The unmaking of American democracy is happening right now

By James J. Devine

The guardrails are gone. Every single one.

In the winter of 2020, a handful of federal officials still had the spine to tell the president no. They huddled in a windowless room deep inside the Justice Department.

William Barr, then the attorney general, had summoned cybersecurity experts to answer one question: Had voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, stolen the election from Donald Trump?

The experts delivered their answer. A clerk made a mistake. Human error. Not fraud. Not a conspiracy. Not the dark machinery of a rigged system. Barr listened. He knew what the truth would cost him. He made hand motions like he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.

He told Trump the truth on Dec. 14. Then he resigned. He left thinking the guardrails had held.

He was wrong. The guardrails were not repaired. They were not reinforced. They were torn out by the roots and thrown on a bonfire.

Now the man who tried to overturn the last election is back, and he has spent the past year methodically, deliberately, ruthlessly dismantling every federal safeguard that stood in his way. The people who said no in 2020 are gone. All of them. Fired. Pushed out. Reassigned to nowhere.

In their places stand the very operatives who tried to steal the vote the first time. They are not outside the gates anymore. They are sitting behind the desks. They have the keys. They have the warrants. They have the guns.

And they are already moving.

On a quiet morning in late January, FBI agents walked into the Fulton County election office in Atlanta. They did not ask politely. They did not request copies. They seized the original ballots from the 2020 election. The actual pieces of paper that voters marked five years ago. They carted them away in boxes.

There is no precedent for this atrocity. No historian has found a single other instance of the federal government confiscating original election records from a sovereign state. The Constitution does not permit this. It says the opposite.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states the authority to run their own elections. That is not a suggestion. It is the architecture of the republic, carefully designed by men who had just spent eight years bleeding to escape a king.

The raid happened because Trump demanded it. Kurt Olsen, the man Trump installed as his election security czar at the White House, flew to Atlanta and ordered the FBI to move.

The FBI special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office was removed after he refused to carry out searches and seizures of 2020 election records, questioning the Trump administration’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia.

Paul Brown looked at the evidence and saw nothing. No fraud. No crime. No justification. Brown was given two choices: retire or be transferred to Alaska. He retired. His replacement signed the warrant.

His ouster cleared the way for federal agents to raid the county’s elections office and cart away 700 boxes of ballots and records, part of a systematic campaign by the president to weaponize law enforcement against the states that refused to overturn his 2020 defeat.

Then Pam Bondi, the attorney general, handpicked a federal prosecutor from Missouri to handle the case. Thomas Albus had never worked in Georgia. He had no jurisdiction there. But he had been meeting with Olsen for months.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which once served as a firewall against precisely this kind of political corruption, no longer exists in any meaningful form. It has been gutted from 36 lawyers to two. There is no one left to say no.

Donald Trump called the FBI agents on the ground during the raid. He phoned them to offer praise and thanks. He sent the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to orchestrate the call. The director of national intelligence. In a county elections office. Directing a raid on a local ballot-counting facility. Let that sink into your bones.

This is not a bug in the system. It is the system now.

Across at least eight states, agents from the Department of Homeland Security have fanned out like an occupation force. In Ohio, they collected voter data from six counties, targeting Democratic strongholds first. In Michigan, they demanded that Wayne County hand over its 2024 election records. In South Carolina, officials from more than 40 counties are now preparing for the possibility of armed federal agents showing up at polling places on Election Day.

That is not speculation. That is what local election officials are telling reporters. That is what court filings show. That is what the president himself said on a Feb. 2 podcast, when he called for Republicans to “nationalize” the voting and “take over” the process in at least 15 states.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump told his former deputy FBI director. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Read that again.

The president of the United States, who has a record of trying to cheat, lie, and steal elections, is openly calling for his political party to seize control of the machinery of American balloting.

He is not hiding this. He is saying it into the microphones. He is posting it on social media.

In August, he wrote that states are “merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

He has it exactly backward. Deliberately backward. Maliciously backward.

The president is not the master of the states in election matters. The states are not his servants. They are not his agents. They are coequal sovereigns under a Constitution that deliberately, specifically, intentionally left the mechanics of voting in local hands precisely to prevent a tyrannical executive from doing what Trump is now doing.

But the Constitution does not enforce itself. It requires human beings to enforce it. And Trump has spent the past 14 months eliminating every human being who might try.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, was created during Trump’s first term to protect elections from foreign interference.

After the 2020 election, its “Rumor Control” website became a bullhorn of truth, debunking every lie Trump told about rigged machines and stolen votes. Trump fired the director. That was just the opening act.

In his second term, the administration put the entire election security staff on leave, froze their work, and then fired or transferred all three dozen of them. The agency that proved Antrim County was a clerical error no longer employs a single person who knows how to do that work.

The FBI’s public corruption team, which monitored Election Day criminal activity for decades, has been disbanded.

The Foreign Influence Task Force, which tracked Russian, Chinese, and Iranian efforts to meddle in American voting, has been disbanded.

The National Security Council’s election security group has been eliminated.

The Foreign Malign Influence Center has been dismantled.

A former national security official told ProPublica that the federal government has simply “abandoned” its role in preserving election integrity.

Inside CISA, one official said, elections are now treated as “a toxic poison.”

The people who replaced them are not neutral professionals. They are warriors in the same crusade that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Heather Honey, who holds a newly created election position at the Department of Homeland Security, falsely claimed that Pennsylvania had more ballots than voters in 2020. Donald Trump cited that exact lie while exhorting his followers to march on Congress.

Honey works for David Harvilicz, an assistant secretary who co-founded an AI company with a man who helped build the Antrim County conspiracy theory. At least 11 Trump appointees have direct ties to the Election Integrity Network, the organization led by Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election.

These are not fringe characters operating in the shadows. They are running the federal government’s election apparatus. They are the ones who will decide what to investigate, what to seize, what to charge, what to leak, what to say to the public on election night when the returns come in, and Trump does not like what he sees.

Because make no mistake: He will not like what he sees. The midterms are coming. The president’s approval ratings are near record lows. The economy is faltering. The deportation machine is terrifying communities. The war on Iran is draining the treasury.

Democrats are overperforming in special elections by margins that suggest a coming tidal wave. A wave that could flip the House. A wave that could subject Trump to the one check the Constitution provides: impeachment.

Does anyone believe he will accept that wave?

He did not accept a fair election in 2020. He spent two months lying about it, pressuring officials to “find” votes, assembling fake electors, and finally unleashing a mob on the Capitol. He has spent the intervening years not reflecting on his sins but planning his revenge. He has told us exactly what he intends to do. He has done it in public, on the record, in front of microphones and cameras.

He said he should have sent the National Guard to seize voting machines. He said that last recently.

He said states must do what the president tells them about counting votes. He said that in August.

The distributed nature of elections throughout the United States, characterized by local oversight and community participation, not only enhances security but also serves as a formidable defense against the potential for large-scale manipulation because any attempt to influence election outcomes would require coordinated efforts across thousands of precincts, significantly complicating any potential scheme.

When community involvement is built into every level—from state oversight down to local poll workers—it not only preserves the integrity of the electoral process but also strengthens it against coordinated interference.

This local focus helps ensure that elections are secure and that their votes count in a democracy.

He said Republicans should “take over” the voting in at least 15 states. He said that on Feb. 2.

And in between those statements, his administration has been methodically executing the plan. Seizing ballots. Demanding voter rolls. Suing states that refuse to hand over confidential personal data. Sending armed agents into local election offices. Firing anyone who objects. Replacing them with people who have spent years claiming that American democracy is a fraud.

Trump wants to cheat, continuing the longtime trend that Republicans will do anything to win except by getting the most votes.

Trump demanded that Republican lawmakers in Texas redraw congressional district maps to give more unfair advantages to GOP candidates, but California and Virginia responded with mid-decade gerrymandering of their own.

Gerrymandering, or the strategic drawing of electoral district lines to favor one political party, is cheating to diminish any chance the voters have to decide who gets elected, but it is not without peril.

University of Florida redistricting expert Michael McDonald said a new map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to give the GOP an edge in four seats now held by Democrats “could backfire gloriously if it’s just a bloodbath everywhere,” for Republicans.

Instead of holding on to districts designed to produce 80 or 70 percent victories for the GOP, a landslide could wipe out incumbents who would normally win with 55 to 60 percent of the vote.

The Justice Department is now suing more than 20 states to obtain unredacted voter rolls containing driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, and voting histories. Two federal courts have already ruled that the administration is not entitled to this data.

The administration is simply ignoring those rulings and seizing what it can by force, because Trump wants to purge voter rolls of citizens who are predictably against him, like pro-choice women or senior citizens whose Social Security checks will be drastically reduced in 2032.

In Colorado, the secretary of state has hired a lawyer just to fight the federal government’s demands. In Maine, the secretary of state says trust between the states and Washington is “absolutely demolished.” In Georgia, local officials are begging a federal court to order the FBI to return the original ballots before they are lost or tampered with or “lost.”

The courts are the last line. They have blocked parts of Trump’s March 2025 executive order on elections. They have dismissed some of the lawsuits. But court rulings take time. Time is the one thing Trump does not need. He just needs to create enough chaos, enough confusion, enough doubt, enough fear, to give his allies in Congress and on the courts an excuse to intervene. To delay. To investigate. To send the matter back to the states. To do exactly what he tried to do on Jan. 6, 2021, but with the full weight of the federal government behind him instead of a mob of flag-waving rioters.

And the courts themselves are under assault. The far right is spending hundreds of millions in dark money to capture state supreme courts. Those courts are the final arbiters of election disputes under the Constitution. If they fall, nothing is left. No firewall. No check. No balance. Just a president who has already shown that he will burn the whole thing down before he will admit defeat.

The guardrails that held in 2020 are gone. The people who held the line are gone. The agencies that told the truth are gone. The president is openly calling for his party to seize the vote. And the machinery of federal law enforcement is already moving, county by county, ballot by ballot, warrant by warrant.

This is not a warning about the future. This is a report on the present.

The ballots from Fulton County are in federal custody. The Gestapo-like agents are in the field. The president has given illegal orders.

The only thing standing between this republic and something darker than most Americans can imagine is a handful of state officials, a few federal judges, and the rapidly fading memory of a time when the guardrails held.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night, Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher and engineer from Torrance, California, was the third man suspected trying assassinate Trump.

On July 13, 2024, during a rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks fired an AR-15–style rifle at him and 58-year-old Ryan Routh, pointed his a high-powered SKS semi-automatic carbine from about 400 yards away, outside Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on September 15, 2024.

Assassination attempts tend to say more about the political climate, extremism, and security conditions of the time than about the president’s effectiveness or virtue.

By using assassination attempts as a metric, Trump risks glorifying violence or confusing notoriety with leadership. A more grounded way to judge a president would be outcomes—policy impact, economic stability, civil rights, crisis management, and the long-term health of democratic institutions.

This has developed into a counterattack on the Democrats for allegedly encouraging would-be assassins. Trump claimed at a New York rally last week that “the fact is I’m not a danger to democracy — they are.”