Tilting the Playing Field
Not long ago, ActBlue was a normal player in American politics. Its website served as a major fundraising platform for Democratic candidates and affiliated PACs, allowing them to reach known party donors and solicit grassroots support.
But Donald Trump does not regard normal Democratic politics as acceptable. This spring, at his direction, the Department of Justice initiated an investigation of illegal “foreign contributions” through the ActBlue website. Although the investigation is ostensibly premised on ActBlue having illegally received donations from foreign donors, there’s no reason to think that the underlying motivation is anything but political. Indeed, the Republican fundraising platform, WinRed, is as vulnerable to foreign influence as the Democratic one, yet only the Democratic platform has been targeted.
What is most troubling is that the attack on ActBlue is not an isolated incident. Rather, it seems to be part of a long-term strategy to change the norms of political engagement in America—and to do so in a way that tilts the playing field, benefiting one side of America’s political divide and harming the other. The Democrats may have had good elections earlier this month, but that could lead Trump and his allies to redouble their efforts for future contests. Should they be successful, the forms of public participation will remain, but the architecture of democracy will become a shell. Instead of an honest competition about ideas and values, Trump seems to want to transform American politics into a system for producing Republican victory.
To be sure, Republicans and Democrats alike have gerrymandered districts and attempted to disadvantage their opponents as long as the parties have existed. But those efforts have, for the past 100 years at least, taken place within limits—for example, redistricting almost always occurred only following the decennial census. Acting recklessly with regard to the physical safety of opponents has also long been considered beyond the pale. Those limits have now been discarded.
Trump’s push to bias the political process is fundamentally un-American and is at odds with basic conceptions of liberty that go back to America’s founding. As John Adams, the father of American independence, put it in his inaugural address when he became our second president:
We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.
Today, Trump and the Republican Party seem to be seeking that very result, employing artifice and corruption to make the electoral results the choice of their party, for their own ends.
Trump’s apparent campaign to tilt the playing field can be broken down into three main categories: rigging elections, controlling the referees, and disabling the opposition.
Rigging elections is the most direct method, and in some ways the whole game. Here, the administration is taking a multipronged approach.
The best-known effort is the push for mid-decade redistricting in Republican states. To be sure, gerrymandering congressional districts is a bipartisan project. Any number of Democrat-controlled states can be condemned for having unusually shaped districts. But those political gerrymanders have, in the past, largely been limited to a once-a-decade adjustment following the release of a new census, and then only in those states where population changes required such adjustments. Although there were rare such instances earlier this century, the country has never seen a broad effort like the one taking place today.
The partisan nature of this gambit is about as transparent as one can get. Trump energized the effort with his claim that the Republican Party was “entitled” to five more seats in Texas. And, as Senator Jim Banks of Indiana said, “They killed Charlie Kirk—the least we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero map.” If it does so (which doesn’t seem likely at the moment), Indiana will join Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas—and likely Florida, a bit further down the road—in creating pro-Republican maps during mid-decade redistricting, a phenomenon wholly unprecedented in its breadth.
To the Democrats’ benefit, Virginia recently took the first steps toward redistricting, and California passed a referendum that approved its own new map—tit-for-tat responses that, although probably the best options available to Democrats, reinforce the bad dynamics at play. But even here, Trump is using the levers of power to try to disable his opponents. The Trump DOJ just sued California to block the new map on the grounds that race illegally factored into the decisions—a step that, notably, the DOJ has not taken with respect to Republican-state redistricting efforts, even though they are unlikely to be better on that account.
[David A. Graham: A political game could redefine voting in America]
Of equal, if not greater, concern is a push by the Department of Justice to compel state election officials to reveal their unredacted voter rolls. So far, the states that have faced these requests and that have responded publicly have refused to provide the data, forcing the DOJ to sue in a (thus far unsuccessful) attempt to gain access. The requests seem to have been made mostly of Democrat-controlled states such as Pennsylvania, California, Oregon, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Colorado.
Full voter rolls contain sensitive private information, such as a voter’s driver’s license, party registration, and voting history—a handy target list. In the first Trump term, his special election-integrity commission failed to find evidence of widespread voting fraud. Some Republican officials have nevertheless used claims of fraud to purge voter rolls and challenge the legitimacy of elections. Assembling a national database could help the Trump administration accelerate those efforts.
Another way to rig the vote is to intimidate one’s opponents in the hopes that they won’t show up on Election Day. Trump’s DOJ sent staff to “monitor” the elections this month in California and New Jersey. It did so not based on any reported irregularities but rather at the behest of Republican Party officials and—again, tellingly—only in Democratic states. A similar move could be made in 2026, when the monitoring could be expanded geographically—Michigan Republicans are now demanding that the DOJ send monitors to their state—and could even include ICE agents or “Quick Reaction Force” National Guard troops alongside the Justice Department. The scenarios for active intervention and mischief are almost endless.
A final tactic is to call the election results into question. Recently, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard suggested that U.S. electronic-voting systems are vulnerable to hacking—that the machines can be manipulated to surreptitiously switch votes. Multiple prior claims have presented little evidence that vulnerabilities of this sort have ever been exploited at scale.
Facts notwithstanding, “official” U.S. concern about such vulnerabilities could be valuable to Trump and his allies. Were Republicans to lose control of the House or Senate in the 2026 elections, this sort of allegation could be used to justify federal intervention and disregard of the reported results. A court—including the Supreme Court—might even find reason to defer to the executive branch’s arguments, given the prior assertions of vulnerability. Gabbard’s claim should be seen as an effort to lay the groundwork for overturning unfavorable results.
If you can’t rig the game, then the next best thing is to try to influence the referees or eliminate them altogether.
Trump’s executive order on “election integrity” is an example of this approach—a manifest attempt to enlist traditionally neutral federal arbiters, such as the Election Assistance Commission, in support of his interests. Although we have, in America, a decentralized electoral system, Trump has asserted a federal role in governing the mechanics of the elections. No prior president has ever asserted such a role.
Under Trump’s legal theory, the president may direct the Election Assistance Commission to enforce federal law to control how state officials behave. Although presented as a move to protect electoral integrity, Trump’s directive is in truth an attempt to control election structures and those who adjudicate them.
Meanwhile, the Federal Election Commission, charged with independently ensuring compliance with federal election law, has been neutered. Four of the six commission seats are vacant. As a result, the commission lacks a quorum and cannot act. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate have, thus far, neglected to fill the vacancies. Perhaps there are other reasons for this lassitude. Regardless, the effect is that the single most important federal-elections watchdog has been sidelined. And it may very well remain so until the 2026 elections, if not beyond.
[From the December 2025 issue: Donald Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already under way]
Another aspect of the campaign to bias the referees is to intimidate them directly. Threats of violence against election officials have increased dramatically in recent years; at least one data set shows a nearly 40-fold rise over the past decade. And it isn’t just threats—some Democratic Party offices have been the targets of actual violence, including shootings. Many Americans who believe in the fair and impartial administration of elections may no longer want to do this thankless job if it puts their life at risk.
Other institutions that are meant to be checks on Trump’s ability to steamroll an election are similarly weakened or gone. As one of his first official acts during his second term, Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general who might have called out his machinations for the violations of law that they are. And the court system, which ought to be the ultimate arbiter of his actions, is proving less effective than many might have hoped, in large part because of the Supreme Court’s deference.
The last possible step in tilting the playing field is to stop the other team from playing—to disempower, demoralize, and frighten them.
The ActBlue investigation is an example of this tactic—using the tools of power to create obstacles to opposition that seem lawful but are likely unmoored from either fact or law. There are any number of other such efforts under way.
Certain individuals—political adversaries of Trump’s—have been implicitly targeted. Trump’s decision, for example, to pull Secret Service protection from former Vice President Kamala Harris as well as Biden’s children, Ashley and Hunter, places them at greater risk of personal harm. Other security rescissions (such as pulling Secret Service protection from the former Trump adviser John Bolton and Diplomatic Security Service protection from two former State Department employees under threat from Iran) have had the same impact, creating a reasonable fear for one’s personal safety.
Most dangerous, Trump and other Republican leaders have been lackadaisical—a generous characterization—in their attitude toward right-wing political violence, including the insurrection of January 6, 2021, whose perpetrators Trump has now pardoned. When asked about the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic lawmaker killed this summer, Trump said he was “not familiar.” Many right-wing activists and some Republican Party leaders indulge in violent rhetoric. (Democratic politicians, by contrast, tend to condemn political violence, even when committed by people on the left, broadly defined.) Many well-meaning liberal Americans may take one look at this landscape and think, You know what? It’s not worth the risk to serve as an election official or run for office.
Republican leaders have also sought to discredit the opposition, perhaps in the hopes of discouraging participation. Recent Republican statements, for example, suggesting that the “No Kings” rallies are terroristic in nature did not have an apparent impact on planned attendance. Likewise, the almost comical declaration that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization appears, thus far, to have had little practical impact.
That’s good news. But other Trump actions seem to have both the intent and effect of intimidating opposition and chilling free expression.
[Peter Wehner: Trump’s plan is now out in the open]
Take, for example, the deployment of the National Guard to various Democratic cities (so far, Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; and Memphis, plus attempted deployments to Chicago and Portland, Oregon). To date, the Guard (unlike ICE) has not appeared to engage in significant violent activity. But the troops’ mere armed presence is intimidating, and it does not take great imagination to consider how Trump might use them prior to or during ballot counting, or in response to widespread protests. By their very presence, they raise the prospect of future intervention.
Trump’s deployment of ICE to many cities may be an even greater deterrent. Although such deployments have targeted undocumented residents, we have already seen ICE’s indiscriminate harassment of Latinos who are lawfully present or even U.S. citizens, to such a degree that, for example, a number of Latin American festivals have been canceled. The implicit threat is, if anything, magnified by actual threats of violence against voters, such as the fake bomb threats that disrupted polling places in New Jersey during the previous election.
Trump already seems to be rehearsing the expanded use of ICE to intimidate his opponents. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s threat to deploy ICE to the Super Bowl this year may deter a number of Latinos who would have liked to attend. And if that happens, then it becomes, again, quite easy to imagine Noem issuing a similar threat to deploy ICE near future protests, or near voting locations in the 2026 elections. Steve Bannon has already called for ICE to deploy near polling sites, and ICE has refused to rule it out.
Finally, not content with deterrence en masse, Trump has also adopted the practice of specific deterrence, using the tools of law enforcement and the Department of Justice against individual political opponents. The list of people targeted in vindictive and selective investigations (and prosecutions) includes James Comey, Miles Taylor, Chris Krebs, Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and, most recently, the Democratic House candidate Kat Abughazaleh.
And although the spirit of resistance among those targeted has been remarkable, standing up to the might of the federal government takes an exceedingly strong will and an adamantine spirit, and can come at great personal and financial cost. Indeed, Biden’s pardons of some Trump opponents, much criticized at the time, look prescient in retrospect and almost too timid. For every heroic Comey standing up, there is assuredly some unnamed, less well-known individual who recedes from the fight.
More to the point, pulling punches out of fear of retribution is surreptitious and insidious. Society can never know what criticism has gone unsaid, what politician has refrained from running, what vote against Trump has been uncast. The self-editing of political action is perhaps the gravest, yet least visible, of the ways in which Trump’s antidemocratic acts erode political society.
The catalog of field-tilting conduct is extraordinary. Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, calls this phenomenon a “competitive authoritarianism.” “Elections may be fiercely contested,” he wrote in The Atlantic. “But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power.”
At least for now, the administration has little standing in its way. The forces of opposition lack any real capacity to respond effectively. When an attorney general can attend an oversight hearing and openly defy Democratic members, the administration is, essentially, triumphally declaring, You have no power over us. Worse, it is also saying, We do not expect to ever face any consequences, because you will never again have power over us.
Trump appears to be trying to use the levers of power to make authoritarianism inevitable. But authoritarianism is not inevitable—at least not yet. So far, these actions are raising only the marginal costs of participation; they are not complete prohibitions. If the idea here is to tilt the playing field, those still on the field must play harder than ever.