Trump’s War on Democracy Moves to Texas

America is about to take another step towards becoming a cult kingdom of one. This time Donald Trump has enlisted allies in Texas as he tries to bury U.S. democracy as deep as he wants to inter the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Gerrymandering is the almost quaint-sounding term for what Trump wants done. But make no mistake. We are talking about a pin-out-of-the-hand-grenade moment in American public life.

It all started with a phone call, where a lot of Trump’s deeper mischief has begun.

In his initial presidency, Trump at least waited until after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden before calling Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to ask him to find 11,780 votes that didn’t exist. That would have given Trump a victory in the Peach State.

To be clear, Trump interfered in that election after it had taken place.

In his second term, Trump has undergone something of an evolution. This time, he called Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ahead of next year’s U.S. midterm elections.

Why the call? Trump aides asked Abbott to find him five more seats in the Lone Star State.

The governor happily obliged the president. He announced that Texas would redraw its electoral map to increase Republican representation in Congress. In other words, he ordered up a big batch of gerrymandering.

Let’s be crystal clear about why this request from Trump, shamefully granted by Abbott, is so fatally wrong and so hugely important.

Gerrymandering is a polite word for cheating. The idea is simple. You identify where voters of various stripes live and draw new district borders favouring your own party while taking districts away from your opponent.

The deed is done by the party that holds power in a given state. It is 100 per cent partisan and 100 per cent anti-democratic.

In Canada, thankfully, we do things differently. Every 10 years after national census results are released Canada’s chief election officer applies a formula set out in the Constitution to recalculate how many new MPs should be allocated to each province. Then, in each province, independent commissions decide how to draw new riding boundaries reflecting the demographic shifts.

Quite a contrast to the United States, where both parties have used gerrymandering to their advantage.

But Texas this time is distinctly different from the usual way that states redraw their districts.

In the United States, as in Canada, the practice normally takes place every 10 years after a census. There is a certain logic to that. If the census shows that the demographics have changed, so too should a state’s electoral districts. It is politics catching up with reality on the ground.

But that is not what Abbott has agreed to do. He was not responding to the results of a census. The next Texas census is years away.

He was responding to the demands of an embattled president who has reason to believe that he is about to lose Congress after the midterm elections.

So let’s call it what it is. This is political cheating for cheating’s sake.

It gets worse. It is forcing the Democrats into a very uncomfortable and morally indefensible corner.

If the Republicans are prepared to cheat by redistricting in states like Texas, then some Democrats are arguing that they must adopt the same tactics in states that they control, like California and New York.

Some have called that fighting fire with fire. I call it answering cheating with cheating. It is the quick route to political hell.

Why do I say that? Even though the polls suggest the Republicans are poised to lose the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms, the party of Reagan totally controls the governments in 23 states, compared with just 15 for the Democrats. In other words, they have a greater capacity to win by redistricting.

Here is what will happen if both parties resort to gerrymandering to win at the polls.

Americans will no longer be able to believe in the very thing that sets them apart in a world of dictators and megalomaniacs: the electoral system that up until now has said that the people are in charge of who runs the country.

If Trump can drag the Democrats into the cesspool of partisan redistricting, the most important institution of democracy in the United States will be gone.

Trump has already systematically undermined and discredited many of the United States’ foundational institutions.

He has sown doubt about the courts, disparaging them when their rulings do not conform to his agenda, and mused about firing judges.

He has denounced the free press as the enemy of the people.

He has attacked and financially punished brilliant bastions of intellectual excellence, including Harvard and Columbia universities.

He has fired dedicated public servants, like labour statistics chief Erika McEntarfer, for the high crime of giving him factual reports he did not want to see.

And he has walked away from traditional allies of the United States, including Canada, the better to cosy up to a sordid collection of demagogues and dictators.

If he manages to get Americans to accept the notion that politicians should get to choose their voters, rather than voters choosing their politicians, then Thomas Jefferson’s worst fears will have been realized.

The republic will have been destroyed from within by a man for whom the mirror, not the constitution, was his guiding light.