For all the understandable concern about Donald Trump's plans to undermine the 2026 elections, it's worth paying attention to his dismal track record in court. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice lost its 25th straight lawsuit seeking access to state voter files.

The DOJ has failed to persuade a single federal district judge that its legal position is correct. It has lost before judges appointed by every recent president, including at least eight appointed by Trump during his first term. It has also lost before the 6th Circuit, the only federal appeals court to rule on the issue so far.

These defeats come on the heels of the Supreme Court's 7-2 ruling blocking the U.S. Postal Service's new rule restricting mail-in voting. The rule, which stemmed from a presidential executive order, had already been blocked by federal judges in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. The D.C. judge was also a Trump appointee.

This losing streak didn't begin in 2026. Trump's first executive order restricting voting, issued in March 2025, was blocked by three federal judges in three separate cases.

Nor have the administration's defeats been limited to executive orders.

The DOJ joined a challenge to California's redrawn congressional map and lost before a three-judge federal panel. When the case reached the Supreme Court's emergency docket, not a single justice publicly sided with the administration.

The administration also backed the Republican National Committee's effort to bar states from counting mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. The Supreme Court rejected that position in a 5-4 decision in June.

If this sounds unprecedented, it is.

The DOJ doesn't make losing a habit — especially in voting cases. After all, the department can be selective about what it litigates, and when its lawyers walk into a courtroom, judges generally view them as experts in protecting the right to vote.

That's not to say the DOJ has lost every voting case it has been involved in, or even every important one. Most notably, it filed an amicus brief supporting the challengers in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court case that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

But while Callais ranks high on the list of damaging anti-voting rulings, it wasn’t the DOJ’s brainchild. The case was fostered by Republicans in Southern states, not in Washington.

Nor have Trump's defeats come only in court. His top legislative priority this year was the SAVE America Act, a bill that would impose steep new hurdles to registering and voting. Despite Trump’s near-constant haranguing of Congress, the bill has failed repeatedly.

His bid to rig congressional maps in states like Texas and Florida appears likely to backfire, given Trump’s historic unpopularity. Similar efforts in Utah and Missouri were blocked by courts.

To be clear, humiliating defeats are nothing new for Trump and the lawyers trying to help him rig elections. But Trump's superpower is a complete lack of shame and a willingness to escalate his attacks on democracy rather than retreat in the face of failure.

That’s what makes these defeats so dangerous.

Despite this string of defeats, Trump is nearly certain to launch an even more aggressive attack on free and fair elections in the weeks ahead.

One likely step: Misusing government data to instigate mass voter purges or challenges. Another is deploying federal law enforcement to disrupt voting and vote counting.

Both tactics would run headlong into federal laws that prohibit them. And once again, lawyers like me would quickly go to court to block them. If history is a guide, we would win.

The final showdown in this fall's fight for democracy will almost certainly come after the ballots have been cast. Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that states merely act as agents of the federal government in counting ballots and tabulating results.

Skirmishes over certification are a virtual certainty. A full-scale legal war is possible.

Win or lose, all of this — the DOJ's legal defeats, the failed legislation and Trump's efforts to rig the rules to keep Republicans in control of Congress — is a sad commentary on the state of democracy in America today.

Lawyers can only protect voting rights for so many elections. At some point, the bad guys will prevail. And once an election has failed because of subversion or mass suppression, the system's ability to bounce back will be severely diminished.

As surely as we must be prepared to defend the 2026 elections, we must be equally prepared to strengthen the system afterward. That will require political and civic courage that seems in short supply right now.

For now, I will keep fighting in court and advocating in the public square. I hope my efforts in the second soon match my success in the first.