Democracy Docket Marc Elias interview with Senator Jeff Merkley: Senator Merkley: "Well, you can steal the purse, but we can hopefully get that back. You can put in loyalists, but hopefully we can have a different administration that doesn't have loyalists. But the things that entrench it are the weaponization of the Department of Justice that's going after political enemies, and in particular, the ability to put troops in the street to suppress dissent. But the scariest piece of all is the rigging of the next election."
January 25, 2026
Sen. Jeff Merkley isn’t just a champion for the people of Oregon — he’s a champion for democracy. The Senator has seen democracies die, and he recognizes our country falling down a familiar, scary path. That’s why he put together 10 strategies that Trump is using to seize power. Senator Merkley joined me to examine those strategies, explain why we need to protect vote by mail, and break down why the U.S. government has decided it’s down with dictators.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Marc Elias: Senator Jeff Merkley, welcome to Defending Democracy.
Senator Jeff Merkley: So good to be with you, Marc.
Marc Elias: Senator, I wanted to have you on because you recently released a document about 10 strategies Trump is using to entrench his power. I wanted to kind of go into this with you and get your perspective as someone who's seen a lot of presidents of both parties, who's worked with Republicans and Democrats to get meaningful legislation passed, how you see the world as it's shaping up.
Senator Jeff Merkley: Well, Marc, this project started because people tend to believe that democracies die when men with guns storm a Capital or the equivalent of a White House. But over the last three decades, what we've really seen around the world is democracies dying because they're destroyed from the inside by an authoritarian president with a rubber stamp Congress, with a deferential court. And here we are in America with all three. So I went through a variety of the literature, including things like On Tyranny and How Democracies Die, and compiled what strategies were being used and the 10 rules of the authoritarian playbook. And then looked at, is Trump using those rules? And it's turned out he's using all 10 of them. In other words, it's a very comprehensive strategy to destroy the checks and balances of our constitution and entrench a strongman state.
I want to step back from it and say, "Folks, we've got to see the big picture. We're losing our republic and we have to stop this takeover.”
Marc Elias: So what do you see right now as the greatest threat? I know that there are lots of threats and he's employing all 10, but what are you worried most about?
Senator Jeff Merkley: Well, you can steal the purse, but we can hopefully get that back. You can put in loyalists, but hopefully we can have a different administration that doesn't have loyalists. But the things that entrench it are the weaponization of the Department of Justice that's going after political enemies, and in particular, the ability to put troops in the street to suppress dissent. But the scariest piece of all is the rigging of the next election.
Marc Elias: I want to start with the troops in the streets, in part because of what we're seeing with ICE in Minneapolis, but also because of what we saw in Portland. We saw it in Portland, we saw troops in Chicago, we saw troops in California, and obviously in Washington, D.C. The courts have had some setbacks to Donald Trump, but I don't think anyone can assume that he won't find other avenues forward. So talk a little bit about the deployment that we have seen him make and what you think comes next.
Senator Jeff Merkley: Let's talk about three strategies. The first strategy is to federalize the National Guard. And certainly that was attempted in Oregon. They tried to do that under Title X powers. And Title X has some very clear standards. There has to be a rebellion, there has to be an invasion, or there has to be an obstruction of the government to be able to perform that can't be solved by regular police forces. So when Trump tried to federalize the Oregon National Guard, we went to court to stop it. And the court said, "Hmm, we don't see a rebellion or an invasion or an obstruction." And Team Trump tried to lay out this war zone going on outside the ICE building.
In fact, what was going on outside the ICE building was like crochet classes and teaching people to do the Cha-Cha Slide and the "Unipiper" on a unicycle with bagpipes and flowers and candles. It looked like a peace zone rather than a war zone. And so the judge said that the case brought by Trump bore no relevance to the facts. Her language was "untethered to the facts," which was quite a powerful put down. So we won that round, but there are two other strategies. And one is the ICE strategy. And what we're seeing there is just a rolling over the top of due process. Folks were untrained. Experts have been talking about how when you do standard approaches, you don't have somebody circle the car and standing in front of it.
You don't have somebody who has a gun in one hand and a phone in the other hand, and you don't have three people giving conflicting information to the driver and so forth. Just hugely unprofessional, hugely aggressive. And then often they're held without access to a lawyer, without access to friends, they're moved to a new location, nobody knows where they are, the family and lawyers can't find out, and maybe even deported. Due process is synonymous with our freedom. That's what prevents a tyrannical state from grabbing us off the streets. Anytime due process is rolled over, we're all at risk for the fundamental vision of what we have, our freedom and democracy.
The third power is one yet to be exercised, but the most dangerous, and that's the Insurrection Act. And the reason the Insurrection Act is most dangerous is it says right in the act there should be deference to the president's interpretation as to whether there is an insurrection, thus making it a tougher thing to tackle in court. And the president has talked repeatedly about the Insurrection Act. The vice president has talked about willingness to use it. If we turn the clock back, I mean, our founders were extremely worried about the military being used against the domestic population. It's why they had a lot of reservations about having a standing army to begin with. And along the way, we really tried to put up some barriers about the possibility of using standing troops against the people.
But there's loopholes in that, and the Insurrection Act is certainly a whopper. So the set of things that I'm very concerned about. You also have, related to this, the president trying to get the military comfortable with the notion of being deployed against the people. When the president brought generals from all over the world, the secretary of defense went to lecture them and he said, "Generals, your training ground will be America's cities." Well, that should put waves of fear through every American about what the president intends.
Marc Elias: I want to connect the first step with the third because there was no rebellion in the streets of Portland.
Senator Jeff Merkley: Yeah, that's certainly right. There were protesters who occasionally got in fights with each other because you had right-wing folks coming down, but that's handled by the normal legal team. You had some occasions where folks were standing in the way of a car entering the ICE building. That was pretty rare. You did see instances that were just outrageous. For example, the agents came out and we believe they were Federal Protective Service. They asked the crowd to back up about 300 yards, about three blocks. Okay, well that's a long ways, but the crowd behaved. There wasn't any conflict.
And then the agents lined up across the street and they had a whole series of professional videographers right behind them. And then proceeded upon command to throw down flashbangs. Now flashbangs sound like gunfire. It's dark, lights are going off and bam, bang, bang, bang. And at the same time they were putting down tear gas and so that had people running. And so the videographers are creating this fake riot tape that they hope they can go to the courts and say, "It's a war zone." I don't know of any other instance in America where there has been an effort to stage a fake riot so the president could use that in court, but that's what happened in Portland. So pretty outrageous, but the court didn't swallow that story.
I also want to mention the "Frog Squad" because that's gotten a lot of attention across America. Folks in inflatable frogs and other outfits. And there were things that people saw that were just like, "Well, this is outrageous." You have a peacefully protesting person in an inflatable frog suit and then ICE walking up and spraying pepper spray in the intake so that the person's trapped inside a cloud of pepper spray. And you had another instance where a woman was out of the way of the car and two ICE agents were talking to her. She's telling them a piece of her mind for sure. But that's called free speech.
There was no physical contact and she was following directions. And the third ICE officer walks up and just sprays her and you see this cone of pepper spray right into her face. And anybody who sees that goes, what the hell is going on here in our country with these authoritarian tactics? And particularly when government agents show up, they do not have an individual and agency identifier on [their uniforms]. They put on face masks. When they are grabbing people and denying due process, this is fascism. This never belongs in the streets of the United States.
Marc Elias: You had a judge, as you say, say that the representations that the government were making were untethered to the facts. Now, if we get to an Insurrection Act situation where the president says, "Aha, I think there is an insurrection going on in Portland." and the judge is supposed to give deference to Donald Trump, this becomes extremely dangerous and allows for authoritarian invocations and as you say, staging of fake video, or video that is taken out of context. So am I right to be worried about what we saw already being replicated for a more extreme action on his part?
Senator Jeff Merkley: Absolutely. What if before the next election the president declares emergency powers and says because of flaws in the election system that vote by mail doesn't work, they weren't postmarked, or who knows what arguments are going to be made. He's delaying the elections and there's street protests, and now he calls up the Insurrection Act and he sends the troops out after Americans, even Americans who are peacefully protesting. This is a very scary dynamic. And I can't even believe we're having this conversation, right? We never thought this could happen in the United States of America. We didn't think five years ago that we would have rioters storm the Capitol trying to lynch the vice president and stop the counting of electoral ballots, but it happened. And we never thought we would see this type of unraveling of the well-established democratic institutions and norms that we have under this authoritarian president. But it's happening.
Marc Elias: What can people do about it? What can Congress do about it? What can governors do? What's the solution to this Insurrection Act threat?
Senator Jeff Merkley: Well, it's tough because under our Constitution, there are two things that are really the biggest checks and balances on the president. First, is that it is Congress that owns the power of the purse. But the president has been taking that away. Every time you hear him say, “We're canceling this program,” or cabinet members say “we're canceling this program” because it's, “not in accordance with the administration's priorities,” that's an authoritarian statement. It's been authorized, it's been funded, and it's the executive's responsibility to carry out that vision. You don't like it? Well then veto the next bill for the next year's program. But not to carry out what's already in law. That's taking the power of the purse.
We see that taken to the extreme by Mr. Russell Vought. And by the way, he is a name I hope people will keep bringing up. Russell Vought, he's really the puppet master of this authoritarian takeover. He believes in what he calls with fancy terms “unitary executive.” When you question him, as I have, about what that means when he was up for his nomination to head OMB, it's basically unlimited power for the president. He's been elected, now he can do what he wants. If the law says he can't fire someone, too bad, he can fire them. The law and the Constitution say he can't cancel a program, too bad, he can cancel it.
So that is the frustration that people are feeling. Well, there's impeachment power, but the House is run by Republicans. They're not going to impeach the president. And getting a supermajority for conviction in the Senate would be very difficult. And then you have the courts, but the courts act slowly. So for example, taxing power is vested in the Constitution with Congress. In fact, the first bill the Senate ever considered in its history was a tariff bill. And because of its taxing authority, every negotiation that presidents have gone through over tariffs had to become a bill approved by Congress. Or Congress just had to have passed it itself.
So here's this president who says, "I want to ignore that. Hey, today I don't like what's going on in Brazil. I'm going to put a 50% tariff on that. Oh, China thinks they're getting the better half of us? Well, I'll put 100% on China." That is power not given to the president, being exercised in an unconstitutional way. But it still is percolating through the courts a year later. So the courts are slow. Congressional legislating power can be easily overridden by the executive. Impeachment isn't going to happen. The power of the purse is being ignored. So thus enormous frustration about what can be done.
And there are really two things that happen according to the experts that can stop the entrenchment of authoritarian power. And the first is citizen action in the streets, protests. That is why the 7 million No Kings march was so significant. That's why we need so many marches this year. I tell people in my town halls, "Hey, protest in every way you can with your phone calls, with your letters, protest outside my office and others. Tell us how angry and frustrated you are and how we have to do more.”
Marc Elias: You tell them to protest outside your office?
Senator Jeff Merkley: Quite frankly, because I do a town hall in every county, so I had 36 of them last year, and people kept saying, "Well, why can't you do more?" Two things that came from that. One is I read a lot about the authoritarian takeover. And the second is I put together this vision of the 10 rules. The third is I went to the floor of the Senate and to ring the alarm bell, spoke for well over 22 and a half hours, to say, "Wake up America, this is the plan, this is unfolding, it's underway," and then put together this pamphlet that we're talking about to have people see the big picture. I'm just trying to think of everything I can do with the powers, official and unofficial, of a U.S. Senator to try to stop this progress. The second big thing apart from citizen protest is the next election. And that brings us to why the scariest is the rigging of the election.
Marc Elias: So let's talk about the 2026 election. We're going to have elections. Even dictators like elections. Vladimir Putin loves elections. They don't like free and fair elections, but Donald Trump can't cancel the elections. The question is how free and fair they will be and he’s aiming to make them as unfree and unfair as possible. He wants to disenfranchise as many democratic voters as he can and he wants to, if necessary, alter the outcome of the election.
He wrote on social media that the states are the agents of the federal government when it comes to tabulating and counting votes, and that he, the president, speaks for the federal government. Tell me your take on this.
Senator Jeff Merkley: I'll tell you the things I've been emphasizing. The first is the president directing the gerrymandering in the middle of a decade, saying, "I want more districts that are redrawn to favor Republican candidates." And of course, Texas has done that. California has retaliated. It's kind of a nine to five ratio if you throw in the other states right now.
Marc Elias: Right, and just so everyone is clear, that's because Republicans have also redrawn maps in Missouri and North Carolina and are likely to do so in Florida.
Senator Jeff Merkley: Yes. And then you have a potential Supreme Court decision that would gut the remaining Voting Rights Act. And the estimate by some experts is that could allow up to 19 additional seats to be shifted from blue to red. So this gerrymandering process, a huge disenfranchisement of the sentiment of Americans in a way never intended by the founders. So that's a whopper.
Then we have the president trying to assemble a national voter database and he's requesting databases from the state secretary of states and many are resisting but they're being sued. We'll see where all that ends. My impression has been that the president would like the power to purge the national voting database the way some states have done. So you go to the polls thinking you're registered and they say, "We're sorry, you're not registered." That's a scary piece.
And then the president's opposition to vote by mail. And to me this all goes to how easy it is to manipulate urban voting on election day. If you don’t want people to vote in an urban center, you move the precinct location, you proceed to make sure the machines don't work, you get a long line so people have to go home and pick up their children from daycare or go back to work, you send out intimidators, you tell people you can't hand out a glass of water to the line.
All of those things can seriously depress the vote. You can even put out misinformation. We've had texts in the past where people were told, "Sorry, you missed the election last Tuesday." Meanwhile, the election is actually the next Tuesday. Anything to kind of confuse people about an election, and it’s easy to do on an Election Day.
But vote by mail? Well, now people have plenty of time to fill out that ballot, get it turned out, be reminded multiple times, get answers to their questions about complicated issues. In states that have initiatives, that's particularly important. So this, in my mind, is why Trump hates vote by mail because it obstructs all of the shenanigans he hopes to employ on Election Day.
Marc Elias: I want to unpack several pieces of what you just said. The first, which is really, really important: In order to suppress the vote, you don't need to engage in the most brutal tactics. I mean, you mentioned the moving the polling place. People keep asking me about like, "Is ICE going to be at the polls with guns or is the military going to be at the polls with guns?" I keep saying to folks, they don't need to be at the polling place. They just need to close the streets. If they want to prevent people from in-person voting on Election Day, they will employ some of the tactics they’re using in Minneapolis close to polling places. It will not just suppress the vote of people who have Hispanic surnames or are worried about being hassled. It will just suppress the vote of everybody because there will be traffic jams, no way to physically get there, and no place to park. People are not going to park two miles away and walk through all of this simply to vote. A large number of them are just going to turn their car around and say, "You know what, it's not worth it.”
Senator Jeff Merkley: You've described it powerfully. I hadn't really thought of the point of closing the streets, but that throws in a whole bunch of intimidating factors and inconvenience, and intimidation and inconvenience are going to decrease the vote by a significant amount.
Marc Elias: Right. Let's talk about voting by mail, because this is something that is near and dear to your heart and it is very dear to me. Trump understands that vote by mail allows people to avoid the voter suppression that can be done in person. If you are trying to run a voter suppression effort, it is harder to do so where you have large numbers of people voting by mail because it's more diffuse.
As you know from your experience in Oregon, voters love vote by mail. Election officials like it and Governments love it because it's honestly cheaper. It's kind of a win-win all the way around. So the issue is not just that he is opposed to it, but he’s gotten Republicans on board with it.
Senator Jeff Merkley: That’s right In 1998, I had my first run for the state legislature and half of the electorate was voting by mail. And it was because first the Republicans had said, "We want our folks to vote by mail because higher turnout." And then the Democrats said, "Well, they're successful. So we better encourage our folks to vote by mail." But it's all voluntary. It was about a 50-50 split. So I'm going door to door and I'm asking people what they like and don't like. And folks are like, "You know what I really like? Is this vote by mail." And I'm like, "Why is that?" "I can sit at the kitchen table. We've got these complex initiatives. I can educate my kids about the importance of voting. I can consult with my spouse.”
And I had started by kind of being opposed to the idea like, shouldn't we still have things we all do together as a nation? Do we really want to disassemble that? And then folks were like, "And by the way, I have a bad hip, I can't stand in line," and so on and so forth. And so it didn't take me long to see that this really was extremely popular, and then Oregon became the first state to go exclusively to vote by mail. You didn't want to vote by mail, you could go down and you could vote in a booth at the county headquarters, but people didn't want to do that. They just dropped their ballot off in a box. It worked great. And Utah adopted it. A Republican state adopted it. It was essentially a win-win on every level as you have described.
And just last week, one of the strategies that team Trump cooked up to try to disrupt this was about postmarks and saying, "Hey, it may well no longer be postmarked on the day you deliver it." Because a lot of vote by mail states say as long as it's postmarked on election day, we'll still count it.
Marc Elias: There is no topic I get more feedback from people on than what the Postal Service is doing. People are fighting mad. Why the hell is the Postal Service getting away with this?
Senator Jeff Merkley: Well, getting away with it because they can adopt a rule and a rule has to be overturned by the House and Senate, which we may well try to do. But the House and Senate are controlled by majority Republicans. So they're reluctant to interfere with the president's strategy. Maybe they've decided they might benefit from it.
What this rule says is that your letters don’t have to be postmarked until they get to a distribution center. And that often takes a day or two. So if you put your ballot in the box on election day, it may not be postmarked until the next day or two days later, and your vote's invalidated. So that was the strategy. And of course, it's also to send confusion and concern so that people go, "Well, maybe it's too late for me to vote, so I just won't get around to voting.”
Now there's a solution to this. In Oregon, it used to be the case that we simply said your ballot has to be received on Election Day. And so we'd say, "Don't put it in the mailbox after Thursday. And here's all the ways you can drop it off directly in a ballot box or at your county headquarters." And that worked just fine. But then we extended it to make it even more convenient for folks that they could mail it on Election Day. And so we may have to reverse course here, but all of it's about intimidation of a strategy that works really well for elections, much more integrity, by the way, than voting in person.
Because in person, all those things we were talking about that allow you to manipulate, those are attacks on the integrity of the election process. And voting by mail takes those away. So when you hear people say, "Isn't vote by mail scandalous? People fill out each other's ballots or they vote five times?" No. Those are fake stories and what you have is a system that's much higher integrity as a system than voting on Election Day where so many forms of intimidation and manipulation can occur.
Marc Elias: I want to turn to the third topic that you flagged at the beginning, which is very much at top of mind, because in the last few weeks we have seen Donald Trump abuse the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.
And now, we have JD Vance announcing that there will be this new position in the Department of Justice that will report to him and Donald Trump. I am very worried about the misuse of the Department of Justice. If you have Donald Trump having a paramilitary force that he controls that we currently see in our nation's cities and now they're going to control even more directly the Department of Justice. This sounds like exactly the kind of authoritarianism that you were warning.
Senator Jeff Merkley: Absolutely. And you think about how the government is there to execute the vision of government by and for the people, not to create a system where they can go after people because of what they say or because the president doesn't like them. And it isn't just people. It's also going after institutions. So using the regular services of government — processing tax returns, the security clearances for law firms, distributing the research money to universities, using mergers and broadcast licenses to intimidate the networks.
But of all those, the scariest is going after individuals using the power of the law to target people you don't like. And of course, the goal isn't just to tie up that person, it's to intimidate everyone else. And the most prominent case for us here in the Senate is the president going after Mark Kelly because he recited the law in a video, the law being that members of the military have the right and the responsibility to refuse unconstitutional or illegal orders.
To simply recite the law was then called traitorous. You call something traitorous, you might be provoking someone to go out and harm a House member or a Senate member. But then they said, “We're going to double down on this and go after his pension and his rank.”
This is unbelievable. This is the behavior of a ruthless dictator exercising authoritarian power to go after people because of freedom of speech. And not just an ordinary citizen, but a US senator. The separation of powers has kind of extra protection for freedom of speech. So if they can go after a senator, think of how any ordinary person is like, “Well, I better be quiet because I can't raise a legal defense fund the way a US Senator can. I don't have the chance to have kind of a bully pulpit to push back the way a Senator can." And so this is super scary stuff being done right before our eyes.
Marc Elias: Do your Republican colleagues get this? Do they understand what is going on here? Do they understand it and they're afraid? Do they sort of avert their eyes from it? Are they just true believers? What is it that is motivating them?
Senator Jeff Merkley: I do think they're averting their eyes because it's so uncomfortable for them to pay attention to the issue because if they pay attention, they know “I should go to the floor of the Senate and I should condemn the president for what he's doing. I should stand up for the Constitution I swore an oath to. But if I just ignore it, maybe I can live with myself.” And you're looking at folks who have stood up, like Thom Tillis did on the "big beautiful bill" and said this thing has hurt ordinary people to fund tax breaks for billionaires. And within hours he was targeted. Within a short period of time after he was like, "You're going to run an opponent against me? Well, you can't. You know why you can't? Because I'm not going to run for reelection." So within a single day he was essentially driven from being a participant in the Senate by virtue of him bailing out of the next election.
And then you saw just this last week where folks in the Senate voted for a three-year extension of the enhanced tax credits to make health care insurance affordable and the president was like, "I'm going to get a primary component for every one of you." And over in the Senate side, five voted last week to join Democrats in the first step in a war powers resolution to say, "Mr. President, you cannot continue military operations in Venezuela unless you get authority from Congress." And immediately the White House went into hyperdrive to create pressure on those individuals.
People quit saying this out loud, but my Republican colleagues used to say: "You have to understand. I don't like what this president is doing. His values are terrible. He has been corrupt in his business life. His personal morals are horrific. A lot of his policies are going to hurt my people. But the majority of my Republican base watch Fox News, and they're convinced he's wonderful and therefore, I have to remain quiet." They would say that years ago, but not now.
Marc Elias: Yeah, well, I would remind your Republican colleagues that John Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage were about US senators and none of them will be in it.
I can't not ask you, since you are a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, what's going on with Venezuela? This is a little outside my normal area of expertise, but it is well within yours. And again, people are very concerned that we appear to have started something, I don't know if it's a war or an incursion or a kidnapping. But it doesn't seem that he asked Congress, it doesn't seem like he has got a plan. How should the audience that is concerned about authoritarianism, how should we think about what's going on with Venezuela?
Senator Jeff Merkley: I think it can be summed up by the term "gunboat diplomacy." And in this case, it had three components. The first was shooting down Venezuelan boats leaving Venezuela. The second piece of this was to intercept oil tankers, thereby cutting off financial dollars to the government. And the third was kidnapping the president. And it's essentially, "Hey, we are powerful and we can create enormous pressure on you, we want a dictatorship that is malleable." And Maduro, he wasn't malleable enough, but the vice president with all of this deeply embedded corruption and authoritarian strategies, well implemented... but now we have a different head of that operation, a different, if you will, dictator who will say, "Yeah, I think we can work something out with the United States so their oil companies can take our oil and operate our oil fields." So there's no principle, say, of restoring democracy.
18 months ago, the people of Venezuela voted overwhelmingly for the opponent. And what they wanted was a restoration of democracy. Venezuela had democracy for three decades. Well, we didn't go in and say, "We're going to use every power we have and coordinate with the Europeans and other countries in Latin America to create pressure and make sure the person who won that election actually is now running the country." No, we didn't say that.
And we didn't say, "Hey, we're going to take the situation from here forward and coordinate with the world to monitor excellent elections so the people of Venezuela can reclaim their democracy." We didn't do anything. We just said, "We don't like that guy being the head of the dictatorial authoritarian government. We want a different strongwomen, the vice president.”
So this is wrong in all kinds of ways. It is wrong because, first of all, it involves a strategy that undermines our relationship with all kinds of countries. People in other countries, they hate the idea that you can come in with gunboats and then tell them what to do. People love their countries and they want sovereignty. The second is it undermines our principles. We're not a champion of democracy. This is back to the 1950s and earlier, where it was, "We don't mind a dictator as long as it's our dictator.”
The third is that it says if there's an indictment that we have for somebody in a foreign country, we can snatch them, we can kidnap them. Is it okay for us that Canada has an indictment against somebody in America and they can just snatch them out of our nation? I don't think so, so it's an inconsistent principle. And finally, the principle is based on "our sphere of influence, we control the resources." Well, if that's extended to China, think of all the resources and relationships and supply chains we have with Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and so forth. No, we don't want China controlling all of that and cutting America out of the ability to have trade and contracts with those countries. So to sum it up, this hurts us in all kinds of ways and it doesn't help the Venezuelan people since we just left a dictatorship in charge.