1). “As Qatar Officially Leaves Iran War, Questions Arise if They Will Boot US From Biggest Middle East Base in Possible Historic Contraction of American Global Military Power, 1945-2026: The Era of American Military Hegemony Is Over”, Mar 28, 2026, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
2). “Stalin Fought A War Using Soldiers Whose Families He Was Starving: A two part investigation into regime durability. What keeps dictators in power, what brings them down, and what decades of research tells us about the fight we are in.”, Apr 23, 2026, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
3). “Coalition Collapse: Four Frameworks on How to End Authoritarian Regimes: A primer for understanding regime durability, how these regimes actually fall, and what we can do about it starting immediately”, Apr 25, 2026, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
4). “Update on the New Mexico Truth Commission's Investigation into Zorro Ranch: Don't get too excited.”, Apr 18, 2026, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, at < https://alisav.substack.com/p/
5). “Confirmation of What I've Been Saying: Top Intelligence Advisor Tells the DOAC Podcast That Epstein and Maxwell Were/Are Israeli Intelligence Assets or Operatives and Everyone in US Leadership Knows It and Is Hiding It From the People.”, Apr 29, 2026, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, at < https://alisav.substack.com/p/
6). “Fifth Circuit Decision Directs FDA to Restrict Mifepristone Access: If allowed to stand, this decision would be the most sweeping threat to abortion since the overturning of Roe”, May 1, 2026, Anon, Guttmacher Institute, at < https://www.guttmacher.org/
7). “ ‘Lines are going to change’: Trump DOJ confirms it will target minority voters nationwide after Supreme Court ruling”, May 1, 2026, Yunior Rivas, Democracy Docket, at < https://www.democracydocket.
~~ recommended by desmond ~~
Introduction by desmond: Christopher Armitage points out, in Item 1)., “As Qatar Officially Leaves ….”, as he deftly outlined what is at stake for the U.S. Empire in the Iran War. Positions worldwide that mostly fell into the U.S. lap in 1945 and in the years afterward, as the British and French Empires were gradually destroyed; are being lost in a severe crisis of confidence among the various U.S. Allies and Client States in the Levant and elsewhere. The U.S. military responded to orders to attack Iran with alacrity, fulfilling the demands of Israeli far-right and Netanyahu, but took little effort to protect the interests of the Gulf States, or for the general populace of the U.S. The result was the disastrous destruction of 13 military bases in the various Gulf States, along with a large amount of expensive and difficult to replace radar and other high-tech equipment. In Item 2)., “Stalin Fought A War …. ” Armitage discusses the fact that authoritarian / cult political movements will tolerate unbelievable privation in service to their “Leader”, and we can expect that sort of loyalty here with the core of the Trumpistas. In Item 3)., “Coalition Collapse: Four Frameworks ….” Armitage discusses the sorts of strategies and tactics that have worked against authoritarian regimes in the past. The complexity of the domestic political situation and the depravity of the far-right in the U.S. is discussed in Item 4)., “Update on the New Mexico ….”; and Item 5)., “Confirmation of What ….” that both discuss the case of the missing young-women and the New Mexico ranch where Epstein and his customers might have killed at least 2 young foreign women. The military, political, and social aspects of these events are all mixed in with each other and are hidden from the public.
The Fifth Circuit court, the farthest right-wing court in the U.S., made its awaited ruling against the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, as reported by Item 6)., “Fifth Circuit Decision ….”. In no surprise the 6 member right-wing majority ruled against the enlightened practices allowing women to get the pills through tele-medicine, the internet and the USPS. Of course appeals will be made immediately, but it is impossible to say what the Supreme Court will do. The most current legal conditions for the state are posted in Map 1)., below. The time might have arrived for the progressive people of the U.S. to not obey the dictates of the high court. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, ruled against what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one report on this is posted in Item 7)., “ ‘Lines are going to change’:....”. The U.S. ruling class is ready to fight a number of political and socioeconomic battles at the same time.
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As Qatar Officially Leaves Iran War, Questions Arise if They Will Boot US From Biggest Middle East Base in Possible Historic Contraction of American Global Military Power
A domino just fell on American global military power, and this one has been holding up the whole structure.
Qatar, which hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the Middle East, has pulled back from its arrangement with the federal government in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Personnel have been advised to leave Al Udeid, with Iran having warned every neighboring country hosting American troops that it would strike those bases if the federal government attacked. The US evacuated Al Udeid twice in two months. Qatar has stated more than once that it does not want the federal government launching attacks against Iran from its territory. A country that spent thirty years anchoring its security to American military presence is now putting distance between itself and that presence, because the presence stopped meaning safety and started meaning target.
This is not a tactical adjustment. This is the visible fracture point of an eighty-year arrangement, and Qatar is not the only country doing the math right now.
Al Udeid is the forward operating headquarters for US Central Command, which oversees American forces across the entire Middle East. It houses around 10,000 troops and functions as the hub through which the federal government projects military power across the region. It is not a listening post or a refueling stop. It is the nerve center. And it has now been evacuated, partially struck by Iranian ballistic missiles, evacuated again, and surrounded by a network of installations taking damage at a rate that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Satellite imagery, verified video, and official statements identified at least 17 damaged US military and diplomatic sites across the region, including at least 11 American bases, as Iran's retaliatory strikes forced Central Command to disperse thousands of personnel away from primary installations.
Qatar's Advisor to the Prime Minister and Official Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Majed Al-Ansari, said publicly: "Total annihilation of Iran is not an option. We will live next to each other and we will be neighbors and we have to find a way to live next to each other." He added something even more damning: "One of the key outcomes of this war is that it revealed the breakdown of the concept of the regional security system in the Gulf region. This system was based on certain principles, and it became clear during the current war that many of these principles have been disregarded." Qatar's own government is announcing the end of the security architecture. On the record.
An Iranian attack on Qatar's Ras Laffan gas facility wiped out about 17 percent of the country's LNG export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue over the three to five years repairs will take. Qatar is the world's largest LNG exporter. The federal government parked its war machine on Qatar's soil and Qatar is paying for it.
Qatar's Prime Minister said directly: "This war must be stopped immediately, because everyone knows who is the biggest beneficiary and the cause of the conflict."
To understand what is actually ending here, you have to go back to where it began.
In 1945, the United States emerged from the most destructive war in human history as the one major power that came out stronger than it went in. Its cities were intact. Its industrial base was running at full capacity while Europe and Asia rebuilt from rubble. And it had spent four years helping save the world from fascism at enormous cost, which earned it something no empire has ever simply taken: genuine trust. Nations did not hand the federal government 750 military bases across more than 80 countries because they were conquered. The United States operates approximately 750 bases in over 80 countries, at least three times as many overseas bases as all other countries combined. They offered those arrangements because they believed American power would protect them. That belief, freely given, is what made American global military hegemony possible. It was never just aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. It was the trust underneath them.
The federal government spent that trust down across eighty years, war by war, choice by choice. And then it launched strikes on Iran from Qatari soil, without Qatar's meaningful consent, and left Qatar to absorb the retaliation.
It is the United States' Gulf partners that have borne the brunt of retaliatory strikes because of the presence of multiple military facilities on their soil. American deployments in Jordan and a lingering presence in Iraq have drawn Iranian strikes as well. Iran did not destroy the premise that hosting American troops means security. The federal government destroyed it, by using those bases to start a war and then watching its host nations take the missiles. Analysts have concluded that American bases have proven to be a source of insecurity for Gulf countries, that US military presence made it too easy for the federal government to go to war while dragging the rest of the region into the conflict, and that the Iranian response has turned large-scale American military presence from a perceived strength into a dangerous liability for Middle Eastern states.
The costs are now spreading far beyond the Middle East, which is where this stops being a regional story and becomes a global one. The Pentagon has begun moving parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery from South Korea to the Middle East to repel incoming Iranian strikes. The missile defense system protecting the Korean peninsula, one of the most volatile borders on earth, has been pulled out and shipped west because American bases in the Gulf are taking fire and there is not enough equipment to cover both commitments at once. South Korea's president publicly opposed the removal and acknowledged he lacked the standing to stop it. That is the definition of overextension: every theater demanding what you promised, and the promises finally exceeding what you can deliver.
Every government currently hosting American troops is watching this and running the same calculation Qatar just ran. Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense treaty with Pakistan in September 2025, suggesting the United States is no longer viewed as the sole potential source of security. A core Gulf partner is quietly acquiring a backup. Instances of host nations altering the terms of, or outright revoking, US basing rights have occurred several times in recent history. It has happened before in isolated cases. What is different now is that the credibility failure is happening simultaneously, visibly, across every theater, on every screen in every capital city that currently has American troops on its soil.
America's basing strategy has been on auto-pilot since the end of the Cold War. Nobody designed this arrangement so much as accumulated it, adding bases after 9/11, expanding after the Iraq War, layering obligation on top of obligation across decades until the whole structure required more than any country can deliver when every commitment starts demanding attention at once. That moment has arrived. You can rebuild a damaged base. You cannot rebuild the moment when nations handed you the keys because they believed you would protect them, and you used those keys to start a foolish and evil war they didn't vote for and couldn't stop.
This is the end of an era. The era that began in 1945, when American power was trusted by enough of the world to make this scale of global military presence possible, is closing in 2026 in Qatar, with ballistic missile craters and a host nation showing us the door.
The world and Americans have watched the U.S. style for-profit war crime industry and will not mourn its death. That reaction is understandable and not wrong. But what replaces American military hegemony is not yet written, and anyone who tells you they know what international geopolitical stability looks like on the other side of this moment is telling you more than they can actually know.
1945-2026. RIP US Geopolitical Military Dominance.
Authors note: the title has been altered from it's original to more accurately reflect the situation and explicitly acknowledge the fact that Qatar has not yet formally ordered US withdrawal. The articles body has not been altered.
Citations
Al Jazeera. (2026, January 14). *US withdraws some personnel from Middle East bases amid Trump Iran threats.* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/14/some-personnel-advised-to-leave-us-military-base-in-qatar-report
Al Jazeera. (2026, March 24). *QatarEnergy declares force majeure on some LNG contracts due to Iran war.* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/24/qatarenergy-declares-force-majeure-on-some-lng-contracts
Ata, H. (2026, February 22). *US withdraws hundreds of troops from Qatar and Bahrain as Iran tensions rise.* Gulf News. https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/us-withdraws-hundreds-of-troops-from-qatar-and-bahrain-as-iran-tensions-rise-1.500451377
CBS News. (2026, January 14). *U.S. reduces some personnel at airbase in Qatar amid U.S. threats to target Iran.* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-reduces-personnel-al-udeid-airbase-qatar-threats-iran/
Congressional Research Service. (2024). *U.S. overseas basing: Background and issues for Congress.* Congress.gov. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48123
Defence Security Asia. (2026, March). *13 U.S. bases in Middle East nearly uninhabitable after Iran missile strikes.* https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/us-bases-uninhabitable-iran-missile-strikes-centcom-force-posture-2026-war/
Ecanow, N. (2026, January 16). *It’s time to rethink Al Udeid Air Base.* Foundation for Defense of Democracies. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/01/16/its-time-to-rethink-al-udeid-air-base/
Euronews. (2026, March 20). *Qatar PM after Gulf energy attacks: ‘This war must be stopped immediately.’* https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/20/qatar-pm-after-gulf-energy-attacks-this-war-must-be-stopped-immediately
Habtom, N. K. T. (2026, March). *Iran war shows perils of America’s Mideast bases.* Responsible Statecraft. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-gulf-bases/
Iran International. (2026, March 24). *Qatar says Iran war must end through diplomacy, no mediation role.* https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603248432
National Priorities Project. (2025, February 27). *Shut them down! Closing military bases is long overdue.* https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2025/02/27/shut-them-down-closing-military-bases-long-overdue/
Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (2026, March 24). *Advisor to Prime Minister: Qatar not engaged in US-Iran mediation, backs diplomatic efforts to end war.* https://mofa.gov.qa/en/qatar/latest-articles/latest-news/details/2026/03/24/advisor-to-prime-minister--qatar-not-engaged-in-us-iran-mediation--backs-diplomatic-efforts-to-end-war
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Stalin Fought A War Using Soldiers Whose Families He Was Starving: A two part investigation into regime durability.
Stalin survived an engineered famine that killed millions of his own people. Saddam Hussein survived two catastrophic wars, a decade of sanctions, and a no-fly zone over a third of his country; he stayed in power until the United States military personally removed him. Putin has survived twenty-five years of economic shocks, a failed invasion, mass emigration of his own educated class, and a mercenary uprising that marched on Moscow. Netanyahu survives coalition collapses every eighteen months and hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in the streets demanding his removal. Orbán survived sixteen years of European Union pressure, frozen funding, and one failed opposition movement after another, until a week ago, when one finally did not fail. Trump is one year into his second term.
These six men are not the same. They are not interchangeable. They came to power through different routes, they hold power through different mechanisms, and they will leave power, if they leave power, for different reasons. But they are all trying to answer the same question, and so are the people who study them. What decides regime durability.
Remember that phrase. Regime durability. That is what we are investigating here, and it is going to be the anchor for everything that follows because understanding regime durability is of existential importance for humanity.
There is academic research on this. Decades of it. Political scientists have built frameworks specifically designed to answer the question of why some authoritarian leaders survive conditions that would end a normal politician a dozen times over, while others finally break. The great news is that you don’t need a PhD in political science to understand this research. All it takes is walking things through in plain language, and that’s the goal here. Why? Because we can’t keep this knowledge cordoned off in academia. We increase the likelihood of democratic outcomes by educating ourselves, and our community, on the underlying principles of power, influence, and political change making.
My hope with this piece, and with the series it opens, is not just to educate but to equip others to educate. I want to put the research backed, real world use case tested, and ultimately replicatable toolkit in your hands. Because understanding regime durability is how we evaluate what is happening right now, and it’s how we figure out where our energy and resources are most effectively applied. By the time we are done, you will be able to look at any news cycle, any Trump administration move, any state attorney general filing, any protest, any cabinet appointment, and understand what it really means. You will have the vocabulary to explain it. Maybe you will convince your neighbors. Maybe you will convince your mayor. Maybe you will convince your attorney general. Maybe you will convince your family. Maybe you will give people hope. Maybe we will inspire them. Maybe one person who reads this is going to change everything. Or maybe we all will.
Here is what we are going to prove across the next two pieces. Things getting worse does not inherently shake his base. Dictators do not need good approval ratings to stay in power. And the goal Trump and the GOP have, the actual goal, is to be a install single party GOP rule.
People generally have an implicit assumption in the US that if conditions get bad enough, the population turns on the leader who caused the conditions. That is the story we tell ourselves about democracy, and it is the story we are counting on to save us. The grocery bills will get high enough, the state violence will get brutal enough, the corruption will get obvious enough, and the base will finally crack.
To start, let’s explore an extreme case. It’s important to begin there because that’s how we discern the outer edges of circumstances. Think of it like starting a puzzle by putting together the outer edges to orient the rest of the picture.
In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization and grain requisitions produced mass starvation across the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian famine, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor, killed somewhere between 3.9 and 5 million people in 1932 and 1933. At the peak in June 1933, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 a day. Soviet police files record at least 2,505 people sentenced for cannibalism in Ukraine across those two years, and historians agree the actual number ran far higher than what the courts processed. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry has since digitized 1,022 surviving case files, with roughly a thousand more destroyed by Soviet authorities in 1956. The Soviet government printed posters across Ukrainian cities with a single instruction for starving parents. To eat your children is a barbarian act.
And Stalin’s hold on the population survived it.
Peasants who had watched their neighbors die, who had buried their own children, who had lived through an engineered famine, wept when Stalin died in 1953. Ukrainians served in the Red Army throughout the famine and after it. When Germany invaded in 1941, millions of Soviet citizens, including Ukrainians who had lived through the Holodomor less than a decade earlier, fought and died for Stalin’s government. Ukrainian Communist Party membership held and in some regions grew during and after 1933. None of this proves universal devotion, and all of it was coerced. But all of it is inconsistent with a population that had been able to turn material harm and suffering into internally driven regime change.
How is that possible? How does a population watch the state starve them, bury their own dead, and still march behind for the man who did it?
The historians who spent their careers on these questions have some answers. Sheila Fitzpatrick at the University of Sydney and the University of Chicago built much of her scholarship on exactly this problem. In Everyday Stalinism and Stalin’s Peasants, she worked through private diaries, letters, and Soviet archives that opened after 1991, and she found a pattern that showed up again and again. Ordinary Soviet citizens redirected blame toward the enemies the state named. They blamed kulak saboteurs. They blamed foreign capitalist encirclement. They blamed Jews, Germans, Americans, Poles, whoever the loudspeaker named that week. A significant share of them blamed local officials for corruption while preserving their faith in Stalin himself. Historians have a name for this last pattern, because it shows up across Russian and Soviet history. They call it the good tsar, bad boyars phenomenon. The leader is good. The leader’s subordinates are the ones ruining everything.
People ask “how can Trump still have a 35% approval rating?” If they want the answer then they just have to go to a construction site or a jiu jitsu gym and they will find people who still have adoration for their dear leader using identical “good tsar, bad boyar” thinking.
Orlando Figes did something similar in The Whisperers, where he interviewed hundreds of families across the former Soviet Union and worked through their private archives. He found the same pattern Fitzpatrick found. The suffering was real; the explanation was manufactured. And as a result, the devotion survived the contradiction, because the story the state told about why people were suffering was more psychologically available to most people than the truth that the state was the one making them suffer.
If you want to understand why your favorite politicians often choose outdated half measures, just read that last paragraph again. It’s less disruptive psychologically to accept even ludicrous lies when it’s convenient or dangerous to step outside approved lanes.
This is the mechanism. When a population’s material conditions collapse under a leader’s direct policy choices, the leader does not automatically lose control. The leader keeps them by naming an external enemy and repeating the name until the lie becomes the less burdensome than truth. The pain gets rerouted. The farmer who buried his family under Soviet policy spent his grief on America, on Germany, on the Jews, on whoever the loudspeaker told him to blame.
We are watching a version of this machinery running right now in the country we live in.
The grocery bill goes up and the blame lands on immigrants. The factory closes and the blame lands on China. A child dies from a preventable illness and the blame lands on trans people, on DEI hiring, on whatever slop was dropped in the fox and friends feed trough that morning. A mother is killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis and the blame lands on her rather than on the federal officer who pulled the trigger. The eight men who own the feed never appear in the story. They are the ones who designed the rerouting, and they are the ones who benefit from it. Every grievance that lands on an immigrant or a trans person or a Chinese factory is a grievance that did not land on them.
This is why the powers that be want to ensure that suffering alone cannot save us. Under the GOP plan, the suffering, chaos, war, and even starvation actually help autocrats retain power, because a starving and poorly educated public whose youth are dying in foreign wars is less capable of effective resistance.
So how do regimes end? What actually makes them fall?
That is what part two is for. In the next piece, we walk through four prominent academic frameworks that political scientists have built to answer exactly that question. Selectorate theory, which explains what Trump is actually trying to do when he purges the civil service and captures the Justice Department. Competitive authoritarianism, developed by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way at Harvard and Toronto, which explains how regimes like this actually fall when they fall, and which just watched its own prediction come true in Hungary last week. Erica Chenoweth’s work at the Harvard Kennedy School on civil resistance, which has measured exactly what it takes to break an authoritarian regime from below and tells us how close we already are. And the framework I have been building around The Taxonomy of State Postures in Response to Federal Authoritarian Capture, which is built specifically for the American constitutional system and offers a nonviolent pathway for states use existing mechanisms to respond effectively when federal institutions have been captured. Together, these four lenses give us all the puzzle pieces. Part two is where start filling in the puzzle and seeing the picture it reveals.
So what do you do next as one of The Existentialist Republic’s readers? We have three full length books and a dozen booklets all available for free with download links below. You can also check out our four pieces of model legislation that are shared directly with legislators and activists. You can join the Discord community of nearly 1,000 organizers (when we open back up invitations).
Thanks for being here.
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Coalition Collapse: Four Frameworks on How to End Authoritarian Regimes
Academics who study authoritarianism for a living have spent decades building frameworks that explain how regimes consolidate, how they fall, and what reverses them. Most of us living through this do not have those frameworks. That gap is part of how authoritarian regimes win. The fix is simple. We learn what the scholars already know. Then we know what to do.
Some of you already have pieces of the picture. You may have encountered Erica Chenoweth’s work and the 3.5 percent rule, though there is far more to her research than the pop science version has shared. Selectorate theory might be familiar if you are a CGP Grey fan or if you have read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. Steven Levitsky’s name you may know from How Democracies Die or from his more recent work on competitive authoritarianism with Lucan Way. And if you are a regular reader here, you already know the framework I have developed and published academically around Oppositional Federalism and Soft Secession.
Few people in American political discourse have pulled all four into one picture. These are four separate bodies of academic work, built by different scholars across different decades, answering different questions. This piece pulls them together, explains each one clearly, and shows how they connect into a single map of how authoritarian regimes rise, how they fall, and what Americans can do about our homegrown autocrats. All of this should be delivered in language that is clear whether you have a PhD in political science or you are still in high school.
An important definition up top: regime durability is how long a system of power lasts, and what makes it robust or fragile. Political scientists have spent decades studying what keeps authoritarian leaders in place and what finally removes them.
The first framework we will explore is called selectorate theory, and it comes from a 2011 book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith called The Dictator’s Handbook. The core insight is simple enough to explain over a beer. Every leader, democratic or authoritarian, depends on the loyalty of a specific group of people to stay in power. Bueno de Mesquita calls this the winning coalition. In a functioning democracy, the winning coalition is huge, because you need millions of votes to stay in office, which means you have to deliver things that millions of people actually want, like roads, schools, hospitals, and safe streets. In a dictatorship, the winning coalition is tiny. It might be a few hundred generals, oligarchs, and security service chiefs. The dictator does not need to please the public. He needs to keep those few hundred people both paid off and scared.
Smaller coalitions produce more durable regimes.
This is why Putin has survived twenty-six years of disasters that would have ended any politician. His winning coalition is small, maybe a few hundred siloviki and energy oligarchs, and they are kept loyal through money from Gazprom and Rosneft plus the credible threat that defectors die, often in horrible ways. The Russian public’s approval of him is essentially decorative. If every Russian voter turned against him tomorrow and the FSB stayed loyal, he would still be president.
Now watch what Trump is doing and ask yourself what it looks like in selectorate terms.
The civil service has been purged of non-loyalists. Federal law enforcement got the same treatment. Ethics offices are shut. Loyalists run the FBI, the Pentagon, and the IRS. A Supreme Court majority operates under unitary executive theory, which holds that Republican presidents have unlimited authority while Democrats face every procedural and judicial obstacle the system can manufacture. Each move reduces the number of people whose cooperation he needs to govern. Each shrinks the winning coalition. That is the pattern of a leader building the machinery to not need your vote.
The second framework is called competitive authoritarianism, and it comes from Steven Levitsky at Harvard and Lucan Way at the University of Toronto. Their 2010 book argued that a whole category of modern regimes are neither full democracies nor full dictatorships. Elections happen. Opposition parties campaign. Most of the formal institutions of democracy stay in place. But the incumbent bends the rules hard enough that he almost always wins. He captures the courts and the media. He redraws districts to guarantee his party wins. His enemies face prosecution. He stays in power through elections that international observers call free but not fair.
Hungary under Orbán was their textbook case. And in October 2025, Levitsky told a Harvard Kennedy School forum that the United States has now joined the list. In his own words: “We have very clearly descended into at least a mild form of what I would call competitive authoritarianism.”
Two months later, in a December 2025 piece in Foreign Affairs with Way and Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote that the United States in 2025 “ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany, or even Argentina are democracies.” He also wrote the line that changes everything: “Trump’s authoritarian offensive is now unmistakable, but it is reversible.”
That word, reversible, is why this piece exists.
Levitsky and Way’s framework is built specifically to explain what selectorate theory explains poorly, which is the cases where authoritarian-leaning incumbents actually lose. They identified three conditions that converge when these regimes fall. First, the opposition unites behind a single credible alternative. Second, international linkage, particularly economic linkage with democracies, constrains how far the incumbent can go in crushing the opposition. Third, the patronage machine loses the money it needs to keep the coalition loyal.
Hungary had all three. And on April 12, 2026, the theory’s prediction came true in real time.
Péter Magyar was a former Fidesz insider. His ex-wife Judit Varga had served as Orbán’s justice minister until she was fired in a scandal that, per Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton, “was probably Orbán’s fault, but that he blamed on her.” Magyar defected in 2024, built the Tisza Party, and won in a landslide earlier this month. Whether his government dismantles the Fidesz machine or becomes a different version of it is a question the next four years will answer, not this article.
What matters for our framework is what the structural moment in Hungary proves. The EU had frozen roughly 28 billion euros of structural funds over rule-of-law violations, starving the Fidesz patronage network that ran on EU money redirected to Orbán’s son-in-law and a handful of connected oligarchs. That is condition three in the Levitsky and Way framework. Hungary’s EU membership meant Orbán could not simply arrest Magyar or disappear him without triggering consequences that would make things worse. That is condition two. And Magyar’s defection from inside the machine, carrying a critique that only an insider could credibly deliver, created the conditions for opposition unity that Hungarian politics had failed to achieve for sixteen years. That is condition one. All three conditions converged, and the regime lost an election it had designed to be unloseable.
The turnout on April 12 hit the highest level since Hungary’s transition to democracy. Magyar won. And Levitsky, asked to comment, said this: “Oppositions can win despite a tilted playing field. Democracies are facing many challenges in many parts of the world, but so are autocracies.”
That is the hopeful part. Here is what he said in the next breath.
Defenders of democracy, he warned, should not take too much comfort from Orbán’s loss, because in some ways Trump has already been more oppressive. He specifically cited Trump’s use of the Justice Department to investigate political opponents and ICE’s shooting deaths of protesters, calling them “steps that Orbán’s government never took.”
The Harvard political scientist whose framework best explains how Orbán fell is telling us that the American case is already worse than the Hungarian one on the specific measures that predict whether a regime consolidates or falls. Scheppele has been making a parallel point for over a year. She noted that Orbán, in the early years of his rule, cut Hungarian university funding by about 40 percent, because universities are the bastion of independent opposition in a hybrid regime. “Orbán’s main weapon of attack against all independent institutions, including the universities, was always financial,” she said. “That’s exactly what we’re seeing here.” Look at what this administration has already done to American universities in one year, and then ask yourself whether we have fifteen years of Orbán’s runway or whether we are already past it.
An important note here that rescinding funding is a powerful tool. When we develop non-tax revenue streams, meaning money a state earns through public banking, investment funds, royalties, and state-owned enterprises rather than through federal grants, we are able to create a shield to protect us from many of the autocratic weapons.
The third framework evaluates tipping points that create regime change. Erica Chenoweth at the Harvard Kennedy School spent years building the largest dataset in the world on how authoritarian regimes fall. With Maria Stephan, they published Why Civil Resistance Works in 2011 and has updated the research since. The core finding has come to be called the 3.5 percent rule. When active, sustained nonviolent participation by 3.5 percent of a country’s population enters the field against an authoritarian regime, that regime essentially always falls. Every case in the dataset that hit the threshold succeeded. In the United States, 3.5 percent is roughly twelve million people.
What Chenoweth measured is not the moral case for nonviolent resistance. They measured the mechanism. In their Harvard Gazette interview, they described four elements that define a successful nonviolent campaign. “The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained. The second thing is that the movement needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites.” Their research found that at the 3.5 percent threshold, defections from the regime’s pillars begin to happen. Leaders in business, media, and politics start to shift. Police and military personnel become less willing to carry out orders against their own neighbors. Members of the ruling party start to calculate that the regime is going down and they need to be on the right side when it does. That is selectorate theory described from the opposite angle. The winning coalition breaks.
Here is where we actually stand. On June 14, 2025, the No Kings protests drew approximately five million participants across more than two thousand locations. On October 18, 2025, that number rose to approximately seven million. On March 28, 2026, eight million Americans took to the streets across more than 3,300 sites, making it the second-largest single-day protest in American history. The trajectory is climbing. We went from roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent to approximately 2.4 percent across three successive mobilizations. We are two-thirds of the way to the threshold in single-day turnout. What we have not yet done is sustain it.
If you have looked at the No Kings protests and thought to yourself that this is a useless parade of hashtag resistance, that this is the same crowd marching once and going home while the regime only gets stronger, I want to take that critique seriously. Because Chenoweth takes it seriously too. Their own research has found that nonviolent movements in the 2010s were larger than in previous decades and statistically less effective, and they named the reasons. Movements relied too heavily on protest as the only tactic. They failed to build coalition discipline before mass mobilization. They did not maintain unity across waves. Her updated work explicitly finds that boycotts and strikes often do more damage to an authoritarian regime than street demonstrations, and that movements with higher participation from women have substantially better success rates.
Maria Stephan, her co-author on Why Civil Resistance Works, put it plainly. What the research found to be decisive, Stephan wrote, was “not simply a few mass demonstrations that brought a lot of people out into the streets, but sustained campaigns that drew together diverse groups of people from different parts of society; that were able to expand the repertoire of nonviolent actions beyond symbolic protests and street demonstrations to include sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and other acts of non-cooperation; that integrated what Gandhi referred to as the ‘constructive program’ of self-governance and community care.”
“Could you imagine,” Chenoweth asked in their Harvard Gazette interview, “if 11.5 million people were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.”
The prescription is mass noncooperation sustained for nine to eighteen months. We fill those institutions. Everyone does, in some capacity. A governor in a different way than a city clerk, a city clerk in a different way than a resident. Sustained refusal from the people inside the machinery can break it.
This is why the No Kings March numbers matter and also why they are insufficient on their own. A country that can put eight million people in the streets on a single day has the raw capacity to generate the 3.5 percent threshold Chenoweth measured. But raw capacity is not the same as organized, sustained, diversified resistance. We have answered whether Americans will show up. We answered it three times in less than a year, each time in larger numbers. What we are still answering is what happens in between the marches, though millions of Americans are showing up in increasing numbers for the boycotts, strikes, refusals, parallel institutions, legislative pressure campaigns, that represent sufficient sustained noncooperation and opposition to break a regime before the world is destroyed.
The fourth framework is my own work, published academically on state-federal postures in response to federal authoritarian capture, with more scholarship in progress. The first three frameworks are theories of how authoritarian power operates and how it falls. Mine is the bridge from that theory to 250 years of American constitutional law and federalism in action.
Every posture in this framework has been sitting in the American constitutional order since the founding, and most of them have been used, by states across the ideological spectrum, in response to federal policies those states judged wrong, illegal, or incompatible with the safety of their residents. Governors have always held emergency powers and National Guard authority. State attorneys general have always held independent criminal authority that no federal pardon can reach. Mayors have always been able to refuse federal cooperation. State supreme courts have invalidated federal laws on state constitutional grounds and released federal prisoners. What did not exist was a map. The framework sorts the postures into tiers and shows how they can be concurrently applied, so that a governor in California and a district attorney in Philadelphia and a sheriff in Vermont can all represent influential pressure points against the same autocratic problem. There are a lot more of us than there are of them, and this applies that logic to the thousands of governmental agencies and levers that exist at the state, local, and even personal level.
The baseline is cooperative federalism. Call it tier zero. States share data with federal agencies, state law enforcement assists federal enforcement, state administrators implement federal policy. Most states on most days and in most ways. The framework starts counting at the point of departure from that baseline.
Tier one is uncooperative federalism. The state withholds cooperation with federal enforcement. A sheriff declines to hold a person for ICE. A state jail refuses to let federal agents operate inside it. A state legislature passes a law directing state police to leave federal enforcement to federal officers. Northern states did this throughout the 1840s and 1850s with Personal Liberty Laws that refused to let state officials or state jails assist federal slave-catchers. California did it in 1996 when it legalized medical cannabis while federal law still classified every gram as a Schedule I felony. Eleven states are doing it right now with laws limiting ICE partnerships, and the Trump DOJ has publicly listed those jurisdictions specifically to apply pressure. The posture is not partisan. Second Amendment sanctuary counties refuse to enforce federal gun laws they consider unconstitutional. Marijuana sanctuary states do the same in the other direction. What ties them together is the decision by a state government that its people are better served by the state declining to be a limb of federal enforcement. Many Democratic governors, legislatures, mayors, and city council members are currently engaged in Tier 1 response. Think of it as “we don’t have to help you do things.”
Tier two is soft secession, also known as financial independence. The state builds parallel financial and social infrastructure to protect its residents from federal corruption, aggression, and exploitation. Twenty-four states built entire legal cannabis markets, with state licensing agencies, state tax stamps, state testing requirements, and state retail regulations, creating a parallel commercial system where the federal one refused to exist. California has positioned its state-run banking infrastructure, its independent climate compacts with other states, and its separately negotiated trade relationships with other countries as exactly this kind of parallel system. Every state with a Medicaid expansion covering people the federal government tried to leave behind is doing tier two work. When the federal government becomes a threat to the people living in a state, the state builds what its residents need outside the federal government’s reach. Think of this tier as “we don’t need you and won’t let you hold us back.”
Tier three is oppositional federalism. The state uses its sovereign authority to go on offense against federal officers who break state law. During Prohibition, state courts let murder prosecutions proceed against federal agents who had shot into cars they claimed were transporting liquor, in cases like Castle v. Lewis and Ex parte Huston. In 1906, the Supreme Court allowed Pennsylvania to prosecute two federal soldiers for killing a civilian at a federal arsenal. Today, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown is suing the sheriff of Adams County for cooperating with ICE in violation of state law. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has said on the record that any ICE agent committing a crime in his jurisdiction will be charged and prosecuted under state law that no presidential pardon can reach. A state attorney general indicting a federal agent is not hypothetical. It is American constitutional practice with a paper trail going back over a century. Think of this tier as “Hey, bad guys. We are coming for you.”
Tier four is constitutional non-compliance. The state uses its sovereign authority to nullify federal law within its borders and, when the situation demands, uses state power to stop federal action on state soil. Wisconsin did this in 1854. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, ordered federal prisoners released through state writs of habeas corpus, and freed Joshua Glover from federal custody. The federal government used the identical constitutional posture in 1957, when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to enforce school desegregation over the resistance of the governor. Same tier, same constitutional mechanism, wielded by different sovereigns, both in the direction of protecting people. Twenty-four states are operating in this tier right now on cannabis, licensing and regulating conduct the federal Controlled Substances Act defines as a felony, and the federal government has chosen not to enforce because the political cost of enforcement is too high. That is what tier four looks like when a state is willing to use it and the federal government is not willing to pay to stop it. What a state should do with this posture today, against mass detention without due process or the operation of federal concentration camps within its borders, is not a new question. It has American precedent pointing toward protecting people. Think of this tier as “there are literal concentration camps, whether it’s me, or me and my friends, or the mayor ordering the city police, or the governor activating the national guard, we are using every power we have to stop horrific things from happening.”
The tiers stack and overlap. A state can, currently is, and definitely should be operating in multiple tiers simultaneously, because the federal regime is operating across multiple pressure vectors simultaneously. A state that licenses cannabis, limits ICE cooperation, builds its own banking infrastructure to fund universal healthcare, and charges a federal agent who commits assault is operating in tiers one, two, two, and three all at once. California is currently operating to various degrees in all three tiers. It isn’t yet at the sufficient pitch, but it is a necessary start.
The framework does not hand anyone new authority. The authority has always been there. What the framework does is make the patchwork legible so actors can plan their moves, so that a governor can see which tier to operate in and what escalation looks like, a district attorney can plan prosecutions that stack with what his state attorney general is doing, and a sheriff can see that his daily cooperation decisions are part of a larger structure and adjust them accordingly. The American constitutional order has been operating in this taxonomy for 250 years. Most Americans have never seen the map. The map is what turns thousands of disconnected decisions by governors and attorneys general and mayors and sheriffs into a coordinated national strategy for reversing authoritarian consolidation and ultimately restoring democracy without needing to wait for a single, and stealable, election.
Now put all four frameworks on the table at the same time. What comes next is the synthesis. It is an argument, built from the academic scholarship, rather than a claim any of the four scholars has made in exactly these terms.
Selectorate theory tells us what the regime is trying to do. Shrink the coalition until only a few hundred people matter, and use the tools of government to make every other American irrelevant to staying in power. Competitive authoritarianism tells us that this kind of regime falls when three conditions converge, which are opposition unity, international constraint, and patronage collapse. Chenoweth’s research tells us what the public mobilization piece of opposition unity has to look like in numbers, which is 3.5 percent sustained, and tells us the mechanism is defection from the regime’s pillars. The Oppositional Federalism framework is the bridge from that theory to American practice, mapping the sovereign postures city, local, and state governments already hold onto a structure that tells every actor which tier their moment requires and what the next move is.
This is regime durability as a fight. The regime is trying to extend its life by shrinking its coalition. We are trying to cut its life short by breaking the coalition it has already built. Every executive order, every firing, every state AG filing, every protest you attend or skip, every billionaire who stays silent or speaks up. Every one of those moves is a deposit or a withdrawal from the regime’s durability, and now you can see the ledger.
Levitsky’s warning is the one that should shape every decision we make from here. Trump is already doing things Orbán never did. We do not get to copy the Hungarian playbook and wait for 2028, because the 2028 election may not look anything like the April 2026 election in Hungary, and we cannot count on the rigging being only partial by the time we get there. The work has to be happening now, at every level, in every state, in every institution. Ten thousand complaints filed with fifty state attorneys general is progress. State legislatures passing non-cooperation bills bring us closer still. District Attorneys investigating and charging high level members of the regime is even more progress still. Every institutional refusal, every citizen complaint, every sustained nonviolent action adds up into the combined force that breaks the regime’s coalition before the regime can finish shrinking it.
We are the durability variable now.
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Update on the New Mexico Truth Commission's Investigation into Zorro Ranch
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The New Mexico Epstein Survivors Truth Commission is 8 weeks into existence. So, what do we know?
We know the names of the cadaver dogs. And that’s about it.
Shamus. Gingersnap. Greta. Mini. Four dogs, names released to the press, deployed to Jeffrey Epstein’s former Zorro Ranch on March 9 and 10. Drones, too. Two days. That’s it. A press release’s worth of activity on 7,500 acres of high desert where, according to a 2019 anonymous email buried in federal files for six years, two foreign girls were strangled and buried somewhere in the hills.
The New Mexico Department of Justice declined to comment on the outcome of the search, saying only that it was 'one component of the ongoing investigation.' It was left to the ranch’s current owner's attorney, Rick Illmer, to fill the silence: “To our knowledge, no physical evidence was found suggesting criminal activity by the prior owner.”
How convenient. How insufficient. How familiar.
Here is what we do know about the search. Investigators covered the main ranch property. They did not search the state land that Epstein leased under a cattle grazing lease for cows he did not own — the same land that New Mexico Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard specifically identified as a buffer zone, saying it was used “almost as a shield to hide what activity was occurring on the ranch.”
They did not search the adjacent King family ranch land belonging to the family that sold Zorro to Epstein, despite Gary King failing to launch any investigation in Epstein as New Mexico Attorney General and accepting intentionally-hidden campaign contributions from Epstein after Epstein’s conviction as a sex offender.
The commission did not search San Cristobal Ranch, either, which shares more than 2 miles of fence line with Zorro Ranch and whose former owner Henry Singleton — a defense contractor with OSS ties and Sandia National Laboratories connections — had his modem number in Epstein’s personal files. The San Cristobal Ranch’s manager also in 2016 discussed sharing cost of a build-out of a massive industrial and military grade microwave communications network with Epstein.
We got the cute names of four cadaver dogs. Two days. One property. Thousands of acres of surrounding land left untouched.
Anyone with knowledge of how cadaver dog searches actually work will tell you: a thorough search of 7,500 acres of rough New Mexico terrain, with multiple structures and outbuildings, requires not days but weeks. It requires ground-penetrating radar. It requires excavation where dogs alert. One alert, one dig. That is the protocol. There is no public record of any digging having occurred.
There is also this: the current owners of Zorro Ranch — the Huffines family, whose patriarch Donald Huffines is the Trump-endorsed Republican frontrunner for Texas State Comptroller — have stationed masked armed guards, dressed all in black, along the property’s fence line, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Totally normal.
The same Donald Huffines, it should be noted, is running for the Texas office previously held by Glenn Hegar — another Trump-endorsed comptroller under whom Gerardo “Jerry” Antonio Paredes Jr. worked as a Tax Analyst II before moving to New Mexico. Paredes now serves as Chief Procurement Officer of the Legislative Council Service. In that role, Paredes controls the contract selection process for the legal team and any other outside help hired to run the Epstein Truth Commission’s investigation. Meaning? The office Donald Huffines is running to lead is the same office that produced the man now gatekeeping the investigation into the property Donald Huffines owns.
The Pugilist has previously reported on this apparent conflict of interest in detail. The commission has not addressed it. Well, that’s not entirely true. We sent a text to state representative Marianna Anaya about the appearance of a conflict of interest and she responded by saying Paredes did not make the final decision about who gets hired, the commission does. I replied by saying it is still an apparent conflict of interest, as Paredes is tasked with screening the applications prior to handing the finalists to the commission. I heard nothing back.
Meanwhile, the Truth Commission — created by the New Mexico House with subpoena power and a $2.5 million budget, charged with delivering an initial report by July — has yet to publicly name the law firm it hired to lead its investigation. The contract award deadline was April 10. It is now April 18. Still nothing. Eight days of silence. When the Santa Fe New Mexican asked how many applications the commission received, a spokesperson declined to say.
We were hoping for transparency from this commission. So far, we aren’t getting it.
I contacted the New Mexico Department of Justice, the Truth Commission, and U.S. Representative Melanie Stansbury — who attended the commission’s inaugural meeting and made public statements about the investigation — and received no response from any of them.
We know the dogs’ adorable names. We don’t know who is running the investigation. We don’t know what the drones recorded. We don’t know what law firm was hired, nor which law firms applied. We don’t know why the state lease land was not searched. We don’t know why the adjacent ranches were not searched. We don’t know why armed men in tactical gear are guarding the fence line of a property whose owner’s attorney just declared it clean.
The Truth Commission was sold to New Mexicans as accountability. What it looks like, eight weeks in, is expensive theater.
New Mexicans need to demand better, for the sake of the survivors.
If you have information about what happened at Zorro Ranch in New Mexico please send to our secure email: newstipsalisa@proton.me
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Confirmation of What I've Been Saying
I am sharing this again, because it echoes some of what I’ve been writing about in my coverage of Epstein and Zorro Ranch. DeBecker is a respected intelligence consultant and security expert. He is certain, as are many other people, that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were both Israeli intelligence assets or operatives, and that their child sex trafficking ring was a kompromat gathering enterprise on behalf of Zionist Israeli military intelligence.
What my work here in New Mexico has uncovered is that their work here was a continuation of work Ghislaine’s own father had begin in the mid 1980s, when he, posing as a mere “British media magnate,” sold backdoored/bugged software to the United States’ two top nuclear weapons laboratories, both based in New Mexico: Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Zorro Ranch is located roughly equidistant between them. That’s not a coincidence. The main house there was built by a massive construction contractor that builds top secret military and nuclear weapons installations, and does NOT build private residences, generally. Epstein also had a military/industrial grade two-way private microwave radio communications network on his ranch that is STILL operational under the new owners. It is the type of system used by military and private companies transmitting large amounts of top secret data, something like Amtrack. Not what you’d expect to see on a private vacation ranch. Epstein communicated with his neighbor, Henry Singleton (and his heirs) about perhaps sharing the cost of this microwave radio system in 2016. Singleton is a former OSS officer who founded Teledyne, one of the top defense contractors on the planet, to this day. These are not the kinds of connections a secretive pedophile cultivates to share his private information with, unless he is military intelligence. PERIOD.
What the mainstream US news media and all politicians are avoiding saying is what I am not afraid to say, and it is this: The United States KNEW about all of it, and willfully ignored it.
Let me be VERY clear here: The national security of the United States was compromised by a prolific pedophile couple who used child sex trafficking to entrap and control American politicians, nuclear scientists and business leaders, WITH TACIT SUPPORT FROM THE CIA, NSA and FBI, as well as the US Dept. of Justice and the New Mexico attorney general’s office under at least two attorney generals, as well as local law enforcement in Santa Fe County.
Thousands of helpless victims, some as young as newborns that underaged girls were forced to give birth to after being forcibly impregnated by Epstein or others, were ignored, dismissed, some even outright killed, and our own government and military industrial complex let it happen. THAT is what ALL of them are hiding. Republicans, democrats, doesn’t matter. ALL. OF. THEM.
This is all because the United States was helping Israel, for decades, to secretly develop their own nuclear weapons, meaning the US was violating its global non-proliferation treaties to give Israel weapons they continue to deny having, though that denial has been debunked by many respectable experts.
This is continuing to be covered up by everyone in government in the United States, including those who purport to want to get to the bottom of it. They are LYING and SPINNING a story to do DAMAGE CONTROL.
They do NOT want the people of the United States to realize their own government was complicit in the kidnapping, grooming, rape, trafficking and possibly murder of children and very young men and women, often American citizens.
This type of crime is nothing new for the CIA, mind you, but this kind of operation had tended to be committed by the United States in other countries.
The United States political and intelligence establishment has, however, fallen so entirely under the control of Israeli military intelligence and other zionist policy control mechanisms, including AIPAC and J Street lobbying groups, that there is literally no one left in the leadership of the United States who is willing to speak up about the reason WHY Epstein and Maxwell raped and possibly killed so many children and no one did anything about it.
It is an ongoing coverup, but covering up the individual sex crimes in the least of the concerns for American power. Power is worried about their own asses when their constituents realize they have been playing nice with a genocidal Zionist government that has been trafficking our own kids in order to control our leaders.
You have to hand it to Israel, though. They played a good game of chess here. A tiny nation was able, from 1945 to now, infiltrate and completely control a world superpower.
Let me be clear about something else: Zionism is NOT Judaism. It is a colonial political operation. And Israel is not Judaism. It is a nation state. To criticize zionism is NOT to be antisemitic, and the fact that so many bot rise up to say so is PART of the abovementioned operation. Judaism is a religion. Most Jewish people do NOT support zionism.
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This would not post to Blogger so please click on the link to read the Mifepristone decision:
6). “Fifth Circuit Decision Directs FDA to Restrict Mifepristone Access: If allowed to stand, this decision would be the most sweeping threat to abortion since the overturning of Roe”, May 1, 2026, Anon, Guttmacher Institute, at < https://www.guttmacher.org/
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Trump DOJ confirms it will target minority voters nationwide after Supreme Court ruling
The Trump administration confirmed Friday it will target Black and Latino-majority voting districts across the country — using the Supreme Court’s recent decision gutting the Voting Rights Act as a legal weapon.
In a new interview, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon made clear the Justice Department plans to go after “majority-minority” districts — where Black and Latino voters are a majority of the population and have historically been able to elect candidates of their choice.
“In any state that has this type of protected Section 2 majority-minority district, those lines are going to change in coming years. So this is a sea change,” Dhillon said. “It’s going to really impact almost all of the southern states. Pennsylvania has a Section 2 district as well.”
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For decades, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required states to draw maps that give minority voters a fair and meaningful opportunity to impact elections. The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday effectively ended that protection — and the Trump DOJ is now signaling it intends to use that ruling to dismantle those districts ruthlessly.
“This is actually going to impact all voters in the United States,” Dhillon said. “This should all shake out by the time of the 2028, 2030 election. You’re going to see a stronger position for competitive districts throughout these states.”
The comments come one day after Dhillon publicly pledged the department was ready to act on the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Senator — we are ON IT!” she wrote in response to Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), who urged the department to review voting maps nationwide and target districts “improperly drawn using race.”
The statements make clear the Trump administration is not simply responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling — it is preparing to use it to go on offense, challenging districts created to protect minority voting power, including in Democratic-led states.
Voting rights advocates have warned the Supreme Court’s ruling dismantled one of the last remaining safeguards against racial discrimination in elections, allowing states to redraw maps that weaken the political power of Black and Latino communities.
And the potential impact with DOJ spearheading enforcement is sweeping.
Majority-minority districts — long a cornerstone of Voting Rights Act enforcement — could now be targeted nationwide as DOJ reinterprets the law to challenge them rather than defend them.
The shift marks a fundamental reversal of the federal government’s role. DOJ — once responsible for enforcing the Voting Rights Act to protect minority voters — is now preparing to use the law’s weakening to attack them.
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