from the bringing-a-nation-to-its-knees dept
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
Bukele — the recent recipient of (apparently illegal) federal payments in exchange for opening up his torture prison to anyone Trump feels like throwing in there — is doing stuff Trump can only dream of. But they’re not so far-fetched we can’t imagine the same thing happening here, perhaps even during the remainder of Trump’s second term.
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Neat! How did this happen? Well… it looks a whole lot like what’s happening in the USA right now:
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
So, that’s the Congress part of it. Who else has been pitching in with the effort to consolidate all the nation’s power in the Executive Branch? Oh. Right.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 that it allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
Things like these once seemed like an impossibility in America. Now, they almost seem inevitable. And while it might be extremely difficult to make this happen as quickly as the world’s “coolest dictator” has in El Salvador, it’s probably neither as hard as we want to believe it is, nor would it take nearly as long as we might hope.
The groundwork for destroying the remnants of a democratic republic is already being laid by the Trump administration. If we’re hoping for an extension of our (mostly) representative democratic ideals, we’re going to need a whole lot more than the obviously faulty assumption our fellow Americans won’t be willing to get stomped in the face by a boot heel, just as long as people they don’t like get the boot heel first.
Jasleen Singh, writing for The Brennan Center, has an extremely detailed report on every effort being made by Trump and the GOP to ensure any future elections (if there are any) will be a.) limited as much as possible to people who support the GOP, and b.) so bereft of security and integrity the GOP can claim any election outcome they don’t like is fraudulent.
It all starts with Trump’s most brazen move — the pardoning of nearly every January 6th insurrectionist convicted of federal charges. This made it clear it didn’t really matter whether you were on the right side of history. It only mattered whether or not you were on Trump’s side. In doing so, he set precedent for anyone willing to follow in his footsteps, providing people engaging in criminal acts with a pretty much guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card so long as their violence is on behalf of the GOP.
Singh’s report is as enlightening as it is horrifying, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’m not going to be able to do it justice with a few pull quotes because there’s just so much being done to undermine the entire election process.
It’s not just the voter suppression efforts, which have been a favorite tactic of Republicans ever since anyone other than white, male landowners were allowed to vote. Multiple aggressive redistricting efforts are underway to throw more votes to local Republicans, and in far too many cases, courts are failing to shut these efforts down.
On the other side of things, nearly anyone or any entity that provided evidence contradicting Trump’s claims about a “stolen” election has been kicked to the curb.
The president and his DOJ appointees have repeatedly threatened to prosecute the election officials who administered the 2020 election. In a March 14, 2025, speech, President Trump stated, “What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country. And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.” The president has also threatened to target nonprofit advocacy groups that play an important role in voter engagement, election monitoring, and litigation to protect the freedom to vote.
[…]
The Trump administration severely undermined the structure and purpose of CISA in the president’s first few months in office. In February 2025, CISA put 17 of its election security staff on administrative leave. Additionally, DOGE fired 130 people from CISA; a judge later reinstated those employees to their positions, but they were immediately placed on administrative leave.
That same month, CISA paused all election security activities pending an internal review. The review was completed in March, but the Trump administration has refused to release the findings. It is unclear which CISA services have been restored, if any, despite repeated requests for information from members of Congress responsible for agency oversight. Reporting from April suggests that CISA is planning massive additional cuts.
The goal here is obvious, especially when combined with the deliberate culling of other forms of oversight and election integrity efforts previously provided by the federal government: make every election so insecure and bereft of external support that every election result can be questioned. Of course, results will only be questioned if they don’t go the way the GOP/Trump want them to, but that’s the entire point of this deliberate destruction of anything related to election integrity. Even those simply interested in ensuring the voting process is as secure as possible won’t actually be able to achieve these aims, perhaps leaving some of them to question the outcomes.
There’s so much more in this report. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself. But let’s dip back in for a second to witness yet another aspect of the Department of Justice the Trump administration has dismantled because it doesn’t serve the squad goals of a bunch of GOP members who were fortunate enough to be born in a country they seemingly want to turn into a country people will regret calling their home.
The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the civil rights division of its career staff. By the end of May 2025, an estimated 250 attorneys making up approximately 70 percent of the division’s lawyers had left the department. The staff of the division’s voting section dwindled from approximately 30 lawyers down to about 6. But the division has begun hiring new attorneys. The voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls.
At this point, even the most “glass is half-full” person will be forced to recognize the glass is at least two-thirds empty. There’s no “it will get worse before it gets better” going on here. It’s just going to keep getting worse unless there’s a sea change in leadership and an extremely focused effort to right this ship after Trump has deliberately run it aground for four straight years. Nostalgia is useless, as is pretending that playing by the rules will somehow return everything to normal. The other side is wiping its ass with every American ideal it can get a handle on. We’re regressing to the mean, which is never something the Leader of the Free World should be doing. If we stay on this path, we’ll be nothing more than a footnote on the wrong side of history.
Filed Under: authoritarian bullshit, conspiracy theories, democracy, election integrity, election security, insurrection, racism, trump
