The assault is happening in plain sight, from the Epstein case to Texas reapportionment to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
by William Kristol, THEBULWARK
In the last few days, it seems as if we’ve reached a new stage in the attempted authoritarian takeover of American democracy. It’s not just that the multi-faceted assault on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society has picked up steam—though it has. It’s that the assault, from our own government, now proceeds so openly and unashamedly.
Once, if there were bad economic statistics, the president and his supporters tried to spin them. Now the president and his supporters simply deny them. And those who produced them are punished. And so President Trump fires, with no pretense of real cause or justification, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a career civil servant who has supervised a host of other career civil servants in producing these statistics, as they have for decades. And he brazenly lies in accusing her and a host of other civil servants of “rigging” their findings.
This is part of a broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard—using the resources of the federal agencies they direct—have taken the lead in this. But they are only the tip of the Trump spear.
Once, if a president or his subordinates wanted to cover up a problem, even a crime, they made labored efforts at obfuscation and concealment. Coverups were, as the term implies, pursued under the cover of darkness. That’s why the Washington Post, with the experience of Watergate in mind, came up at the beginning of Trump’s first term with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But that slogan applies to a different era.
Now Ghislaine Maxwell, one of two organizers of a massive and horrendous child sex trafficking ring of which Donald Trump appears to have had considerable contemporaneous knowledge, meets with the deputy attorney general of the United States—who had previously been Trump’s private lawyer—and the White House openly embraces it. A week later, contrary to the normal rules for a prisoner convicted of her crimes, Maxwell is transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” facility. This was presumably as a down payment on not spilling the beans about Trump, and perhaps as an interim step on the way to a pardon. This coverup is happening in broad daylight.
Once, state legislators redistricted congressional seats every ten years, after the constitutionally mandated census. These reapportionments were often accompanied by gerrymandering. But, with a notable exception, the partisan power grabs were at least adjacent to a regular and lawful process. They were at least somewhat constrained by calendars and custom.
Now the governor of Texas has decided, at the public urging of the president of the United States, to have his state legislature carry out a gerrymander mid-decade, so as to try to preserve a Republican majority in the House of Representatives for the final two years of Trump’s term. And it seems other red states will follow.
There is no pretense here other than a grab for power. It is the unconstrained use of the instrumentalities of government, state and federal, to hold on to control of the House.
The New York Times quotes “one person close to the president” as summing up the approach of the Trump White House as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” It’s important to add that it’s not just maximum warfare by one party against the other. It’s warfare by the government of the United States against the justice system, against the presentation of true facts, against free and fair elections. It’s maximum warfare against the norms and institutions of a liberal democracy and republican self-government.
It was one hundred and eleven years ago—at the beginning of August 1914—that a long-established and seemingly solid international order came crashing down. Now at the beginning of August 2025, it seems as if the authoritarian assault on the long-established and seemingly solid institutions of American democracy has reached a critical point. The nations of Europe had the excuse that they did not know and could not see that they were careening into an abyss. We have no such excuse. Today, in the United States of America, liberal democracy is being killed not in darkness but in broad daylight.
Note: This post originally appeared as “Democracy Dies in Daylight” in BULWARK Morning Shots.
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