What Do Venezuela and Minnesota Have in Common

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Donald Trump has begun to speak openly about placing the federal government in charge of overseeing elections in as many as 15 states where, he claims, corruption is rampant. What might Minnesota and Venezuela have in common under this framing? The answer points toward an emerging imperial logic of rule—one that increasingly displaces the constraints associated with the United States as a constitutional republic.

Trump’s approach follows the logic of the South’s Lost Cause...