Good News: Trump Loses 20 Voting Cases in a Row

Bryan Stevenson teaches America how to remember, and judges keep showing Trump who's boss

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and I want to spend today’s newsletter on the things that went right.

This week, Trump tried to rewrite history, but a man who builds museums fought back. And Trump lost his twentieth case after trying to steal your voting data.

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A Man in Montgomery Shows Us How to Remember

The Trump administration is working overtime to erase the ugliest chapters of our history. They’ve pulled down National Park Service signs about slavery, reinstalled a Confederate general’s statue in Washington and ordered warning signs for the Smithsonian to caution visitors about “ideological capture.”

But there’s a man in Montgomery, Alabama fighting back.

Bryan Stevenson runs the Equal Justice Initiative, and what he’s built down in Montgomery is extraordinary. A lynching memorial. The Legacy Museum. A sculpture garden. A public square documenting the civil rights movement. Columnist M. Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer, profiled Stevenson this week and called each piece as powerful as any museum they’d ever walked through.

What’s remarkable is this: Stevenson took a city with dozens of Confederate monuments and one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and turned it into a destination. People come from everywhere to see it, and the economy feels it. Montgomery is a place where Americans go to reckon with who we’ve been.

Stevenson’s museums aren’t dependent on federal funding, so Trump can’t shut them down. There’s a deeper argument in what Stevenson is doing. He draws a straight line from the past to the present, and puts himself, and all of us, in the story. The stories invented to justify enslavement, the ones that fueled lynching, and the ones that feed mass incarceration today.

The real evil was never just the chains and the cages, he says; it was the narrative that justified them.

Change the narrative, and you change what a country lets itself do next. That’s why Trump is so desperate to control the museums and the monuments. It’s not about the past. It’s about who gets to decide the future.

Stevenson talks about pride, too. Real pride, the kind you earn by revealing truth. He points to Germany’s Holocaust memorials and their promise of “never again” as a fundamentally hopeful thing. And when he describes what this country did to Black Americans, he says “we,” not “they.”

Asked why, he said: “I refuse to give America to anyone else.”

Trump wants us to unlearn what we know, and remove ourselves from the horror, and the truth. Stevenson won’t. Neither will we. Gessen’s profile is worth a full read.

Trump’s DOJ Just Went Zero for 20

Here’s a story that hasn’t gotten enough attention. On Monday in Colorado, a federal judge threw out Trump’s lawsuit demanding the state’s voter rolls and dismissed it with prejudice.

That makes Trump’s DOJ zero for twenty in its campaign to seize states’ voter data.

Trump’s DOJ has sued roughly thirty states demanding unredacted voter files. These include birthdates, addresses and partial Social Security numbers. Their goal? To run the data against a Department of Homeland Security database and establish the raw material for a national voter file. The Brennan Center says their goal is to purge voters from the rolls.

Secretaries of state — Democrats and Republicans both — keep telling them no. Judges keep tossing out Trump’s suits. A Rhode Island judge called it a “fishing expedition”; the Sixth Circuit ruled Michigan doesn’t have to hand over a thing.

Voting data is supposed to be managed by the states. This is what it looks like when the guardrails hold. Election officials in both parties did their jobs and the courts did theirs. That’s worth a cup of coffee.

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The President Is a Tenant, Not the Owner

You’ve seen the pictures of the East Wing rubble - the demolition Trump ordered to make room for a $400 million ballroom nobody voted for. On Friday, a federal appeals court ordered him to stop.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” Judge Richard Leon wrote. “He is not, however, the owner!” The appeals panel put it just as plainly: each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the people’s house.

Trump’s vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, and the order is paused for two weeks while he tries. But the principle matters: in this country, the White House doesn’t belong to whoever happens to be holding the keys. It belongs to us.

The Ground Still Favors Us

Behind all the noise, the electoral map keeps tilting our way. A New York judge ordered Staten Island’s congressional seat, the state’s only Republican-held district, redrawn after finding it diluted the votes of Black and Latino residents. That’s a possible Democratic pickup.

Meanwhile, Democrats have overperformed in essentially every special election and off-year race since 2024. And the analysts watching the fundamentals still see the makings of a blue wave in November, even with redistricting losses.

None of this means the fight is won. The voting map got worse this year; the Supreme Court gutted the core of the Voting Rights Act in April. But a losing streak for the purge machine, a wall in front of the ballroom, and a museum in Alabama that refuses to let America forget: that’s a week where the truth held its ground.

Be One of the One in Twenty

Here’s what this week added up to, when you stack it end to end: the government is trying to erase what we know and grab what isn’t theirs, and good people are getting in the way. Judges. Election officials. A dreamer in Alabama who won’t let the country look away. Ordinary stubbornness — “good trouble” — doing what the powerful swore couldn’t be done.

That’s our whole model. Nobody can rescue us but ourselves.

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So — will you be the one in twenty?

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Thanks for keeping us in the fight. See you next Sunday.

—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

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