Right Here, Right Now
There's No Place I'd Rather Be...
Donald Trump didn’t build a wall between the US and Mexico, despite his gaslighting and grotesquery. He did, however, build a far more damaging barrier between the American people. In not quite nine years, Trump’s lizard instincts divided us in places and in ways many of us didn’t think possible.
He turned proverbial Thanksgiving dinners into political combat. He ensured friendships would end over opinions about him. Most consequentially for Americans, America, and the free world, Trump built a rampart around himself and his followers, complete with palisades and willing warriors.
Four years ago, this week we launched The Lincoln Project. Our mission? To defeat Trump and those that aided and abetted him. If you’d told us then, that Trump and MAGA would be more dangerous and widespread after his (free and fair) 2020 defeat, I don’t think we’d have believed it. Even then, Trump appeared an aberration; a temporary loss of sanity brought on by a choose-your-own-adventure collection of forces and dynamics.
And yet, here we are.
The fight against Trump and MAGA goes further back, of course. There were a few who warned what Trump would be if elected. Some of us, me included, were convinced that once he understood the nature of being president, Trump would be formed by the office. Instead, his very presence distorted the presidency, our institutions, and our country with a malignant narcissism and selfishness on a scale that left even clinical psychologists bewildered.
Studying, understanding, and attacking this menace is a continuous endeavor. MAGA calls it “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I prefer the “Trump Engagement Strategy.” If I attempt to be objective, I can see why a normal person would see this work, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, ‘as some damn fool idealistic crusade.”
A couple of years ago, a supporter of ours observed that he thought we were taking our fight against Trump ‘a little too personally.’ You’re damn right I do. The dynamic changes, really changes, when you get the threats. When you know people have spent millions of dollars to ruin you.
When you see a research memo sent from the White House Chief of Staff to the Attorney General of the United States with your name, and the names of your brothers in arms at the top. It changes in those moments when you know that the fight begins, literally, at home, for your family, and those that have fought alongside you for years, against the worst people in the world.
With all that said, there is no place I’d rather be and nothing else I can imagine doing. It is a rare thing indeed to know you’re able to be in a place of consequence in the fight of your time. The magpies can scream from their branches all they want. Those in the vanguard of the pro-democracy movement didn’t ask for this fight, but I can proudly say that the men and women I fight alongside have shied neither from the day-to-day slings and arrows nor the darkening horizon.
We know the stakes, and if you’re reading this, you do, too. But it bears repeating.
This battle is about the future. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s about the past. We’ve reached Robert’s fork in the road. Which path will we take? Ironically, the darker path is the clearer of the two. Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and all the neo-fascists lay out in painful detail what they’re planning when they retake power. To say, “it’s just rhetoric,” is the height of naiveté or willful blindness.
It’s also the easier choice. Let someone else make the decisions. Many might just want to be left to their screens, streaming services, and the freedom to know that your personal destiny is now fully in the hands of someone else. “Plug me back in,” they say, and make all the noise stop.
The world that so many pine for: Before Trump, before Covid, before Ukraine, before the constant bombardment by politically radioactive isotopes, is gone. It. Is. Gone. It’s never coming back. The world of now is one of living on a precipice – looking out at a world waiting to be created, not by the forces of Trump, but by proud Americans of all stripes.
The better road is the one not yet fully built. This is the harder choice! Former House Speaker Sam Rayburn once said, “Any jackass can kick a barn down. It takes a carpenter to build one.” We must be a movement of carpenters, joiners, plumbers, and electricians, designing our national home, one beam and one joist at a time. Understanding and accepting the frustration between a beautiful design and the reality of turning that first shovel of hard earth to build something.
To steal from the Greeks, America can be great when we agree to build this new national home knowing that many of us will never live in it. It’s the realization that what we do today, like all human endeavors, will never be perfect, nor complete. The planning, the collaboration, and the community that can only be created by the friction of good people working toward a common goal is what we must focus on in the next 46 weeks.
We must put aside our petty differences and long-standing disputes. Holding a grudge? Get over yourself. Not comfortable in the environment in which we now operate? Get used to it or step aside. “We’ve never done it that way,” is grounds for dismissal in this conflict. This fight is here 24/7/365. If you’re comfortable, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re risk averse, you’re in the wrong business.
If you sit at the top of an organization that can be leading but won’t, ask yourself why not. And let me be clear: Because you live in Washington, DC or because you have the ear of a billionaire is not enough. It's not about you. It’s not about your bullshit fiefdom. It’s about 330 million Americans, the vast majority of whom we will never meet, nor will ever hear our names. To my Beltway friends: If your big goal this year is to get invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner, retire.
Right now, as you’re reading this, very bad, very smart, very well-resourced people are designing a world that Lewis, Orwell, Atwood, and Collins have warned us about. Each generation’s artists illustrate the dangers of centralized, authoritarian government. We ignore their warnings at our peril.
What’s the battle of our time about? It’s simple: Everything.
Everything you cherish, that you hope for in your life, and that of your children, your community, and your planet is on the line. When you think about it, it’s really very simple: There is work to be done and a limited amount of time to do it. As your gathers this Christmas season, look around. If you could do one thing that would give them the opportunity to live a better life in a greater country, what would you do? Would you, do it? How could you not?
Now think about next Christmas. As you look forward to seeing everyone next year, what world will have you helped create? The one where fear, the arbitrary rantings of a mad man, and the devilish desires of mediocre men determine your family’s future?
Or do you want to wake up in the bright light of a new dawn and look out across the hustings and see a hole in that wall that has separated Americans for too long already. It’s an easy choice for me, a no-brainer. That world, and all the hard work that comes with it, is out there waiting for us. Now it’s time for each of us to pick up our tools and go to work.
Thank you Reed. This is another piece of necessary and great writing.
Dear Reed,
Earlier today, I read a profoundly unsettling reminder of past Republican presidential candidates' wartime demagoguery and voter suppression to win their elections. I realize from watching your strategy sessions with Rick, Stuart, and Joe that a critical focus for TLP will be to move the number of votes in swing states to the Bannon line. Brilliant! I’m all for it!
Do you think that crafting your messages to your target voters with this information (below) would piss them off to vote Dem or to stay home?
If not, TLP, what voter engagement organization would use this Intel? Should you think it is a potent message for 30 or 60-second spots?
The presidential elections highlighted by Thom were in 1968, 1991, and 2000.
I excerpted these historical facts from Thom Hartmann’s Substack:
“In 1968, for example, after tens of thousands of American deaths and millions of Vietnamese, President Lyndon Johnson had worked out a peace deal between the US, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for president in the 1968 election against Richard Nixon, and announcing the peace deal in the fall of ’68 would almost certainly swing the election in Humphrey’s favor.
So Nixon went to work. He had his people reach out to the South Vietnamese officials and tell them that he’d make them rich if they’d just refuse to go along with LBJ’s peace deal. It worked.
The FBI had been wiretapping the Vietnamese and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd, they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon, who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.”
“But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.
An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers.
• Next, Thom cites Reagan’s duplicitousness; the costs of empowering Iran at the critical juncture Reagan chose has cost an incalculable number of lives in the decades since.
“Because Nixon got away with it, Reagan tried the same stunt, this time with Iran’s mullahs. His campaign — confirmed just this year by The New York Times — reached out to the Ayatollah and told him that if he’d hold the US hostages taken in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he’d begin shipping weapons and spare parts to Iran as soon as he became president.
American soldiers died trying to rescue the hostages, but Iran firmly held them to meet the terms of Reagan’s deal; it was during Reagan’s swearing-in ceremony on January 20, 1981, that Iran released them, just as Reagan put his hand on the bible, to the minute.”
Reread this extraordinary moment:
Iran released them, just as Reagan put his hand on the Bible to the minute.
Next, Thom tells the story of Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris’ unscrupulous actions to throw the presidency to Bush by throwing out ballots intentionally marked for Al Gore.
“Spoiled ballots” were ballots mostly coming from Black neighborhoods where Bush’s and Harris’ people had installed old, defective, and unreliable punch-card voting card machines. When people weren’t sure all the right holes had been punched (because some hadn’t worked right), they’d often write in “Al Gore” in the “write in” space along with punching the Gore button.
This, according to Bush and Harris, “spoiled” the ballots so they didn’t need to be counted, although there is no state or federal law that would back up that claim and require those ballots to be ignored.
As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:
“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.
“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”
To read the full text of Thom Hartmann’s substack, I used excerpts from today’s newsletter, “Can the GOP Be Stopped from Defying Courts & Stealing Elections Out in the Open?”
Reed, thank you for your thoughts.
Sincerely yours,
Bess Carrick