Prop. 50 is part of a historically uncertain moment in American democracy

Will President Trump resume nuclear weapons testing? When will this federal shutdown end? Will Californians accept Proposition 50, upending the state’s congressional maps and shaking up next year’s midterm elections?

Between the high-stakes standoffs and unprecedented stances of Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other leaders in Washington and Sacramento, the future of U.S. politics and California’s role in it have become extremely uncertain of late.

Political debates about issues like sending military troops into American cities, cutting food aid to the poor, or questioning constitutional guarantees like birthright citizenship have become so detached from longstanding norms that everything feels new.

His ways of seizing political power—such as Trump teasing a potential third term, appointing federal prosecutors without Senate approval, cutting federal budgets without congressional input, and pressuring red states to redistribute in his favor before the midterm elections—have changed so sharply that many Americans, some historians and political experts, have lost confidence in U.S. democracy.

“This is completely unprecedented, completely abnormal; I think it represents a major transformation of our normal political life,” said Jack Rakove, professor emeritus of history and political science at Stanford University.

“You can’t compare this to any other chapter, another era, or any other series of events in American history. This is radically new in unique and distressing ways,” Rakove said. “As soon as Trump was re-elected, we entered a constitutional crisis. Why? Because Trump has no respect for constitutional structures.”

“President Trump’s unorthodox approach is why he has been so successful and has received so much support from the American public,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

Jackson said Trump “has accomplished more than any President in modern history,” including “securing the border, removing dangerous criminals from American streets, brokering historic peace agreements.” [and] “It brings new investments to the United States,” he said, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly supported the legality of his approach.

“So-called experts can argue whatever they want, but President Trump’s actions have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court despite a record number of objections from liberal activists and unlawful rulings by liberal lower court justices,” Jackson said.

Rakove and other political experts said there are many examples of Trump directly disregarding or suggesting he would violate the Constitution or other laws, leaving people insecure and anxious about what the next step for the country will be politically. This is fueled by his constant flirtation with the idea of ​​a third term in office, his legal challenge to birthright citizenship, and his military’s penchant for blasting ships allegedly carrying drugs out of international waters.

On Wednesday, Trump raised the possibility of further violations of international law and norms, suggesting on social media that this would be the first time in three decades that the United States would do so. continue nuclear weapons tests.

“Due to other countries’ testing programs, I have directed the War Department to begin testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote, leaving it unclear whether he meant detonating the warheads or simply testing the missiles that launch them.

There are many examples, experts say, of American political norms being tossed aside and the country’s political future thrown up in the air by others around Trump, both allies and foes, who seek to please or push back against the unorthodox commander in chief with their own unorthodox political maneuvers.

One example of this is House Speaker Mike Johnson (R.-La.). Refusing to swear at Adelita GrijalvaAlthough he was elected to represent parts of Arizona in Congress in September. Johnson cited the shutdown as an example, but others, including the Arizona attorney general in a case – They suggested that Johnson was trying to block a House vote on the release of records about the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire sex offender whom Trump befriended before a falling out years ago.

Uncertainty about whether these records would implicate Trump or any other powerful person in any crime has prevailed in Washington throughout Trump’s tenure; Despite Trump’s insistence that he has done nothing wrong and that the issue is a distraction, it perhaps shows more staying power than other issues.

The redistricting battle in the middle of the decade, when California’s Proposition 50 loomed large, was another prime example, experts said.

Normally, redistricting occurs every ten years after federal census data are released. But at Trump’s insistence, Texas Governor Greg Abbott agreed to redraw his state’s congressional boundaries this year to ensure Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections. In response, Newsom and California Democrats introduced Proposition 50, which asks California voters to amend the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redline in their favor.

As a result, Californians, millions of whom have already voted, are bombarded with messages both for and against Proposition 50; many of them are hyperfocused on the uncertain consequences for American democracy.

“Let us fight back and democracy can be defended,” one supporter of Proposition 50 wrote in a postcard to a voter. “This is undemocratic and strips the people of their power to pick up congressional seats,” opponents of the measure wrote to others.

“Americans who are concerned about democracy are right to be concerned” because Trump “has broken or threatened many of the guardrails of democracy,” said H. W. Brands, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Texas at Austin.

But in part a reflection of the country’s precarious moment, he also noted that Trump had long rejected a particularly “sacred” part of American democracy by refusing to accept his loss to President Biden in 2020, and that Americans had already re-elected him in 2024.

“Americans have always been politically divided. This is the first time (other than 1860) that division has gone down to the very foundations of democracy,” Brands wrote in an email, referring to the year the U.S. Confederacy seceded from the Union.

high stakes

Uncertainty has been exacerbated in an era where political disinformation is rife and under a president prone to direct challenges to reality on an almost daily basis; On a trip to Asia this week, he not only said he would “love” a third term, which is prohibited by the Constitution, but also claimed: Mistakenly, is having its best poll numbers ever.

Democrats have also added to the uncertainty, wielding their only remaining lever of power by refusing to concede to Republicans in the bitter shutdown battle in Washington and submitting Proposition 50 to California voters.

The shutdown has major and immediate impacts. Not only are federal employees across the country, including California, being furloughed or missing a paycheck, but billions of dollars in additional federal funds are also at risk.

Democrats have resisted funding the government in an effort to force Republicans to abandon major cuts to health care subsidies that help millions of Californians and many more Americans get health insurance. The shutdown means Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits could be cut for more than 40 million people (about 1 in 8 Americans) this weekend.

California and other Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration, asking the federal court to issue an emergency order requiring the USDA to use existing emergency funds to distribute SNAP funding.

Jackson, the White House spokesman, said Democrats should be asked when the shutdown will end because “they are the ones who decided to shut down the government so they can use working Americans and SNAP benefits as ‘leverage’ to further their radical left agenda.”

The redistricting battle could have an even bigger impact.

If Democrats retake the House of Representatives next year, it will give them a real source of oversight power to confront Trump and thwart his MAGA agenda. If Republicans maintain control, they will help facilitate Trump’s agenda — just as they have since Trump took office.

But even if Proposition 50 passes, as polls show, it’s not clear whether Democrats can win all the races lined up for them in the state, or whether those seats would be enough to give Democrats a win in the chamber, given their efforts to pick up Republican seats in Texas and elsewhere.

Uncertainty about the midterms thus leads to more uncertainty in the second half of Trump’s term.

What will Trump do, especially if Republicans remain in power? Is he stationing troops in American cities as part of a broader game to maintain power, as some Democrats have suggested? Is he setting the stage to challenge the integrity of US elections by citing his own testimony? False claims about fraud in 2020 and task election deniers with overhauling the system?

Is he really preparing to challenge the constitutional limits on his tenure in the White House? This week he said he “very much wanted” to stay in office, but then “too bad” this is not allowed.

Fire with fire?

According to David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University, it is Trump’s unorthodox policies and tactics, as well as his brazen demeanor, that “make this a more unsettling moment than we are accustomed to feeling.”

“Sometimes when he does things that other presidents have done, he does it in such a strange way that it feels unprecedented,” or “stylistically,” but not essentially unprecedented, Greenberg said. “Self-aggrandizing claims are often untrue. His brazen disparagement of people. His change of heart on an issue. These are all highly unusual and typical of Trump.”

In other cases, Greenberg said, Trump has pushed the boundaries of the law or violated political norms that previous presidents consider themselves bound by.

“One of the things Trump has shown us is how much of our operating system depends on norms, not just the letter of the law,” Greenberg said. “What can the president do? What kind of authority can he exercise over the Justice Department and who it prosecutes? It sounds like he can probably do a lot more than he’s allowed to do.”

But Greenberg said the appropriate response is not to “be more like Trump” or “fight fire with fire” — the response seemingly gaining momentum among Democrats — but to look for ways to reinforce the political norms and boundaries that Trump has ignored.

“The more the public and citizens in general feel that it is okay to ignore long-standing ways of doing things that have stood the test of time to this day, the more likely we are to enter a more chaotic world, a world where there will be less justice, less democracy,” Greenberg said. “It’s going to be more dependent on the whims or preferences of whoever is in power, and in a liberal democracy you’re trying to fight against that.”