By Yiannis Damellos
May 9th, 2026
Democrats Bet the Rules Would Restrain Republicans but When Legitimacy Meets Power Politics, Guardrails Don’t Compromise
In 2016, it was Trump who shocked the Americans when he said that he knew the system was rigged because he used it extensively. Voters thought he was going to change it so they elected him President, but instead, since that day, Trump and his right-wing colleagues used that same system to their advantage to strangle Democracy. Yet, the Democrats did not learn anything from that warning. They kept on making the same mistakes. As with redistricting, the Democrats’ mistake wasn’t that it exists, or even that politicians draw maps for advantage. That's how the system works. It was that Democrats treated the rules of political competition as something you can “lead by example” against an opponent who leads by corruption, exploitation, and greed. During the last decade, the Democrats gambled that showing restraint would persuade their opponents to reciprocate. Like, little Goebbels, Stephen Miller was going to play fairly! To the contrary, Republicans learned they could use the same system—courts, deadlines, mapmaking authority, and uneven state processes—to keep winning, and then kept escalating to rig the next cycle.
