They Are Not Hiding It: The Open Campaign To Keep Power

Power in this country is no longer being seized quietly. It is being rearranged in the open — announced from a studio desk, a courtroom filing, a podium beneath the Parthenon — by men who no longer feel the need to pretend the game is fair.

Start with what they are afraid of. On prediction markets and in polling there is talk of an "expanding map" for Democrats heading into November's midterms, with states like Texas and even Kansas drifting into play. That is the ordinary mechanism by which an unpopular administration is supposed to be checked — and it is precisely that mechanism they are moving to dismantle.

So they move to change what counts. The MAGA host Benny Johnson has openly celebrated Trump's proposed census changes — excluding undocumented immigrants from the population count used to divide up House seats — as a way to keep Democrats out of power. People who live and work here, struck from the arithmetic of representation so that the districts drawn around them tilt rightward. The policy is the quiet part; the bragging is the loud part.

The rewriting does not stop at who gets counted. It reaches who pays for the propaganda. The Democratic National Committee this week sued to stop campaign-style ads it says the administration funded with government money, in a 31-page complaint alleging the TV spots broke U.S. propaganda law. The public treasury turned into a campaign war chest: the taxpayer billed to advertise the man rigging the count against them.

Abroad, the same project wears a toga. In Athens this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered what the Guardian called a classically inspired apologia for Trump's "America first" foreign policy, urging Europe to "awaken from its slumber" and build its own self-reliance. Rubio, by his own account, was "unapologetic" in the "pursuit of national power." Strip away the selective history and the message is bare: might is the only law, abroad and at home alike.

And who profits while power consolidates? Retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis — co-chair of the Senate's NATO group — this week condemned a report that two consultants to Trump took a large profit advising a pro-Russian government in the Balkans during the very midterm cycle now underway. The people shaping American politics were, at the same time, on a Russia-aligned payroll.

The enrichment is not incidental; it is the texture of this administration. The U.S. Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, disclosed assets of between $1.17 million and $3.75 million, a prior $10,000 payment from Coupang, and law-firm pay topping $650,000. Further up, Trump has granted $6 billion in contracts to arms makers his sons have invested in — the president having said his children have "inside information" about government actions. The men writing the rules of trade and war are, by their own filings, doing very well out of it.

The cost falls where it always falls. While the family banks the contracts, GEO Group — the private prison firm that jails people for ICE — is in court suing California to strip privacy rights from immigrant detainees. The immigrants struck from the ledger, the voters gerrymandered around them, the taxpayers footing the propaganda, the detainees denied even a curtain: all told that national greatness requires their silence. They are not hiding it. We should not pretend we cannot see it.