Hey there. Todd Zwillich, VICE News Deputy D.C. Bureau Chief here.
A lot of things have happened lately that I never thought I’d see: a helicopter landed on Mars, Ice-T appeared on a Cheerios box, and a president led an attempted coup against the U.S. government. I'm not an expert in thin-atmosphere flight, and I'm not up on cereal-marketing trends, but after years covering politics and elections, this I can say for sure: American democracy is under threat, and Donald Trump’s Republicans are the ones threatening it.
That's a heavy thing to say! And for a Washington political reporter, it feels risky. After all, political reporters come from a culture of balance; we're comfortable sitting in the middle, happily detached while the two political parties slug it out over policy, make their best arguments in elections, and then share power according to what voters say every other November.
But what happens when one party checks out of that arrangement? How do we cover "both sides" when one side no longer believes in fair elections and isn't interested in ceding power when they lose? What is "fair" reporting when one side embraces its leader's lies about a stolen election and then launches a campaign to steal the next one, all out in the open?
That's why we launched the Breaking the Vote newsletter, to bear clear-eyed witness to the conspiracies, cover-ups, and coups that are now a regular, maddening feature of U.S. politics. Every week we take you inside the bipartisan January 6 investigation where Dems and Republicans of good faith are trying to get to the bottom of Trump’s attempted coup (where, unlike Ice-T, people actually killed cops). We monitor accountability in the courts, where some of democracy's biggest nihilists have already been charged for the (allegedly) illegal stuff they do. We cover the states, where Trumpist candidates—some of them soaked in QAnon—are trying to take over elections.
And we corral the leading experts on authoritarianism, disinformation, and elections so that you can see through the storm with the democracy-honed eyes of a proud American eagle!
We're pro-democracy, pro-voting, and pro-truth. (We're also pro-pun, but less proud of that).
So sign up now for the Breaking the Vote newsletter to put us in your inbox every Friday.