• ��The Guardian:
• The New York Times:
• The Brennan Center:
• Time Magazine:
• The Guardian:
• The Atlantic:

To write about the complete illegality of US President Donald Trump’s cabal’s action would be redundant. No credible legal expert, no nonpartisan hack even tries to justify Trump’s action (there are a few *cough-cough* legal experts who may try, but they’d probably sell their own children to the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein to stay in the good graces of Donald…)

So, I’m not going to write about the illegality of Trump’s actions — it has been well covered by many more eminent than a pseudonymous ghost on the internet. Rather, it’s important instead to address Trump and his acolytes’ constant derision of legality, to explain why legality matters, not just to the public or the rest of the world, but to the US, and why ultimately the US may pay a long-term price for undermining both international and domestic law and principles. First, we shall look at FDR’s famous speech, the one that inaugurated US participation in WWII:

YESTERDAY, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

– US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressing Congress on December 8, 1941

The Japanese failure to deliver their intended declaration of war was due to incompetent planning and a failure to recognize that the very Sunday-morning torpor they planned to exploit at Pearl Harbor would make securing a last-minute meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull difficult. But crucially, it was this violation of international law that animated the US’s participation in World War II.

The US was, until recently, a polity where at least the appearance of compliance with the law in its international relations mattered. Even the invasion of Iraq was accompanied by efforts to legalize it such as the Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq�� of 2002 and Colin Powell’s efforts to secure an authorization from the UN Security Council; the US presence in Vietnam was accompanied by the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin ; and the war in Korea was accompanied by US Security Council’s 1950 82, 83, 84 and 85.

International law also played a major role in World War I, not just through the 1839 that established Belgium and guaranteed its neutrality — signed by Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia — but also through the US view that Germany had violated international law in its actions ������-à-������ the US.��

But the Trump administration has repeatedly asserted that it is not bound by international law, or indeed US domestic and constitutional law, but, in , “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me…” or as his savant, Stephen Miller : “‘We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, has also openly that no one has the right to thwart Trump, even on Constitutional grounds.

In an effort to put some intellectual basis behind this glib, “whatever I can get away with” mindset, in 2017, the then-Trump administration described it as “[a]n America First National Security Strategy … a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology,” which it unconvincingly last year.

Even a semblance of legality matters to the US

Fundamentally, the philosophy Trump’s clique is advancing is what Athenian historian and general Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” as well as Greek sophist Thrasymachus’s from Plato’s Republic that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger” and “injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.” But that philosophy and the Peloponnese war that it spawned shattered political, diplomatic, religious and cultural rules, laid waste to much of the Greek countryside, wrecked its cities and ended the “golden age” of Greek civilization — devastating its principal protagonist and beneficiary, Athens, and ultimately Sparta too.

Like Athens, the main beneficiary of the “rules-based international order” has been the US, just as the British Empire was a previous beneficiary. As far back as Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s earliest , The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and later The Wealth of Nations, he asserted that economic prosperity is contingent upon a stable legal framework and “tolerable administration of justice.” According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions , wealthier nations rank highest on the list of the least corrupt countries for the 2025–2026 period, primarily due to their strong institutions. In contrast, the countries at the bottom of the list tend to be uniformly poorer and often suffer from questionable enforcement of the rule of law, a point that Transparency International has :

Corruption and justice are closely linked in a complex and inverse relationship: where justice prevails, there is little room for corruption, but where corruption thrives, it throws the scales of justice out of balance.

A well-functioning justice system is meant to uphold the rule of law, protect human rights and ensure that all other rights and obligations contained in the law, including existing anti-corruption provisions, are appropriately observed.

Moreover, across the US, states perceived as the most corrupt — where justice is least consistently enforced — are consistently also the poorest, with the lowest per capita incomes.

Patterns of migration, internally in countries as diverse as the US, India, China and across Europe, also indicate the preference of the ambitious to move to places where the rule of law is an animating principle. This is a major cause of the migration that politically bedevils the governments of liberal democracies — it is the rule of law that makes their countries attractive to migrants and refugees, its promise not just of safety but prosperity.

It’s not just Shibboleths

It’s easy to just declaim, pompously, that “essential to global prosperity” and equally easy to announce, as one seemingly morally bankrupt commentator on (surely an oxymoron) did recently:

There is no such thing as international law. It’s a papered-over fiction to give some powers power and deny it to other nations. The truth is, what rules the world and has ruled humanity is the law of the jungle. It is power. It is leverage. And the United States maintains preeminent power in this world. There is no illegality to this intervention.

There was a time when conquest was celebrated, for God, for king, for glory, for Americans. There’s no such thing as stolen land. There’s no such thing as international law. There is only such thing as conquest. And if it serves Americans, then so be it. We rule the jungle. We are the lion.

Until you get mange, a broken tooth, a thorn in the paw… But there is broadly accepted international law, even if it is implemented in domestic contexts, and the US benefits from it enormously.

Take a simple, accepted principle of international law: . This principle holds that citizens or businesses of another country are entitled to the same treatment in a country’s legal system as one’s own “nationals.” No one has benefited more from this principle than large international companies, and none more than the US. Pretty much every country, when establishing diplomatic relations, makes the guarantee of national treatment a central part of the underlying Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation (FCN), and it is a central provision of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) rules (e.g., General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ), the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) , and the Berne and Paris Conventions. It also lies at the core of the treaties that establish the EU.

of the UN charter specifically prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state. In August 1975, 35 nations, including the US, Canada and most European states, confirmed the inviolability of Europe’s post-war borders in the , allowing for changes only through peaceful, negotiated agreement rather than by force, and the “penumbra” of the Helsinki Accords has effectively extended to South and Central America. It was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s breach of Article 2(4) and seizure of Kuwait that legalized the first Gulf War. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also flagrantly violated Article 2(4) when he invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the US under President Joe Biden vigorously opposed it, while Trump almost acquiesced.

The US can’t be “the Preeminent Power” everywhere

For all the “flexing” and muscular preening Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and various Fox News hosts like to engage in, it is infeasible for the US to be a preeminent power everywhere, to face down every challenger like, for example, President Xi Jinping in China. Rather, the US needs and wants its allies. But retaining those allies depends on soft power and a belief that they, too, benefit from the international system the US promoted after World War II — namely, that the US will, for the most part, adhere to international law.

Legality matters to the US’s most important allies, not just as a matter of public opinion. No matter how friendly those allies may seem to Trump’s agenda (and few genuinely are), all of the meaningful allies, beyond Israel, face domestic legal, constitutional and political constraints on what US adventures they can participate in.

When Trump in a meeting on Tuesday with a largely supine German chancellor, Friedrich Merz: “Spain has been terrible … We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain…” Trump was missing the crucial point — Spanish cooperation is not something Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez can just deliver, even if he were so inclined; Sanchez faces issues of legality, of obtaining legal authority for the demanded support.

Meanwhile, Trump’s attacks on British Prime Minister Karl Starmer for the UK’s limited support have, if anything, been helpful to a prime minister being heavily criticized for that support. The more important the US ally, the more likely it is to be a country with meaningful rule of law and basic constraints on its ability to participate in military aggression.

The US economy and its Treasury also rely on that principle, on the belief, for example, that foreign holders of US Federal Government Bonds will always benefit from “national treatment.” Members of the Trump cabal have brought this principle into doubt with the so-called “” floated by Stephen Miran, formerly chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, until his elevation to governor of the Federal Reserve.

Trump’s tariff games and his threats of random sanctions are themselves illegal under both international law (under WTO rules, as they violated the principle of equal treatment, and under the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement []), and, as the US Supreme Court , illegal and unconstitutional under US law. But what is more notable is they have done to the US economy, both short-term and long-term, with objective data showing they have in the US, leading businesses to delay or even cancel hiring and expansion decisions. Much of this is fundamentally about abandoning basic principles of the rule of law.

It’s a boring, perhaps pompous point, but modern states have built themselves around a legal order, around the idea that rules, fairly applied, matter. Iran, perhaps, was one example of a state where the rules did not matter, at least if you were part of the ruling group. But if the US now fully abandons legality, the end result will not be pretty for Western Democracies. Indeed, at this point, it is hard to see what the US can do in a post-Trump era to restore the idea that the US is an advocate for the very rules-based international order it has benefited from.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why Legality Matters: The Crucial Role of Law in Global Order appeared first on 51�Թ�.

So, the “Sinister Six” (as the conservative justices have been dubbed) followed a of suspending or revoking lower court injunctions against Trump’s blatant violations of the Constitution, pending a final ruling by the Supreme Court. The curb this can-kick would inevitably encounter was the need for the Supreme Court to eventually issue a final ruling. That curb came on February 20, when the Supreme Court ruled that US President Trump’s tariffs were unconstitutional.

The issue, the decision and the impact

In the case of Trump’s tariffs, they were facially contrary to the plain of the US Constitution:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.

– Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1

The Supreme Court’s decision was split 6-3. What is interesting about this decision is not necessarily the fact that the Supreme Court came to a decision, but the fact that the decision was not split along party lines. Even with the inevitable partisanship that comes with the Supreme Court’s makeup, three conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined the liberal justices.

However, our focus should also be on the three conservative dissenters — Justices Clarence Thomas, Brent Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito that Trump’s tariffs were, in fact, legal. Even though they were a minority, these dissenters point out a major issue with the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court continues to forgive Trump’s overreach, the trust the American public has in the Court will continue to decrease. Therefore, the Democratic Party will have more of a chance to garner support for “court packing,” or increasing the amount of justices to counter the heavy conservative majority. Court packing, if achieved, will deal a massive blow to the conservative side of the Supreme Court and also open up a host of legal problems.

Why now?

The Supreme Court has been politicized quite intentionally by the Republican Party in an effort to create a pro-business court. And, having secured their clear majority, the right-wing justices have spared no effort to secure their wish list, with a secondary objective of fulfilling the hard-right social objectives. Legal commentators in Washington DC, have, from time to time, explained that the so-called “Sinister Six” right-wing justices have expressed a “YOLO” — You Only Live Once — mentality as the driving factor in their approach since 2016. In other words, the Sinister Six believe they have this single opportunity to deliver the right-wing fever dreams of the Federalist Society.

Conservative justices have turned the Supreme Court into a partisan game where they force the ball to always remain in their court. One way they do this is by deploying the restrictive Major Questions — a principle in US administrative law that requires clear congressional authorization for agencies to address significant political or economic issues. The Doctrine was invented under President Barack Obama and applied almost exclusively to frustrate Obama and, later, President Joe Biden.

Another way the conservative justices retain their hold on a partisan court is through the deployment of the permissive Unitary Executive , which states that the President of the US has sole authority over the executive branch. It is employed pretty exclusively to forgive overreach by Trump. But as a result, US public opinion of the US Supreme Court by mid-2025 and, since then, has almost certainly fallen further.

The Supreme Court as a central issue in the 2028 election

“Fixing the Supreme Court” is, unsurprisingly, a central demand of Democratic voters and constituencies. Many of whom advocate for “,” i.e., giving a presumably Democratic president in 2029 the opportunity to expand the Supreme Court and appoint enough liberal justices to reverse what are perceived as the many excesses of the Court of Chief Justice John Roberts’s decisions on abortion, voting rights, gerrymandering, campaign contributions, antitrust law and more.��

The situation presents an interesting point from US political history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) first presented the “court-packing” through the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. This was a legislative initiative proposed on February 5, 1937, to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 justices. However, despite his control of the House and Senate, the bill failed to pass. Perhaps the primary reason FDR’s court-packing plan failed was that, despite the unpopularity of the right-wing Supreme Court by 1936, FDR had not even hinted at the possibility of court-packing in the 1936 elections. Thus, he lacked a political mandate.

By contrast, with more than three years to go, the current Supreme Court (packed by former Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell) has openly gone too far. It’s a “racing certainty” that a Democratic Presidential candidate, as well as the vast majority of congressional candidates in 2028, will suggest court packing. Unless the Supreme Court performs a dramatic volte face, the Republican majority on the Court may be doomed.

To have upheld Trump’s facially unconstitutional tariffs seems to have struck Roberts, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett as going just too far. Supporting the tariffs risked creating too great a mandate for court-packing — so, abruptly, they decided that it was time to use the Major Questions Doctrine to thwart Trump. But given Trump’s rants and threats in response, it seems unlikely that the issues around the Court will go away.

[The editorial team updated this piece on March 13, 2026.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post US Supreme Court Blinks: Partisan Justice and the Court-Packing Debate appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Recently, I endured a couple of weeks of people outside the United States explaining to me, indeed lecturing me, on what the Trump administration’s cabal’s strategy, objectives and purposes are; to which I wearily responded that what makes President Donald Trump and his claque of close advisers so frightening is the lack of any clear strategy, purpose or thought-through objectives — it’s a random walk.

A random walk

A is a mathematical model of a path made of a series of random, independent steps, like a drunkard’s unpredictable journey, used to describe phenomena from particle movement () to stock market fluctuations, where each step’s direction or length is chosen by chance, often with equal probability, but with statistical patterns emerging over many steps.

There is a pattern, but it’s bizarre. Trump and his courtiers are dogmatic single-issue zealots who reject any facts, any information that might contradict or undermine their latest idée fixé — half-formed notions drive them — a collective gestalt frequently detached from objective reality. Any random thought may fall into abeyance for a while, but it will abruptly reappear, more dogmatically, irrationally and relentlessly than before.

Take, for example, the US mid-term Congressional elections. One should not discount the possibility of Trump trying to cancel the 2026 US Congressional midterms, even though he lacks the power to do so and attempting to cancel them might guarantee the impeachment and conviction he fears. Trump has repeatedly maundered: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election…”

“How we have to even run against these people — I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’”

His explanation of why is: 

“You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me …. I’ll get impeached.”

When asked about this, the toxically vacuous White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt resorted to her usual ad hoc explanation — Trump was :��

“The president was simply joking … He was saying, ‘We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously.”

As usual, neither Trump nor his courtiers grasped the constitutional reality of what would likely happen if he and the Republicans tried to cancel the elections, thus accusing his critics of dour humorlessness (an approach they are now re-utilizing in response to Trump’s flagrantly racist portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys).

A US Congressman’s term officially ends at noon on January 3rd of the odd-numbered year following their election, as established by the ; a Senator’s on the sixth year. So all of the House ceases to be members of Congress, unable to vote after January 3rd of 2027 unless re-elected; one-third of the Senate, 33 Senators, will also, unless re-elected, cease to be members of the Senate — 20 Republicans and 13 Democrats.

Now, envision a situation where Trump attempts to cancel the 2026 midterms. There’s a basic problem, he can’t … it’s not up to him whether the election happens or not, it’s constitutionally entrusted to the individual US :��

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Solidly Republican “Red States” might obey, maybe even Republican counties and municipalities would, but Democratic “Blue States” and marginal states would go ahead with their elections. The result would likely be, as of January 4th, a massively Democratic House that would instantly impeach Trump (and Vice President JD Vance), and a Senate that would be circa 50–54 Democrats (based on current polling) and 33 Republicans out of 80–84 members. In such a Senate, it would only take 53 votes (remember the Red States that obeyed Trump’s cancelation order would have elected no one to replace their term-expired Senators) to convict.

Random policies, random strategies to implement them

The problem is that Trump’s “jokes” turn into reality. His with Canada was driven by his demand that Canada become part of the United States (an outcome that, inter alia, would mean electoral doom for the Republican Party.) In , his first administration spun his earliest comments about annexing Greenland as not serious… and by late 2025, it was yet another idée fixé. Notions that initially appear completely unserious, even facetious, rapidly turn into hard policies — and trade and tariff wars.

In general, the adoption of policies by the US Administrations follows a process — admittedly, within the Bush administration, “stove-piping” (bypassing established procedures for review by the national security apparatus) became common, leading, for example, to the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation’s multiple failures in 2003–8 — discarding and rejecting input from experienced subject matter experts from various disciplines provide on decisions, plans, etc.

But the Trump cabal has abandoned any remote semblance of process — if Trump or his courtiers, or those with access to him, have a notion or scheme, there appears no process for considering necessity, means or consequences — it becomes an instant obsession of the administration, that does not go away, but keeps reappearing, driving ever weirder paroxysms. There are so many examples: Canada as the 51^st state, abandoning Ukraine, seizing Greenland, random , blocking , persecutions, meritless prosecutions, the Nobel (any peace prize)…

It has been widely pointed out that the 1951 Defense of Greenland with Denmark granted the US the right to expand its military presence to pretty well any level necessary for its defense from, say, Russia or China — including setting up additional bases (although by all accounts an assignment to the Thule base is considered somewhat of a punishment detail in the US military). Somewhere along the way, Trump developed an obsession with Greenland — it could literally have been anywhere, Iceland, even Ireland.

These obsessions then rapidly escalate — so now Trump announced a 10% tariff on those countries that took steps to obstruct a US military invasion of Greenland in a surprisingly and unusually coherent (for Trump) , albeit one filled with bullshit. The tone and the complete sentences point to someone other than Trump ghost-writing it — most likely White House advisor Stephen Miller; they reflect his signature boorishness. Trump then backed off the threat to invade in yet , but the nature of his administration suggests this obsession will reappear in yet another.

What “random tweet” is next?

This is the central frightening aspect of the Trump administration— no one can predict what its latest “brain-fart” (and I use the term advisedly) will be, the next “random fucking tweet.” Demand Iceland become the 52nd State — Trump’s incoming ambassador just “” — did that come from Trump? Ireland too? Surrender more of Ukraine to Russia? Offer Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China in a fit of pique? Invoke the and send regular troops to occupy Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? A travel ban on the entire EU?

What’s frightening about the Trump administration is not merely its lack of any meaningful constraints from the Supreme Court or the supine and groveling Republican majority in Congress, but the lack of any predictable or identifiable logic to its behavior.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Assuming they cannot perform sufficient, effective and non-counterproductive vote suppression, there is a risk with extreme gerrymandering (apart from the ethical issues) that you might end up creating more seats vulnerable in a wave election against you than any that you might gain.

How gerrymandering works

Although there isn’t active gerrymandering in the UK, as in the United States, the UK uses first-past-the-post electoral districts, and the last elections there are illustrative of what might happen in the US. In the UK in and , relatively small swings in the popular vote led to a remarkable number of “safe seats” changing hands, first Labour, then Conservative.��

To break it down, the Conservatives in 2019 surged to 365 seats (of 650), a majority of 35 based on 43.6% of the popular vote, which imploded to 121 with 23.7% losing two-thirds of their seats for a less than half collapse in their vote. Meanwhile, Labour fell to 202 in 2019 with 32.1%, then more than recovered to 411 in 2024 with just 33.7%, more than doubling their seat haul for a mere 1.6% increase in their vote, i.e., a 5% increase in their total. Thus, a small increase in Labour’s vote share propelled Labour to a substantial majority, surpassing what the Tories secured in 2019 — indeed, 46 more seats with 10% fewer votes. The central factor, of course, was the collapse of the Tories’ vote, magnified by first-past-the-post; Labour didn’t have to be popular, just not as unpopular as the Tories. It’s not who voters love, it’s who the voters are angriest with.

Back in the US, the danger in the Republicans’ mathematics is part of how gerrymandering works — it tries to create districts with enough reliable voters for one party, say reliable Republican voters, to ensure that the seat is noncompetitive, that it will only ever return a Republican. 

Gerrymandering works by “packing and cracking” — pushing many of the (presumed) consistently Democratic voting demographics into just one potential House-seat of several, and spreading (presumed) reliable Republicans out to create majorities in as many of the remaining districts as possible — the latter also with supposed to be low-propensity Democratic voting groups. The data that gerrymandering depends on is the decennial census combined with voter behavior in the most recent elections.

Dependence on voter behavior — what if the Republicans are very unpopular?

The problem is that the more extreme the gerrymandering, the thinner you have to spread the presumed-to-be-reliable Republican voters, and the more you depend on Democratic voters not turning out. This inevitably reduces many of their “safe majorities.” But it also depends on how consistently voters will repeat their previous behavior in the next election — it assumes stability from one election to the next.

In a wave election, those assumptions can break down — gerrymandering might have turned what were believed to be safe Republican seats into marginal ones during a big wave; the “sea-wall/levee is overtopped,” leading to electoral collapse.

Moreover, assumptions predicated on voter behavior in previous elections are “carrying a lot of freight,” but if something happens to change that behavior — boom! It also raises the question of whether voter behavior in past elections was atypical or a durable trend — say in 2024…

In Texas, a lot seems to be riding on Republican assumptions about how the Hispanic population will vote; in the this month’s general and special elections, the gains in Hispanic votes that US President Donald Trump and Republicans secured in 2024 appears to have (this too may be a long-term problem — running against the Catholicism of former Presidential Candidate Al Smith in cost Republicans Catholic voters all the way into the 1950s and 60s. How badly and permanently have Hispanics been alienated by the Make America Great Again [MAGA] Republicans’ actions and rhetoric?)

In addition to 2024 voting patterns, the gerrymander is also based heavily on data from the 2010 census, which will be six years old by November 2026, in a state with large and rapid population and demographic shifts. Moreover, Texas has historically had unusually low turnout, 56.6% in 2024 versus 63.9% in the US as a whole — were something to “goose” that turnout, such as voter anger at Trump and the Republicans…

Republican strategy and Trump’s influence

Although it appears extreme, Republican gerrymandering has, until now, been cautious and carefully calculated to limit the impact of a wave election, but, spurred by Trump’s demands, they may be going too far and have massively exposed themselves. That may leave few options except for blatant voter suppression — but this too brings its own risk of backlash, of spiking angry turnout amongst the groups targeted for suppression. 

Historically, incumbents — especially those in safe seats — have had a lot of influence over districting and gerrymandering (state parties, too, are happy to keep their safely gerrymandered majorities). They are, in fact, a key effective, if not very visible, opponent of overly increased gerrymandering because it necessarily reduces their safe majority, makes them work harder in elections and puts their seat at greater risk. But Republican incumbents are more terrified of Trump and his backing a primary candidate in their district than they are of their natural antipathy and caution about excessive gerrymandering.

Anyone remotely familiar with, say, Texas politics, or North Carolina (to cite two heavily gerrymandered states) would say that in 2001, the Republicans there already seemed to have pushed the gerrymandering math as far as they safely could get away with.

Trump, in his demand for increased gerrymandering, has nullified and silenced incumbent objections while paying little attention to the mathematics — but those Republicans are obviously more scared of a Trump-backed primary opponent than the general election. That may cost them.

Voter suppression’s limits

Notably, a lot of voter suppression relies on making voting more logistically and bureaucratically difficult — through obstacles such as voter identification requirements, registration hurdles, voter record purges and logistical challenges like limiting or banning mail-in ballots or having polling stations that are poorly located with limited hours (which can be hard for hourly workers to find time to vote). 

The problem with these voter suppression efforts is that they could disproportionately affect MAGA constituencies, making it harder for Republican voters to cast their ballots. This is especially true because the Republican base within that group tends to include older voters, hourly workers, workers without a college education and people who will find voter suppression obstacles harder to navigate than younger, increasingly more educated voters who are breaking heavily Democrat. 

Moreover, despite Trump’s preening, voter suppression has mostly to be instituted at the state level — and, if there is a wave election in 2026, Republican losses in statehouses might preclude effective voter suppression measures by 2028 — even more so if Republicans lose the national House and Senate. Under current law and voting arrangements, states organize and administer elections, even Federal elections, and within those states, municipalities (cities) and counties play a significant role. Even with the current Republican control of Congress and, despite the Supreme Court disgracing itself with obvious political partisanship, voter suppression would be very hard to do at the national level.

A national infrastructure usable for voter suppression simply does not exist and would take time to create (Trump has largely gutted the Federal Election Commission, by firing the Democratic Commissioner and driving two relatively moderate Republicans to resign, it no longer has a quorum, it can’t do anything). Ideas Trump is militantly pressing for, like say banning postal voting at the federal level would:

— Likely have to be executed at the state level and predominantly in Republican states;

— Fall heavily on elderly, infirm and rural voters, constituencies Republicans rely on.

— Risk a backlash amongst regular postal voters, like say the US military.

Efforts to intimidate by, say, deploying Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to polling stations would be predicated on the myth of noncitizens voting; they’d be ineffectual at suppressing these nonexistent votes, but very effective at enraging Latino, Black and other voters. The Army, the National Guard and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are not likely to be sufficiently partisan to be effective or willing to engage in intimidation.

Indeed, the central risk of obvious, clumsy efforts at voter suppression is that it’d turn voting Democratic into an act of defiance, a middle finger extended to the Grand Old Party (GOP). Meanwhile, crude voter suppression and gross gerrymandering may antagonize independent voters — witness the huge majority the “Proposition 50” retaliatory redrawing of California’s districts in response to Texas unexpectedly — in August 2025, almost two-thirds of those asked in opinion polls opposed it, but it secured a vote of almost two-thirds by November. Voters are angry, but are they particularly angry at Republicans more than Democrats?

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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There’s also somewhat of a theme to Rish!’s serial gaffes, a sense that he’s not as clever as he and his advisors think he is — and they are, too. Further, the press and public are far from as stupid as presumed.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for those MPs — the survivors or beneficiaries of the Conservatives’ of those who failed to be enthusiastic Brexshitters. They are broadly incompetent, mendacious or delusional. Most Brits (closer to the story than US enthusiasts) today regard Brexit as an utter fiasco, with as many as thinking it a mistake and only 28% a good idea. As many as are in favor of the UK rejoining the EU and a similar 28% are opposed.

Well before the Brexit referendum, Rish! was a proponent of leaving the EU — or rather, like a fantasy girlfriend, the EU of tabloid (and Boris Johnson) myth, not reality. But the “Get Brexit Done!” election of 2019 was such a massive victory for the Tories that, at the time, there were widespread predictions of unassailable Conservative majorities for a decade or more, two or even three election cycles into the future. They reckoned without the spectacular incompetence and provocative clumsiness of the three successive Tory Prime Ministers. Sunak was supposed to be a safe pair of hands after Liz Truss famously to outlast a lettuce — but will still manage the third-shortest premiership in modern history.

To be fair to Rish!, the prognosticators of 2019 ignored many things. Like that decades of underinvestment in the UK economy had left it in a parlous state. Or that the austerity policies of previous Tory governments had failed to shrink UK deficits, because they shrank growth faster than any reduction in spending. Or that the Brexit referendum result was heavily a protest vote against the social and economic consequences of that austerity, which Sunak as Chancellor mostly continued.

Tory privatization has turned into a long-term fiasco, too. One example is privatized water and water treatment, which has resulted in 83% of British rivers with, well, shit! The National Health Service, as close to a secular religion in Britain was and is similarly afflicted by underfunding and a dearth and of EU citizen healthcare professionals as a result of Brexit. They also ignored what a talentless claque those Conservatives willing to enthuse about Brexit were. Post-2016 cabinets have been largely stuffed with buffoons, ignoramuses and Moreover, Brexit and its predicted adverse consequences (aka “”) have increasingly come true. It is, as many UK commentators note, the central campaign neither Tories nor Labour will mention.

But is Rish! trying to lose?

However, dealt a bad hand, Sunak has played it with a level of incompetence that leaves many wondering if he’s actively trying to lose. Start with the announcement: Despite having a new, large, plush and scandalously expensive press briefing available to him, Sunak strode out to a lectern in the street outside Number 10 to announce the 4th of July election date. Oblivious to the umbrellas the gathered press hacks were huddling under, he was by a near-biblical downpour as his words were drowned out by a protestor with a loudspeaker playing Labour’s 1997 election anthem: “THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER!” Most of his cabinet had only been informed moments before. Though his parliamentary private secretary, Craig Williams MP, appears to have known that date for three days, allegedly using that insider knowledge just in time to place a winning with bookmaker Ladbrokes on it. If he did, it’s a crime under British law.

But the fiasco wasn’t over. He followed it with a fear-mongering speech — he mentioned “security” eight times — at London’s Excel conference center, which was forcibly attended by around 100 drafted Tory political aides and advisors. But not before a reporter from the usually Conservative-leaning Sky News had been unceremoniously from the event!

The next day, at a warehouse rally, he took softball questions from two Tory white-collar councilors posing as manual workers — to be promptly found out by the local press — then traveled on to Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. This inevitable comparisons and questions as to whether he was captaining a sinking ship. But in pursuit of what? The Conservatives have no candidates in Northern Ireland!

Rish! then briefly appeared to recover in a TV debate with Labour leader Kier Starmer, where he repeatedly accused Labour of planning a tax rise of £2,000 per family. He smugly insisted on its veracity as independently costed and verified by the UK Civil Service. The glow lasted until the next morning, when a from the head of the Civil Service was released, stating that the number was by no means independent. There’s no kind way to put this: Sunak was caught loudly lying. Compounding the misery, the UK’s independent statistics agency is now investigating the Tory claims.

A perk of competent premiers seeking re-election is the opportunity to pose as a statesman bestriding the world stage. Rish! was afforded a golden opportunity: the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy invasion. This wasn’t foregone by Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, the newly crowned Charles III — even Volodymyr Zelenskyy and many others. Moreover, it offered perhaps the last opportunity to pose with centenarian survivors of one of the most pivotal moments of World War II, to borrow their honor for a moment. Sunak, though, found better things to do: Rish!ng away in a helicopter, he gave a pre-recorded interview to Sky News that he wouldn’t postpone. He his opponent, Starmer, the photo-ops with Presidents Biden and Macron, German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the President of the EU Council and 15 other national leaders, not to mention his new King. The next day, Rish! and the cabinet were forced on an for the disrespectful gaffe.

Rish!’s wealth doesn’t help

Could it get worse? Yes! Although his elders were Asian immigrants, essentially economic refugees from East Africa — rendering Sunak’s enthusiasm for deporting more modern migrants to Rwanda ironic — his parents were well-off. They were a doctor and pharmacy-owner, and his grandfathers were an accountant and a UK tax official awarded the MBE. They sent him to the expensive Public (i.e. private) School Winchester, a more discrete version of Eton, where he was “head-boy.” In the pre-recorded Sky interview that showed a week later, Sunak made efforts to suggest he had a deprived childhood. When an example was sought, the best he could come up with is that his parents denied him a Sky satellite television ! The suffering!

Additionally, the adult Rish!, a former Goldman banker and hedge funder, has a personal north of $100 million. Combine that with the value of his Infosys heiress wife, and his family worth is nearly $1 billion. He regularly uses it to finance expensive commuting by helicopter to the family’s country mansion, supplemented by a large penthouse in Santa Monica with views of the famous pier. (It is widely rumored that the Sunaks plan to decamp here after losing the elections.)

Rish!’s by far the richest member of the UK Parliament. His denials are not helped by widespread rumors that the Sunak daughters are already enrolled for the fall semester in an expensive private school in California, coming from an eye-wateringly expensive school in England. People are suspicious that Sunak chose not to wait until the last possible election date so the family could be safely installed before school started.

In a strange way, though, Rish! may be rescuing the Tories by inviting an even huger defeat. The biggest long-term electoral threat is a less than total Labour victory; the Liberal Democrats’ price for a coalition would be electoral reform and proportional representation, which most political analysts anticipate would doom the Conservatives as currently composed in future elections. Of course, those prognosticators may be ignoring the desperate state of the UK’s finances and economy Labour will likely inherit, or how long they can blame the Tories for that mess.

There is also little room for Labour complacency about its long term electoral prospects. Recent polling shows that though likely to win, both the “Tories and Labour [are] on course for [the] lowest of the vote since 1945.” Labour may win a large majority, but like the Conservatives in recent elections, with a minority of the vote. Proportional representation would be hard on traditional Labour, too, for this reason is opposed by its left wing.

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