new inmates should empty the center. The judge ordered that after 60 days, officials must begin to dismantle parts of the facility because of the damage it was inflicting on an environment that has been protected since 1947.
“[S]ince that time,” she wrote, “every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/us/politics/california-newsom-redistricting-texas.html
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-new-competitive-authoritarianism/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/us/trump-military-drug-cartels.html
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-plans-military-action-mexico-cartels-2117318
https://www.wsj.com/politics/justice-department-told-trump-name-in-epstein-files-727a8038
Bluesky:
marcelias.bsky.social/post/3lwwanqwy6s2m
Nobel prize? Give him the Darwin Award, he won’t know the difference.
Three quotes from Heather’s of yesterday.
In one, she returned to a longstanding theme of hers, her mythic cowboy, who “wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women.”
This sounds, too, like Donald and Jeffrey, who wanted the law to leave them alone, so they and peer rich could rape underage girls – still a dominance story. But while some can have their Lolita fantasyland, others like Donald again, Russell Vought, J. D. Vance, Kevin Roberts, and social media billionaires can have Project 2025 fantasyland – “a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism.”
For fantasyland, to be free to dominate, all the practicalities of government must also give way to D,O.J., I.C.E., and D.O.G.E. wrecking teams. Or, as Heather put it in her third most choice quote yesterday, that “democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.”
The three quotes cohere in a mad way. Donald, Jeffrey, and Ghislaine’s set must be free to rape underage girls, others like Putin freed to destroy whole countries, still more like our hybrid of techies, white supremacists, and religio-nationalists freed to replace all of the real world with their fantasies.
It’s madness. Tri-partite. But totally mad.