Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey speaks at a news conference in December about the Trump administration's plans for immigration enforcement in the city. Frey encouraged other mayors last month to stand up to President Donald Trump; some mayors have taken a more compromising tone. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

WASHINGTON — Five days after federal immigration enforcement agents killed the second of his constituents, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had a message for his peers: Speak out.

“Mayors, we do not back down to bullies. We stand up for democracy,” Frey said in a speech last month in Washington, D.C., at a gathering of hundreds of mayors from around the country.

Frey left the U.S. Conference of Mayors and rode to Capitol Hill to meet members of Congress, and five days after that, President Donald Trump said that he’d pull 700 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents out of Minneapolis. Some 2,300 would remain.

Frey, a liberal mayor governing a predominantly liberal city, illustrated his way of responding to Trump’s increasing encroachment into city limits and city business, and he urged that way — public, loud, strong — for others too.

But his path isn’t the right one for all mayors, who hold mostly nonpartisan jobs in an increasingly hyper-partisan political environment. Their jobs are primarily to pick up trash, fill potholes and keep people safe. While some view confrontation with the White House as the right approach, others are opting for accommodation — or just keeping their heads down.

Cities rely on federal money, and Trump has made it clear that more ICE agents and fewer federal dollars will flow to cities that don’t respond to his requests.

Plainfield, New Jersey, Mayor Adrian Mapp, the son of immigrants, said in an interview at the conference that some disagreements with the federal government, such as those over immigration raids, can feel like a personal and political battle. Residents expect their mayor to fight for them, he said, especially against unpopular policies or federal overreach.

“There is a sense in our community that this is what people want from their mayor — to know we’re standing up, putting resources together and doing everything we can to support those who are affected,” Mapp said.

Boots on the ground

Chris Jensen, a two-term mayor of Noblesville, Indiana, told Stateline that city leaders are often insulated from Washington’s partisan battles, and that unless those issues get local, they’re not worth engaging in.

“Mayors don’t get to go on cable news and just repeat talking points,” Jensen said. “We have to do the work every single day. Snow has to be plowed. Roads have to be built. Trash has to be picked up. That’s not partisan, that’s just governing.”

A registered Republican who used to work for former Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, Jensen said mayors must embrace bipartisanship so they can get resources for their constituents. And federal leaders, he added, could better utilize mayors by asking them for on-the-ground data and feedback from their constituents.

“We’re the boots on the ground,” Jensen said. “If you want to talk about housing, we know how many permits we pulled. If you want to talk about mental health, we know how many crisis calls we ran. Rely on us and get out of the way when we need to move faster.”

At last month’s conference, several mayors described tensions with the Trump administration — often not naming the president directly — as having intensified in recent months, particularly around immigration enforcement, federal deployment of National Guard troops and threats of revoked federal funding.

Much of Trump’s ire, they pointed out, has been aimed at big cities with large Democratic populations. The African American Mayors Association has noted that the cities Trump has decried as lawless and in need of National Guard troops — Chicago; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Oakland, California; and Washington — are all led by Black mayors. All have seen significant declines in violent crime.

Trump has also threatened to send troops to New Orleans, despite its falling crime rate. Mayor Helena Moreno, who took office in January, was among the mayors visiting Washington. She told constituents in an Instagram message that she grabbed a moment with Trump at another event — and worked to shift his attention to other city needs.

“I thought it was very important for the president to hear directly from me on what the city of New Orleans actually needs from the federal government,” she said in the video. The city’s homicide rate is at its lowest in 50 years, she said, and she told Trump of the city’s infrastructure needs.

“I think he was receptive,” Moreno told constituents. “I’ve always said this: That even though I might not be politically aligned with someone, that if they are in a position of power, and have the ability to help the city of New Orleans, then I want to make sure that our needs are being told … so that we can figure out if there’s a path to being able to work together.”

Pushing back

Trump had told mayors that if they didn’t agree to drop sanctuary status, which bars local police agencies from working with ICE on immigration enforcement, their federal dollars would be cut off Feb. 1.

When the funding threats from the president didn’t materialize, newly sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration “will continue to stand up for the city” against efforts to restrict federal funding for cities based on politics and ideology.

But Mamdani, like other mayors, has looked for ways to connect with the president, meeting with Trump in the Oval Office shortly after his election last fall.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Browser, who finishes her third term next year, has said that whoever succeeds her in office will have an especially tricky job, because of the city’s unique circumstances — the federal government can overrule local laws.

Bowser pushed back strongly against Trump in his first term, but has been more pragmatic in his second term — looking for common ground over his National Guard deployment, accelerating homeless encampment sweeps and erasing a block-long “Black Lives Matter” mural that had been painted onto the street as protest in front of the White House. At the same time, Bowser has warned that such measures could limit city autonomy.

Similarly, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie persuaded Trump in a phone call last fall to hold off on surging immigration agents to the city, telling the president that the city was doing well. Trump told reporters he was giving San Francisco a chance.

But sustained pushback may have been what led to the scaling back of ICE operations in Minneapolis.

Portland, Oregon, Mayor Keith Wilson has been hoping for a similar reduction in immigration enforcement in his city as he calls for ICE officers to leave the city.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who noted at the conference that mayors are facing “headwinds” at the federal level when it comes to funding, recently joined regional mayors to announce a slew of accountability measures for ICE officers.

Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka and Jersey City Mayor James Solomon are both advocating for state lawmakers to pass legislation limiting how much state officials and local police can cooperate with ICE agents.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order to expand the city’s investigation into possible misconduct by ICE officers.

Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval said during a panel session at the mayors conference that the administration’s use of partisan politics — and the scope of the federal government’s powers — has profoundly changed the job for mayors.

“It’s absolutely affecting trust at every level,” he said.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

FBI agents load boxes of election documents onto trucks at an elections warehouse in Fulton County, Ga. State and local election officials are bracing for the prospect of federal action after President Donald Trump’s call to nationalize elections. (Photo by Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder)

President Donald Trump’s calls this week to “nationalize” elections capped a year of efforts by his administration to exercise authority over state-run elections. The demands now have some state and local election officials fearing — and preparing for — a tumultuous year ahead.

“I don’t think we can put anything past this administration,” Oregon Democratic Secretary of State Tobias Read told Stateline in an interview. “I think they’re increasingly desperate, increasingly scared about what’s going to happen when they are held accountable by American voters. So we have to be prepared for everything.”

Ever since Trump signed an executive order last March that attempted to impose a requirement that voters prove their citizenship in federal elections, the federal government has engaged in a wide-ranging effort to influence how elections are run. Under the U.S. Constitution, that responsibility belongs to the states.

Then came Trump’s remarks on a podcast Monday that Republicans should nationalize elections and take over voting in at least 15 places, though he didn’t specify where. In the Oval Office the next day, the president reaffirmed his view that states are “agents” of the federal government in elections.

“I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday, despite the Constitution’s clear delegation of that job to states.

Across the country, election officials are watching recent developments and, in some instances, grappling with how the Trump administration’s moves could affect their preparations for November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress. Local election officials say they are considering how they would respond to the presence of federal law enforcement near polling places and what steps they need to take to ensure voting proceeds smoothly.

Several Democratic election officials, and some Republicans, have spoken out. Placing voting under control of the federal government would represent a fundamental violation of the Constitution, they note.

The U.S. Constitution authorizes states to set the time, place and manner of elections for Congress but also allows Congress to change those regulations. The elections themselves are run by the states.

“Oh, hell no,” Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said in a video statement posted to social media about federalizing elections. Bellows, who is running for governor, said she would mail the White House a pocket Constitution, “because it seems they’ve lost their copy.”

The U.S. Department of Justice already has sued 24 states and the District of Columbia to obtain unredacted voter rolls that include sensitive personal information that it says is needed to search for noncitizen voters. The Department of Homeland Security wants states to run their voter rolls through a powerful citizenship verification tool. Those opposed to the demand say sharing the data risks the privacy of millions of voters. Many fear the administration could use the information to disqualify eligible voters, challenge the legitimacy of a victory in a closely contested midterm election, or use the information to target political enemies.

In recent weeks, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi linked the presence of federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in part to Minnesota’s refusal to turn over its voter rolls. And the FBI seized ballots from an elections warehouse Fulton County, Georgia — a state that was a central focus of Trump’s push to overturn his 2020 election loss.

“I think it does affect our planning as far as, what if there is some sort of federal law enforcement presence on Election Day or before or after? So that definitely factors into our planning,” said Scott McDonell, the Democratic clerk in Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes Madison.

Ingham County, Michigan, Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat running for secretary of state, said she and other election administrators conduct tabletop exercises and keep emergency plans for numerous scenarios. Those used to focus on floods, power outages and cyberattacks.

“Now, unfortunately, it’s turning into the president of the United States meddling in elections,” Byrum said. “We will be prepared. Voters will hopefully not see anything different at their polling locations. … But we need to be diligent.”

Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, said election officials and their lawyers need to study up on laws and regulations, including chain-of-custody requirements for ballots.

David Becker, director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, which operates the Election Official Legal Defense Network, said more than 10,000 lawyers have been recruited who are ready to provide pro bono legal assistance or advice to election officials.

Trump doubles down on calling for the feds to take over state elections

When Stateline asked Read whether he anticipates Oregon facing federal pressure over its voter rolls, the secretary of state said he was set to meet this week with county clerks in the Portland metro area “to talk about that very question.” Read’s office later confirmed the meeting took place.

Oregon’s largest city, Portland, has been a focus of the Trump administration. Last year, Trump deployed federalized Oregon National Guard members to the city after protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. And federal agents last month shot two people in a hospital parking lot. Portland is a self-described sanctuary city that does not aid the federal government in immigration enforcement.

The concern in Oregon comes after Bondi on Jan. 24 sent a letter to Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz after federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in separate shootings in Minneapolis that were captured on video.

Bondi’s letter outlined three “common sense solutions” that would help end the “chaos” in Minnesota, she wrote. One of those solutions called for the state to provide the Justice Department with its full, unredacted voter rolls.

Minnesota Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon has called Bondi’s letter an “outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota” into handing over the data. Simon hasn’t provided the voter list, but White House border czar Tom Homan is pulling 700 immigration agents from Minnesota amid outrage over their presence. Roughly 2,300 agents will remain in the state.

In North Carolina, Durham County Director of Elections Derek Bowens called Trump’s rhetoric and recent federal actions concerning. Bowens, a nonpartisan official appointed by the Durham County Board of Elections, said that as long as the rule of law persists, a “constitutional guard” will protect election administration.

Still, Bowens, who oversees elections in a largely Democratic area in a presidential swing state, said he and other local officials are preparing to prevent potential “intrusion” into the process.

“I’m not at liberty to divulge what that would be in terms of security protocols, but that’s definitely in the forefronts of our minds,” Bowens said in an interview, adding that he would be working with local emergency services officials “to make sure we’re positioned to ensure everyone that is eligible has unfettered access to the ballot box.”

Trump wants federal control

Trump appears to be crossing a line from urging Congress to set additional election requirements into wanting the federal government’s hands on states’ election administration infrastructure, said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Elections Research Center at the university.

“That would be brand new,” Burden said.

After Trump called for nationalizing elections during Monday’s appearance on the podcast of Dan Bongino, a right-wing media personality who was previously a top FBI official, the White House said Tuesday that the president had been referring to legislation in Congress that would require individuals to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. The bill has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate.

But Trump late Tuesday doubled down on his original comments during an unrelated bill-signing ceremony in the Oval Office. He suggested the federal government should take a role in vote counting.

“The federal government should get involved,” Trump said. “These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

Even before Trump’s nationalization comments, Democratic state chief election officials and some Republicans had refused to turn over copies of voter rolls containing driver’s license numbers, date of birth and full or partial Social Security numbers after the Justice Department began demanding the data last spring.

Federal judges in California and Oregon have ruled those states don’t have to provide the data; numerous other lawsuits against other states are ongoing.

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Trump-supporting Republican who campaigned for office on calls to hand-count ballots, told a Missouri House committee on Tuesday that he wouldn’t provide the state’s full voter list without a court order. He said his office had only shared a public version of the voter rolls; Missouri hasn’t been sued by the Justice Department.

The Trump administration has previously confirmed it is sharing records with Homeland Security, which operates an online program that it uses to verify citizenship. The Justice Department has also offered some states a confidential agreement to search their voter lists.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a statement to Stateline.

“The DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”

But U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee, wrote in a Jan. 15 decision that the voter roll demands risk a chilling effect on Americans who may opt not to register to vote over concerns about how their information could be used. He dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking California’s voter rolls.

“The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left. The case before the Court is one of these cuts that imperils all Americans,” Carter wrote in a 33-page decision.

Some Republicans oppose nationalization

Amid Trump’s call for nationalizing elections, some Republican election officials have broken with the president even as they have avoided criticizing him directly. State control has long been a central tenant of conservatism, though Trump has challenged elements of Republican orthodoxy over the past decade.

Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, told state lawmakers on Tuesday, “I personally don’t believe we should nationalize elections.”

Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a news release on Monday urged lawmakers to focus on strengthening state administration of elections. He said that was better than “moving to federalize a core function of state government.”

Raffensperger, who is running for governor this year, was famously targeted by Trump following the 2020 election to overturn his loss in Georgia. In a phone call, Trump told Raffensperger he wanted to “find 11,780 votes” — the size of his loss in the state. Raffensperger refused to aid Trump.

Five years later, Raffensperger now faces pressure from Georgia state lawmakers to provide the state’s unredacted voter list to the Justice Department. The Georgia Senate on Monday passed a resolution calling on the secretary of state to fully comply with the department’s request.

Georgia Republican state Sen. Randy Robertson, the resolution’s lead sponsor, said during a state Senate committee hearing last month that federal law supersedes limits on data sharing in Georgia law. He didn’t respond to an interview request.

In a statement to Stateline, Raffensperger said that state law is “very clear” that officials aren’t allowed to turn over the information. “I will always follow the law and the Constitution,” Raffensperger wrote.

The Georgia Senate vote came less than a week after the FBI searched the Fulton County elections warehouse and seized ballots. Fulton County, which includes much of the Atlanta metro area, was where Trump was indicted on charges of conspiracy and racketeering related to his efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election. The case was dismissed last year.

The Justice Department didn’t answer a question from Stateline about whether it plans to seek search warrants for other election offices.

On Wednesday, Fulton County filed a motion in federal court demanding the return of the seized ballots and other materials, Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said at a news conference. The motion also asks for the unsealing of the affidavit used by the FBI to support its search warrant application.

“We will fight using all resources against those who seek to take over our elections,” Pitts said. “Our Constitution itself is at stake in this fight.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

President Donald Trump tours the assembly line at the Ford River Rouge Complex on Jan. 13, 2026 in Dearborn, Michigan. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised during his bid for another White House term that he would be a dictator only on “day one.”

Before a town hall audience in Iowa in December 2023, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump, “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”

“Except for day one,” Trump responded, seconds later adding, “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

But a year since his inauguration, Trump has acted on some of his most extreme campaign hyperbole, and then some. 

A limited history of Trump’s expansion of presidential powers includes:

• The unilateral capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Máduro and deadly U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-running boats off that nation’s coast, as well as a threat to acquire Greenland.
• The targeting of Democratic-led cities with federal immigration agents — most recently Minneapolis — and National Guard troops.
• The threat to cut congressionally approved funding from institutions, including universities, that do not align with the administration’s ideology.
• The prosecution of political opponents and attacks on the free press.

Those actions and others, coupled with a cooperative GOP Congress, have created an unprecedented shift away from the United States’ democratic tradition and founding principles that establish a system of checks and balances, States Newsroom was told in extensive interviews over recent months.

Many congressional Democrats — and nearly half of Americans, in a recent poll — believe Trump has gone too far in his expansion of presidential power. Historians, political scientists and legal experts have sounded the alarm, with some saying the United States has reached authoritarianism, even as Trump has shown no signs of slowing down. 

Experts interviewed agreed that the United States finds itself in a “troubled moment,” as William Howell, dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, put it. 

“We’ve never seen a presidency that represents such an enduring threat to the health and well-being of our democracy as we do today,” said Howell, who recently co-authored the book “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.”

Experts wary 

Ilya Somin, professor of law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and constitutional studies expert with the libertarian Cato Institute, said “I don’t know that it is likely that we’re going to slide into authoritarianism, but the very fact that the issue has to be raised is itself already bad.”

“My hope, and to some extent my expectation, is that a combination of legal and political action will stop these abuses, or at least curb them, and to some extent, it has already. But, you know, how well the system withstands it remains to be seen,” Somin told States Newsroom.

Others painted a more dire picture by pointing to the lack of such checks from the other branches of government.

Retired Army Col. David Graham, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Law Center’s Center on National Security, said Congress’ inability to block Trump’s military action in Venezuela shows that the president is operating with “unbridled” power.

“This unbridled presidential authority represents what I consider to be a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and to the global security of the international community,” Graham said.

The Cato Institute’s Patrick Eddington offered: “It is absolutely noteworthy the speed and systematic nature (with) which Trump has been successful in literally gutting and reshaping to his will the domestic instruments of coercive power.” 

“I speak here about the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, in particular, but also successful in reshaping the military, the military leadership and the entire institution, to make it essentially as subservient as possible,” Eddington, the think tank’s senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties, and former senior policy adviser for Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., told States Newsroom.

Doubts growing among Americans

Pollsters also find voters are increasingly wary of Trump’s governing style.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found 70% believed the president needed authorization from Congress to go to war. The same day the poll was released, Jan. 14, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate rejected a measure to require Trump to obtain permission before further operations in Venezuela.

Bright Line Watch, a quarterly survey of the health of American democracy, has shown a decline in both expert and public opinion of how U.S. democracy has fared since Trump’s inauguration. The poll, conducted since 2017, surveys roughly 700 political science faculty at U.S. universities and 2,750 members of the general public.

A Pew Research Center survey of 3,455 adults released in late September found 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump is trying to exert more presidential power than previous administrations. And overall, 49% of those surveyed said that Trump’s use of power compared to presidents past is bad for the country — though responses notably split along partisan lines.

In response to an interview request for this story, White House spokesperson Liz Huston provided a one-sentence on-the-record written statement.

“President Trump is making America greater than ever before for all Americans,” she wrote.

Throughout its first year, the Trump White House has trumpeted its many policy victories, including conducting mass deportations, raising money through tariffs, extending tax cuts, cutting some federal spending and exerting influence over elite universities.

Deploying the National Guard 

Throughout 2025, until the Supreme Court disallowed the practice days before New Year’s, Trump sent National Guard troops to a handful of cities led by elected Democrats. 

Depending on the city — Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and New Orleans  —  he rationalized the deployments as either to control crime or protect immigration operations and federal property.

His critics, though, say those were pretexts meant to get Americans used to seeing military forces in U.S. cities, potentially to be deployed during the next federal elections.

“It’s really designed to lay the groundwork to normalize a militarization, essentially, of American civic life, as a prelude to using federal troops and National Guard troops, probably specifically for so-called election integrity operations,” Eddington said.

 

The deployments themselves, especially in California, Illinois and Oregon, where Democratic governors who usually control the state national guards vociferously objected to federal troops patrolling their cities, seemed to violate a founding U.S. principle against the military acting as a police force. 

The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the Chicago deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century law forbidding military forces from civilian law enforcement.

Trump’s use of military forces domestically is out of step with precedent, at least of the last 50 years, Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said.

“The last nine presidents, not counting Trump I, we saw exactly two deployments to quell civil unrest or enforce the law,” she said. “Nine presidencies. Under President Trump, it’s happened five times in the last four months. So this is not normal,” said Goitein, who previously worked as counsel to former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

Oregon Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley told States Newsroom the deployments marked one of the criteria of authoritarianism.

“In order to anchor a strong-man state, you have to have the ability to put troops in the street,” he said.

All night on the Senate floor 

Congressional Democrats, and in a few cases Republicans, have also protested Trump’s reach.

Days after nationwide “No Kings” day protests filled the streets on Oct. 18, Merkley led fellow Senate Democrats in an all-nighter on the Senate floor, speaking against what they described as Trump’s slide into authoritarianism. 

In mid-December, Merkley introduced a resolution “denouncing the horrors of authoritarianism.”

Merkley has emerged as perhaps the leading Democrat focusing on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. He’s made several closed-door presentations to his colleagues on the subject that includes urging them to look beyond the daily drumbeat of Trump news, he said.

“It’s one issue after another in this flood-the-zone undertaking, and it’s easy to see the issue of the day and miss the big picture,” Merkley said in a Jan. 8 interview with States Newsroom. “And the big picture is a systematic implementation of an authoritarian strategy to create a strong-man state.” 

Merkley has branded Trump’s actions as authoritarianism, but said that is actually “weaker” language to describe it.

“The stronger language is fascism,” he said. 

Speaking the day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, Merkley said the agency’s mode of operating under Trump, as well as the deportation of hundreds to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, were fascism in action.

“And when you see people with their faces covered, with no identifier of what military unit or police unit they belong to, it just says like, ‘Police.’ That’s fascism. Grabbing people off the street without due process, preventing them from talking to a lawyer, shipping them overseas. That’s fascism,” he said.

Congressional Republicans who control the Senate and the House have paved a smooth path for Trump’s agenda.

Despite a notable rebuke of Trump, in which a handful of Senate Republicans joined Democrats to advance legislation to curtail Trump’s unilateral military actions in Venezuela, the chamber eventually opted not to rein in the executive.

Republican Sens. Todd Young of Indiana, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska split with their party in the Jan. 8 procedural vote to act as a check on the administration’s use of military forces — as did Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the measure’s co-sponsor with Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. 

Trump swiftly responded on Truth Social that the five “should never be elected to office again.”

The pressure campaign worked. In a followup vote less than a week later, Young and Hawley flipped and voted to block the measure.

Five days prior to the procedural vote, U.S. special forces apprehended Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in the Venezuela capital of Caracas.

Extra-judicial Caribbean killings

In the months leading up to the operation, the Trump administration amassed roughly 15,000 troops and personnel, according to a figure cited in a U.S. Southern Command press article, and nearly a dozen warships in the region, including the largest U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, according to numerous media reports on the buildup. U.S. Southern Command declined to confirm specifics on “force posture.” 

Since September, U.S. warplanes have targeted numerous small boats off the coast of the South American country, killing more than 115 alleged “narco-terrorists” by the end of 2025, according to the U.S. Southern Command.

By using the military, instead of police, to kill, instead of capture, suspected drug traffickers, Trump was subverting the rule of law, critics across the political spectrum said.

Rep. Adam Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “Basically what the president has decided is that we are now going to have the death penalty for drug traffickers.” 

“But further, not only are we gonna have the death penalty, but Trump is going to be judge, jury and executioner. … That, again, is a massive expansion of presidential power,” Smith, a Washington state Democrat, told C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Dec. 19.

Graham, a former staff judge advocate for U.S. Southern Command, said the alleged drug-running boats should have been treated as suspected criminals, not as enemy combatants akin to terrorist groups like al-Qaida. The alleged drug organizations involved did not constitute an “armed attack on the U.S. government,” he said.

But the Trump administration wrongly expanded the definition of enemy combatants to include alleged drug organizations, rather than as alleged criminals, to circumvent laws governing police powers, he said. 

“If there exists no non-international armed conflict, and thus no applicable law of armed conflict, no unlawful combatants, no lawful targets, the U.S. personnel conducting these strikes. …  are simply engaged in extrajudicial killings,” he said. 

Perhaps most troubling, Graham said, Trump told New York Times reporters in a Jan. 7 interview he did not “need” international law, and that the only restraint on his use of the U.S. military was his “own morality.”

Venezuela is not the only country on Trump’s radar. The president told reporters as recently as Jan. 11 that the U.S. is going to take over Greenland “one way or the other.” 

Trump first mentioned buying Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark, during his first term. Now, in his second, the president has not ruled out the idea of taking the massive Arctic island by force. 

Quashing dissent 

Soon after Trump took the oath of office for the second time, he trained his focus on any dissent. Universities, media outlets and law firms were quickly in his crosshairs. 

The president demanded that in return for federal funding, access to government buildings and contracts, the institutions adhere to principles in line with the administration’s vision for America. 

The administration froze billions of federal research and grant dollars for Harvard University unless it changed its admissions and hiring policies, among other demands. The university won a First Amendment lawsuit against the administration in Massachusetts federal district court Sept. 3. 

Much of the funding was restored, according to Harvard Magazine, but the Trump administration appealed the decision in mid-December, again putting the nearly $2.2 billion in jeopardy. 

Other higher education institutions settled with Trump’s White House, including Columbia, which agreed to pay $200 million over three years to get its federal funding reinstated. 

“Universities that Trump considers to be liberal in their views are being punished. Journalists and media companies that don’t toe the line (and) that are critical of Trump are being punished, directly or indirectly,” Goitein said. 

“Everywhere you look, you are seeing the targeting of people and institutions based on perceptions that they are politically opposed to the president,” Goitein said.

In late September, Trump signed a memo directing law enforcement to prepare a national strategy to investigate “domestic terrorists” who are animated by “anti-fascism” as well as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

Attacks on the free press

The president has also homed in on news and entertainment media that don’t align with his vision.

The Associated Press and the White House remain tangled up in court over press access after the wire service refused to use “Gulf of America” in its reports without noting that Trump had ordered a renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. The AP, a leader in editorial style, issued the same guidance for other news outlets. In response, the administration curtailed the AP’s access to press events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. 

The Pentagon has also placed stipulations on press access. In October, dozens of reporters walked out of the building after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave journalists an ultimatum: either sign a pledge to only publish approved material or lose their press badges.

Trump also requested Congress yank previously appropriated funds for public broadcasting stations around the country, including affiliates of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service, which the administration said “fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda.” House and Senate lawmakers voted mostly along party lines to nix the funding in July.

Trump has also been exerting influence over network television, both news and entertainment operations.

In September, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke Disney-owned ABC’s affiliate licenses unless they pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” from the air after the late-night host made comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Disney and ABC adhered to Carr’s demand but reinstated Kimmel a week later following public outcry.

ABC News settled with the then president-elect in December 2024 for a $15 million charitable contribution to his future presidential library, and $1 million for legal fees. Trump had sued the network for defamation following a misstatement by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos regarding a civil suit finding.

In July, CBS’ parent company, Paramount, paid Trump $16 million after he sued over an edit in a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Trump and his enemies 

Trump’s latest target among his political foes is Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The president has publicly pummeled Powell with threats to fire him if he did not rapidly lower interest rates.

Powell learned Jan. 9 upon receiving a federal grand jury summons that the Department of Justice is probing whether he lied to Congress in June about renovation costs to the agency’s District of Columbia headquarters. 

Trump’s investigation of the Fed chair drew swift criticism as an overreach into independent monetary policy decisions meant to stabilize the economy.

Numerous former Fed chairs and White House economic officials who served under both parties issued a statement calling the investigation  “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine that independence.”

The investigation revelation even roused Senate Republicans to question Trump’s actions. Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said in a statement he will oppose Trump’s forthcoming nominations to the Federal Reserve board of governors, including the Fed chair vacancy when Powell’s term expires.

“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” wrote Tillis, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee. 

Murkowski chalked up the investigation as “nothing more than an attempt at coercion.” 

Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told numerous reporters on Capitol Hill Jan. 12 that the allegations against Powell “better be real and they better be serious.”

Trump had already exerted his influence over the central bank when he fired Board Governor Lisa Cook, appointed to the panel by President Joe Biden in 2023.  

Trump hit setbacks in lower federal courts after Cook sued and retained her position. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 21 on the question of the president’s power to fire independent agency appointees without cause. 

The justices heard a similar argument Dec. 8 over Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission appointee Rebecca Slaughter. 

The president has so far hit roadblocks in his other attempts to prosecute political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Trump’s cases against Comey and James after finding U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi illegally appointed former special assistant and personal lawyer to the president, Lindsey Halligan, as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Halligan secured a two-count indictment against the former FBI chief for allegedly lying to Congress over a leak to the press about the bureau’s investigation into whether Russia played a role in Trump’s first presidential campaign. Comey pleaded not guilty.

The indictment followed the departure of Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Seibert, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who declined to seek charges against Comey.

Halligan also secured an indictment against James, alleging bank fraud and that she lied to a financial institution to receive better loan terms. James also pleaded not guilty.

James successfully prosecuted a massive fraud case in 2024 against Trump, his family and the Trump Organization, for falsely inflating asset values.

In one particularly high-profile post on his own social media platform, Trump directly appealed to Bondi to prosecute Comey and James.

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He continued further down in the post: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Eddington described Trump’s actions as a “revenge tour” and said the president is “utilizing the coercive power of government, and in this particular case the Department of Justice, to go after his political enemies.”

Then, the administration on Jan. 5  attempted to downgrade the military retirement rank and pay of Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and retired Navy captain. 

Trump and Hegseth singled out Kelly after he and five fellow Democratic lawmakers, all veterans, published a video encouraging U.S. troops to refuse “illegal orders.” 

In a barrage of Truth Social posts on the morning of Nov. 20, Trump wrote, “Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT” 

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!,” he added a couple of hours later.

The president reposted several messages from Truth Social users, including one with the handle @P78 who wrote, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” 

The lawmakers published the video as the U.S. was nearly three months into its campaign of striking small boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Alien Enemies Act

The president has also reached back as far as the late 18th century to invoke laws meant for extraordinary circumstances.

In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to bolster his mass deportation campaign and deport more than 100 Venezuelans, without due process, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. 

The wartime law, which had only been invoked during the War of 1812 and both world wars, gives the president power to deport people from nations with which the U.S. is at war.

Even when a federal judge issued an emergency order that the flights carrying men deported under the law turn back to the U.S., the Trump administration did not comply. As of Jan. 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it was unlikely the men could be retrieved due to the chaotic situation in Venezuela, which the Trump administration caused.

The Venezuelan nationals, ages 14 and up, many of whom the administration accused without evidence of being gang members, were incarcerated for months before being released to their home country in a prisoner exchange.   

A federal appeals court has blocked Trump, for now, from using the law to quickly expel Venezuelan nationals. A full hearing is pending.

Trump renaming

Trump is also facing headwinds from Democrats and advocates for affixing his name to federal buildings and his face to this year’s national parks annual pass.

Senate Democrats Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joined independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont Jan. 13 to introduce what they’re calling the “SERVE Act,” short for “Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego Act.” 

The lawmakers unveiled the bill less than a month after Trump announced his name would now appear on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Trump was elected chair of the cultural center after he installed new board members early in his second term.

Sanders said in a statement that Trump aimed “to create the myth of the ‘Great Leader’ by naming public buildings after himself — something that dictators have done throughout history.”

Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, sued Trump in federal court on Dec. 22, alleging only Congress has the power to rename federal buildings.

A public lands group has also challenged Trump in federal court, alleging he broke the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act when he replaced a national contest-winning photo of Glacier National Park with his image next to George Washington on the U.S. residents’ annual National Parks and Federal Recreation Lands Pass.

‘The best job ever’

Nearly a year after he took office, Trump again sat down with Hannity. 

In the Jan. 8 interview — the same day the administration sent more federal agents to Minneapolis in the face of intense protests and a day after the president said his own morality was the only restraint on his power — the Fox News host asked whether Republicans will win the upcoming midterm elections.

“I think we’ve done a great job,” Trump said. “Maybe the best job ever in the first year.”

Timeline graphic by Ashley Murray.

Wisconsin State Flag | Getty Images Creative

This week marked the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, demanding that then-Vice President Pence overturn the will of the people. Efforts to impose accountability for those responsible and those involved have largely ended — except in Wisconsin. This means that Wisconsin has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to re-assert the rule of law, to ensure justice, and to bolster the foundations on which American democracy has been built over the past 250 years.

As we assess the state of our democracy in light of this somber anniversary, let’s start with the bad news: 

• The U.S. Supreme Court derailed efforts by states to enforce the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against insurrectionists serving in federal office, and then it invented an ahistorical and jaw-droppingly broad doctrine of presidential immunity to derail criminal prosecutions of Trump in state and federal courts alike. 
• Federal prosecutions of the violent mob in the Capitol were upended by Trump’s Department of Justice, and Trump issued sweeping federal pardons to every individual connected with Jan. 6, effectively encouraging them to keep it up. 
• State prosecutions of the fraudulent electors — those who executed an unprecedented effort to overturn the 2020 election by submitting to Congress (and other officials) paperwork that falsely declared Trump to have won seven key states that he in fact lost and thereby laying the groundwork for the Jan. 6 rioters to violently demand Pence validate their efforts — have faltered, often for reasons unrelated to the merits of those actions. 

But here in Wisconsin there are still grounds for hope. Hope that bad actors who deliberately took aim at our democracy will be held accountable. Hope that our institutions will stand up and protect our democracy from further meddling by those most directly responsible. And hope that those institutions will act promptly to prevent further damage. Every Wisconsinite should be watching the following accountability efforts — and urging our elected officials to use their authority to advance the rule of law and protect our democracy. 

First, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will soon determine the appropriate sanction for Michael Gableman’s ethical transgressions as he spearheaded a sham “investigation” of the 2020 election. Gableman, who once served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, accepted this job despite his own assessment that he did not understand how elections work in Wisconsin. He wasted taxpayer funds, undermined government transparency laws, dealt dishonestly with his clients and the public, lied to and insulted courts, and tried to jail the elected mayors of Green Bay and Madison. In March 2023, Law Forward filed an omnibus ethics grievance, documenting Gableman’s myriad breaches of the ethics rules that bind all Wisconsin attorneys. Last summer, Gableman stipulated that he had no viable defense of his conduct and agreed with the Office of Lawyer Regulation to jointly recommend his law license be suspended for three years. (He is now trying to wriggle out of accountability by serially pushing justice after justice to recuse.) 

Wisconsin precedent is clear that, where a lawyer is charged with multiple ethical breaches, the proper sanction is determined by adding the sanctions for each breach together. The Court should apply established law, which demands revoking Gableman’s law license. Then the Office of Lawyer Regulation and the Court should act on our requests to hold Andrew Hitt (chairman of the Wisconsin fraudulent electors) and Jim Troupis (chief Wisconsin counsel to Trump’s 2020 campaign and ringleader of the fraudulent-elector scheme) accountable as well.

Second, the primary architects of the fraudulent-elector scheme, detailed in records  obtained through Law Forward’s groundbreaking civil suit, are also facing criminal prosecution in Dane County. Attorney General Josh Kaul’s case is narrowly focused only on three lawyers — two who were based here in Wisconsin, and one working for the Trump campaign in DC — who conceived and designed the scheme to overturn Wisconsin’s results and then convinced six other states to follow suit. Troupis, who himself was appointed to the Wisconsin bench by former-Gov. Scott Walker as a reward for his key role in the 2011 partisan gerrymander, has gone to great lengths to slow down this prosecution, which Kaul initiated in June 2024. He filed nine separate motions to dismiss the case. He accused the judge hearing preliminary motions of misconduct and insisted that the entire Dane County bench should be recused. And now he has appealed the denial of his misconduct allegations. This case, since assigned to a different Dane County judge, will proceed, and it is the best hope anywhere in the country to achieve accountability for the fraudulent-elector scheme. 

Third, on behalf of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and two individual voters, Law Forward is suing Elon Musk and two advocacy organizations he controls for their brazen scheme of million-dollar giveaways to influence the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election. This case is about ensuring that Wisconsin elections are decided by Wisconsin voters, not by out-of-state efforts to buy the results they want for us. We’re waiting for the trial court to decide preliminary motions, but, with another Wisconsin Supreme Court election imminently approaching, there is urgency to clarify that Wisconsin law forbids the shenanigans we saw last year, which contributed to the most expensive judicial race in American history. 

Beginning in 2011, Wisconsin became the country’s primary testing ground for the most radical anti-democratic ideas. From Act 10 to one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country, from subverting the separation of powers and steamrolling local control over local issues to hobbling the regulatory state and starving our public schools, Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Legislature adopted idea after idea hostile to democracy. With the end of the nation’s most extreme and durable partisan gerrymander in 2023 and a change in the makeup of the state Supreme Court, however, the tide in Wisconsin has ebbed somewhat. 

Now, improbably, Wisconsin is the place that democracy can best hold the line. We can create accountability for those who have abused power, have undermined elections, and have diminished the ideals and institutions of our self-government. That, in conjunction with Law Forward’s broad docket of work to defend free elections and to strengthen our democracy, sustains my hope.

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Protesters supporting U.S. President Donald Trump break into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Five years ago today we were transfixed by the surreal spectacle of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The violence and horror of that day was made more bearable when the insurrectionists were arrested and the election results they tried to overturn were certified.

But now they’re back, pardoned by President Donald Trump, released from prison and planning to parade triumphantly today through the streets of Washington, D.C. 

Among the people convicted and later pardoned by Trump, at least 33 have been arrested and charged with new crimes, according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Their alleged continuing criminal behaviors include rape, illegal possession of weapons, firing on police officers, and, in the case of Chrisopher Moynihan, threatening to murder House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

Some of the most violent offenders are back behind bars. But the most powerful proponents of the Big Lie, including Trump himself, the enablers who staff his administration and the Wisconsin Republicans who hatched the fake electors scheme to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, continue to work to undermine our democracy. 

“We must continue to defeat election deniers and the threats they pose,” the Wisconsin-based progressive firm Law Forward declares on its website, in a section devoted to a timeline of the fake electors scheme. Law Forward brought the first class-action lawsuit against the fake electors, and forced the release of documents, text messages and other evidence showing how the plot unfolded, starting in Wisconsin. They present the timeline “as a call to action for every American to see how close our democracy came to toppling and how the freedom to vote must continue to be protected, not taken for granted.” 

For a few years it seemed as though we had dispelled the nightmare of Jan. 6. But the lawless, emboldened second Trump administration has dragged us back to that scary, dangerous time.

The brave work of people like Jeff Mandell, founder of Law Forward, and the other lawyers, judges and investigators who continue to struggle against the agents of authoritarianism trying to destroy American democracy is still making a difference. 

Last month, Dane County Judge John Hyland found probable cause to continue the trial of Wisconsin attorney James Troupis and Trump campaign aide Mike Roman, charged with felony forgery by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul in connection with the fake electors scheme. Hyland  rejected Troupis’ desperate effort to scuttle the case by claiming another judge had a personal bias against him.

Wisconsin attorney Ken Cheseboro, the originator of the fake electors plot, is also facing felony charges.

As Trump and his gang openly defy the U.S. Constitution, pursue baseless, vindictive prosecutions of their political enemies, launch military actions without the consent of Congress, threaten to seize other countries and use their positions to enrich themselves while destroying the public welfare, it feels as through that dark moment on Jan. 6 when American democracy was under physical attack was just the beginning.

But as Mandell told me last year, a few months after Trump took office, “I think building a stronger, more resilient democracy in Wisconsin is its own form of resistance.”

“When things feel most shocking and unstable at the federal level,” at the state and local level, Mandell said, “we can show our institutions still work and provide some reassurance.” 

We need that reassurance today more than ever.

“We are slow to realize that democracy is a life and involves continual struggle,” said Robert M. La Follette, the great governor and senator from Wisconsin and founder of the Progressive movement. I’m grateful for the Wisconsinites today who, like La Follette, are committed to that life and willing to continue the struggle.

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