Joining with fighters defending democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties

The Trump/MAGA imbalance: not much good, overwhelming bad

Nowadays, it is very important to pay specific attention to the intentional damage to America’s D-RL-CL (democracy, rule of law, civil liberties) that Trump, MAGA elites, and their politics and policy have caused. So far, the breadth and depth of accumulated damage is enormous. The damage is truly heart-breaking. We have lost so much that was good since Trump came on the scene in 2016, when he energized the forces of aggressive authoritarianism and corruption. Although a precise number is impossible to assign to the analysis, the effects of Trump/MAGA elites on American D-RL-CL have been maybe ~90% bad and ~10% good since 2016 when Trump came on the scene. The ~10% good is almost completely in the form of indirect reactions that Trump and MAGA elites have triggered in people alarmed by MAGA’s toxic, aggressive politics and policy. That good amounts to resistance to MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy, after Trump and MAGA exposed ghastly weaknesses in our D-RL-CL. That created fear that convinced a lot of people and institutions to organize seriously in defense of our beleaguered D-RL-CL. Multiple indicators show a decline in the health of America’s democracy in 2025 — The assessments come as most Americans say democracy in the United States used to be a good example for other countries to follow but has not been in recent years; Understanding democratic decline in the United States — The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach; Legal experts say rule of law has hit its lowest point in a decade; ACLU 2025 Annual Report — In 2025, the Trump administration has shown extraordinary hostility toward our First Amendment freedoms. Attacks on free speech are a hallmark of authoritarianism; Civicus Monitor Watchlist —  In the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term, authorities have escalated suppression of protesters through military deployments, targeted journalists, criminalised dissent, and undermined civil society through legislative and financial restrictions. The USA, once a global champion of democracy and civic freedoms, joins the latest Watchlist along with Kenya, El Salvador, Indonesia, Serbia, and Turkey.

Yes, looking for and understanding MAGA’s damage is a scary, sad activity. Doing that requires a person to put some effort into understanding what is actually going on. The MSM does a piss-poor job of connecting MAGA’s authoritarianism and corruption dots for us, grade of F. The MSM’s shockingly bad job arguably amounts to complicity with Trump and MAGA. It’s been that way since 2016. The MSM never had a handle on Trump or America’s radical right authoritarianism. The MSM still underestimates the depth, power, and aggressiveness of radical right American authoritarianism and corruption. How The Media Failed In Covering Donald Trump; Media “Failings” In Covering Trump; In Trump 2.0, MAGA-aligned influencers and media emerge as the new mainstream — There’s an argument to be made that they’re not influencers, they’re propagandists; Why is Trump coverage so feeble? — You simply cannot cover Trump’s second term accurately and responsibly if you are not willing to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into authoritarianism, racism, and cruelty. And the mainstream political media – for a variety of reasons — is not willing to do anything of the kind. Rather than speaking truth to power, they have become stenographers with amnesia, hiding the truth through the use of anodyne adjectives, convoluted phrasing and buried leads

That’s all water under the bridge. Our sordid past can’t be undone.

Joining with patriots and freedom fighters

There are pockets of resistance to MAGA tyranny and corruption. Their successes tend to be small and mostly invisible due to lack of MSM and MAGA media coverage. Little things usually don’t make for profitable news reporting, and for MAGA media, inconvenient things usually aren’t reported at all.

Here are some groups that worried D-RL-CL defenders can contact and offer support in money or time.

Democracy Forward: Uses litigation and policy work to challenge illegal executive actions and defend what is left of our collective power.

Democracy 2025: A coalition hub connecting 700+ pro-democracy organizations. It invites people to sign up, donate, or partner with the coalition.

Protect Democracy: Focuses on free and fair elections, stopping consolidation of authoritarian power, and collective action. It offers action steps like poll-working and election-related engagement.

ACLU: A major civil-liberties organization that engages in election safeguarding, volunteer training, and litigation programs.

Human Rights First / Democracy Watch: Tracks rights-crushing legislation and organizes response and opposition efforts.

ACLU’s election safeguarding initiative: A particularly good fit for people who want a direct volunteer pathway tied to the 2026 midterms.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State: A well-known pro-democracy, church-state separation group.

Interfaith Alliance: A faith-based democracy and pluralism organization.

One approach is to split support for one litigation group (the 1st three listed), a voting-rights group (2nd three), and a coalition or local civic group (last three). That gives support for defenses against immediate authoritarian and kleptocrat abuses and a support for longer-term democratic infrastructure defense.

Democratic Party: Despite being generally clueless, flawed, cautious, and compromised, it still is one of the few large-scale organizations still organizing mostly in defense of democracy, elections, voting rights, checks and balances, anti-corruption law, and defense of civil liberties. Like it or not, the Dems are the biggest, most powerful thing we have left defending D-RL-CL. Bad as Dem elites are, they’re far better than the corrupted, authoritarian elite Repubs.

Q: If Trump and MAGA elites, with their policies, politics and tactics have been more good than bad for D-RL-CL, exactly what are the good things that rationally flip the Trump/MAGA assessment from almost all bad to mostly good?

USSC attacks congressional power and the public interest

Most headlines about Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety say the Supreme Court denied a Rastafarian prisoner damages after guards forcibly shaved his dreadlocks in violation of his faith. That’s the facts, but it’s only the surface story that most of the MSM is reporting. Most of the MSM is ignoring the far more important flow of power context. This June 23, 2026 decision is far more important than those facts alone. This decision in Landor is really about (1) gutting Congress’s ability to enforce federal conditions on spending federal money, and (2) gutting civil rights for people affected by federal spending conditions that require respect for people's civil liberties. US Supreme Court won't let Rastafarian man shaved bald in prison sue guards; The Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to Congressional Authority -- In one devastating ruling, the Republican justices disempower ordinary citizens and their elected representatives. ..... with time, the ruling may prove far more disastrous and far-reaching, unleashing illegal behavior that both Congress and the victims are powerless to prevent; Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety (2026) -- Although the federal government had the right to attach strings to aid that it provided, any conditions had to be clearly established and agreed to as they would be in most contracts. Although the prisons that had accepted aid had agreed to the conditions Congress had imposed under RLUIPA, their employees had not and were hence not liable. 

Under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), Congress promised “appropriate relief” when prisons violate religious rights. For decades, courts treated that kind of statutory language as enforceable creating rights, including enforcement of spending‑clause programs like Medicaid, nursing‑home protections and prisons. In Landor, the 6–3 MAGA majority written by the authoritarian kleptocrat Gorsuch changed that. Now, federal spending‑clause statutes are just contracts with states, not “laws” that individuals can enforce against state officials. This lands a massive blow to Congressional power because it severs civil rights from remedies to enforce those rights. The MAGA judges have been planning this kind of authoritarian attack for some time now. LANDOR v. LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF

CORRECTIONS AND PUBLIC SAFETY ET AL. -- Held: Individuals may not be held liable in their personal capacities under a Spending Clause statute unless those individuals have voluntarily and knowingly consented to answer lawsuits under the statute; because the individual defendants in this case did not voluntarily and knowingly consent to face RLUIPA liability in an agreement with the federal government, Mr. Landor’s case cannot proceed against them; Spending Programs and the New Roberts Court -- The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. .....  Congress may not choose to work more with states if the spending power becomes harder to exercise; and, states depend on federal funding for the safety net’s fiscal stability. Also, federal spending has often protected civil rights, so limits on spending programs may contribute to retrenchment.; New Rule: Spending Clause Statutes Cannot Impose Personal-Capacity Damages Liability on Nonconsenting State Employees

Mainstream coverage mostly misses this. Most MSM reporting frame Landor as a narrow question about whether a mistreated prisoner can sue his guards for money, emphasizing the egregious facts and the culture‑war angle around religious liberty. Some highlights the contradiction with the Court’s broader campaign to expand religious‑liberty claims, but still treats the case largely as a doctrinal oddity in that field. The result is fact‑accurate but context‑empty reporting that leaves readers thinking Landor is a one‑off injustice instead of a major shift in federalism and civil‑rights enforcement. The Supreme Court’s campaign to expand religious liberty now has a glaring exception; Supreme Court Bars Lawsuit After Prison Guards Shaved Inmate’s Dreadlocks -- Damon Landor, a Rastafarian, tried to sue Louisiana prison officials for violating his religious rights

The main, under-reported impact is on power. Congress uses conditional spending to enforce civil‑rights and social‑welfare protections in the public interest. That includes Medicaid patient rights, nursing‑home standards, nondiscrimination rules in education and health care, and protections baked into environmental cooperative‑federalism regimes like the Clean Air Act. When private enforcement is taken away from injured people, their “remedy” becomes federal agencies cutting off or threatening funds. That is no remedy at all. The HHS itself has said cutting funding is politically implausible, usually harmful to the people Congress meant to protect. Landor shifts serious power from Congress and individual beneficiaries to state governments and the organized interests that dominate state policy, e.g., hospital chains, insurers, fossil‑fuel businesses, charter‑school advocates, and utility giants. The Spending Power and Environmental Law after Sebelius -- The review sheds light not only on environmental law after Sebelius, but also the many other realms of American governance that engage spending power bargaining, such as public education, civil rights law, social service programs, and civic infrastructure. The Article concludes that the impacts of the doctrine will be most palpable not in litigation but in the dynamics of intergovernmental bargaining. States will have more leverage when negotiating design and enforcement terms within spending-power partnerships; Federalism by Waiver after the Health Care Case -- But the Court’s Spending Clause ruling will have potentially an even more far-reaching effect on the constitutionality of other federal statutes enacted pursuant to Congress’s spending power, as states will be prompted to challenge other conditional-spending laws in the education, social welfare, environmental, and civil rights areas as unconstitutionally coercive 

In a normal constitutional order, that would be bad enough. In a political environment where the MAGA movement and its allies are openly hostile to voting rights, equal protection, and independent law enforcement, disabling Congress’s main enforcement tool for civil rights, health care, and environmental protections takes on a different character. It gives state‑level actors aligned with authoritarianism and special interest demands much more room to violate federal spending conditions with impunity. Violators of the law can be confident that neither Washington nor individual plaintiffs can predictably hold them to account. 

Fundamentally, Landor is authoritarian and kleptocratic even though it’s dressed up in contract‑law jargon. Authoritarian, because it concentrates power in less accountable state institutions and a Supreme Court majority that is systematically obliterating space for democratic lawmaking and rights enforcement. Kleptocratic, because the beneficiaries of weakened enforcement are not “the people” but entrenched economic interests that profit when civil‑rights, health‑care, and environmental conditions are treated as optional rather than obligatory. The MSM sells the Landor decision to the public as a tragic but technical dispute about a prisoner’s dreadlocks. In reality, the decision is a major step in dismantling Congress’s capacity to protect the public interest. Special interests[1] win, we lose.

Footnote:

1. Special interests include state governments. By contrast with the federal government, it is usually easier for special interests to capture and corrupt state governments. About 85% of public‑corruption convictions in the US are the result of federal prosecutions, not state or local cases. That suggests states do little to prosecute corruption by their own state and local officials. In effect states acquiesce to federal dominance in corruption enforcement. State governments are, on average, easier targets for corrupt networks than the federal government because federal prosecutors and national media often uncover and punish state‑level corruption. Now the government is neutered by MAGA anti-government and anti-rule of law politics and policy. 

Which States Have the Highest Public Corruption Convictions?

Corruption in America

Public Corruption and Federalism

Trump's lies about election interference by China and the deep state

page 26 of 37

"IC Mainline Judgments: Beijing has not deployed influence efforts 

intended to change the outcome of the US presidential election" 

Influence ≠ interference

On July 16, Trump have a highly publicized prime time speech to reveal huge evidence of massive election vote and voter fraud. As expected, his speech consisted of a pack of unsubstantiated lies, falsehoods and bizarre crackpottery. Trump prominently blamed China and the evil Deep State for shocking vulnerabilities in American voting systems and vote counts. But neutral assessments of the documents he released (available at this link) show that his allegations were false, unsubstantiated and/or idiotic. The documents again show that Russia tried real hard to get Trump elected, but there's nothing of substance about China or any alleged American Deep State fraud. Not much new information was released.

Some analysist assert that Trump's obvious goal is to set the stage for him to directly intervene in and subvert the 2026 mid-term elections.   

Q: Is Trump's allegations credible in view of the contrary evidence in the documents he says proves his story, or is he as usual just a morally rotten dictator lying to the American people?

Info sources: 

Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China -- ..... what these documents discuss are influence operations—propaganda, proxies who speak for foreign interests, fake stories, and so on—rather than interference, which would involve actual manipulation of data or sabotaging of electoral infrastructure. These classified revelations, despite Trump’s assertions, show that the intelligence community didn’t even agree that China was fully engaged even in these more limited influence operations.

The Documents Trump Declassified To Blame China For The 2020 Election… Actually Show Russia Was The One Meddling For Him -- At a fundamental level, none of it makes sense. He’s focused on the 2020 election, when HE was in charge of the government. Assuming that there really was a huge foreign effort then, wouldn’t it have also worked in 2024 when Trump won, but Biden was president?

Trump Accidentally Proves That Putin Did Help Him Run for President -- Among the newly declassified intelligence documents Trump released Thursday are assessments that the Russian president and senior Russian officials directed proxy efforts to spread allegations about Joe Biden and Burisma, ..... orchestrate a corruption scandal against the Democratic nominee, and “ensure the President’s victory,” a reference to Trump, who was the incumbent at the time.

Trump Election Documents Reveal China, Russia Targeted Joe Biden -- A Newsweek review of the documents posted on the White House’s website found no evidence supporting Trump's claim that foreign interference or fraud had altered the outcome of any election, including the 2020 presidential election.

‘Trump Is Trying to End Our Democracy’: Alarm as President Attacks Elections Ahead of Midterms -- Trump, who has said his administration should “take over” US elections that are currently run by states, asserted in his speech that the American voting system was “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” by his political enemies and accused China of “illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files” in an effort to undermine him.

Trump’s Presidential Address: Accuses China, ‘Deep State’ of Election Interference

Trump's White House speech shows he's the real threat to U.S. elections

Trump setting stage to declare emergency around midterms, former White House attorney says

Declassified documents undercut Trump’s ‘rigged’ election claim

Trump's damage to the US nationally and internationally

International relations

A Foreign Affairs magazine article, The World Is Giving Up on America, summarizes reasons that our allies and some other nations now have negative opinions of the US government, its trustworthiness, and its disrespect for personal freedoms. Foreign nations that Trump has threatened and insulted are undergoing a slow process of de-coupling from American entanglements when possible. A 36 nation survey found that solid majorities (correctly) believe that the US government does not respect the personal freedoms of its people. 

Biden was viewed more positively than Trump, and approval of the United States’ approach to world affairs and its respect for individual liberties at home, returned or nearly returned to pre-Trump levels in many countries during his presidency. That has reversed since Trump took office in Jan. 2025. Foreign publics mostly disapprove of Trump’s approach to immigration, trade, climate policies, international relations and military interventions. Allies no longer trust the US to be a reliable partner for addressing major international problems.

Foreign public opinion is generally not far out of synch with majority US public opinion on the same issues.

Economic impacts

Loss of trust and dislike of Trump and his politics is starting to generate significant economic losses. There are measurable economic costs from reduced tourism and exports, higher risk assessments on US assets, increased macro‑uncertainty, and damage to the “safe haven” status of the US economy. Cost estimates range from tens of billions of dollars annually to significantly more. Damage has negatively affected both growth and borrowing costs. 

Info sources: 

The biggest economic risk from Donald Trump’s presidency is a loss of confidence in US governance -- Trump’s economic policies may prove surprisingly benign in the short term. But steps that undermine domestic US institutions and international alliances would do serious and lasting damage.

The World Is Cutting Ties With America. It’s Already Costing Us. -- As Mr. Trump muses about making Canada a 51st state, it has embarked on a “new strategic partnership” with China, opened its market for the first time to 50,000 Chinese electric vehicles and joined a more than $150 billion European defense fund aimed at breaking the dependency on the American defense industry.

Unusual sell-off in the dollar raises specter of investors losing trust in the U.S. under Trump

Businesses, investors ‘flying blind’ when trust in government statistics declines

Costs from Trump's tariffs paid mainly by US firms and consumers, NY Fed says

THE COST OF TRUMP'S FOREIGN POLICY: DAMAGE AND CONSEQUENCES 

FOR U.S. AND GLOBAL SECURITY