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I am not ashamed to be an American. I am proud. Even, especially, in this moment with Donald Trump as president, I’m proud to continue to fight for what is good and what is decent in this country, and to work to expand its promise to more people and in more ways, and to make it better than it was before.
Donald Trump is not a part of the America I celebrate and never has been. He is an embarrassment, as are the people who continue, knowing everything that is now undeniable, to support him.
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It’s tempting to call for Trump’s impeachment or the use of the 25th Amendment at this point, but JD Vance would be no better, and settling him into the incumbency in advance of the 2028 election might force us to endure still more. The real answer is to take on Trump’s false version of who we are and to tell him no. The only real answer is to vote.
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Trump’s tariffs have made life increasingly difficult to afford for Americans without doing any good at all. Like his wars, which have cost Americans their lives and left us worse off than before he started them.
Greg Sargent had a fascinating interview last week with Charlie Cook, who has handicapped elections for decades. He says the midterms are a “nightmare” for the GOP because of Trump’s unpopularity, which he says “may be historically unique.”
There are strong signs that people who believe Republicans are in trouble heading into the midterms are correct. But it’s important, no matter how good the polls are looking, to remember that every vote is essential. That means every voter is essential. The only way forward is to have turnout and a victory too massive to credibly contest in court, far beyond any conceivable margin of error. We know we are capable of doing this, and now, as Democrats and others who love democracy seem to be increasingly confident, it’s important to double down on what matters the most: getting yourself to the polls, or voting by mail early, or doing whatever it happens to take to cast a ballot and make sure it gets counted in your state.
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Trump’s Truth Social feed is juvenile, mostly offensive trash, designed to provoke, designed to distract from what he’s actually doing. We’re seeing him do more outrage baiting as we get closer to the election. It’s part of his stock-in-trade. He wants to distract you from what is important. He’s betting you won’t notice his efforts to interfere with free and fair elections if you’re focused on his social media attack on the Canadian PM or his efforts to stake other countries, even the moon, as part of his fiefdom. Of course, we are smarter, and wiser, than that.
We all understand Trump is dangerous. He is dangerous in a way that the Founding Fathers clearly envisioned: the concentration of power in the hands of one man, who in essence becomes a king, exactly what they wanted to avoid. The Founding Fathers had no use for kings, and neither do we. Kings control how countries are run and who runs them. That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants to do. And it’s all the more reason to tell him no.
At the same time our country was founded, Ben Franklin challenged us. “A Republic if you can keep it.” Increasingly, I think that after we get through this, we are going to look back with pride on what we did when Donald Trump challenged democracy. We stayed the course. We did what we could, everything we could. And we voted. We did the thing