In the aftermath of the Roberts Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, it’s clearer than ever that the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority is willing to use its power to halt the coming backlash to the second Trump regime’s catastrophic first two years in power. Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues are all in: They’ll do whatever it takes to guard the Republican Party against the political consequences of their shameful capitulation, and the accelerating authoritarian entropy of the moment.
Kate Ertmann of Dame Magazine wrote back in September 2025 about authoritarian regimes and the cults of personalities that drive them. Every authoritarian regime in modern history has started its reign with maximum energy that can make it appear invulnerable. The second Trump regime has been no different.
“When a system is relatively new, like the Trump regime, there’s a lot of energy that keeps its pendulum slowly swinging on the functional side,” Ertmann wrote, nine months after Trump was sworn in for a second term and four years after his failed attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. “But, as it is in the lifecycle of all systems, as time passes, a regime’s pendulum swing will begin to have diminishing returns.”
These regimes, bucking or outright ignoring small-d democratic norms, need people to believe they do not have a “sensitive underbelly,” as Ertmann writes. They know they have one, however, and like an animal fighting for its life, they will do anything and everything to protect that vulnerable underbelly, or to make their opponents believe there is no underbelly at all.
In the summer of 2026, we are seeing the entropy of the Trump regime in real time. Federal courts defying the regime at every turn: Trump’s name being torn off the Kennedy Center, for instance, and congressional Republicans refusing to confirm the president’s choice to lead U.S. intelligence. Trump and his goons have drastically overplayed their hand, interpreting the results of the 2024 election as an ironclad mandate from the American people to eviscerate constitutional governance and reshape the nation in the image of the man who wants you to believe he is sovereign.
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Authoritarian entropy has a handful of telltale signs: a lack of a legitimate succession plan, as Marco Rubio and JD Vance vie to lead the GOP after Trump; mishandling of information, as with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s accidental disclosure of sensitive military information; and internal upheaval among regime members, as with former Attorney General Pami Bondi quarrelling with FBI Director Kash Patel before she was booted, and with Elon Musk and Stephen Miller having at it, and with Greg Bovino’s ouster after the PR disaster that was the occupation of Minnesota. Other telltale signs include cultural unpopularity (almost every musical act withdrew from Trump’s America 250 celebration) and political self-destruction (look no further than the president saying during an Oval Office interview that he “loves the inflation”).
These are all forms of authoritarian entropy that have taken down other authoritarian regimes that pitched themselves to the public as unstoppable forces with an edict from God to rule now and forever. Most recently, that includes Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who was swept out of office in May following years of entropy that left his opponents energized and his former supporters angry, as longtime Orban backers were alienated by astounding levels of corruption, the pardoning of a former deputy director of a children’s home who had covered up child sexual abuse, and the shrinking of wages combined with steadily climbing inflation.
In Trump’s case, authoritarian entropy has led to losing previously unshakeable support from bedrocks of the MAGA coalition: Namely, men, even white men.
The Roberts Court, stacked with justices whose opinions and public statements betray an appetite for right-wing media misinformation, also sees the Trump regime entering advanced stages of entropy. And so they have stepped in and undone voting protections that just might allow their team to hang on to the House of Representatives in the fall: Thanks to the Court’s decision in Callais, Congressional Democrats will now have to overperform Republicans by about 5 percent to secure a bare House majority, according to an Axios data analysis.
This is how state-level Wisconsin Republicans held on to legislative majorities for years despite Democratic candidates outperforming them time and again. After a red-wave election in 2010, Republican officials in Wisconsin joined forces with anti-democracy judges to build a system in which they could not lose, even when they lost. Back in the blue-wave midterms of 2018, Democratic candidates in the Wisconsin legislature earned 54 percent of the vote, 10 percent higher than the state’s Republican candidates. This hardly put a dent in Wisconsin Republicans’ dominant legislative majorities.
The logic of this vile minoritarian scheme both underpins and explains the Roberts Court’s panicked destruction of Black congressional districts throughout the former Confederacy ahead of the 2026 midterms. They want every electoral outcome to be good for their Republican colleagues.
The Court’s greenlighting of Jim Crow-style electoral maps serves two purposes: It is the grand culmination of a generations-long project to destroy Black political power in the United States, and it could save the president, whom this Court already blessed with monarchical powers, from facing the consequences for his never-ending efforts to plunder the United States and sell it for parts.
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As the Court’s liberal justices issue one opinion after another that sound like constitutional alarm bells, Democratic politicians finally appear open to reforming the Court — which should have been a Day One priority for the Biden administration. That it wasn’t speaks to the Democratic Party old guard’s inability or failure to recognize the seriousness of the situation. Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the rest surely understand the threat a new crop of Democrats would represent to an institution designed to play backstop for any progressive policymaking that might emerge from a Democratic majority.
The all-out attack on Black voting rights and representation—made possible by the bad-faith assertion that racism in the U.S. is over—should be seen as the Roberts Court hitting the accelerator in the American right’s long game: to maintain the veneer of electoral democracy while never truly being in danger of losing power. Stopping the country’s political pendulum from swinging toward pro-democracy forces would also have the added benefit of protecting the Supreme Court from pro-democracy reforms, as the idea of the Court as a compromised institution spreads into the political mainstream.
Democratic members of Congress over the past couple years have made more noise than usual about reforming the rancid Roberts Court by forcing the Court to explain its emergency decisions, changing the way the Court picks its cases, and stopping the Court’s bad-faith justices from weaponizing their so-called shadow docket. There’s a parallel effort among pro-democracy members of Congress to implement term limits for Supreme Court justices. I’m fairly certain Roberts has read up on these efforts to put his Court back in line with the U.S. Constitution, and I’m fairly certain he does not like them one bit.
Justices know what’s coming in November. They watch the news. They’ve seen the mood of the country change in a hurry. They see even the moderate wing of the Democratic Party talking openly about adding seats to their precious, corrupted court. After swinging hard to the right in 2024, the pendulum is on its way back. They believe they can stop it.
