You're Worrying about the Wrong Thing.

The word you want is “quadfecta.” Back after medical and family emergencies, I’ve got some thoughts on November—and what’s really to fear come January.

More often used in the context of gambling, “quadfecta” is just the word we need to encapsulate November and its consequences. You might assume it’s just the next natural descriptor after “trifecta.” And that works. But it’s more than that: At the track, a quadfecta refers to winning four bets in a row, just as Republicans have by taking over the House (if narrowly), the Senate, the presidency, and the courts.

Republicans made their first big bet years ago, that investing heavily in shaping the federal judiciary would yield dividends. Perhaps not even the far-right architects of this judiciary imagined just how successful this long con would be—and, yes, it’s been a con. Conservative members of the 6-3 Trump Supreme Court have abandoned all pretense they care about precedent—and not just in their rulings.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee, investigating judicial ethics, sought his attendance, Chief Justice Roberts knowingly and erroneously claimed it would be unusual to testify. Ethically challenged Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (and their spouses) are now forgoing even basic opportunities to appear impartial.

Home state Republican senators with judicial vacancies used blue slips when Democrats were in power to keep them from filling judgeships. They kept seats open—including the vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia—until it was possible to fill them with candidates of their choice.

Placing party before principle, Republicans’ judicial power play left us with judges ranging from desperately unqualified to overtly political and aggressively unprincipled in their judicial activism. In their rush to confirm as many lifetime appointees as possible as early in their careers as possible, Republicans installed judges whose transgressions extend from bench to chambers.

Forty-something former Judge Joshua Kindred of Alaska heard more than 20 criminal cases in which he had a conflict of interest and subjected his law clerks a range of sexual misconduct—including physical—before finally resigning after a Ninth Circuit investigation.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit’s James Ho has distinguished himself as the least principled of Trump’s picks in a crowded field. An immigrant himself, Ho’s now aggressively auditioning for Trump’s Supreme Court short list and has radically revised his positions on issues including birthright citizenship to match the incoming executive.

Nor will any of us soon forget the one-man wrecking ball that is Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who takes advantage of being the single judge in his Northern Texas sub-jurisdiction to ensure suits like Elon Musk’s absurd SLAPP suit proceed and, of course, facilitate overeager efforts to end access to reproductive health care. Note: Kacsmaryk’s disregard for law and precedent is radical enough to have earned him—and the circuit in which he sits—a Supreme Court smackdown from even this Court.

Republicans have broken their word—shocker!—on a deal to expand the lower federal courts by 66 judgeships, seeking a way to advantage Trump. The original bipartisan agreement was long overdue, Republicans having begun to block the necessary expansion of the lower courts since the 1990s. Though dead for now, thanks to Biden’s promise of a veto, expect Republicans to return to the issue in 2025. And, of course, though entering with a historically low number of judicial vacancies to fill thanks to the Biden administration, Trump can be expect to benefit from strategic retirements in addition to whatever new seats Congress may create. While proposed legislation suggests staggering the 60-plus judgeships across multiple administrations, for Trump to be handed 25 new vacancies would be disastrous. And, reminder, vis-á-vis the Supreme Court: The filibuster’s no longer a meaningful barrier.

The second long-term bet Republicans made was in—or on—the House. Their primary tactics: aggressive gerrymandering and long-term investments in communities and populations who, demographically, might be expected to vote for Democratic candidates. To offer just one example, think of Puerto Ricans along the I-4 corridor in Florida. In 2008, spending the last month of the election in Orlando, pitching in on Spanish-language media and events, I saw the consequences of decades of personal and community-level involvement by Republicans in Puerto Rican communities at every turn.

Third, Republicans have invested deeply in Senate races, identifying candidates who can self-fund—see, e.g., Wisconsin 2024–and cultivating relationships with special interests to ensure incumbents and challengers alike are flush. Case in point: Former classmate J.D. Vance, for whom support from Peter Thiel and the ilk was decisive in his rise to the Senate—and soon to the White House.

Dark money is pouring in from all over, but little on the left is spent as strategically as on the right. While Democrats are getting better at the dark money (and gray money) game, the right has the edge. They excel at finding not just donors but legal avenues and conduits to channel cash to communities, candidates, issues, and race—not just around elections but bills and nominations, wherever there’s a chance to bolster the Trump-ified GOP worldview.

Fourth and finally, Republicans went in big on Trump’s non-consecutive re-election bid. They did so despite having years to come up with an alternative, knowing the horrors Trump’s inflicted and incited, and understanding that he plans to double down on the worst of his policies. Those who made his 2024 election possible include his sharpest conservative critics, who fell in line with no reason, save ambition, do to so.

Even before COVID, and despite not repealing the ACA, Trump stripped 2-3 million Americans of their health insurance. In 2018, Trump’s failure to address the COVID pandemic contributed to at least 461,000 deaths. In total, the U.S. death toll was 40 percent higher than in comparable nations that took responsible precautions and acted swiftly to mitigate the pandemic.

Nor are his health-specific actions the only way he’s harmed Americans: More than 22,000 people died in 2019 as a result of Trump environmental policies. Those who died, as with COVID, no doubt also disproportionately belonged to marginalized communities—more heavily affected because of where they lived, not having health care, or whether they had access to caretakers.

Then there are the discriminatory and outright vicious policies Trump has announced as priorities. These range from ejecting transgender members of our military—of whom there are at least 15,000—to finding new ways to encourage or perpetrate violence at the border, which he has fruitfully—politically speaking—mischaracterized for years.

It’s important to remember that the implications of Trump’s actions go far beyond immediate effects. Nowhere is that clearer than with respect to pardoning and valorizing January 6 rioters. The far-right groups affiliated with January 6 , including myriad Nazi and vocally white supremacist organizations among others, will be emboldened by sweeping pardoms—taking them as the carte blanche they are.

For context, 1,600 people have already been charged with federal crimes linked to January 6, 2021, when the rule of law was at least theoretically still a deterrent. Come late January, Trump’s DOJ is likely to drop charges against those not yet convicted and step into the debate over whether those already convicted can accept pardons without admitting guilt—on the wrong side, as usual.

Quadfecta

It’s not just that the Republicans have the House, Senate, and White House—they’ve got the courts. In his first term, Trump appointed 234 Article III judicial appointments, including “his” three Supreme Court justices. That’s a quarter of the federal judiciary.

While most federal cases will be decided by lower courts, not jetted to the Supreme Court, the culture this Court is promoting—rubber-stamping Trump even to the point of granting presidential immunity—affects how lower court judges behave. Trump judges can be certain of a receptive audience upon appeal to the Supreme Court and are testing the limits of that sympathy.

For their part, even when the justices don’t rule outright for Trump and his ilk, they’ve issued guidance in the form of dicta—non-binding portions of the majority opinion or separate opinions—to lead far-right impact litigators and others to more successful strategies for future efforts. These directives are boons to organizations like powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), staffed by thousands of attorneys—some intimately connected to conservative judges. ADF’s primum mobile is obtaining conservative victories from the courts that change the landscape within and beyond them.

Hence, America faces not a trifecta in federal government but a quadfecta. It’s not just the White House and Republican margins in Congress we have to worry about but the erosion of the separation of powers: a far-right Court that Congress will not check, no matter how far it goes. And their decisions, like overturning Roe v. Wade, have already killed or harmed hundreds or more.