Widen Your Lens

Thoughts on Political Possibility

The people around me that focus on American politics—journalists, academics, pundits—seem systematically more optimistic about the prospects for American democracy than people who work on other parts of the world. The America specialists point to our long democratic tradition, our decentralized election system, public opinion polling, and recent Special Election results and conclude that the worst of it will be over in November. Republican candidates will begin to distance themselves from Trump. The Democrats will retake the House and maybe even the Senate, some balance will be restored, and we can begin thinking about accountability. Most of them are concerned about American democracy and will use the word authoritarian to describe Trump’s behavior. But most seem to believe, in the end, that the institutions will hold and rule of law will prevail.

Nate Silver just published a piece on this issue—“Don’t Discount American Democracy’s Resilience,” noting, “It can also be hard to see the world through clear eyes when you’re constantly in crisis mode.” I guess I’m one of the crisis mode guys.

I have written in the past about some of the ways the U.S. is exceptional, and I agree with the sources of resilience Silver identifies and the broader thrust of his piece about public opinion. But we are exceptional in bad ways too. Compared to other advanced democracies, our society has much higher levels of inequality, political polarization, and political violence. As Sue Stokes and others have shown, these factors are systematically associated with the type of democratic erosion we are observing now.

My piece this week is short and will make a simple point: We need to widen our outlook for what is politically possible in this country at this moment.

Widen Your Lens

Had we been asked in October of 2020, most of us would have said that something like January 6^th or Trump’s election meddling efforts would have been impossible. No candidate in recent American history had refused to concede the election like that, let alone actively try to overturn the result and delegitimize it for years on end.

Had we been asked in February of 2021, most of us would have predicted that Trump would face some sort of accountability for his actions, perhaps even jail time. Had we been asked in early 2022, we may have thought it impossible that the GOP would dare nominate him again.

In fall of 2024, we would have all thought it unlikely that we see the National Guard deployed in American cities against the wishes of state governors. Or for two Americans to be killed by ICE agents and posthumously labeled domestic terrorists. Or for the FBI to seize old ballots from a swing state metro area.

Asked today, most of us would think it impossible that Trump would somehow be able to cancel the midterm election in November. Or seize ballots before they are counted. Or refuse to seat Democrats that win. Or disband Congress entirely. Or run again.

But if we asked the people of Venezuela, or Turkey, or Peru, or South Korea, they would tell us some stories. These sorts of events, while foreign to Americans, are common in the rest of the world, and usually core to the process of democratic erosion. At some point, the conversation is not about whether the proto-autocrat can legally do something. It’s whether those around him allow him to try, and whether the opposition has the means to stop it.

Steven Cash of The Steady State made this point in our interview last week when I asked him his level of concern over the 2026 election:

Steven Cash: Well, my initial and most important concern, and it’s significant, is that we will not have an election, that it will be canceled… I talk to a lot of people and I say, I’m worried that the election will be canceled.

Rory Truex: They probably say you’re crazy, right?

Steven Cash: They’re a little more diplomatic than that. What they say is, you can’t cancel an election. I’ve read the Constitution and there’s no statute which allows you, and the Constitution doesn’t provide for that. And in fact, members of The Steady State sometimes have said that to me.

And then my rejoinder is, how many countries have you served in where the leader canceled the elections despite whatever was in the constitution of that country? And they’re like, yeah, that happened when I served in this place and this place. And I said, why are you saying he can’t?

In other words, legal impossibility is not the same as political impossibility. This is an administration that has proven completely fine with ignoring the law and the courts, and the legal justifications they do muster seem to be growing thinner.

Steven went on to describe his concerns as someone who spent decades in the intelligence community:

Steven Cash: There are lots of ways that an American president can cancel an election. The simplest is, on the November date right before the election, he has a Oval Office address to the nation, and he says, “we’re facing terrible threats from domestic extremist terrorists, blah, blah, blah. I can’t guarantee the safety of anybody during the voting. I’m going to be deploying the military, we strongly urge people to stay at home and shelter in place while we manage this terrible threat to America.” There won’t be an election if he does that, and there’s any number of other ways that, that it can be done.

But you don’t have to actually cancel the election to get the result you want. And this is what autocrats do. There’s all kinds of tricks. You move the ballot boxes, you stuff the ballot boxes, you seize the ballots, which is exactly what he tried to do in 2020. So whether we have a free and fair election, I think is really up for grabs and it’s a tremendous concern.

I am heartened by all the polling and special election results. It tells us that the American people in general see through Trump’s lies and understand the gravity of the threat he poses to our democracy. Silver nicely highlights these patterns in his piece.

But at times it feels like people are celebrating in the third quarter. Ask yourself the simple question: do you believe Donald Trump will allow and honor a free and fair election that he and his Party will likely lose, one that could bring actual accountability to the White House? I have trouble answering in the affirmative, especially given the FBI’s recent adventures in Fulton County. I hope I am wrong.

To be clear, I am not saying these sort of worst-case scenarios are the most likely outcomes, or even probable. And I don’t think Steven believes they are either. But they are possible. We need to collectively be open to those possibilities, and work to limit them as much as we can in the interim. That is the task of the next nine months.

That’s all for today. A new episode of the podcast will drop on Tuesday featuring Marcel Dirsus who will provide us some perspective from Europe. Links to the Steven Cash episode are below. Thanks to the many of you who have become Citizen Sponsors— I am hiring a producer and editor with those funds and it will really help me professionalize this whole thing. I very much appreciate the support and affirmation of what I am trying to do.

Rory