It’s not just you. It really is impossible to keep track of all the political news. But one thing is pretty reliable: When Donald Trump has a bad week, he will use social media to make a presidential announcement.
Last week was one of those bad weeks. President Vladimir Putin of Russia landed in America as if he had V.I.P. tickets to a private Taylor Swift meet-and-greet. He made no concessions in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Trump belatedly realized that he had been played. Plus, that Jeffrey Epstein thing just won’t go away.
So, true to form, the president took to social media on Monday and announced that he would issue an executive order banning mail-in voting in time for the midterm elections. Like a lot of things Trump says, it is hard to know if we should be storming the streets to protest or keeping our eyes on the other things going on — Epstein! Russia! War! Tariffs! ICE!
Just how do we know which of Trump’s moves matters?
We don’t.
But despite his record-low approval ratings, Trump seems bullish on the G.O.P.’s chances in the midterms. What makes him so confident? Is it because this Supreme Court enables his policy agenda? Or is it because he surrounds himself with sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear? Or maybe he thinks he knows something about the midterm electoral math that the rest of us don’t.
Patterns matter. And a pattern is starting to emerge around the midterms.
Trump does not have a theory of political change in the traditional sense, but his second-term executive orders do tell a political story. One, signed in March, telegraphed the administration’s intention to “protect the integrity of American elections.” That order embodies the right’s lie that elections have been “stolen” in this country, and it is a clear example of how Project 2025 has made prosecuting so-called election fraud a policy objective.
Trump’s latest, a missive on mail-in voting, is just moving that same ball forward. Whether the executive order ever materializes or is enacted, it matters that when the president reaches for a strategic distraction, he chooses one that matches Project 2025’s goals. If you want the CliffsNotes version of America, you can just read Project 2025, which is a blueprint for how to codify conservative rule in this country until time immemorial. Maybe you cannot bear to read more than a summary. You can still see its fingerprints in these kinds of patterns.
Another piece of that pattern is the Republicans’ dogged attempts to redraw electoral maps before the midterms. In June, Trump’s political team urged Texas to redraw its districts to benefit the G.O.P. When the state obliged in early August, a political spectacle followed as Texas Democrats fled the state to avoid voting on new congressional maps and one of the state’s Republican senators called on the F.B.I. to track them down. Democrats needed permission slips and a police escort to leave the Texas Legislature while it was in session. Those new Texas districts are now poised to be drawn, and Republicans in Ohio, Missouri and Florida have promised to follow suit. Regardless of whether they succeed in their own gerrymandering schemes, their ambitions represent an undemocratic wave of disenfranchisement.
We can add the Roberts-led Supreme Court to the pattern, too. Just before the midterms, the justices will once again hear a case that was crafted to challenge the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority voters. Court watchers reading the tea leaves of the court’s conservative majority are not hopeful. It is very possible that it will interpret the 14th Amendment such that Black enfranchisement discriminates against white voters. That decision would be disastrous for fair elections at any time. But in this political moment, it would provide legal cover for activist state legislatures across the country to follow Texas’ lead.
Many states are already ready to do just that. Lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills since 2024 aimed at changing, restricting and in some cases undermining voting, according to data collected by the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab. The bills that would “interfere with election administration” are a mixed bag. The good news is it is still easier to propose a bill than it is to pass one — only four states of the 22 in this group have enacted such a bill.
The bad news is that many of the proposed bills aimed at election administration sound boring but are actually radical. These bills don’t issue poll taxes or literacy tests. Instead, the most telling of them aim to make voting harder by making it more onerous for election offices to meet new rules, overwhelming them with expensive, laborious technical requirements. This is how they catch both the bird in your hand and the one in the bush. Onerous oversight for a nonexistent problem makes voting harder. It also seeds a nasty undergrowth of doubt should an election tally not go their way.
This is how you disenfranchise voters without the provocation of Jim Crow-era water hoses and violence.
Once you see these pieces of the pattern, the president’s decision to once again send the National Guard to occupy an American city — this time, Washington, D.C. — takes on a different valence. Trump has long taken a special interest in crime, real or imagined, happening in Oakland, Calif.; Washington; Chicago; New York; and Los Angeles. These are places that run up the Democrats’ tallies during national elections. They also all have Black mayors.
By sending in the National Guard, or threatening to, is he bullying a Black-led city or punishing a city that did not vote for him or getting ahead on intimidating voters ahead of election season?
We can’t know why for certain. But we don’t need to know or agree on a why to know that whatever the reason, it is a part of the pattern.
All these things — executive orders, gerrymandering, a favorable Supreme Court, legislation-happy state legislatures and a National Guard presence — matter as much as their implementation, because the pattern can reveal intention. Taken together, a reasonable person can conclude that the right is enacting a coherent, strategic plan to make midterm elections appear fair, even if they’re designed so that Republicans will almost surely win. The Democratic Party has little in the way of a cohesive strategy to respond, not just to the midterms but also to the very idea of U.S. election safeguards. Should it pack the court? Propose its own legislative agenda for elections?
For Democrats, at least, it’s unclear what they want voters to demand. This isn’t bringing a knife to a gunfight. This is looking at the sky for fireworks when the bullet casings are landing at your feet.
It’s worth noting that co-opting voting rights like this is not a historical aberration. Lobbyists, policy wonks and other nongovernmental actors have co-written papers like Project 2025 to influence the law for a long time. But that’s exactly the point. The reversal of civil liberties, the activist court, the clearly articulated white Christian fascist rhetoric: None of it is a historical aberration. If we can say that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political ideology was organized under a single banner and even give it a name, the New Deal, it is notable that we will not say that Project 2025 is Trump’s political ideology. That is true in almost all major areas of policy, including electoral governance. We don’t win anything by pretending that a pattern is not there.
Whether Americans can elect a majority of Democrats in the midterms or stop Trump from running for an unconstitutional third term, what matters is that one political party is waging war on free and fair elections.
Sometimes we get lost in debating definitions. Is this authoritarian or fascist or politics as usual? Definitions matter, but sometimes political patterns are so violent, so grossly immoral, that we absolutely should pay attention to them, even if the obvious name for them terrifies us. Especially if it terrifies us.
The pattern also tells us something about what will matter in the future. The president may use executive orders for political spin. They may be alternately silly, unconstitutional and incoherent. But they are data points in a bigger state of play than this administration or these midterms. Before the 2024 election, Trump told a crowd of his supporters that if they voted for him they wouldn’t have to vote again. Was it a joke? Was it literal? Was it sarcastic?
Those are the wrong questions.
The only question is: Does it matter?
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
The post We Can Disagree on Trump’s Motives. But a Pattern Is Still Emerging. appeared first on New York Times.
