The Trump regime, its minions in Congress, and its MAGA partisan allies on the Supreme Court have taken a sledgehammer to pluralistic democracy, the rule of law, and the promise of shared prosperity. The backlash to Trump’s reign of incompetence, malfeasance, terror, and greed will play out in the midterm elections.
However, two reform-minded groups have wasted no time in exposing the extent of the autocratic abuse and beginning to formulate reform plans. With their help, our task of restoring and bolstering our democracy will be less onerous.
Let’s start with Common Cause, which has — among other things — been front and center in the effort to expose ICE abuse and regime-wide corruption. In April, Common Cause’s Senior Policy Director for Anti-Corruption & Accountability Abigail Bellows wrote:
President Trump has turned the White House into a gold mine, earning more in the last year than he did in his entire first term. Long-established forms of self-enrichment — such as emoluments violations — have been paired with a dazzling new array of money-making schemes. Many of these tactics are, shockingly, legal, despite their combined effect: a president getting rich off the presidency, a government increasingly captured by the wealthy, and the American public absorbing the costs. . .
From memecoins to real estate investments to licensing deals for the president’s name, the Trump family is cashing in on the power of the presidency in ever more creative ways. Issuing presidential pardons to campaign donors. Soliciting crypto investments from foreign governments. Hosting political events at Trump properties. Demanding settlements from tech and media companies awaiting federal regulatory decisions. Plus the Qatari jet, the Vietnam golf course, and the Melania documentary. These pursuits may not all constitute “corruption” in the narrow legal sense, but they reflect how most Americans use the term – to refer to a rigged system, where self-serving politicians are above the law.
The schemes and scams have only expanded since then. For example, the array of conflicts involving Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff has recently come to light.
Rather than play whack-a-mole trying to bat down each new scam and legislate in dozens of areas, Common Cause has come up with a devastatingly simple proposal; a clean anti-corruption reform every pro-democracy advocate should support:
“Congress should pass a clean prohibition on personal profit during the presidency. As is already established precedent for other senior government officials, the president and vice president would receive their official salaries — and that’s it. No side hustles.”
Its idea has intuitive appeal:
By curbing any outside income during the presidency, a profiteering ban would provide much more comprehensive coverage than just restricting “improper” or “illegal” enrichment. A flat ban would also be more likely to endure in the face of future profiteering tactics, avoiding a whack-a-mole approach. Drafters could create multiple avenues for enforcing the profiteering ban, in addition to the ban’s inherent deterrence value. And a federal ban could help prevent a cascade of profiteering by state officials, where there are myriad opportunities for graft plus far less scrutiny.
In addition to its legal impact, such a proposal could have narrative impact — providing a powerful counterpoint to the cynical ways in which Trump is seeking to monetize public office. It is simple by design, making it easily understandable for public audiences that have grown despondent about government corruption. It also resonates with the older notions of public service, patriotism, and morality that many Americans still hold dear. The idea of a profiteering ban is already popular: recent polling indicates that 77 percent of Americans believe a sitting president should not be allowed to profit from his business ventures while in office, including majorities across all parties.
Meanwhile, the ACLU has taken on another area of despotic abuse. Its new study on the reign of ICE and CBP abuse is chilling: “Among the administration’s most powerful and frequent tools in executing on its dangerous, anti-democratic vision is the mass deportation agenda.” The report tracks 76 ways the Trump regime has used its mass deportation agenda to undermine America’s multiracial democracy and civil rights and liberties. This includes “mass de-legalizing more than one million people, stripping them of legal status and work authorization.” It has literally created more than one million “illegal immigrants,” providing a pretext for uprooting them, devastating families and communities, and sowing fear among the broader non-white population.
The report breaks down the abuses into three areas: attacking civil liberties (e.g., targeting journalists, infiltrating and surveilling organizations engaged in peaceful protest and activism, expanding deadly immigration detention and offshore detention); attacking our democracy’s integrity and structural checks (e.g., deploying federal patrols indefinitely in American cities, racially profiling targets, using excessive violence and then lying about deaths, evading court orders); and attacking pluralistic, multiracial democracy (e.g., de-legalizing more than one million people, attacking birthright citizenship, attempting to “exclude non-white people from entering our country through extensive visa and travel bans and the exclusion of all but white South Africans from the refugee program,” disrupting naturalization and legal immigration processes).
The ACLU also offers a set of reforms that will be essential to repairing the damage and fixing our longtime dysfunctional immigration system. These include a broad-based path to citizenship process; abolishing and replacing ICE; modernizing border control and our asylum system to “create a workable border entry process, address the case backlogs and ensure that vulnerable people can get protection and an opportunity to rebuild their lives”; and creating mechanisms to hold federal officials responsible to Congress and the public for abuses, including the right of private legal action.
Its recommendation for an ICE abolition and replacement is especially noteworthy:
Congress should conduct rigorous oversight of abuses committed by immigration agencies across our nation. Oversight has already shown the need for reform. Congress should build on the immigration enforcement reforms it debated during the 2026 Department of Homeland Security funding negotiations. While important, reforms such as banning law enforcement masking and requiring the use of body-worn cameras are insufficient to address the myriad abuses and threats to our civil liberties.
Beyond those measures, Congress should amend our laws to dismantle, once and for all, the national deportation policing force, which cannibalizes federal, state and local agency personnel and diverts them to a single force that can be wielded not just against immigrants, but those who disagree with a government’s actions.
In its place, the ACLU recommends setting up a new immigration management agency that would set “clear rules to qualify for termination of removal proceedings and lawful status, including a pathway to citizenship.” (A fuller ACLU blueprint for such a system will be forthcoming.)
Both Common Cause and the ACLU have done essential work in exposing some of the worst aspects of the Trump regime, but also in beginning the process of formulating systemic, long-term reforms that will permanently insulate democracy from the abuses we have endured or witnessed. Their undaunted, unwavering, unabashed, uncompromising efforts to expose wrongdoing and set us on a path to reclaim our democracy deserve our gratitude and support.
trump's surrogates are talking about confiscating ballots and other election crimes. They wouldn't talk that way if we had a history of holding them accountable.
Wonderful, Ms. Rubin! I've been supporting both groups. Both have been tireless in this work. Shout out to ACLU Texas, where I live in a rural town.