Since returning to office, President Trump’s Department of Justice has now indicted former FBI Director James Comey three separate times. On Oct. 26, Comey was charged with allegedly leaking a sensitive national security document in October of 2016, when he was still director of the FBI.

“It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to,” Comey said in a video posted to social media.

The charges have not yet been presented to a grand jury — what DOJ filed on October 26 was a “criminal information,” meant to extend the 10-year statutory deadline for official charges that DOJ says are still to come. The information was unsealed the same day that a court ordered that Comey’s daughter Maurene was unlawfully fired from DOJ last year. Regardless of the exact reasons for the filing, though, the investigations into Comey are simply the latest example of the president’s willingness to individually target those who have spoken out against him using the full weight of the federal government.

In a post on Truth Social, President Trump vilified the Somali community in Minnesota, before encouraging others in Minnesota to take action against them:

“The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”

This is a direct call to violence from the president of the United States, one designed to reinforce existing prejudices in parts of Minnesota. It’s not the first time that he has spoken this way about the Somali community, but that does not make these kind of calls for racist violence any less startling. Thankfully, these calls do not appear to have resulted in any actual violence in the state yet. Nevertheless, they undermine the safety of American communities that have done nothing to deserve the ire of the president or his millions of supporters.

President Trump’s first major action in the days after a rebuke in the 2026 midterms was to promote Stephen Miller to the position of chief of staff. Miller, who has been an ally of the president since his first administration, is also the chief proponent of the mass deportation policy that has targeted vulnerable communities across the country over the past two years.

Miller’s stance on deportations is a clear signal that ICE activity is unlikely to slow down over the next two years. Instead, the president is apparently planning to double down on one of the most unpopular, antidemocratic policies of the first half of his term. A pro-democracy Congress should take every action it can to rein in the excesses of this enforcement regime, which has already had real costs for thousands of vulnerable people across the country. 

The past two years of the second Trump administration have made it clear that the president prefers to govern alone. New reporting suggests that, now that the president is set to face a legislature controlled by his opposition, he is already making plans to work around Congress wherever possible.

“White House counsel Will Scharf and his team also are looking at ‘what Trump can legally do on his own, where he could push the limits of his authority and how to defend those decisions in court,’” a White House official said, per Reuters.

This kind of end-run around Congress is perhaps not surprising, but it is anti-democratic. Trump and his allies have received a clear signal from voters across the country, and were he receptive to it, he could find ways to work with a Congress to come to some sort of consensus on behalf of the American people. Instead, he’s making plans to work around them.

Thankfully, Congress will have a say here as well. This new, pro-democracy Congress should make asserting its prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government central to its approach, even if that means coming into conflict with the president.

After launching an investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar just weeks before a major election, Attorney General Todd Blanche is now saying that he won’t rule out charging other lawmakers. During an interview with CNNhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbBoWZXYW2M

on Nov. 8, Blanche refused to rule out investigating lawmakers who had promised to conduct oversight investigations into the Trump administration.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons for the Department of Justice to investigate lawmakers, and investigations of this kind have happened in the past. That’s not what this is. Blanche’s comments specifically targeted members of the House Oversight Committee, which will play a key role in investigating Trump administration abuses next year: “I would be very worried if I was a member on that committee.”

On Fox News on Nov. 10, Blanche went even further, suggesting that lawmakers could find themselves under investigation for things they say. “There’s been so much vile rhetoric coming out of the incoming congressmen and senators,” he said. “We cannot let the rhetoric turn from just honest debate to actual criminal conduct.”

As far as we know, the Department of Justice has not yet launched any new investigations into lawmakers, but these kinds of threats can have a chilling effect even if no action is ultimately taken. Blanche is making it clear that, even with an oppositional Congress, he will still use the Department of Justice to retaliate against anyone who pushes too hard against the Trump administration.

Although President Trump initially accepted that Republicans had lost the 2026 midterms, he is starting to sing a different tune. In a post on Truth Social on Nov. 9, the president suggested that the results were hard to believe.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest?” he wrote on Truth Social. “How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to  vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”

This claim is baseless and shameful. The president of the United States and his party lost an election, and now they’re crying foul. The 2026 midterms showed a clear result, and this kind of unfounded conspiracism is an insult to both voters and to the election officials who together delivered a free and fair election with robust turnout. Even as he makes these claims, though, House and Senate Republican leadership have acknowledged the midterm loss, and Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded in the Mississippi Senate race, which is how losing an election is supposed to go.

Ever since President Trump launched his first campaign for the White House in 2015, American politics has been dogged by persistent claims of election rigging. In 2026, though, candidates of both parties largely conceded defeat, including the president himself.

For most of American history, conceding defeat after the voters have made their choice clear was an unremarkable, standard part of every election cycle. The news that these candidates, some of whom have denied elections in previous cycles, have decided to concede, speaks both the margins by which they lost and, perhaps, to a realization that election denialism was part of the reason for their defeat.