Trump, Abbott and the GOP bring Orbán-style autocracy to Texas

On Sunday, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made it clear: His party’s fight to gerrymander the state’s congressional map “could literally last years.”

But as the story has played out since Texas Republicans first met in early June to discuss redrawing congressional districts, another thing has become apparent: This is an authoritarian powergrab.

Abbott and Texas Republicans are seeking to take away at least five congressional seats from the Democrats. Redistricting has historically occurred once every ten years. The districts that would be eliminated are predominantly Black and brown, and these millions of voters would be effectively disenfranchised.

The effort is coming at President Donald Trump’s request as a means of securing an advantage in the upcoming midterms and beyond. This would also give Trump and his MAGA successors an advantage if the presidential election were to be decided by a congressional vote.

The moves by Trump, Abbott and other Texas Republicans should be seen for what they are: Part of a much larger campaign to end multiracial democracy on a national level. It continues the trend of red states such as Texas, Indiana and Florida being laboratories for American autocracy and Trumpism.

On Aug. 5, Trump told CNBC that the Republicans in Texas are “entitled” to more congressional seats in Texas. In a democracy, this is not true. Political candidates and parties win elections by persuading the public that they have earned their vote. Demagogues believe they are entitled to votes and the power that comes with it. “Trumpmandering” is this principle of corrupt power applied to gerrymandering on a nationwide scale.

As I explained in a recent essay, Trump and his MAGA Republicans are advancing policies that are wildly unpopular with most Americans. Instead of adjusting course, they’re doubling down — not to win more votes, but to rig outcomes. Their tactics include voter nullification, suppression, gerrymandering, lawsuits, dark money and even threats of violence.

In total, this tactic of burrowing into a democracy and then destroying it from within is a classic strategy among authoritarians and autocrats.

“Though the whole episode appears extreme, it is straight out of the playbook of would-be authoritarians around the world,” said Susan Stokes, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the faculty chair of the Chicago Center on Democracy. “Their core goal is to loosen the mechanisms of accountability.”

“Steep drops in accountability,” she said, are a key measure social scientists look for in considering whether democracies are endangered. “We look for simultaneous declines in horizontal accountability — the ability of coequal branches of government, whistleblowers and autonomous public bodies’ to monitor and constrain chief executives — and in vertical accountability, [which is] the ability of voters to reelect officials when they have performed well and turn them out of office when they have performed badly.”

All of these, of course, have been in precipitous decline since Trump returned to office. His moves, Stokes said, puts him “in the company of leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.”

David Pepper, the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines,” also reached for the Hungary comparison. “This is Orbán-style competitive autocracy in action in America.”

He continued: “This is far bigger than Texas, as bad as it is. When you consider the broader map [where] they’re attempting to gerrymander mid-decade — Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Florida and Indiana, at least — what we’re witnessing is November 2020 [to] January 2021 all over again. Trump’s just interfering in elections before they occur, rather than after.”

The president’s anxiety, Pepper said, stems from historical precedent; the party in power usually loses seats in midterm elections.

Trump is worried sick the GOP will lose its House majority in 2026, just like it did during his first term in 2018. He also remembers his own loss in 2020 — and the efforts of 147 House Republicans to overturn the election results when the chamber met to certify the election. But instead of close electoral college states, he’s going after states where they hope to flip House seats in advance in order to avoid those losses before they happen.

The difference, of course, is that before Jan. 6, those officials did not have recent experience or an inclination to interfere with elections after they had happened. So they largely said no.

But since most of these politicians have a long and sordid history of gerrymandering districts to guarantee outcomes — it’s how many themselves occupy power today — they’re far more willing to do Trump’s bidding this time.

Since Trump’s election and inauguration, national Democratic leaders have remained largely passive, confused and ineffective in resisting Trump and the MAGA movement’s assault on democracy. As a practical matter, Democrats do not have a winning brand or messaging, and they are desperate to find one.

By comparison, Texas Democrats have acted boldly: They fled the state to deny Abbott and Republicans the quorum needed to push through their authoritarian gerrymandering scheme. And they have held firm in their resistance, despite facing an onslaught of threats, including a request from Texas Sen. John Cornyn for the FBI to help track down the lawmakers and enforce civil arrest warrants, exorbitant fines, formal censure, expulsion and their seats declared vacant, and bribery investigations, because they accepted funds to help defray travel costs in leaving Texas.

Cornyn announced on Friday that the FBI had granted his request. If true, it would mean that federal law enforcement is now doing the political work of Trump and the Republican Party by targeting their political “enemies.” And if Abbott proves successful in having the absent lawmakers’ seats declared vacant, Texas Republicans would have a quorum — and gain de facto total control of the state legislature.

According to reporting by the Texas Tribune’s Kayla Guo, the Democratic lawmakers have conceded they may lose the fight. But they hope to set an example for Democrats and to “lay the groundwork for a national fight over redistricting.”

The national Democratic Party leadership needs to lead, follow or get out of the way so that bolder (and younger) leaders can take their place and engage in a more effective resistance campaign that will give the party a much better chance of winning in the 2026 midterms and beyond — assuming free and fair elections still exist in the U.S.

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At a meeting held in Chicago last week, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said, “This is not the Democratic party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to the knife fight…This is a new Democratic party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight, and we are going to fight fire with fire.”

Unfortunately, the party has shown no such fire since the disastrous 2024 election and Trump’s return to power.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also been a loud and strong advocate of a much more aggressive strategy. Last week, he said, “Donald Trump is trying to steal the 2026 election. We cannot sit back and watch this happen.” Newsom has also proposed using gerrymandering against Republicans in California if the Texas plot continues to offset any GOP gains in congressional seats.

Steven Fish, a political scientist and a leading expert on authoritarianism and democracy, applauded Newsom’s “high-dominance” leadership style as an example of how the Democrats should fight back against Trump and the MAGA movement.

Newsom, he said, “seems to grasp the imperative of confronting Trump’s cramped, ethnonational story with a compelling counternarrative…[he] is going on the offensive on immigration in a way few other Democrats have dared for decades.”

Fish pointed to Newsom’s “bold” viral video that refuted MAGA’s xenophobic narrative about immigration and attributed California’s economic dominance as the world’s fourth-largest economy “all to the fact that fully 27 percent of Californians [are] foreign-born.”

“Re-enchanting democracy is required to save it,” Fish said, “and that can be done only by bold Democrats who arm themselves with stirring national narratives that glorify and defend the mainstays of Americanism that Trump betrays every day: Democracy, service to country, openness to new arrivals and ferocious commitment to the security of the nation and its democratic allies.”

Democratic Govs. Kathy Hochul of New York and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois also support using gerrymandering and other such means in their respective states — and more broadly across the country — to counter the Republican Party’s authoritarian gerrymandering.

This growing push among Democratic governors to match the GOP blow-for-blow could lead to a potential spiral of escalation, where one party’s moves are responded to in kind by the other party. What gets damaged in the process is America’s democratic culture and political institutions. But as in war, the side that refuses to respond in kind, or to escalate, risks an outcome where they may be defeated without having used all of their forces. Cold War nuclear strategists had a term for this dilemma: Use it or lose it.

In an email, Norman Ornstein, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prominent pro-democracy voice, offered a dose of realpolitik. “[This] will inevitably spread to many other states, both red and blue. Democrats have to respond, when the alternative is to disarm unilaterally and enable even more the march to full autocracy.”

He also issued a sober warning. “But we need to understand that even if the response leads to a wash in partisan advantage, it is deeply unhealthy to have started down this path. We will have more and more states where a party with 40 or 45% of its voters will have zero or minimal representation in Congress, which will eat away even further at the system’s legitimacy. Even if we come out of this dark period with the structures of our democracy intact, this is a deep blow to our constitutional system.”

The Democrats and other pro-democracy Americans are running out of time. According to an analysis by writer and ABC News legal contributor Kimberly Wehle, Project 2025 is already 47% complete. Trump has been president for just seven months. If Democrats continue to hold their forces in reserve, they risk being fully steamrolled by Trump and his MAGA movement.

To better contextualize the GOP’s authoritarian redistricting strategy, I asked historian Matthew Dallek, who is the author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right,’ for his insights. He offered a sobering warning, one that merits being quoted in full.

“What’s different about this moment from prior redistricting battles is the context in which it is occurring,” Dallek said. “It comes after a decade in which norms, rules and traditions have been tossed aside; bedrock assumptions about multiracial democracy — a more or less bipartisan commitment to extending the Voting Rights Act, a broad desire to defend the idea of majority-minority districts and equal representation, the federal government’s role in ensuring states don’t discriminate in elections on the basis of race — have all been undermined via the courts and political actors.”

Dallek noted that this all stems from Trump’s vise grip on the Republican party. He specifically pointed to Trump’s encouragement of foreign actors like Russia and Ukraine to come to his aid; the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, which was fomented by lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen by Democrats; and the Justice Department launching criminal investigations of Trump’s political opponents, including former President Barack Obama and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump’s “naked effort” at authoritarian gerrymandering “is a reminder that American democracy is not functioning well,” Dallek said. “It is a sign of the times. The latest evidence of how the foundations of equal representation and voting rights are being eroded. The political system is teetering and there is no clear end in sight to the partisan struggle for power in the United States.”