By CLINTON FEIN
August 31, 2025

On August 29th, 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott performed a public execution of representative democracy while MAGA zealots cheered from the gallery. Signing a redistricting bill with the smug satisfaction of a man who knows he can’t win fairly, so he’s changing the rules instead, confident there will be no consequences.

There’s something particularly nauseating about the brazenness of Abbott’s latest move. They’re no longer even pretending this is about fair representation. The mask is off, the gloves are off, and apparently, so are any remaining shreds of integrity.

Abbott proudly dubbed this monstrosity the “One Big Beautiful Map — a phrase that drips with the same hollow, compensatory bravado as every other “big beautiful” thing in the MAGA lexicon. (So much so that Trump has ordered Republicans to stop calling their assault on Americans the Big Beautiful Bill.)

What’s particularly galling is how Abbott preened on X (that vile cesspool of hate and ignorance formerly known as Twitter) about making Texas “more red” with “the one big, beautiful map that ensures fairer representation in the United States Congress for Texas” Not more representative. Not more reflective of its population. More red. He’s literally bragging about the partisan outcome of what should be a neutral process. He’s like a referee announcing before the game which team he’s planning to help win.

Instead of doing everything in their power to upgrade their useless, outdated flood warning systems, as Texans still mourn their buried children and missing family members lost in flash floods in July, Abbott and Texas Republicans are involved in cartographic masturbation exercises. Getting themselves off on power while the actual voters get fucked.

The historical parallels are impossible to ignore. This is Jim Crow in a Brooks Brothers suit. It’s the same impulse that once demanded poll taxes and literacy tests, just executed with GIS software instead of billy clubs. The goal remains unchanged: ensure that certain communities, specifically Black, Latino, and young voters, have their political power systematically diminished.

The technical term for this is gerrymandering, but that antiseptic word doesn’t capture the violence of what’s happening. Much of the media focus has been on the political power MAGA will gain in the House, not the voters who this travesty will essentially disenfranchise. This is political apartheid. It’s electoral eugenics. It’s democracy by dismemberment.

What makes this particularly grotesque is that Abbott is doing this at the direct behest of the twice-impeached felon currently occupying the White House. The same cheat who was literally indicted for trying to “find” votes in Georgia in 2020. The same loser who attempted a fucking coup when he lost. The call came down from on high: secure the House for 2026, by any means necessary. And Abbott’s obsequious response wasn’t “That’s not how democracy works.” It was “How many times would you like me to roll over, sir?”

Authoritarianism doesn’t happen overnight with armed Gestapo and tanks in the streets, although that’s literally happening overnight. It happens through bureaucratic changes, through the quiet replacement of votes with maps, through the gradual erosion of institutional norms until one day you wake up and realize the institutions you trusted no longer exist in any meaningful way.

That’s where we are right now. We’re not approaching authoritarianism; we’re practically drowning in it. The water is up to our necks, and our flood warning system appears to be as effective as Kerr County’s.

Abbott’s “One Big Beautiful Map” is ugly as sin, and not just aesthetically. It’s morally repugnant. It’s the kind of ugliness that comes from watching a spineless sucker proudly dismantle the machinery of democracy to demonstrate his fealty to his cult leader.

The only way forward is to call this what it is: cheating. Not strategy. Not politics. Not “redistricting.” Cheating. The desperate, pathetic flailing of a party that knows it cannot win on ideas, cannot win on policy, cannot win on vision, so has decided to win by simply changing the definition of winning.

What Trump, Abbott and the rest of the MAGA crowd didn’t anticipate was the resolve and fortitude of the opposition, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker. The days of lamenting rather than fighting back are over.

 “We’re not going to roll over. And we’re going to fight fire with fire. Whatever they are doing will be neutered here in the state of California,” Newsom warned. Last week, he signed a redistricting proposal aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional boundaries, a direct response to the gerrymandered Texas maps.

On X, he responded to Abbott’s brag: “Congratulations on your new position as Trump’s #1 lapdog, I know you worked hard for it!”

The gloves are off.