It’s preseason football. The games don’t count, but the plays do. August is when coaches test the roster, run experiments, and flash just enough of the playbook to hint at what’s coming. Starters run a series or two. Rookies play like their careers depend on it. Veterans jog through familiar routes. Preseason is rehearsal and preview, a low-stakes glimpse of how the coach plans to run the real game.
That’s also what American politics looked like this week. US President Donald Trump was the coach. His team was on the field. And nothing he called was random. These weren’t scattered plays. They were practice runs for one central move: Erase the idea of neutral rules, brand every referee a cheat, and make only one result possible.
On Monday, he declared mail ballots and voting machines a scam and promised to federalize state elections with the stroke of a pen. His Truth Social post read like a coach screaming the scoreboard itself was rigged. Mail ballots? Fraud. Voting machines? A “total disaster.” His cure-all: government-issued paper ballots with watermarks, counted by hand, supposedly faster, cheaper, flawless. But the real twist was his insistence that states are “merely agents” of the federal government, bound to obey his executive order. That isn’t just trash talk. It is a constitutional mugging. Elections have always been state-run under federal guardrails. Trump wants them president-run, with states reduced to clerks.
The deeper move is psychological. Mail voting has been around since Union soldiers cast ballots during the Civil War. Voting machines have been in use for more than a century. Neither exotic. Neither inherently insecure. Yet Trump brands them counterfeit by definition. He isn’t accusing Democrats of bending rules. He is saying the rules themselves are a scam. Once the scoreboard is declared broken, only he can decide the final score.
In American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off.
The next day brought a subtler drill, but the same logic. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, the Department of Education barred colleges from using federal work-study jobs for voter registration, even if the work was nonpartisan. Registration, they argued, was “political activity.” Political activity cannot be paid with federal funds. Which wipes out the kids at folding tables in student centers, the ones passing forms in dorms, the reminders before deadlines. Without them, colleges are still technically required to hand out forms, but the mandate is toothless. The memo even lets schools withhold them from students they “reasonably believe” are ineligible, like international students. In practice, discretion becomes exclusion.
This isn’t mobs storming the field. It is the authoritarianism of memos: quiet, technical, bureaucratic. A faceless letterhead does what the riot could not. Clipboards become contraband. Neutral acts—handing out a form, reminding someone of a deadline—are suddenly reclassified as dirty tricks. The players who kept the drive alive are ruled out of bounds, whistled for fouls that do not exist.
By midweek the action shifted to Austin. Texas Republicans, at Trump’s demand, rammed through a new congressional map. Democrats tried to deny a quorum by fleeing the state. They were threatened with arrest and ended up sleeping on the House floor. “I want to cry, but I am too angry,” said state Rep. Nicole Collier (D-95), exhausted and furious. The maps weren’t surprising, but they were ruthless: Communities of color carved into ribbons, cities lashed to rural strongholds, Republican dominance welded in place for years. Gerrymandering is an old sport. What’s new is how openly it is played as loyalty to Trump. Gov. Greg Abbott congratulated his party for “staying true to Texas.” Democrats called it dictatorship by district. Both were right. The field itself had been tilted until one team always played uphill.
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all. Once the referees are branded cheaters, every loss looks stolen and every victory feels like divine justice. That is how a system loses the ground it plays on.
We’ve seen this game before. After Reconstruction, Black political participation itself was cast as fraud. The sight of Black officeholders was derided as “Negro domination.” Literacy tests and poll taxes were marketed as neutral “integrity measures,” though their purpose was exclusion. Everyone knew the score was rigged. The trick worked anyway because neutrality had already been redefined as corruption.
The pattern repeats. In the 1960s, psychiatrists described civil rights activism as “protest psychosis.” In the Soviet Union, dissidents were diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán branded NGOs as “foreign agents.” Different fields, same tactic: Erase the baseline of neutrality so only raw power remains.
What makes this moment distinct is the speed and coordination. In 72 hours, Trump called the game crooked, the Department enforced it on paper, and Texas locked it into law. History shows that once neutrality is redefined as fraud, procedure alone cannot fix it. Reconstruction faltered not only because of violence but because federal enforcement was itself declared illegitimate. Jim Crow endured not only because of poll taxes but because Black citizenship itself was rebranded as a scam. Once the field is said to be broken, every call looks rigged.
And the breakdown isn’t just on the field. It is in the stands. Pew finds nearly half of Republicans now say mail ballots are fraudulent by definition. Trust in voting machines has cratered. Gallup reports confidence in federal institutions at record lows. Even basic registration drives—students handing out forms, neighbors reminding each other of deadlines—are increasingly seen as partisan cons. Some call this polarization. It is worse. Polarization assumes the same field, however bitterly contested. What is dissolving now is belief in the field itself.
Trump’s conditioning drill is simple: Teach the fans to boo the refs before kickoff, and every call looks crooked. A loss feels stolen. A win feels ordained. That isn’t healthy mistrust. It is training people to believe the scoreboard only works when their side is ahead.
And that is the whole horror of preseason. You think it is rehearsal. You think the game has not started yet. You think this is just your team practicing, that things will get better once the season starts, that you will pull it together. But in American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off. The loudest man on the sideline is calling the score, daring anyone to say otherwise.
