After contemplating a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors Wednesday, the Supreme Court appears likely to greenlight the prohibition on the theory that nine humble justices are not the best arbiters of complex medical questions.

It’s a theory of a modest judiciary that stays in its lane and knows the limits of its expertise. But the notion is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: Under the guise of judicial restraint, several justices suggested during arguments they would allow states to circumvent the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection.

Roberts’ notion of a humble court contrasts with a pattern of augmenting its own authority.

This Supreme Court, dominated by a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees, doesn’t usually take such a modest posture toward government regulation. But when it does, it’s often in cases that will allow a state to implement a constitutionally questionable and partisan-motivated policy. If Wednesday’s case, United States v. Skrmetti, is decided this way, it will be one in a line of decisions where the court deferred to state legislatures so it could avoid facing the constitutional deficiencies those same lawmakers created. Such an outcome would also stand in stark contrast to the court’s rulings on federal law and regulations, where conservative justices have been eager to take power away from Congress and federal agencies.  

Wednesday’s case pitted Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care against transgender youth and their parents, the ACLU, and the US government, who allege that the law prohibits treatment on the basis of sex. As a result, they argue, courts must take a closer look at the legislature’s justification for the law to determine whether it violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

In taking the case, the Supreme Court agreed to decide the proper judicial analysis. That first means determining if the law indeed discriminates on the basis of sex or targets a protected class of people. If it does, then the state of Tennessee must provide additional proof that a ban based on sex is necessary to further the state’s purported goal of improving the health of young people. 

It’s hard to deny that Tennessee’s law treats people differently based on sex. For one, the Tennessee law explicitly states that its purpose is to “encourage minors to appreciate their sex” and prohibit treatments that might “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” As Justice Elena Kagan put it on Wednesday, “sounds to me like we want boys to be boys and we want girls to be girls.”

But at oral argument on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts kept trying to dodge that constitutional analysis by describing the medical science around gender-affirming care as “evolving” and “technical.” “Here, it seems to me that the medical issues are much more heavily involved” than in other sex discrimination cases the court has ruled on, Roberts said. “Doesn’t that make a stronger case for us to leave those determinations to the legislative bodies rather than try to determine them for ourselves?”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly made similar points about stepping back. “The Constitution doesn’t take sides on how to resolve that medical and policy debate,” he said. “Why isn’t it best to leave it to the democratic process?”

But the premise that the court was being asked to make a scientific determination was simply untrue. Again, the question before the court was whether Tennessee relied on sex to ban gender-affirming care. That’s because while the Constitution may not take a position on a certain medical treatment, it does take a position on whether a treatment can be denied on the basis of sex. As Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, arguing for the United States government, put it to Roberts, “It would be a pretty remarkable thing for the Court to say that just because we’re in the space of medical regulation, you are not going to apply the traditional standards that ordinarily are applied when there’s a sex classification.” It would also be a classic Roberts move: reaching a radical conclusion while claiming the mantle of restraint.

So Roberts theorized the justices have a constitutional duty to defer to the legislature. “It’s not really so much a question of qualifications,” Roberts said, even though he had repeatedly suggested that it was. “It’s more questions of constitutional allegation of authority. We might think that we can do just as good a job with respect to the evidence here as Tennessee or anybody else, but my understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor.”

“The medical purpose is utterly and entirely about sex.”

This notion of the humble court flies in contrast with the Roberts’ Court’s usual pattern of deciding cases in a manner that augments its own authority. Time and again, the justices have let neither mootness nor irreparably weak standing theories stop them from ruling when they want to decide a hot button issue. The justices have invented the so-called “major questions doctrine” to shoot down agency programs they deem too big or expensive to enact without clear congressional authorization, leaving the nine justices to decide whether an action survives—not the elected branches. Roberts has authored several of these opinions.

And last term, the court threw out Chevron deference, the judiciary’s decades-long practice of deferring to reasonable agency interpretations of statutes when the law is unclear. The opinion, by Roberts, was a judicial power grab: rather than defer to the expertise of agency policy-makers and scientists, judges should take it upon themselves to second guess all manner of US regulations. As Kagan wrote in her dissent: “In recent years, this Court has…substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education. But evidently that was, for this Court, all too piecemeal.”

Despite this track record of amassing power, on Wednesday, Roberts shifted directions to urge deference. Conservatives on the court rarely grant such deference to the federal government—at least under a Democratic president—but often reserve it for states seeking a constitutionally dubious outcome. This may reflect an ideological dislike for over-regulating states. But it also demonstrates an aversion to enforcing the Constitution’s bedrock civil rights protections.

A good example are the court’s decisions granting states almost entirely free rein to gerrymander legislative and congressional maps. In 2017, the court was served an opportunity to place constitutional limits on extreme partisan gerrymandering. But during oral argument, Roberts spurned it, calling the proposed method of determining when voting boundaries are unconstitutional “sociological gobbledygook,” and, in writing for the court, Roberts declined to decide the issue on a technicality. In a subsequent 2019 case heard after the roster of justices had shifted, Roberts had the votes for the outcome he wanted and authored an opinion holding that partisan gerrymandering was a political issue that could not be litigated in federal court. The federal judiciary was, conveniently for Republicans in the case, bowing out. (It’s worth noting that it appears that next year’s GOP majority in the House of Representatives will be a result of the court’s gerrymandering permission slip.) In 2023, the court made it much harder to fight gerrymandering that uses race to sort voters. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito created a new standard for racial gerrymandering cases, now requiring that courts act with the “presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.” Under such a presumption, courts are instructed that the word of the legislators outweighs their deeds.

On Wednesday, that same kind of instruction appeared likely to carry the day in when it comes to gender-affirming care bans. Rather than assess whether legislators use sex to unconstitutionally limit access to the drug and whether doing so is justified, the justices could simply defer to the good judgment of the legislators.

The Democratic appointees to the court were alarmed by the implications of Roberts’ and Kavanaugh’s questions. “I’m suddenly quite worried about the role of the core questions and the constitutional allocation of authority concerns,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. Jackson explained that the court simply needed to engage in a two-step analysis. First, does the law draw lines on the basis of sex, and second, if it does, is that delineation justified? 

“We’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.”

Jackson pointed to a bedrock civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court banned anti-miscegenation laws as a violation of equal protection. In that case, she noted, Virginia argued that the court should defer to the states because the science on interracial marriage was in doubt. In 1967, the court declined. But on Wednesday, it looked like the Roberts’ court might take the bait.

If this court decides “there are lots of good reasons for this policy and who are we as the Court to say otherwise,” warned Jackson, “I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.”

The three Democratic appointees see Tennessee’s ban as treating people differently based on their sex, which would raise the bar a state must clear to justify the law. (The liberals also likely agree that transgender people should be, in the eyes of the law, a protected class so that laws targeting them be subjected to more intense judicial scrutiny.) 

The argument that Tennessee’s law discriminates based on sex was laid out multiple times and is fairly simple. If a boy seeks puberty blockers to prevent precocious puberty, he can get them. If a transgender boy seeks them to stop puberty, he cannot get them. In other words, access to the drug depends on the biological sex of the child requesting it. That, the plaintiffs argue, is sex discrimination. The law “prohibits inconsistency with sex,” Prelogar argued, in the same way that laws once prohibited people dressing like the opposite sex or women from pursuing certain professions.

Tennessee denies any sex discrimination, arguing instead that it is not banning access to puberty blockers and hormones based on sex, but rather purpose. If a boy seeks puberty blockers to stop precocious puberty, the drugs are allowed. If the same boy requests them to treat gender dysphoria, the drugs are denied. The underlying medical condition is different. “Its application turns entirely on medical purpose, not a patient’s sex,” Matthew Rice, Tennessee’s solicitor general, told the justices Wednesday. 

The problem with that analysis, the liberal justices countered, is that the purpose of hormones and puberty blockers is to control sexual development. If a boy and a girl both want to take testosterone for the same purpose—perhaps to deepen the register of their voice—only the boy can do so, Jackson pointed out. As Prelogar put it, under the law “you can’t have these medications to live or identify in a manner inconsistent with your sex.” Kagan was more blunt. “It’s a dodge to say that this is not based on sex, it’s based on medical purpose, when the medical purpose is utterly and entirely about sex.”

Which is why the justices may choose, boldly and consequentially, to ignore their own duty to analyze the law’s equal protection impact.

“If Tennessee can have an end run around heightened scrutiny by asserting at the outset that biology justifies the sex-based differential in the law, that would undermine decades of this Court’s precedent,” Chase Strangio of the ACLU said Wednesday. And it would undermine the rights of transgender people—and likely those of many others—as well.

Pete Hegseth, the Fox News anchor whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his defense secretary, has come under intense scrutiny for his mistreatment of women, including an allegation of rape. One of his critics was, at one time, his own mother.

“That is the ugly truth.”

In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote her son an email in which she laid into him for poor behavior and disrespect toward women. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by the New York Times. 

Hegseth chastised her son for how he treated his wife, Samantha, in the divorce proceedings that prompted her to send her April 2018 email. She concluded it by writing, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…”

Reached by the Times yesterday, Hegseth defended her son and recanted the accusations in the email. She said it was written in anger, and that immediately afterward, she had followed up with a second email apologizing for the first.

Penelope Hegseth isn’t the only woman to raise question about her son’s treatment of women. Most seriously, Pete Hegseth was accused of rape while attending a 2017 Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth denies the allegation, saying the encounter was consensual, but paid the woman a settlement in 2020. His lawyer said the payment was to ensure the allegation didn’t cost him his Fox News job.

Hegseth also has a history of cheating on his spouses. His first marriage ended due to infidelity, according to the divorce judgement. So did his second; that divorce prompted the email lashing from his mother. He is now married to the woman with whom he fathered a child while married to his second wife, Samantha.

Samantha “did not ask for or deserve any of what has come to her by your hand,” Penelope Hegseth wrote in the email. “Neither did Meredith,” she added, referring to his first wife.

Hegseth’s treatment of women is set to be a major issue during his prospective confirmation hearings in 2025—though not necessarily a dealbreaker. In the past, Republicans have rallied around nominees accused of sexual assault, such as when they circled the wagons to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Trump himself has been found liable for sexual assault, and faced numerous other allegations of assault and cheating. If the commander-in-chief can get away with it, maybe Hegseth can too.

Democrats will have the unenviable task of pushing back against a second Trump administration as the minority party across Washington. And in the House of Representatives, some Democrats are openly wondering whether the septuagenarian leader of their caucus on the Judiciary Committee is up to the task.

According to the New York Times, a movement is afoot to force 77-year old Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a member from New York since 1992, to step aside and let a younger, more energetic opponent of Donald Trump take charge. If the motif sounds familiar, it may be because the Democrats are generally led by aging long-timers, from President Joe Biden in the White House to committee chairs like Nadler. Now, they must reckon with whether loyalty to these elder statesmen is a winning strategy.

The battle raises the question of how far Democrats will go to shake up their own ranks.

Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi, then 82, stepped down as leader of the House Democrats. Today, she is reportedly one voice urging a changing of the guard on the Judiciary Committee. According to the Times, Pelosi has encouraged Rep. Jamie Raskin, who first won his Maryland seat in 2o16, to challenge Nadler for the job of ranking member on the committee.

Raskin, a constitutional lawyer, gained a nationwide profile for leading the second impeachment trial against Trump in 2021. Current House leadership, according to the Times, are staying neutral in the race. But for Democrats, who generally don’t abide challengers to incumbent leaders, public neutrality is a marked shift. Still, Raskin has taken his time weighing any challenge to Nadler, with no decision announced.

The debate over who will lead the committee’s Democrats is part of a prospective much larger remaking of the Democratic Party in the weeks, months, and years to come. After losing the 2024 elections, the party already has multiple candidates seeking to lead the Democratic National Committee, the central organ of the party, offering competing visions for how to win back a majority of Americans. Within the halls of Congress, Democrats similarly must grapple with the most effective way to hold a Trump administration accountable while in the minority.

In the context of that struggle, the choice of a Democratic leader at the Judiciary Committee is unusually consequential. Trump is widely expected to try to use the Justice Department, which the panel oversees, to exact political revenge. From immigration to abortion and beyond, he promises to push the bounds of presidential power. The committee will be at the center of those fights, and its leader charged with playing a central roles in illuminating and fighting any abuses.

Nadler isn’t the only ranking Democrat facing resistance. The Democrat currently leading the caucus on the Agriculture Committee, Rep. David Scott of Georgia, is 79. Two Democrats are challenging him for the spot. And Rep. Jared Huffman of California, 60, is challenging Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, 76, for the top spot on the Committee on Natural Resources.

“Now, with the shockwave of Trump’s ‘First 100 Days’ agenda about to slam into our committees, effective committee work led by our Ranking Members will be critical to limiting the damage from Trump’s Project 2025 agenda,” Huffman said in a statement outlining his pitch. (Grijalva has said he will only serve two more years in Congress as he battles lung cancer.)

These fights raise the question of how far Democrats will go to shake up their own ranks in the wake of a demoralizing loss—or if they will stay the course under leaders who just weeks ago oversaw that defeat.

Pete Hegseth, the Fox News anchor whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his defense secretary, has come under intense scrutiny for his mistreatment of women, including an allegation of rape. One of his critics was, at one time, his own mother.

“That is the ugly truth.”

In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote her son an email in which she laid into him for poor behavior and disrespect toward women. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by the New York Times. 

Hegseth chastised her son for how he treated his wife, Samantha, in the divorce proceedings that prompted her to send her April 2018 email. She concluded it by writing, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…”

Reached by the Times yesterday, Hegseth defended her son and recanted the accusations in the email. She said it was written in anger, and that immediately afterward, she had followed up with a second email apologizing for the first.

Penelope Hegseth isn’t the only woman to raise question about her son’s treatment of women. Most seriously, Pete Hegseth was accused of rape while attending a 2017 Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth denies the allegation, saying the encounter was consensual, but paid the woman a settlement in 2020. His lawyer said the payment was to ensure the allegation didn’t cost him his Fox News job.

Hegseth also has a history of cheating on his spouses. His first marriage ended due to infidelity, according to the divorce judgement. So did his second; that divorce prompted the email lashing from his mother. He is now married to the woman with whom he fathered a child while married to his second wife, Samantha.

Samantha “did not ask for or deserve any of what has come to her by your hand,” Penelope Hegseth wrote in the email. “Neither did Meredith,” she added, referring to his first wife.

Hegseth’s treatment of women is set to be a major issue during his prospective confirmation hearings in 2025—though not necessarily a dealbreaker. In the past, Republicans have rallied around nominees accused of sexual assault, such as when they circled the wagons to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Trump himself has been found liable for sexual assault, and faced numerous other allegations of assault and cheating. If the commander-in-chief can get away with it, maybe Hegseth can too.

Democrats will have the unenviable task of pushing back against a second Trump administration as the minority party across Washington. And in the House of Representatives, some Democrats are openly wondering whether the septuagenarian leader of their caucus on the Judiciary Committee is up to the task.

According to the New York Times, a movement is afoot to force 77-year old Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a member from New York since 1992, to step aside and let a younger, more energetic opponent of Donald Trump take charge. If the motif sounds familiar, it may be because the Democrats are generally led by aging long-timers, from President Joe Biden in the White House to committee chairs like Nadler. Now, they must reckon with whether loyalty to these elder statesmen is a winning strategy.

The battle raises the question of how far Democrats will go to shake up their own ranks.

Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi, then 82, stepped down as leader of the House Democrats. Today, she is reportedly one voice urging a changing of the guard on the Judiciary Committee. According to the Times, Pelosi has encouraged Rep. Jamie Raskin, who first won his Maryland seat in 2o16, to challenge Nadler for the job of ranking member on the committee.

Raskin, a constitutional lawyer, gained a nationwide profile for leading the second impeachment trial against Trump in 2021. Current House leadership, according to the Times, are staying neutral in the race. But for Democrats, who generally don’t abide challengers to incumbent leaders, public neutrality is a marked shift. Still, Raskin has taken his time weighing any challenge to Nadler, with no decision announced.

The debate over who will lead the committee’s Democrats is part of a prospective much larger remaking of the Democratic Party in the weeks, months, and years to come. After losing the 2024 elections, the party already has multiple candidates seeking to lead the Democratic National Committee, the central organ of the party, offering competing visions for how to win back a majority of Americans. Within the halls of Congress, Democrats similarly must grapple with the most effective way to hold a Trump administration accountable while in the minority.

In the context of that struggle, the choice of a Democratic leader at the Judiciary Committee is unusually consequential. Trump is widely expected to try to use the Justice Department, which the panel oversees, to exact political revenge. From immigration to abortion and beyond, he promises to push the bounds of presidential power. The committee will be at the center of those fights, and its leader charged with playing a central roles in illuminating and fighting any abuses.

Nadler isn’t the only ranking Democrat facing resistance. The Democrat currently leading the caucus on the Agriculture Committee, Rep. David Scott of Georgia, is 79. Two Democrats are challenging him for the spot. And Rep. Jared Huffman of California, 60, is challenging Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, 76, for the top spot on the Committee on Natural Resources.

“Now, with the shockwave of Trump’s ‘First 100 Days’ agenda about to slam into our committees, effective committee work led by our Ranking Members will be critical to limiting the damage from Trump’s Project 2025 agenda,” Huffman said in a statement outlining his pitch. (Grijalva has said he will only serve two more years in Congress as he battles lung cancer.)

These fights raise the question of how far Democrats will go to shake up their own ranks in the wake of a demoralizing loss—or if they will stay the course under leaders who just weeks ago oversaw that defeat.

During this year’s campaign, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation agenda that would transform the federal government’s enforcement powers into political weapons while selling off the rest to the highest bidder, by swearing he didn’t know who was behind it. But now that voting is over, he’s finding the plan a handy way to fill positions in his incoming administration.

Carr is ready to punish media companies for coverage he dislikes.

On Sunday, Trump announced he would nominate Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, already an FCC commissioner, was the only sitting member of government to author a chapter of Project 2025.

It’s not hard to predict what Carr will do with the FCC, since he wrote it all down. In Project 2025, in posts on X, and in interviews with conservative outlets including Fox News, Carr has laid out a vision for an FCC that would deregulate most broadcasters and telecommunications companies, while cracking down on and intimidating traditional media, growing the reach of conservative media, and unleashing disinformation on social media platforms. The result: An information ecosystem tilted further in Trump’s favor.

It’s a baseline for democracy that people are able to obtain accurate information. And it is a real threat to democracy when the government begins to target and punish the media for publishing disfavored viewpoints. Yet that is precisely what Carr has threatened to do.

In the days before Trump tapped Carr, the FCC commissioner seemed to be auditioning for the body’s top job by attacking NBC for featuring Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live days before the election. In a series of posts on X, Carr alleged that the appearance violated the FCC’s “equal time” rule, which requires broadcasters in certain circumstances to provide candidates the opportunity to claim time on its airwaves if it gives such time to their opposition. But NBC did just that, and no rule was broken.

Nevertheless, Carr worked to create a sense of scandal over Harris’ appearance. That Sunday, Carr appeared on Fox News to threaten that the FCC could pull NBC broadcast licenses: “One of the remedies ultimately would be license revocation if we find that it’s egregious,” he said. In another appearance later that day, he offered a broader warning: “Every single option needs to be on the table for the FCC. Because we not only need to respond to this if it turns out to be as clear a violation as it looks like, but it sends a message to deter anybody from doing this again, whether it’s to benefit a Republican or a Democrat.”

While it could be argued Carr was simply warning broadcasters not to violate FCC rules, there’s a more ominous message if you read between the lines: As a FCC commissioner—and now, likely its chair—Carr is ready to use the FCC to punish media companies for coverage he dislikes. It’s a chilling example of how Carr could, over the next four years, wield the commission’s powers to squash dissent and create an environment of self-censorship among media organizations. Indeed, as the FCC’s chair, Carr could have a significant impact on the information environment both through legal means and the chilling effect of his threats—even if his words are not backed up by actual authority.

For example, Carr’s Project 2025 chapter rails against viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech, even though the FCC has no authority over social media platforms. But that might not matter. “It has an extremely chilling effect when a government actor and an FCC incoming chair says he’s going to go after tech platforms,” says Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a nonpartisan group that advocates for a media ecosystem that fosters democracy. “Hate speech is on the rise on these platforms, in my opinion, because the leaders of those platforms don’t want to get into legal troubles with Donald Trump.”

With Carr as FCC chair, the world’s richest man stands to get a whole lot richer.

Despite Carr’s criticism of tech companies, he is generally pro-business and anti-regulation. He calls for ending net neutrality and allowing media companies to grow their market share. That kind of relaxation of the commission’s anti-consolidation rules could help Sinclair, the conservative broadcast company, execute its plans to buy up as many local TV stations as possible, increasing the MAGA movement’s control of local news.

Then there is Carr’s relationship with Elon Musk. If his contribution to Project 2025 and on-air media bullying weren’t enough to get Trump’s attention, his burgeoning friendship with the world’s richest man and Trump mega donor surely didn’t hurt.

Carr appears to have initiated a public bromance with Musk. As Politico detailed last month, Carr has used both his official position to support Musk and his companies, as well as his words in interviews and on X. In turn, Musk has promoted Carr’s posts on the platform he owns, and even took a picture with him when Carr visited a SpaceX facility in Texas.

“It poses a conflict of interest that Brendan Carr sucked up to Elon Musk as a strategy to get appointed by Donald Trump,” says González, “because of the amount of public funding that Musk receives from the federal government and from the FCC in particular.”

With Carr as FCC chair, the world’s richest man stands to get a whole lot richer. During Trump’s first term, the FCC awarded Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink, $885 million to bring internet access to rural areas. But under the Biden administration, the FCC, worried the funding might be poorly spent, stripped related contracts from Starlink and several other companies. Carr criticized that decision and claimed it was political, and while that pot of money is likely gone, there’s an even bigger one Starlink could drain. Carr, who has said he wants the government to fund Starlink’s work, recently told Politico that he believes about a third of some $42 billion in federal funds set aside to boost broadband should go to satellite internet providers like Starlink.

With Carr as chairman, Musk’s $200 million bet on electing Trump could turn out to be an incredible bargain. From promises of revenge upon his enemies to opportunities for self-enrichment schemes, the project of the new Trump administration is almost certainly a combination of weaponization and plunder. Based on his actions thus far, Carr appears ready to aid in both endeavors.

During this year’s campaign, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation agenda that would transform the federal government’s enforcement powers into political weapons while selling off the rest to the highest bidder, by swearing he didn’t know who was behind it. But now that voting is over, he’s finding the plan a handy way to fill positions in his incoming administration.

Carr is ready to punish media companies for coverage he dislikes.

On Sunday, Trump announced he would nominate Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, already an FCC commissioner, was the only sitting member of government to author a chapter of Project 2025.

It’s not hard to predict what Carr will do with the FCC, since he wrote it all down. In Project 2025, in posts on X, and in interviews with conservative outlets including Fox News, Carr has laid out a vision for an FCC that would deregulate most broadcasters and telecommunications companies, while cracking down on and intimidating traditional media, growing the reach of conservative media, and unleashing disinformation on social media platforms. The result: An information ecosystem tilted further in Trump’s favor.

It’s a baseline for democracy that people are able to obtain accurate information. And it is a real threat to democracy when the government begins to target and punish the media for publishing disfavored viewpoints. Yet that is precisely what Carr has threatened to do.

In the days before Trump tapped Carr, the FCC commissioner seemed to be auditioning for the body’s top job by attacking NBC for featuring Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live days before the election. In a series of posts on X, Carr alleged that the appearance violated the FCC’s “equal time” rule, which requires broadcasters in certain circumstances to provide candidates the opportunity to claim time on its airwaves if it gives such time to their opposition. But NBC did just that, and no rule was broken.

Nevertheless, Carr worked to create a sense of scandal over Harris’ appearance. That Sunday, Carr appeared on Fox News to threaten that the FCC could pull NBC broadcast licenses: “One of the remedies ultimately would be license revocation if we find that it’s egregious,” he said. In another appearance later that day, he offered a broader warning: “Every single option needs to be on the table for the FCC. Because we not only need to respond to this if it turns out to be as clear a violation as it looks like, but it sends a message to deter anybody from doing this again, whether it’s to benefit a Republican or a Democrat.”

While it could be argued Carr was simply warning broadcasters not to violate FCC rules, there’s a more ominous message if you read between the lines: As a FCC commissioner—and now, likely its chair—Carr is ready to use the FCC to punish media companies for coverage he dislikes. It’s a chilling example of how Carr could, over the next four years, wield the commission’s powers to squash dissent and create an environment of self-censorship among media organizations. Indeed, as the FCC’s chair, Carr could have a significant impact on the information environment both through legal means and the chilling effect of his threats—even if his words are not backed up by actual authority.

For example, Carr’s Project 2025 chapter rails against viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech, even though the FCC has no authority over social media platforms. But that might not matter. “It has an extremely chilling effect when a government actor and an FCC incoming chair says he’s going to go after tech platforms,” says Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a nonpartisan group that advocates for a media ecosystem that fosters democracy. “Hate speech is on the rise on these platforms, in my opinion, because the leaders of those platforms don’t want to get into legal troubles with Donald Trump.”

With Carr as FCC chair, the world’s richest man stands to get a whole lot richer.

Despite Carr’s criticism of tech companies, he is generally pro-business and anti-regulation. He calls for ending net neutrality and allowing media companies to grow their market share. That kind of relaxation of the commission’s anti-consolidation rules could help Sinclair, the conservative broadcast company, execute its plans to buy up as many local TV stations as possible, increasing the MAGA movement’s control of local news.

Then there is Carr’s relationship with Elon Musk. If his contribution to Project 2025 and on-air media bullying weren’t enough to get Trump’s attention, his burgeoning friendship with the world’s richest man and Trump mega donor surely didn’t hurt.

Carr appears to have initiated a public bromance with Musk. As Politico detailed last month, Carr has used both his official position to support Musk and his companies, as well as his words in interviews and on X. In turn, Musk has promoted Carr’s posts on the platform he owns, and even took a picture with him when Carr visited a SpaceX facility in Texas.

“It poses a conflict of interest that Brendan Carr sucked up to Elon Musk as a strategy to get appointed by Donald Trump,” says González, “because of the amount of public funding that Musk receives from the federal government and from the FCC in particular.”

With Carr as FCC chair, the world’s richest man stands to get a whole lot richer. During Trump’s first term, the FCC awarded Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink, $885 million to bring internet access to rural areas. But under the Biden administration, the FCC, worried the funding might be poorly spent, stripped related contracts from Starlink and several other companies. Carr criticized that decision and claimed it was political, and while that pot of money is likely gone, there’s an even bigger one Starlink could drain. Carr, who has said he wants the government to fund Starlink’s work, recently told Politico that he believes about a third of some $42 billion in federal funds set aside to boost broadband should go to satellite internet providers like Starlink.

With Carr as chairman, Musk’s $200 million bet on electing Trump could turn out to be an incredible bargain. From promises of revenge upon his enemies to opportunities for self-enrichment schemes, the project of the new Trump administration is almost certainly a combination of weaponization and plunder. Based on his actions thus far, Carr appears ready to aid in both endeavors.

There will be endless ink spilled over the 2024 election, trying to sort out the overlapping reasons why the world’s oldest democracy placed its fate in the hands of a would-be strongman who promises to dismantle democratic norms. There are many culprits—rising costs, raw white supremacy—but among them, let’s not forget the role of Chief Justice John Roberts and the US Supreme Court.

Under Roberts, American democracy felt humiliating, looked like a joke, and became increasingly tenuous.

The Supreme Court has become a major force in American politics in recent years. Increasingly, it has stepped in not just to decide questions of legal importance, but to resolve heated partisan disputes. From abortion and gun rights to gerrymandering and voting rights, the justices have become the arbiters of our toughest political questions. This wasn’t a sudden change, though it has accelerated in the last four years, leaving Americans as the proverbial frog in the pot. The water is now boiling.

Why Americans chose a demagogue to helm their democracy may be partially explained by the fact that, in many ways, the United States isn’t a democracy any longer—and in many ways, that’s thanks to the Roberts court. Our system was never perfect; on a basic level, the US only became a democracy in 1965 when it finally gave all Black people the right to vote.

But for nearly two decades, Roberts and his colleagues have done immense damage to the underpinnings of the democracy Americans painstakingly built. They have reallocated political power from ordinary citizens to billionaires, worsened congressional paralysis, and transformed many elections into meaningless exercises. If you are looking to explain why America picked Trump, you could do worse than look to these five Roberts-era Supreme Court cases that weakened our democracy and faith in government. After all, voters seem to have decided that when there’s so little to protect, there’s much less to lose.

Citizens United

To understand why elections are now so expensive—and why Trump’s campaign in particular was waged with money from outside billionaires—you have to go back to January 2010, when a 5-4 majority set the country on a new political path. The court’s Citizens United decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited sums to elect candidates of their choosing was expanded two months later by an appeals court ruling allowing anyone to contribute infinite amounts of money, including untraceable money, to influence elections. 

One of the most destructive forces in American politics in the last several years is how much is spent on them—and by whom. The 2024 election cycle was (in a record that is reliably reset every four years) the most expensive in US history. The presidential race alone garnered nearly $2.7 billion in donations, with the money raised split almost evenly between the candidates’ campaigns and outside groups attempting to influence the outcome. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign was powered by outside money, which totaled more than $710 million—compared to the $380 million his campaign took in directly. Eight years earlier, in 2016, Trump raised $333 million while outside spending on his behalf totaled just $100 million. 

In his majority opinion in Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy justified dispensing with a century of campaign finance limitations by arguing that outside spending—money not given directly to a campaign—does not create the only kind of corruption he considered valid: a quid pro quo. “Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption,” Kennedy insisted.

Compare Kennedy’s words to what we just witnessed. In April, Trump promised oil executives he would roll back environmental regulations if they spent $1 billion to reelect him, which looks awfully like the quid pro quo scenario Kennedy denied was possible. In what appeared to be a concession to a billionaire backer, Trump changed his position on banning TikTok after meeting with Jeff Yass, a key investor in the app, who gave to pro-Trump outside groups. And then there’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent nearly $120 million late in the election backing Trump. Musk wanted the job of deciding which government regulations to eliminate, and, in September, Trump promised it to him. And Trump, ever obsequious to his biggest (outside) donor, praised Musk in his victory speech as a “genius” and a “star.” Never have billionaires played such a visible and important role in an American election, nor been promised so much in return.

It didn’t take long for the fallout of Citizens United to reallocate political power toward the richest Americans. (And through dark money groups, possibly wealthy foreigners too.) By 2015, a small coterie of the uber-rich were bankrolling a growing share of political spending. “In a time of historic wealth inequality, the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value,” campaign finance expert Daniel Weiner wrote that year when assessing the decision’s impact.

That kind of democratic disenchantment can feed into authoritarian movements—even if they promise, like Trump’s, to further widen gaps in economic and political power.

Shelby County

Just three years after Citizens United, Roberts did something he’d been wanting to do since his days as a fresh-faced Reagan administration attorney: Gut the Voting Rights Act. The 1965 law had become the lynchpin of America’s multiracial democracy, but Roberts’ opinion in Shelby County v. Holder excising a powerful provision set the country back. 

In his majority opinion, Roberts jettisoned the law’s preclearance regime, which required advance federal approval of changes to election procedures in areas with a history of voter suppression, including most of the south. As justification, he wrote that the country had changed and no longer needed such a strong federal intrusion to protect voting rights. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg analogized Roberts’ logic to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

She was right. Unshackled, states rushed to implement restrictions on voting. Last year, on the 10-year anniversary of the decision, the Brennan Center for Justice counted at least 94 voter suppression laws across 29 states. It ushered in our current era of discriminatory voter ID laws, polling place changes, restrictions on mail-in ballots, and more. In Alabama, one of several states with new voter suppression laws, the Brennan Center found that the turnout gap between Black and White voters tripled after the court’s decision, from 3 percent in 2012 to 9 percent in 2022, a difference of tens of thousands of voters. In subsequent cases, Roberts continued to remove the VRA’s protections. This election cycle, the Republican Party fabricated a false narrative of non-citizens voting, in part to justify imposing or keeping burdensome proof of citizenship requirements when registering or voting. This is the next frontier of voter suppression—and the Supreme Court weighed in August with a thumbs up. 

The court has also greenlit efforts to purge voter rolls in a manner that disproportionately affects poor and minority voters. In 2024, Trump and his allies launched discredited lawsuits seeking to force purges across the country, with the Supreme Court stepping in to allow one such purge despite a federal law prohibiting it so close to the election. 

The Roberts court’s decisions also changed the experience of voting; many of the same urban voters of color who, in polls, expressed low confidence in American democracy and seem to have turned to Trump, also experienced the worst of the Shelby County fallout, including prohibitively long voting lines. In their communities, American democracy felt humiliating, looked like a joke, and was increasingly tenuous.

Rucho v. Common Cause

Gerrymandering has always been an issue in American politics. But in recent years, it’s become a serious problem. After Republicans’ well-timed nationwide sweep to power in 2010—the year of a decennial census, which is followed by redistricting—they drew political maps that aimed to lock in their majorities indefinitely. Thanks to unprecedentedly sophisticated computer models and granular data, their gerrymanders delivered historically lopsided results, distorting the partisan make-up of both state legislatures and Congress. A chorus of voices called on the Supreme Court to set some limits—and it appeared poised to do so.

But when a related case presented itself to the justices in 2017, Roberts wrote an opinion declining to touch the issue on a technicality. A year later, with Kennedy, one of the court’s sometime swing votes, replaced by Trump-appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Roberts blessed partisan gerrymandering. Federal courts, he ruled, must stay out of the way. 

The result is that several states have gotten away with partisan gerrymandering that not only warps their states’ politics, but also their congressional delegations—and with it, which party controls the House. The Brennan Center estimates that this cycle, gerrymandering gives Republicans a 16-seat advantage in the House of Representatives. That margin may be enough to determine which party controls the chamber next year—and consequently, whether Trump will have any check on his authoritarian ambitions.

There’s another way gerrymandering’s warping effect paved the way for Trump. Rather than competitive districts, conservatives in Congress are ensconced in bright red ones, only afraid that a more conservative challenger will come along. In the years after 2010, and coinciding with Citizens United, polarization deepened as more moderate Republicans were replaced with adherents of the Tea Party movement—the antecedent to Trumpism. 

Biden v. Nebraska

By unleashing a gusher of money and allowing abuses of voting rights, the Roberts Court has made Congress more polarized and dysfunctional—essentially hobbling a co-equal branch of government. While politicians always campaign on policies they can’t or won’t deliver, if some voters soured on the Democrats because they didn’t do enough of what they promised, they may have been experiencing a very real effect of Congressional paralysis. 

Student loan forgiveness is a perfect example: Biden wanted to keep his commitment to forgive some federal student debt, but getting it through Congress was a nonstarter. Finally, Biden’s Department of Education used its own authority to forgive $400 billion in student debt. 

Not so fast, said John Roberts. In Biden v. Nebraska, Roberts blocked Biden’s loan forgiveness plan. To do this, he used a new doctrine the conservative justices had recently begun deploying to justify stepping in to stop executive policies they dislike. If voters are mad Biden didn’t deliver more on student loan forgiveness, they should be mad at Roberts and his colleagues. 

The loan forgiveness program is a vivid example of a larger problem. Between congressional dysfunction and judicial veto, it’s hard to get stuff done. What’s the point in preserving a system where the policies politicians campaign on disappear into the ether? It’s certainly not a system that inspires trust.

Trump v. United States

After Trump lost the 2020 election, he attempted to stay in office by plotting to overturn the will of the voters, culminating in a violent insurrection at the US Capitol. In the summer of 2023, special counsel Jack Smith brought charges against him for his role in the scheme. A trial was scheduled for March 2024, during the Republican primaries. But the Supreme Court was there to help Trump.

The ex-president tried to delay and ultimately derail the trial by claiming that he is immune from prosecution for official acts made while in office. It was an outlandish claim. (Just imagine: a coup attempt is an unpunishable offense?) Between December 2023 and July 2024, the Supreme Court took multiple steps to delay the resolution of the immunity question, each time pushing a trial date further and further down the road, helping Trump sail through the primaries and, as the general election got underway, making it less likely a trial would happen before November.

Then, on July 1, John Roberts released a stunning opinion. He bought Trump’s argument—hook, line, and sinker. Former Presidents are now immune from criminal prosecution for anything deemed an official act. Even evidence of a crime is inadmissible if it involved official acts. The court, with Roberts in the lead, had not only removed a serious impediment to Trump’s reelection efforts—but ensured that should Trump return to the White House, he would do so with more power than any president ever before. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s chilling dissent laid out the stakes: “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Now, we are there. Trump will be president again, immune from criminal liability, surrounded by loyalists, and likely with the GOP in control of Congress. In his first term, the Supreme Court was often called upon to limit Trump’s worst—and most obviously illegal—actions. But that was a different iteration of the Roberts court: In 2017 and 2018, it still had Kennedy and Ginsburg. Today, thanks to three Trump appointees, it has a hard right 6-3 majority.

When we think about the darkness of Trump’s second term agenda, from detaining millions of immigrants in camps to prosecuting his political rivals to using the US military to put down anti-Trump protests, we have to think about what the Supreme Court will do. As Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck wrote in his substack, One First, “it seems more than likely that the Supreme Court—this Supreme Court—will be the only institution standing between Trump and…whatever Trump wants to do.” 

Roberts significantly shaped Trump’s campaign and the democracy we have today. Now that he will be one of the only Americans with power to temper Trump’s worst impulses, remember that he already enabled them.

The Republican Party is on track to win control of the Senate, a significant victory that will allow the GOP to exercise power over judicial appointments and executive branch appointees.

If Trump retakes the White House, GOP Senate control will clear his path to make significant changes to the judiciary, including possibly appointing multiple Supreme Court justices. A GOP Senate is also likely to handily approve his Cabinet picks and other appointments, allowing Trump to place loyalist allies throughout the government.

The Senate map favored Republicans, and left Democrats on defense.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, a Republican Senate would block her judicial picks, possibly her Cabinet picks, and her legislative priorities.

The Senate map favored Republicans this cycle. While Democrats were more broadly on the defense, only three Republicans were in tight reelection races, and all three were in red states where the incumbent Republican was likely to win. Meanwhile, with the retirement of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, Republicans were destined a pickup in the GOP-voting state. His decision not to seek reelection almost guaranteed, at minimum, a tied Senate, and the GOP still had several prospects for picking up new seats.

Several vulnerable Democrats were running for reelection in swing states and red states, providing Republicans with many opportunities to pick up seats and secure a majority. In Ohio, incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown, a progressive and longtime union ally, lost his race to Bernie Moreno, who made millions running a car dealership empire with a history of worker exploitation. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin ran against Eric Hovde, another millionaire whom she attacked for spending most of his time in California.

And while the overall map was difficult for Democrats, in the final months of the race, it became clear that Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, from the solidly red state of Nebraska, was in a surprisingly tight race against independent Dan Osborn.

It started with Georgia: a handful of bomb threats sent to polling locations in heavily Democratic areas. Two polling sites in Union City outside Atlanta, where the population is nearly 90 percent Black, were temporarily shut down. Georgia officials, citing federal law enforcement, named Russia as the culprit, as the threats had come from that nation’s email domains.

As Election Day went on, the threats kept coming, causing polls to close and evacuate for short periods. It seems Russia was brazenly interfering on Trump’s behalf, as it has in the past—but more openly this time.

There have been dozens of bomb threats today in blue areas around Atlanta. In Fulton County, the police chief said law enforcement had responded to 32. Multiple precincts faced temporary closures. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The threats targeted Democratic areas in other swing states as well. Several were sent to Arizona’s Navajo County, where many Native Americans vote. (Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also blamed Russia.) The critical “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania received threats too, as did Minnesota, Maine, and Ohio, according to various reports. “The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the agency said in a statement. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”

If Russia is indeed the culprit, it means President Vladimir Putin feels sufficiently emboldened to help Donald Trump openly on Election Day by attempting to disenfranchise Democratic voters. This effort follows the recent disinformation of viral videos by a Russian-backed propaganda outfit. As Mother Jones has reported, evidence links a Moscow-backed disinformation unit to fake videos stoking fears of voter fraud in recent weeks. One of the videos purported to show recent Haitian immigrants voting for Kamala Harris in Georgia; in another, Haitian immigrants brag about voting in multiple precincts in the state. A third bogus video shows mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

Putin would clearly prefer to have Trump in the White House. The former president has said he would broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, which would be a win for Russia, has questioned America’s membership in NATO, and is generally solicitous of Putin and other authoritarian leaders. Harris, on the other hand, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine and strengthening NATO.

In the wake of the bomb scares, the US intelligence community has warned that Putin’s goal is to sow chaos and distrust in the democratic process. They don’t expect Russian interference to go away just because Election Day is winding down. “If chaos is the point,” Chris Krebs, former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the Washington Post, “the most opportune window to create mischief is the post-November 5th pre-certification period.”

The Republican Party is on track to win control of the Senate, a significant victory that will allow the GOP to exercise power over judicial appointments and executive branch appointees.

If Trump retakes the White House, GOP Senate control will clear his path to make significant changes to the judiciary, including possibly appointing multiple Supreme Court justices. A GOP Senate is also likely to handily approve his Cabinet picks and other appointments, allowing Trump to place loyalist allies throughout the government.

The Senate map favored Republicans, and left Democrats on defense.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, a Republican Senate would block her judicial picks, possibly her Cabinet picks, and her legislative priorities.

The Senate map favored Republicans this cycle. While Democrats were more broadly on the defense, only three Republicans were in tight reelection races, and all three were in red states where the incumbent Republican was likely to win. Meanwhile, with the retirement of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, Republicans were destined a pickup in the GOP-voting state. His decision not to seek reelection almost guaranteed, at minimum, a tied Senate, and the GOP still had several prospects for picking up new seats.

Several vulnerable Democrats were running for reelection in swing states and red states, providing Republicans with many opportunities to pick up seats and secure a majority. In Ohio, incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown, a progressive and longtime union ally, lost his race to Bernie Moreno, who made millions running a car dealership empire with a history of worker exploitation. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin ran against Eric Hovde, another millionaire whom she attacked for spending most of his time in California.

And while the overall map was difficult for Democrats, in the final months of the race, it became clear that Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, from the solidly red state of Nebraska, was in a surprisingly tight race against independent Dan Osborn.

It started with Georgia: a handful of bomb threats sent to polling locations in heavily Democratic areas. Two polling sites in Union City outside Atlanta, where the population is nearly 90 percent Black, were temporarily shut down. Georgia officials, citing federal law enforcement, named Russia as the culprit, as the threats had come from that nation’s email domains.

As Election Day went on, the threats kept coming, causing polls to close and evacuate for short periods. It seems Russia was brazenly interfering on Trump’s behalf, as it has in the past—but more openly this time.

There have been dozens of bomb threats today in blue areas around Atlanta. In Fulton County, the police chief said law enforcement had responded to 32. Multiple precincts faced temporary closures. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The threats targeted Democratic areas in other swing states as well. Several were sent to Arizona’s Navajo County, where many Native Americans vote. (Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also blamed Russia.) The critical “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania received threats too, as did Minnesota, Maine, and Ohio, according to various reports. “The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the agency said in a statement. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”

If Russia is indeed the culprit, it means President Vladimir Putin feels sufficiently emboldened to help Donald Trump openly on Election Day by attempting to disenfranchise Democratic voters. This effort follows the recent disinformation of viral videos by a Russian-backed propaganda outfit. As Mother Jones has reported, evidence links a Moscow-backed disinformation unit to fake videos stoking fears of voter fraud in recent weeks. One of the videos purported to show recent Haitian immigrants voting for Kamala Harris in Georgia; in another, Haitian immigrants brag about voting in multiple precincts in the state. A third bogus video shows mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

Putin would clearly prefer to have Trump in the White House. The former president has said he would broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, which would be a win for Russia, has questioned America’s membership in NATO, and is generally solicitous of Putin and other authoritarian leaders. Harris, on the other hand, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine and strengthening NATO.

In the wake of the bomb scares, the US intelligence community has warned that Putin’s goal is to sow chaos and distrust in the democratic process. They don’t expect Russian interference to go away just because Election Day is winding down. “If chaos is the point,” Chris Krebs, former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the Washington Post, “the most opportune window to create mischief is the post-November 5th pre-certification period.”

The morning of Election Day, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed Russia for creating bomb scares at polling places in the swing state of Georgia. “They’re up to mischief it seems,” Raffensperger said at a press conference of Russia’s efforts. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election.”

The bomb threats temporarily closed two voting sites in Union City, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, according to the Election Protection Coalition, which monitors Election Day disruptions. Union City is nearly 90 percent Black and therefore tends to be overwhelmingly Democratic. The county is attempting to extend voting hours at the affected locations.

Five non-credible bomb threats were called in on Tuesday morning. Raffensperger said Russia was the culprit and that federal law enforcement had helped make that determination.

The presidential race in Georgia is expected to be very close and it is one of the states that could determine who wins the White House. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a clear interest in former president Donald Trump retaking the White House. Trump is much more interested in appeasing Putin’s war in Ukraine, has expressed little loyalty to other allies, and is generally solicitous of the authoritarian leader. Vice President Kamala Harris, conversely, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine as well as strengthening NATO.

Georgia appears to be a target of Russian meddling this year. A fake video purporting to show recent Haitian immigrants illegally voting for Harris in the state was produced and disseminated by a Russian disinformation outfit, US intelligence officials revealed last week. And this is only the most recent example of a months-long effort by Russian-backed propaganda to target the Harris campaign. As Mother Jones previously reported, the disinformation group responsible for the Georgia video also is believed to be behind another fake video purporting to show ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

On Friday evening, just as reporters were logging off, the Supreme Court let slip a clue about whether it would take up cases that could determine the outcome of a close election in the coming weeks. Specifically, the hint came in a statement from Justice Samuel Alito. Spoiler: He’s open to it.

Alito’s missive came as the Supreme Court declined to take up a case over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The Republican National Committee had asked the court to throw out a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision allowing voters who had forgotten to place their mail-in ballot into a secrecy envelope to vote a provisional ballot. By declining to weigh in, the Supreme Court allowed some valid Pennsylvania voters who made a mistake in returning their mail-in ballots to still vote. The RNC had asked the US Supreme Court to stop them.

In response, the justices unanimously declined to disenfranchise these voters and created the impression of a win for Democrats and more expansive voting rights. Technically, this is true. But as a signal of whether the justices intend to meddle in the outcome of the election, the message was muddled by Alito’s writing.

Typically, the justices wouldn’t have considered such a case, because the Supreme Court isn’t supposed to second guess state court interpretations of a state law. But these are not normal times. Last year, the justices decided that second-guessing state courts was within their remit if the state law they were interpreting was election-related. In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court gave itself the authority to intervene in state election law matters if a state court’s decision “transgress[ed] the ordinary bounds of judicial review” at the expense of state legislative power. It’s a vague and untested standard, and this is the first election under this new precedent. The Supreme Court now has become a Sword of Damocles hanging over every state court decision concerning election procedures.

The Supreme Court now has become a Sword of Damocles hanging over every state court decision concerning election procedures.

In a statement accompanying the court’s order, Alito agreed with the rest of the justices not to take the case but chalked it up to the facts of the case, which he said constrained the court’s ability to give the RNC their requested relief of banning provisional ballots for spoiled mail-in ballots. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined Alito’s statement. In the past, problems with the facts have not stopped the court’s conservative wing from taking on and deciding any case it wanted to. There’s the website designer who wanted to discriminate against a client who didn’t exist; the football coach who claimed he prayed alone when pictures showed him surrounded by players; and the case against President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans on behalf of an entity that wanted nothing to do with the case. The Roberts court’s forbearance is not something to take for granted. So was the show of restraint with the Pennsylvania case a sign that the justices will not become involved in the 2024 election?

Probably not.

Alito signaled that he and his two colleagues might reopen this specific dispute and others like it in the coming weeks if another case were presented. He called the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision “controversial” and the issue at stake “a matter of considerable importance.” As legal journalist Chris Geidner noted, this language is “a sure signal from the trio to the RNC, Donald Trump, and other possible litigants” and “clearly a set up.” Should Trump or his allies want to bring a new suit after the election, at least three justices would be open to taking the case. The question is, would a majority be willing to, as this case asked, deny people the right to vote? One framework for looking at a possible answer is by comparing the 2000 election to the 2020 election.

In 2000, the presidential election came down to a few thousand votes in Florida. It wasn’t clear who the winner would ultimately be if all of Florida’s votes were counted, but by mid-December, George W. Bush held a lead of 537 votes. The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of certain ballots, so the Bush campaign asked the Supreme Court to intervene. So when the justices halted the recount in a 5-4 decision, they handed the election to Bush in Bush v. Gore. In effect, they picked the president in what was a tossup situation.

In 2020, on the other hand, there were many entreaties for the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to throw out ballots and hand the election to President Donald Trump. The efforts to contest the election were coming days and even weeks after it was clear that, with almost every swing state declaring Joe Biden the winner, this was not an undecided election. It was, barring very significant judicial meddling, an insurmountable lead, and despite his protestations, Trump had lost. In such a situation, the Supreme Court stepping in would have risked the court’s reputation. Why help Trump when it would only have given Biden, who would become president, a very good reason to consider court reform?

If tomorrow’s results look like a Bush v. Gore scenario, particularly if the single swing state of Pennsylvania looks like the new Florida, the court’s right flank may be faced with the opportunity to help in Trump’s election. After all, the court has taken multiple steps to help Trump retake the White House, most notably by scuttling his criminal trial over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. They have also shown a willingness to help the Republican Party in their recent decision to allow Virginia to remove voters from the rolls in a manner contrary to federal law. Interfering again would be a continuation, not an aberration.

But if tomorrow’s results look more like 2020’s, and within a few days, Harris is the clear winner, a majority of the justices might find it unwise to stick their necks out for Trump. Famously, Trump doesn’t like to be associated with “losers.” The justices may feel the same way.

Donald Trump has promised to prosecute his political opponents should he retake the White House. He’s planned to remove the firewall that has traditionally existed between the White House and the Justice Department, and harness federal prosecutors into political dirty work.

But Trump isn’t waiting for Inauguration Day, or even Election Day, to get something similar going—and his first target is the press: In the last 24 hours, Trump has filed legal complaints against two news organizations with frivolous charges. Whether they succeed might be beside the point, because they are a warning shot for what is coming if he wins.

Media organizations are well aware of the risks of crossing Trump, and some already look to be backing down.

On Thursday, Trump sued CBS News over its October “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. In the suit, Trump argues that the interview was edited to make Harris look good, amounting to election interference. “To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” the complaint alleges. He is asking for $10 billion in damages.

The suit is legally ludicrous, according to experts. “It’s ridiculous junk and should be mocked,” Harvard professor Rebecca Tushnet told CNN. But the fact that it was filed in Amarillo, Texas, is a sign that Trump means business. The only logical reason to file the suit in this division is to secure a friendly judge, a practice known as judge-shopping. And in Amarillo, the only federal judge happens to be one of the most ideologically-driven conservative judges in the country: Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk has shown a willingness to go beyond the bounds of the law to advance lawsuits he agrees with. Most famously, he eschewed long-held legal doctrine to block the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug Mifepristone. (The Supreme Court overruled him.)

There is also a political reason to file the suit, which follows weeks of Trump complaining in public about CBS’s editing of the interview. Being able to point to a lawsuit alleging media bias furthers his argument to supporters that the press is the enemy and is working for the other side.

It’s one thing for Trump to sue CBS as a citizen. But if he wins, Trump could make sure this type of suit comes from the Justice Department. It’s a warning shot to the media that any coverage Trump deems unfavorable, including an interview with a rival, could land them in court opposite the US Government.

Media organizations are well aware of the risks of crossing Trump, and some already look to be backing down. Exhibit A are the last-minute decisions by the billionaires who own the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to block their papers’ editors from making Harris endorsements at the last minute. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, has billions in government contracts that could be nullified in retribution under a Trump presidency.

Trump is already targeting the Post. On Thursday, the campaign submitted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission alleging that, by paying to boost stories critical of Trump, the Washington Post illegally donated to the Harris campaign. Clearly, Bezos’ decision not to endorse Harris hasn’t appeased Trump.

These attacks on both the Post and CBS should sound alarm bells. They also follow Trump’s efforts to punish CNN for its coverage during his first term, and his repeated calls for every major television broadcaster to lose its broadcasting license. Whether Trump could pull off such a feat is unclear—for one thing, local affiliates hold the licenses—but the message Trump is broadcasting is being heard loud and clear: If Trump wins, he will retaliate against the press.

Indeed, he’s already started.

If Donald Trump wins a second term, he will enter the White House at 78 years old, making him the oldest person ever elected president. Anything can happen over four years, and there is, of course, a chance he will not complete his term. The former president, who has already been the subject of two impeachment efforts, has refused to release even basic information about his health.

Given that state of affairs, it seems important to have a sense of how his vice president might govern if elevated to the top job. That person would be Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance.

“We’re going to have to get pretty wild.”

Vance vaulted to celebrity with the publication of his book, Hillbilly Elegy, in 2016, in which he brought attention to the down-and-out white working class in the midwest. In the memoir, Vance describes how he worked his way into the belly of elite America, namely Yale Law School, where he felt out of place and unschooled in the mores of the upper class.

But after law school and the conclusion of that book’s story, Vance joined the elite as a protege of far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. Ahead of the 2022 elections, Thiel spent a critical $15 million funding Vance’s victorious Senate race, before reportedly lobbying Trump this summer to select him as running mate.

In a short span, Vance’s has transformed from a self-appointed speaker for the masses to a protege of his billionaire patron—and along the way, adopted much of the techno-authoritarian, anti-democracy ideas of Thiel and other Silicon Valley rightwingers. He’s also associated with a crowd of highly online Christian nationalists, the so-called “TheoBros,” who want the United States to be both Christian and white while seeking a return to archaic gender roles, including by ending women’s right to vote. Vance converted to Catholicism under the influence of a thinker named Patrick Deneen, who advocates for an end to liberal democracy.

With such a background, what kind of president would Vance be? According to Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who studies democratic backsliding, Vance could choose between two paths. As a power-seeking pragmatist, he could decide that his best route to sustained success is through a more traditional Republican politics. Or, he could attempt to push on and bring about the extremist, anti-democratic worldview he has been marinating in for several years.

One of Vance’s most chilling quotes, from a 2021 podcast appearance, promises the latter. Vanity Fair quoted parts of it in a profile the following year, as a summation not only of Vance’s views, but of those of Thiel and the far-right community he has become a part of:

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” [Vance] said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

If fate gives Vance a chance to put these words to action, his past policies and ideas are the best indication of the kind of president he would be. Here’s an incomplete list of what America could expect.

Abortion

Without Roe v. Wade, Vance would be free to pursue a nationwide abortion ban. And while Vance has recently tried to moderate his stance by favoring the euphemistically named “minimum national standard,” that sounds like Yale Law-speak for a ban.

He has previously stated his opposition to any exceptions for rape and incest, and compared abortion to slavery. Vance would use the tools of government to enforce such bans, as laid out in Project 2025. Vance also supports the ability of local law enforcement to obtain women’s private medical records, which would be key evidence in prosecuting women, doctors, and possibly others who may have aided in obtaining an abortion. 

Vance is also an adherent of pronatalism, a movement associated with Elon Musk and far-right Silicon Valley circles. In addition to banning abortion, Vance would likely implement policies to encourage larger families, possibly through a larger child tax credit, as he has supported in the past.

He’d also like to tie those families together by making it harder for people to get divorced. Family law is traditionally a state-level issue. But if it were up to Vance, divorce, even in a violent relationship, would be a lot harder to obtain.

Despite his emphasis on making babies, Vance would likely there’s evidence he might oppose IVF. In 2017, he wrote the forward to a Heritage Foundation report on how to encourage women to have children earlier and return to “traditional” family structure, according to the Guardian. The report included an essay denigrating in vitro fertilization and argued that women spend their reproductive years on advanced degrees and careers, rather than having kids, thanks to the promise of having children later with IVF. (Vance’s spokesperson said the essay did not necessarily reflect his views).

Transgender rights

Vance would seek to ban gender-affirming care. In the Senate, Vance is a sponsor of legislation to impose a 12-year federal prison sentence for providing gender-affirming care to a minor. His bill also targets transgender adults by cutting funding from any health plan that covers gender-affirming care. And in a jab at the First Amendment, it prohibits institutions of higher learning from teaching about gender-affirming care—a move that signals Vance would be open to using the tools of government to regulate curriculums.

Foreign policy

Upon the selection of Vance, European diplomats reportedly worried what a Trump-Vance presidency would mean for Europe’s security. The answer, they concluded, is not good.

As a senator, Vance has been a vocal critic of sending military aid to Ukraine. If Vance became president, the United States could (if it hadn’t already under Trump) cease its support of Ukraine against Russian aggression, a move that could signal that Russia might get away with invading more neighbors without pushback from Washington.

Vance has instead argued for focusing US military resources in a fight against China. This would include additional tariffs on Chinese goods, likely causing prices in the US to rise. Vance hopes that limiting imports from China would boost US manufacturing as part of a broader withdrawal from economic globalization.

Economy

Aside from tariffs, Vance has supported other government policies aimed at bolstering production in the US. Vance has co-sponsored legislation to raise the minimum wage to $11 per hour—more than the current $7.25 per hour, but much lower than the $17 favored by some Democrats. Perhaps he’d follow through, especially if tariffs cause prices to rise. He also sees immigrants as a cause of depressed wages, citing that as a reason they should be expelled. Vance’s minimum wage bill, for example, includes increased penalties for hiring undocumented workers.

Vance is pro-crypto. According to NPR, he owns over $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and has fought efforts to regulate the industry, even as ordinary people, like those who put their money in FTX, lose money. 

In addition to protectionist trade policy and tariffs, Vance has spoken in favor of breaking up monopolies a point of convergence between the left and the right. But his antipathy can be focused on Big Tech companies, which may have less to do with their size than his perception they are liberal. In a February X post calling for Google to be broken up, he complained that “monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.” Perhaps if Google were more reactionary, he wouldn’t mind so much.

Whatever antitrust sentiment he sincerely holds would be paired with a typical GOP deregulatory scheme that allows billionaires, oil executives, and Wall Street to plunder the economy and environment to further line their pockets. 

Labor

Vance has paid lip service to unions, but he opposes the PRO Act, which would bolster union organizing and bargaining. Vance is aligned with individuals who oppose unions, including Elon Musk who is currently waging a court battle against the constitutional underpinnings of the National Labor Relations Board. 

Vance has given a frank and pragmatic reason for opposing union power. “I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican,” Vance told Politico. Indeed, authoritarians do not like other centers of power, particularly those that might challenge their authority.

Immigration

At the Republican National Convention, Vance described the United States as “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As my colleague Kiera Butler explains, this line was a wink to Christian nationalists who view immigration as a threat to the country’s white, Christian identity. 

In the Senate, Vance sponsored a bill to ramp up deportations, crack down on asylum claims, and resume construction of a wall along the southern border. He also proposed a resolution backing a radical constitutional theory that would allow governors to round up and deport immigrants—and possibly even carry out their own military operations in Mexico. He has also fundraised on the promise of the mass deportation of every undocumented immigrant.

Clearly, Vance would seek to limit immigration, deport millions, and curb the rights of all immigrants. He’d justify this agenda by scapegoating immigrants with false smears, as he did to the community of legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming without evidence that they were snatching and eating pets. 

Free speech

In the Senate, Vance supported legislation to crack down on protest encampments on college campuses. It’s probably safe to say he wouldn’t like protests against his own policies either, and would crack down on those as well. Trump wanted to use the military to do that. Vance hasn’t himself said he would go that far, but has defended the ex-president’s recent remarks on the subject.

There is one kind of protest Vance approves of, which is demonstrators who interfere with people’s right to enter an abortion clinic. But with abortion outlawed, that kind of protest probably won’t be happening.

Civil Servants

As Vance’s quote from 2021 shows, he favors a hostile takeover of the federal government to enact his own vision for the country. So if Trump hadn’t already replaced the civil service with loyalists, Vance would try to finish the job.

Pushing through a change creating a new federal employment category known as “Schedule F,” as Project 2025 envisions, would allow the president to purge non-partisan government workers and instead fill agencies with loyalists. Trump actually attempted to enact the change at the end of his first term, but Biden promptly revoked it.

Democracy

Vance, by his own admission, would have helped Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election had he then been his vice president. That is, above all else, why Trump selected him. Vance would put Trump over free and fair elections. And if he’d do that for Trump, you have to ask, would he do it for himself? 

Certainly, he’d support laws that make it harder to cast a ballot, and nominate judges who would help his party win elections through legal challenges. Vance probably wouldn’t feel too bad about it, as his intellectual influences include neo-monarchists who advocate for the end of popular democracy.

When thinking about the possibility of a President Vance, remember what he said on that podcast in 2021: “We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild.”

Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.

Trump is promising to do things in a second term that he didn’t get close to achieving in his first: rounding up, detaining, and deporting millions of immigrants, using the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies, and deploying the military against Americans he’s identified as “the enemy from within.”

“Usually, it’s worse.”

It’s an agenda much bolder and much more authoritarian than what he accomplished in his first term, when low points included a ban on people from certain Muslim countries from entering the US, family separation at the border with children held for weeks in cells, withholding weapons from Ukraine in an attempt to get dirt on his political opponent (the reason for his first impeachment), and a bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The finale was a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. (Hence the second impeachment.)

But there is another, frightening list of the things that Trump wanted to do, but, thanks to hurdles in his own administration, he wasn’t able to. He wanted to deny disaster relief to California because it’s a blue state. He wanted the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs. He wanted the military to seize voting machines after he lost re-election.

There was also significant pushback to Trump from outside the government. There were massive popular protests, and a torrent of litigation from groups like the ACLU. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post added a slogan to its homepage and print editions: “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” a phrase Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had borrowed from a speech by Bob Woodward.

Some of that opposition to Trump is alive and well. Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, went on the record warning that Trump is a fascist. The Cheneys are voting for Harris. But some things seem to have changed in recognition of what Trump might do if re-elected. The Post opted not to endorse a candidate this year, a decision that came from Bezos, who has lucrative Pentagon contracts. The Los Angeles Times, also owned by a billionaire, likewise declined to endorse. It’s a chilling sign if acquiescence is already the response of America’s richest men.

To get a sense of what a second Trump term would be like, and what guardrails would remain to box in his authoritarian ambitions, I spoke to Steve Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die with co-author Daniel Ziblatt. We spoke on Friday, when Levitsky and Ziblatt published a New York Times op-ed chastising America’s business and religious elites for sitting on the sidelines during this momentous election. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We already lived through one Trump term. Why should we be expecting, possibly, a dramatically different result in a second Trump term? The consensus among experts in authoritarianism like yourself is that a second could prove really catastrophic.

Just to begin, several cases immediately come to mind—Nicaragua and Hungary—where the second term around was considerably worse than the first. Autocrats learn from their mistakes. Folks whose primary goal is to concentrate power learn how to do it. In the case of Trump, we have to remember he didn’t expect to win in 2016. He had no plan. He had no experience. He had no team. Very importantly, he relied heavily on mainstream Republican Party officials and technocrats to govern. He had no clue how to manipulate the machinery of government. In fact, he was shocked and appalled to learn that the machinery of government didn’t just operate at his whim, that he was unable to manipulate a range of state institutions for his own political and personal ends.

Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, was his first chief of staff. He used to apparently dissuade Trump from his worst impulses by telling him they would do it “next week.”

Exactly. There were adults in the room who prevented him from doing a lot more damage, who found ways to to distract him, or to dissuade him from his worst instincts. He learned that he if he’s going to wield the machinery of government for his own ends, he needs to purge and pack the government with loyalists, as much as he possibly can. It’s much more likely that he’ll be able to wield, for example, the Justice Department against critics and rivals. He’ll be able to launch investigations and even prosecutions, often for petty infractions against all kinds of people, hundreds and even thousands of people.

I don’t think Trump’s control over the courts will be sufficient for him to actually jail his rivals, but you can do a hell of a lot of damage investigating and trying and attempting to prosecute people. You can dissuade hundreds, even thousands of people to stay out of politics, to avoid the kind of harassment that a federal investigation can involve.

The largest difference, though, is that now Trump thoroughly controls the Republican Party. He did not have that control in 2016 but now there is no other faction outside of MAGA. His cabinet will be a Trump loyalist cabinet, which is not the case in 2016. It’s very unlikely that you will see much pushback from the Senate or the House, and there is a very good chance that if Trump wins the presidency, the Republicans also win the House and the Senate. You’ve got a pretty friendly Supreme Court. He’ll have a better sense of what he wants to do. This is really night/day from 2016.

Some of the people that have come out and called Trump a fascist have been generals who worked for him, Mark Milley and John Kelly. Kelly cited Trump’s threat to use the military against the “enemy within” as a reason he spoke out. Trump has said he wants to send the military into Democratic cities. Is the military an area where you see susceptibility to authoritarianism, or would it be more of a bastion against crossing certain lines?

We don’t know, because we haven’t seen anything like this, perhaps since the Civil War, where you have a professionalized military that’s asked by a civilian leader to to violate the Constitution or to help him abuse power. That puts military leaders in a terrible bind, because, on the one hand, in a professionalized military, you’re duty bound to both the Constitution and the president, and when the President is asking you to choose between the Constitution the president, it’s a very, very difficult bind. It’s really hard to anticipate how the military will respond.

I think the military itself will find itself divided. It’s very hard to say whether Trump will make the effort to pack the military. The military commanders are still going to be adults, certainly relative to the people in the Trump cabinet. I think they’ll be much more difficult to push around than Trump’s cabinet. But at the end of the day, if he insists, and they are trained to obey civilian authorities, so if Trump orders them under the Insurrection Act to go and shoot protesters in the legs like he wanted to during the Black Lives Matter protests, the military is going to have a hard time disobeying it. Until he’s stopped by the courts or by his own people, if the President wants to try to turn the military into a weapon, yeah, he may be able to go part of a ways towards doing that.

I read the New York Times piece you published today on the role of civil society. It doesn’t seem like you’re very impressed with what civil society has done so far. Do you believe it would still be a guardrail in a second Trump presidency?

The US has a pretty vibrant civil society and it played a pretty important role in the first Trump presidency. We created pro-democracy organizations, bankrolled by wealthy business people. There was a lot of societal pushback in 2016 and 2020.

We are concerned that a lot of church leaders and business leaders, politicians and university leaders, too, are just fearful and wanting to accommodate themselves. They’re trying to position themselves so that they don’t have it too bad under a Trump presidency. That kind of uber pragmatism, when democracy is on the line, is very dangerous. It’s not a great sign that somebody like [JPMorgan CEO] Jamie Dimon, who has a lot of influence in financial circles, is unwilling to come out and repudiate Trump as an authoritarian. This guy should be a business leader. The private sector should be standing up. Most CEOs are going to vote for Harris, but they’re unwilling to take a strong public position, and that may have some effect in the election, because voters still do respond to elites. If all the elites who say in private how terrified they are of Trump, if they were all to hold a press conference and say it in public, it would move the electorate enough to hand the election clearly to Harris. So it matters that these guys are behaving in such a fearful, hyper pragmatic way.

And it’s a bad sign for what will happen if Trump wins the presidency. It suggests that, much like we’ve seen in other countries like Hungary and Turkey, you’ll see an awful lot of business people willing to be co-opted and unwilling to bankroll opposition organizations. I think the private sector and our civil society is big, diverse, and wealthy enough that you’re going to see a pretty healthy opposition. But not enough. To see how influential university presidents, Catholic leaders, and business people remain on the sidelines is worrisome.

What is your best case scenario for a second Trump presidency?

The best case scenario is that we muddle through. That Trump lacks the energy or the ambition to fight too many fights, that his performance in office is somewhere between poor and mediocre, [Republicans] lose the midterm elections, and we have a dysfunctional four years. And he can’t get JD Vance or his son or whoever he wants to be the candidate in the 2028 election.

I think about who would run in 2028 since Trump is disqualified from a third term.

There’s a decent chance we’ll see a President Vance in the next four years if Trump is elected.

Mike Pence turned out to be one of those guardrails on January 6. Vance has said he would have approved the fake slates of electors.

Vance has a better grasp of reality than Trump, which, I suppose, is comforting. We know he’s a hyper pragmatist. He will say anything to further his ambitions. I mean, that’s true of all politicians, to a degree, but this guy really takes it to the next level.

There’s one world where this new rightwing Catholic ideology and blood and soil nationalism that he’s grasped on to in recent years, that he really believes that stuff, and that he’s pretty ideologically driven. You combine somebody with actual talent and discipline and skill with an ethno-nationalist ideology, and it’s scarier than Trump, because at least Trump is inept and has no discipline or patience.

Or, he may just want power, and may decide that the safest route, the more pragmatic route, is to sort of head back to more traditional Republican territory. I have no idea which of those two scenarios would happen.

Countries that have gone the authoritarian route, they still have elections, but they aren’t really fair elections, where people can actually express their preference or have it be accepted. Could that happen in the US in four years?

I have no doubt that if Trump has a horse in the 2028 election, that he will try to use the machinery of government to tilt the playing field, and that you may see some real abuse in Republican-controlled states. There could be a certain amount of unfairness. I don’t think there’ll be anywhere near enough unfairness that people will be not be able to express themselves at the ballot box.

The Democratic Party has the advantage of being a unified opposition party, which you don’t see in places like Hungary or Nicaragua or elsewhere. It’s an electorally viable party. It has a shitload of money. And that’s not going to change. Trump is not, I think, going to be able to do what Putin did, or Orban did, or Chavez did, which is squeeze the private sector, all the private sector so much that nobody is willing to finance the opposition. That’s a really critical thing to be able to do. You can really tilt the playing field when you do two things: when you get the media to self censor, either because you put your guys in control of the media, private or public, and you bully the private sector into not financing the opposition or media. When you can do that, then you really have tilted the playing field. I don’t think Trump’s gonna be able to do that. We may well slide into a mildly authoritarian regime. I think Democrats will be able to contest and and quite possibly win.

There are voters who are really disaffected. I’m thinking particularly of young voters who say democracy isn’t working for them. They don’t have faith in the system, and they’re thinking about voting for Trump, or not voting, or voting a third party, because they just want to burn the whole thing down and start over. Is there any plausible way that electing Trump does that? And a better government, like a Phoenix, rises from the ashes?

What do you mean? What Phoenix?

I don’t know. Is there a lesson from history that would show that if Trump wins, then maybe we can get something better out of it?

Usually, it’s worse. With a populist, you’re just pretending to burn the house. You’re basically just punching the establishment in the gut. Just watch them squirm. But most of the time, people elect a populist, and the populist is predictably mediocre or poor in their performance, and the really discontented people who voted for him end up in a slightly worse place. Once in a while, though, the populist will be so bad, it will kind of cure people of their democratic discontent, and they become a little bit more committed to democratic institutions.

But most of the time, it just makes things a little bit worse. That’s the best case scenario.

If the polls are right, the United States is headed for the largest Election Day gender divide in history. Women will cast a ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris by 54 percent to 42 percent, according to the latest New York Times/Sienna poll, while men will vote for former President Donald Trump, 55 percent to 41 percent. The gap is even more extreme among voters under 30, with 69 percent of young women picking Harris, but only 45 percent of young men choosing the vice president.

The march towards any kind of greater equality…has never been straight in this country.

Gender is, in many ways, the defining feature of this election, and the contrast between the candidates could not be more stark. There is Harris, who could be the first woman president, or Trump, whom a jury found liable for sexual assault. More critically for voters to consider, this is the first presidential election after the fall of Roe v. Wade. In choosing between Harris and Trump, voters are choosing between a candidate who wants to again make abortion legal across the country, and a candidate who refuses to rule out signing a nationwide ban. 

The issue is one of the ways this election has become a referendum on women’s place in society, a revisitation of progress made since the women’s movement. One party wants to put a woman in the White House, the other wants to send women back into their own homes to focus on childbearing. In a post-Roe world, this is far more than any symbolic referendum: Access to abortion is about health care, but also about a woman’s ability to decide the course of her life. As Trump’s campaign promises a return to a patriarchal society, his is not a vision of an equal society, where both sexes benefit from equal rights. Instead, it’s a zero-sum contest where one sex prevails.

Helping his cause is that, on the other side of the ledger, men also feel their future is on the line. Again and again, young males report feeling directionless and emasculated by modern society. They report wanting to be able to earn enough money to support a family, like their fathers or grandfathers did. Trump has courted these men by presenting himself as the epitome of masculinity, describing himself as the protector of women while associating himself, as he did at his convention, with wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off—a combination of paternalism and hypermasculinity that, if the polls are right, carries significant appeal.

To make sense of these currents, I spoke with Notre Dame political scientist Christina Wolbrecht, whose scholarship focuses on the politics of women’s rights. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Polls are showing a bigger gender gap this year than ever before. Do you have any reason to doubt this? 

The usual cause of the gender gap is not abortion, it’s not women’s issues. It really has more to do with different preferences among men and women on social welfare issues, on support for education, and health care. The truth is—and I’ll put a big asterisk on this, because we live in a post-Dobbs world—that men and women don’t vary dramatically in their preferences when it comes to abortion rights. 

The post-Dobbs asterisk is this: since Roe, the status quo has favored the pro-choice side. And until two years ago, I would have told you that there are single issue pro-life voters whose number one issue was stopping abortion. I would have told you, pre-Dobbs, that pro-choice people are not that way. The world has changed now. No longer do pro-choice people have the status quo. They are instead fighting to get it back. And they’re the ones that are desperate to change policy.

So now that the status quo has changed, we’ll see if that draws people to the polls or influences their vote.

Threat is a mobilizer. This is why, according to the NRA, they’re always coming for your guns, right? Because fear gets people to donate and vote. And now they really are killing women and denying them health care, and that may be more mobilizing.

When I think about the very real possibility of a gender gap bigger than previous cycles, it seems to me that abortion would have to be a big part of that, because there’s so much on the line for women: decisions about if they want kids and when, what they can afford, and what job they have—everything is wrapped up in that.

I think that’s all true, but that doesn’t mean that other things aren’t as or more important. So yes, you want to control your fertility, but you also live in a town where all the manufacturing has left and you don’t have access to jobs and you’ve been told it’s the fault of immigrants. Or you are really worried about foreign trade and how it’s affecting your company. At the end of the day, things like education and wealth and occupation have always driven vote choice. It’s not always clear to me that abortion can overcome those things. Among some people, it can be true that you want to be able to control your fertility and and have access to abortion, and you don’t like what’s happening to women in the states with bans, but you also don’t really like immigrants very much, or you hold sexist beliefs. 2016 was the first time that people’s views on sexism predicted whether they vote Democratic or Republican, and that has remained true since. Both men and women can be sexist. It may be the case that abortion will change everything. But if it does, that’s going to be unprecedented, because it hasn’t in the past.

Staying on that theme of sexism predicting your vote, I want to ask you about men. It does seem like men are moving toward Trump, particularly young men. Trump’s campaign stands for a restoration of traditional gender norms that is appealing to some men. The idea seems to be that men are suffering as gender roles are changing. 

There’s traditional sexism that’s like, ‘It’s better women stay home with the kids, and a man’s place is in business, and women are more naturally caring.’ It’s very gender stereotypical. What you were really talking about is gender resentment: ‘Women get stuff just for being women, women are always accusing men of stuff they didn’t do, I can’t tell jokes at work anymore because there are women around.’ That sense that the advance of women limits me, that’s to say, a man, is really powerful. And we’ve seen an association with [that] and voting for Republicans. It’s similar to racial resentment, which is a little different than traditional racism. It’s more focused on, again, ‘People get all these advantages I don’t get, and it’s unfair.’

After the 2016 election, surveys showed that people who voted for Trump were more likely to say, ‘It’s harder to be white, there’s more racism towards white people.‘

Racial resentment was an important predictor in 2016, as was gender resentment. That continued in 2020 and I absolutely, 100 percent assume it will continue in 2024. In general, men are more likely to hold those sorts of gender resentment views. There are a lot of women who feel like they lose out from women’s equality; it’s probably fair to say more with older women.

Resentment sexism seems to be cropping up more with younger men in terms of feeling like, ‘I have no future, I can’t make any money, I can’t buy a house, there’s no place for me in society right now.‘

There’s been talk for months of this idea that young men are becoming very conservative and young women are becoming very liberal. There are debates amongst the more statistically-minded pollsters about what the data really show. What’s interesting is that a lot of that isn’t so much the movement of men, but it is the movement of women.

Let me circle back to the two types of sexism you described. We’re seeing a lot of messaging around the resentment piece, particularly targeted at young men. There also actually seems to be a lot of what you described as traditional sexism. I think especially of JD Vance and his derision of childless cat ladies, his comments that the role of grandmothers is to take care of their grandkids and that women are more fulfilled by having kids. 

To make the connection to race again—because I do think they belong together—ten years ago, we talked about racial resentment as dog whistles. The dog whistles are gone. People are just coming out and saying outwardly racist things: ‘These people aren’t as smart. They’re rapists and murderers.’

You are absolutely correct that a lot of what has been brought to people’s attention, about JD Vance in particular, is exactly what you said. It’s out and out. ‘It’s better if women are at home and men are working. What’s wrong with Taylor Swift, she’s 33 years old and doesn’t have a child, because that’s women’s purpose in life.’ I don’t think it’s a mistake.

On the flip side, masculinity appears to be a big part of Trump’s draw. He has Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the convention, he talks about how he is going to protect women. That all seems like stuff in the traditional sexism bucket. There’s this clip of Stephen Miller, Trump’s close adviser, giving dating advice. He told men to “wear your Trump support on your sleeve” to “show that you’re a real man” and “not a beta.” The obvious message is if you want to be masculine, then you vote for Trump.

It’s a huge, huge piece of it. The gender resentment we were just talking about is a strong man who provides for his family, is the leader, is the decision maker. We’re seeing that a lot in this election. [There’s a] comparison to Tim Walz. Donald Trump’s the above-it-all, wealthy traditional man. Tim Walz has all these male skills. He’s going to fix your gutter. He coached football. He has a traditional family. But he’s also community-oriented. Nobody thinks Donald Trump ever helped anybody do anything. Whereas part of the Tim Walz brand is this idea that he’s always the guy who lends a hand.

He’s the Democrats’ alternative version of what it means to be a man who is not threatened by women.

I gotta tell you, I’ve been studying women in politics for 30 years. It’s insane. This is not where we were going.

What do you mean?

That I succumbed to one of the greatest myths in American history, which is this idea that the road to progress is straight and continually forward. I was 14 when the first woman was on a presidential ticket, and that was a big deal in my household. And so, of course, then we’re going to have a woman presidential candidate, and we’re going to elect the first woman vice president. And in some ways, that’s right. In the last three presidential elections, women have been at the top of one of the tickets in two of them. That’s remarkable, given our history.

But the reality, the thing that I know in my more experienced and knowledgeable brain, is that the march towards any kind of greater equality and breaking down hierarchies has never been straight in this country. We’ve made leaps and bounds on things, and then taken them back. That struggle over what is the future, and what does the United States look like, and what kind of people are we going to be, and how are we going to live? It has really been very pointed in this election.

There’s the narrative about women’s place being raising kids at home. But with access to abortion being also on the ballot, it’s not just rhetoric anymore. Maybe women will just have to stay home—or more women than want to.

Do people truly understand what is at stake in this election? Is it getting through to women that this really is limiting access—not just to abortion, but to birth control, to control over your children and how they’re raised, and all those types of questions? More broadly, that a Donald Trump presidency almost certainly leads to a dramatic corrosion of the state of American democracy. Rights and freedoms and liberties are also on the ballot. There are probably some psychologists that could explain how it’s hard for our brains to grasp something that significant.

I see that meme all the time showing women in Iran in the ‘40s and ‘50s, where they had all sorts of freedoms and were very cosmopolitan. And then a different kind of government comes in and shuts all of that down. If we’ve learned anything in the last eight years, it’s that the United States is not as special as we thought, that the erosion of rights is very, very real.

Nearly half of states accept mail-in ballots that were mailed by Election Day, but arrive sometime after it. No court has ever questioned this practice, which is squarely within the purview of states’ election authority. But in an attempt to throw out possibly thousands of mail-in ballots, the Republican National Committee launched a challenge to the practice in Mississippi. And in a stunning opinion released late Friday, an ultra conservative panel of three Trump-appointed appellate judges agreed.

With the possibility of the ultimate promotion so close, there’s no room for squishiness.

Georgetown professor Steve Vladeck called the opinion “nuts on its face.” UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen called it “bonkers.” Legal reporter Chris Geidner explained that the opinion is the logical equivalent of Swiss cheese: “It’s a ruling that has to write around all of the laws that allow the receipt of ballots before Election Day, the federal laws that allow the receipt of ballots after Election Day, and all other practices that could contradict with such a strict definition of Election Day.” .

At oral argument, the three judges actually appeared circumspect of the RNC’s arguments, chief among them how to square early voting with the idea of an Election Day that proscribes a single day for casting ballots. Observers predicted that even this far-right panel wouldn’t throw out decades of unquestioned election law. And yet, on Friday evening, all three judges did just that.

And when you think about it, that was always going to be the outcome.

The 5th Circuit judges who heard the case—James Ho, Andrew Oldham, and Kyle Duncan—were all appointed by Trump and have significantly shifted the appeals court not just to the right, but by putting it in service of a Trumpian agenda that rules in favor of Republicans and against the federal government. All three have appeared use their position as part of an ongoing audition for an appointment to the US Supreme Court. And a vital step of the interview is happening right now.

Donald Trump may be only a few months from re-taking office and replacing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are reportedly looking to retire under a Republican president. With the possibility of the ultimate promotion so close, there’s no room for squishiness. This is the time for ambitious lower court judges to make their case. As long as one of the three is willing to throw out thousands of ballots to help Trump, then of course the others will join in.

If there is any sign of restraint, it’s that they did not put their decision into effect. Instead, they sent it back to the district court in Mississippi to decide the next steps. So it is likely that this ruling will not directly affect the 2024 election. While the Supreme Court could promptly take up the issue directly on appeal, it’s unlikely that the justices will use the case throw out ballots that lawfully arrive after Election Day, now that mail voting has already begun and people are making decisions based on laws as they currently stand. The Supreme Court, by its own doctrine, is not supposed to change the rules mid-game.

But by keeping the issue alive and casting doubt on the legality of ballots that arrive after Election Day, the 5th Circuit may have provided grist to those who wish to sow doubt about the election outcome after November 5. Whereas the panel’s decision injects some uncertainty into the 2024 election, its most obvious impact, beyond the career prospects of Ho, Oldham, and Duncan, is on future elections. If the Republican Party continues to believe its best long-term interests lie in disqualifying mail-in ballots, then it is likely this issue will rise to the US Supreme Court under the next president. If the court follows this panel’s logic, it will bar thousands of ballots from being counted in the future.