The Vice President of the United States is actively campaigning for the authoritarian-leaning president of Hungary. Rather than spreading democracy, the US is actively trying to spread authoritarianism.
Orban has given himself the ability to rule by decree, restricted the media, manipulated the electoral and district system, taken over and abused with police NGOs and universities, redistributed wealth to loyalists rather than based on sound policy, and supported Russia invading its neighbor. He has bent a former democracy toward authoritarianism. The European Parliament has declared that Hungary is no longer a full democracy in a 433 to 123 vote.
The death of the West will be the end of Western values like free speech, free association, free press, and free and fair elections. Vice President Vance supports Orban’s authoritarian actions in Hungary just like he supports Trump’s, often illegal, authoritarian actions at home.
“Donald Trump’s signature will soon appear on US paper currency, the treasury department announced Thursday.
The move marks the first time a sitting US president’s signature will appear on legal tender. To accommodate this change, the treasurer’s signature will be removed for the first time since 1861.”
“In August 2025, President Trump vowed on social media to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” claiming, without proof, that “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST” if Americans cast their votes by mail.
Yet when the time came for Trump to cast his own vote in Tuesday’s special election in Palm Beach County, Fla., he chose to do it … by mail.
Just like he did in 2020.
The president hasn’t abandoned his outspoken opposition to mail-in voting — at least not for other people. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said during an appearance in Memphis on Monday. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.””
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In the 2024 general election, about 30% of all ballots were cast by mail. That’s 48 million votes. In the 2020 election — which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic — the number was even higher: nearly 66 million votes. Since 2000, more than 250 million votes have been cast via mailed-out ballots in all 50 states.
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For decades, mail-in voting wasn’t seen as controversial — let alone partisan. In fact, Republicans were even more enthusiastic about the practice than Democrats.
Why? Because they saw it as a safe and efficient way to make voting easier for rural and older voters — a key part of their base.
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As polls began to show Trump trailing his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by a sizable margin, the incumbent seized on mail-in voting as a preemptive explanation for any unfavorable election outcome. “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump wrote online that July. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” He described mail-in voting as the “biggest risk” to his reelection, and both his campaign and the GOP unsuccessfully sued to stop it.
Trump’s rhetoric effectively polarized the practice. Democrats (who were already more prone to avoid pandemic-era gatherings) embraced it; Republicans resisted. As a result, 58% of Democrats wound up voting by mail that year; only 29% of Republicans did the same.
Trump lost to Biden by more than 7 million votes, but he’s been blaming election “fraud” — including supposedly fraudulent mail ballots — ever since.
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In 2020, the president was particularly upset when he seemed to be “winning” early on election night — only to see Biden catch up and surpass him as the evening wore on. But that effect — known as a “red mirage” or a “blue shift” — is easily explained by the fact that if Republicans tend to vote in person and Democrats tend to vote by mail, Republican votes will tend to be counted before Democratic votes.
At times, Trump has also tried to distinguish between absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail. But the same multistep security and verification methods apply to both processes, and states that rely on universal vote-by-mail haven’t experienced more misconduct because of it. One election expert dismissed as “nonsensical” any “distinction” between the two forms of voting “in terms of the potential for fraud.”
In truth, fraudulent mail voting is vanishingly rare. According to a Nov. 2025 analysis by the Brookings Institution — which relied on an election fraud database compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group — there were only between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud in each general election from 2016 to 2022.
That means just 0.000043% of mail ballots — four out of every 10 million cast — have been found to be fraudulent during the Trump era.
In general, all of Trump’s allegations of widespread, result-altering election fraud — claims he has been making since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — have been conclusively debunked, both in court and by GOP election officials.
Much of America is enthralled by a demagogue who never had policy competency or decent character, and who has staffed his administration with many unqualified people and some who previously pretended like they stood for something but are now sycophantic enablers.
The government ignored late night shows for a long time as far as the equal time rules. The rule could be applied to comedy and talk shows, but the Trump administration is unlikely to apply it fairly, rather than based on who bends their speech to Trump’s will.
Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and then he tried to steal that election himself, and is now trying to steal future elections. US democracy is under threat.
If you are disenfranchising millions of Americans to stop a few dozen potential illegal voters, then your goals are to make it harder to vote, rather than to secure the election, unless you are just ignorant of the facts.
Kansas tried a documentary proof of citizenship law in 2011 and it blocked 31,000 citizens from voting–12% of first time registrants.
The founders intentionally did not give the president the power to regulate elections because they feared something like a king or a dictator. Yet, Trump is claiming such powers.
“The Department of Homeland Security has hindered internal investigations amid scrutiny for its handling of President Donald Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration, the agency’s official watchdog warned in a letter to Congress.
DHS has been “systematically obstructing” investigations by withholding records, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said in a letter released Tuesday — hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced withering bipartisan questioning at a Senate hearing.”
“Trump appointees who defy the president’s will are showing the courage of their convictions, applying the law as they understand it rather than reflexively deferring to the politician who gave them their jobs. But Trump, who takes it for granted that justices vote the way they do for political reasons, neither understands nor appreciates judicial independence.”
There’s not good enough reason to believe Hillary Clinton had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes to force her to come to Congress. Melania Trump had more connections with Epstein than she did. And obviously, Donald Trump had a lot of connections with him! This is an abuse of power by the Republicans in Congress.
“Human soldiers can disobey unconstitutional orders, but “with fully autonomous weapons, we don’t necessarily have those protections,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Ross Douthat in a recent interview. Amodei also worried that AI could help the government track protesters and political opponents and “make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.”
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While not explicitly expressing a desire to use AI for those purposes, the Pentagon has insisted that Anthropic setting any limits on the military’s use will not do. It wants Anthropic to grant the government the right to employ its products for “all lawful use,” according to CNN.
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This refusal hasn’t gone over well with the Trump administration. Hegseth has reportedly demanded that Anthropic remove its restrictions on certain military uses or else face consequences.
These consequences could include the Defense Department ending its business relationship with Anthropic as soon as Friday—which, OK, fine.
While not reassuring that the government won’t respect these limits around robot death machines and mass spying, it’s sadly not surprising. Ending its relationship with Anthropic’s contract in response would be a disappointing but not outrageous or beyond bounds.
What pushes this above and beyond normal government villainy are the other potential consequences that Hegseth has been floating, including using the Defense Production Act to compel compliance or declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk”—possibly both. An anonymous senior official reportedly told Axios that severing ties with Anthropic would be “an enormous pain in the ass” for which Anthropic would have to “pay a price.”
Declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk would mean anyone who wants to work with the U.S. military in any capacity must sever ties with the AI company.
“Activating this power would cost Anthropic a lot of business—potentially quite a lot—and give investors huge skepticism about whether the company is worth funding for the next round of scaling,” writes Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. “Capital was a major constraint anyway, but this makes it much harder. This option could be existential for Anthropic.”
Declaring an entity a supply chain risk is usually a move reserved for risky dealings with foreign companies. Deploying this designation against a U.S. company just because its leaders have some morals and some backbone is highly undemocratic—the sort of move one would traditionally expect from the Chinese Communist Party, not a U.S. administration.
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But it gets worse. Hegseth is also threatening to “invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs” and remove all safeguards, per Axios.
So, here we have an AI company trying to act ethically and prevent government abuse of this technology and the government threatening to seize the company’s property and do with it whatever the Pentagon wants. If that’s allowed, it means no limits on what abuses the government can force private companies to participate in.”