Trump Forces His Opponents to Choose Between Bad Options

By David A. Graham

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

 

Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made himself a spokesperson for Democratic resistance to Republican plans for a brazen mid-decade gerrymander, and on Sunday, he appeared on Meet the Press to state his case. “It’s cheating,” Pritzker said of the Texas redistricting that the president has demanded. “Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”

 

It’s a clever line. But it would have been better if not for the fact that some of Pritzker’s fellow Democrats, including the governors of New York and California, are now trying to redraw their state’s maps to squeeze Republicans. (It might also have landed better if Illinois’ maps weren’t already gerrymandered, as Representative Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat, recently acknowledged.)

 

If they’re going to strike back, Democrats in some of these states don’t just have to draw new maps—they have to find ways to circumvent structures they enacted in recent years to make maps fairer. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has been the driving force behind Democrats’ work for fairer districts, but he’s now in the awkward position of calling for cutthroat maps. “My hope would be you have these temporary measures,” he told The New York Times. Of course, everyone always hopes that. The political scientist Sara Sadhwani, who helped draw the Golden State’s current maps, argued for tossing them, telling Politico’s California Playbook, “These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times often call for extraordinary measures.”

 

This reasoning feels both dangerous and alluring. Democrats pushed for fairer districts to bolster democracy; if they remain pure and Republicans rig the system, then it was all for naught. Yet if they abandon the push for fairness, what are they preserving? Saying that Americans should resist tyranny is all well and good, but the past decade has shown that resisting involves a lot of risky judgment calls. Part of Trump’s political genius, and his threat, is that he forces his opponents to choose between bad options.

 

During the first Trump administration, for example, some of his aides simply refused to execute on things the president told them to do—or, in one case, reportedly even swiped a draft letter from his desk to prevent it from being signed. On the one hand, they were probably right on the merits: Trump has lots of bad ideas, some of which might have endangered the country if enacted. On the other hand, they were unelected officials refusing lawful commands from the elected president. What’s right in the short term can set perilous precedents in the long run.

 

This week, Trump dispatched the D.C. National Guard and federal officers to the streets of the capital. Five summers ago, amid major protests, he did the same—and reportedly contemplated calling in active-duty soldiers. Then–Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was able to talk Trump out of that, but the price he paid was participation in a photo op with the president as he walked across Lafayette Square from the White House. The resulting images “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” as Milley put it. He quickly came to regret that decision and apologized. Knowing which choice was better is nearly impossible.

 

Once Trump left office, federal prosecutors had to grapple with how to handle both his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s misdeeds were not especially murky or covert: Everyone watched him try to subvert the election in real time, culminating in the January 6 insurrection; the documents in question were demonstrably at Mar-a-Lago, and the government had subpoenaed them.

 

Declining to prosecute Trump for these actions would have encouraged his own further abuses and also fostered the impression that not everyone is equal under the law. Yet political leaders in functioning democracies generally do not charge their political rivals who have left office with crimes, because it injects partisanship into the system, eroding it for the future. Trump falsely accused President Joe Biden of engaging in banana-republic-style politics, but now that Trump is in power, his government is reportedly pursuing an absurd investigation against former President Barack Obama.

 

Once criminal charges were set in motion, the judges presiding over the cases had their own challenges. Would they give Trump a gag order—standard procedure to prevent a defendant from attacking witnesses publicly—and create an opportunity for him to claim “election interference,” or would they allow attacks that no other defendant could get away with? (They mostly tried to split the difference.) The country ended up with perhaps the worst outcome: Trump faced charges, he reaped political benefit from claiming persecution, and now he has avoided convictions or even trials in all but one case, evading accountability by running out the clock.

 

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser is now facing her own tough choice: If she forcefully opposes the president’s temporary takeover of the city’s police force, as well as other measures that he says he is taking to fight crime, then she risks inviting even more aggressive action from an angry Trump. If, however, she mostly acquiesces, then she is yielding the city’s powers and surrendering her constituency’s preferences to his. Meanwhile, university presidents are weighing whether to give in to Trump’s attempts to seize control over their operations. Is it better to strike a costly settlement and regain some limited autonomy, or to fight the administration and risk even greater damage?

 

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Republican Senator Barry Goldwater said during his 1964 presidential bid. “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Americans resoundingly rejected that vision at the time, but now many of Trump’s opponents and targets are adopting it as a philosophy. Forcing Americans who care about democracy into these dilemmas is part of what gives him such power.