The Chris Hedges Report

01/22/2026

Trump told The New York Times he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. He wants to abolish mail-in voting, along with voting machines and tabulators, which allow boards of elections to post results on election night. Better to slow the process down and like the Chicago political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, stuff boxes with ballots after the polls close to ensure victory.

Trump’s administration is prohibiting voter registration drives at naturalization centers. It is imposing nation-wide restrictive voter ID laws. It is reducing the hours that federal employees have to leave work and vote. In Texas, the new redistricting map blatantly disenfranchises Black and Latino voters, a move upheld by the Supreme Court. It is expected to eradicate five Congressional Democratic seats.

Our money-drenched elections, coupled with aggressive gerrymandering, mean few races for Congress are competitive. Recent redistricting has, so far, all but guaranteed the Republicans another nine seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and six for the Democrats, five in California and one in Utah. Republicans intend to carry out more redistricting in Florida and Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia. If the Supreme Court continues to gut the Voting Rights Act, then Republican redistricting will explode, possibly cementing into place a Republican victory whether the majority of voters want it or not. No one can call redistricting democratic.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United took from us any real input into elections. Citizens United permitted unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals to rig the election process in the name of protected speech under the First Amendment. It ruled that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is an application of the people’s right to petition their government.

Our most basic rights, including the freedom from wholesale government surveillance, have been steadily revoked by judicial and legislative fiat.

Trump and his minions are energetically closing the last exit built into the system that prevents absolute dictatorship. They intend to orchestrate the sham elections familiar in all dictatorships, or abolish them. They are not joking. This will be the death blow to the American experiment. There will be no going back. We will become a police state. Our freedoms, already under heavy assault, will be extinguished. At that point, only mass mobilizations and strikes will thwart the solidification of the dictatorship. And such actions, as we see in Minneapolis, will be greeted with lethal state repression.

The subverting of the next elections will offer two stark choices to Trump’s most vocal opponents. Exile or arrest and imprisonment at the hands of ICE thugs.

Resistance to the beast, as in all dictatorships, will come at a very high cost.