Sometimes, the quiet part has to be said out loud. Other times, the harder thing is finding language big enough for the dismay so many Americans seem to be carrying right now.
I keep asking myself whether we can recover from Donald Trump’s presidency, not merely from the man himself, but from the habits his administration has made seem normal. The habit of blaming someone else for every crisis. The habit of treating independent institutions as enemies. The habit of acting first and explaining later. The habit of telling people to ignore what they can plainly see.
None of this exists in isolation. It is all part of the same problem: a government and political movement that increasingly treats accountability as an inconvenience rather than a requirement.
The Supreme Court is at the center of that problem, even when it rules against Trump. The Court has blocked, narrowed, or scrutinized parts of the administration’s agenda more than once since Trump returned to office in January 2025. But it has also granted emergency relief in cases that allows the administration to move ahead while larger legal questions remain unresolved. That is what makes the Court’s emergency docket so consequential. A ruling described as temporary can change the facts on the ground before the public, Congress, or lower courts have had a meaningful chance to respond.
Its recent decision involving the SAVE database is a case in point. The Court allowed the Trump administration to restore its expanded use of the citizenship-verification system for state voter-roll checks. In theory, ensuring that only eligible voters cast ballots is a legitimate goal. Elections should be secure, and voter rolls should be accurate.
But accuracy is not achieved by pretending databases are flawless.
The updated system has erroneously flagged some U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens, according to reporting on the program. That should be the real concern. A citizen should not have to prove their right to vote because a government database produced a false match, an old record did not update, or an administrative system made an assumption. The right to vote is too important to be treated like a technical error message.
Republicans will say this is about election integrity. Democrats will say it is about voter suppression. There may be political incentives on both sides, but the real question is more practical: What happens when an eligible American gets flagged, especially close to Election Day? Are they notified? Can they appeal? Who checks the state’s work? Is there a public audit trail? And how many people will simply give up because correcting a government error takes more time, money, transportation, or legal help than they have?
That is how democracy erodes. Not always through a dramatic declaration that voting has ended, but through systems that make voting harder for the people least equipped to fight back.
And that brings us to the press.
The Trump administration recently revoked White House credentials for CNN, Politico, and MS NOW after the outlets published reporting the president disliked. A federal judge, Timothy J. Kelly, ordered the credentials restored through a temporary restraining order, concluding that the organizations were likely to succeed in their argument that the White House had denied them constitutionally sufficient due process.
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The first thing people often say in moments like this is, “Well, the press is biased.” Of course, news organizations have blind spots, editorial judgments, corporate pressures, and mistakes. That has always been true. But it misses the point.
The First Amendment does not protect only journalists who make the president comfortable. It protects a free press because politicians should not get to decide which outlets can ask questions and which ones are punished for asking them. The moment a White House starts acting as though access is a reward for favorable coverage, every reporter becomes vulnerable, not just the outlets currently under attack.
For several hours after the judge ordered access restored, reporters were still blocked and a Politico journalist had a press pass confiscated. The White House later complied, but the message was already clear: access can be weaponized. That is not the behavior of an administration confident in its own record. It is the behavior of one that believes scrutiny is a threat.
This is why it is impossible to separate press freedom from voting rights. A public cannot make informed decisions at the ballot box if the government can make reporters disappear from the rooms where information is gathered. Likewise, voters cannot hold officials accountable if the mechanisms for voting are quietly turned into obstacles.
The administration’s favorite answer to criticism is blame. If the economy is weak, it is Joe Biden’s fault. If the national debt grows, it is the Democrats’ fault. If prices are up, if wars drag on, if the country feels unstable, it is always somebody else’s mess.
There is truth in saying that no president inherits a perfect country. The Biden administration did leave behind serious challenges, including inflationary pressure, housing shortages, a costly debt burden, and foreign-policy problems that were never going to be solved overnight. But Trump took office in January 2025. The choices being made now belong to him, his Cabinet, and the Republicans enabling them.
The national debt recently surpassed $40 trillion, after years of spending and tax choices made under both Democratic and Republican presidents. That is the honest version. It is not helpful to pretend one party created every problem and the other party merely arrived to clean it up. Governing is not a podcast. You do not get to talk about responsibility while forever avoiding it.
The Justice Department’s case against former Olympian David Hearn showed what happens when a government gets ahead of the facts. Hearn was accused of deliberately sabotaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Prosecutors later dropped the case after acknowledging they could not prove the allegation and that the damage likely resulted from a rushed, flawed contractor installation.
A government making a mistake is bad enough. A government accusing a citizen of a serious crime before it has the evidence is worse. The same administration that wants Americans to trust it with voter databases, classified information, immigration enforcement, and the machinery of federal power must demonstrate that it is capable of slowing down, checking its work, and admitting errors before ordinary people pay the price.
This same failure to think beyond the immediate political win shows up in the country’s rush toward artificial intelligence.
AI did not appear out of nowhere. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, laid important conceptual groundwork by asking whether machines could think. The phrase “artificial intelligence” was later coined at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a gathering that became widely regarded as the formal birth of AI as a field of study.
But the history is not the point. The present is.
We are being told that America must win the AI race by building bigger data centers, consuming more electricity, extracting more water, and clearing more land. No one seems interested in pausing long enough to ask what winning looks like if the cost is passed on to the communities nearest those facilities.
Data centers are not floating somewhere above us. They consume real resources. A Congressional Research Service report has identified water supply and quality concerns connected to data-center cooling, while the Bipartisan Policy Center has highlighted questions about electricity demand, land use, local impacts, and the environmental consequences of rapid development.
That is not an argument against technology. AI can help doctors identify disease, assist people with disabilities, uncover cybersecurity risks, and make certain kinds of work more efficient. It can also help writers polish a draft, catch a typo, or organize a complicated set of ideas.
But it should remain a tool, not a replacement for our judgment. We should not hand off our creativity, research, education, or civic responsibility to systems built by corporations whose primary obligation is to shareholders. And we should not let those corporations treat water, electricity, and land as though they are limitless inputs with no consequences for the people who live nearby.
That principle extends beyond technology because all power needs limits.
The Supreme Court should recognize that emergency orders can shape the country before a full hearing occurs. The White House should understand that press access is not a favor. Federal agencies should not be permitted to build systems that can endanger voting rights without clear safeguards. Technology companies should not be allowed to extract public resources without public accountability. And elected officials should stop blaming former administrations for problems they have had nearly two years to address.
Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 32 percent in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, reflecting public concern over high costs and the administration’s policies. That is not the lowest approval rating in presidential history. Harry Truman fell to 22 percent in 1952, and Richard Nixon reached 24 percent shortly before resigning in 1974. But it is still a major warning sign for a president who came back to office promising order, affordability, and strength.
Approval ratings are not elections, however. They are not a substitute for organizing, voting, volunteering, running for office, reading beyond headlines, or asking better questions of everyone seeking power. Democrats cannot assume they will win simply because Trump is unpopular. Republicans cannot assume that fear, confusion, and stricter voter checks will carry them through. Both parties owe the country more than that.
My job is not to tell you who to vote for. It is to tell you that voting is not enough if we are not paying attention to what is being done in our name.
Democracy is holding its breath. It needs a public willing to defend voting rights, press freedom, accountable government, responsible technology, and the basic principle that no president, party, court, or corporation should have unlimited power.
The question is whether we are ready to let it breathe.
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