The Friday Brief

September 27, 2024

Inside: Time To Endorse Harris, Killer Helene and Project 2025, Nina Burleigh on Opus Dei, Truth Social crashes out, Pennsylvania Jitters, What I’m Reading, Ads of the Week, Scenes From The Home Front

This week, The Big Picture will be entirely in front of the paywall. I hope you’ll share it widely.

The Big Picture

It’s Time To Endorse Harris

Republican elected officials and activists are doing the previously unthinkable and endorsing Kamala Harris for President.

This is the right thing to do in this moment of national peril. Donald Trump’s reelection would lead to an era of division, chaos, corruption, and violence. It would begin a national collapse into autocracy, the deprivation of civil rights for millions of Americans, and a sovereign risk to our nation — if I may use a Trump phrase — like we’ve never seen before.

Political courage is a virtue that is challenged in America every day. It is conflicted by ambition and corrupted by the fear of the seething violence and anger in the eyes and hearts of Trump’s slavering mob.

But more frequently than not, it is constrained by the fear that taking a stand means leaving the tribal comforts of a party in which they shaped their lives, careers, and fortunes. It does, and it’s hard. I can promise you from personal experience that the hundreds of us who have already made the jump have cleared the path for you.

But for the many Republicans who heartily loathe Donald Trump, but still can’t bring themselves to cross that final Rubicon of endorsing Kamala Harris, I’m here to tell you that history, your children, grandchildren, and friends are watching.

Just saying you won’t vote for Trump and that you’ll write in a third-party candidate or someone not on the ballot is morally and politically insufficient. It is not a sign of courage to merely reject Trump. It is not a sign of strength to say he’s unqualified to be president and then refuse to endorse Harris. (Some of you will vote for Harris in secret; this is fine for rank-and-file folks but not for you.)

The test here is only passed with a ringing, public endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Nothing else suffices.

I failed this test in 2016. I worked for and voted for Evan McMullin as a write-in in Florida. It made exactly zero difference. My vote wouldn’t have put Hillary Clinton over the top, but it could have at scale and in an election decided by the narrowest of margins.

Voting for Harris is not a declaration you’re a raving progressive now, ready to seize the means of production and usher in the vanguard of the proletariat. It doesn’t mean you’ve adopted every policy and premise of the Democratic Party.

It means you give a damn about your country. Unlike Trumpism, this decision doesn’t demand uniformity and obedience.

We’re approaching when all eyes will turn towards some of the remaining holdouts in the Republican firmament. People like George W. Bush, Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Senator Mitt Romney have found no reason to take the most courageous stand of their lives and endorse Harris. All of them believe Trump is unacceptable.

The time for equivocation and excuses is over.

If Liz and Dick Cheney, not exactly the stars of “America’s Most Progressive,” can take the step of endorsing and voting for Kamala Harris, so can you.

For Republicans wondering about their place in history, allow me to make both the affirmative case for endorsing Harris and warning on what taking the coward’s way out on this matter by “writing in Reagan” will leave them in the eyes of history.

You cannot beat Trump by pretending he is the lesser of two evils. You cannot reform the Republican party and allow Trump‘s influence over it to survive. The break must be hard and sharp. It will express that Harris is, in fact, not the lesser of two evils but an American who loves her country and who will put it above petty grievances, corporate deals, and personal venality.

Trump Is An Autocrat and Institutional Arsonist

As Trump is shown over and over again, he is an institutional arsonist, a man who loathes and seeks the destruction of every American institution that is not in his immediate service. His first term was a cautionary tale: his second term, informed by the sweeping and aggressive statism of Project 2025, Agenda 47 (or whatever other identity the architects of his planned authoritarian government adopted today), spells the absolute end of conservatism and Republicanism as we know it.

Everything about the MAGA iteration of the Republican party results in greater power reposed by the state and the executive and more impingements on the rights and liberties of individuals.

Even if you, as a conservative, don’t agree with Harris on abortion or the economy, you must, at this point, recognize that Trump has a rampant demand for executive power and is, in fact, not conservative but radical in every dimension.

Over and over again, the guardrails have barely held. The systems have been strained to their breaking point. A second term will be unconstrained, dangerous, and lawless.

There Is No Conservative Party With Trump

As long as Trump remains the prime mover of a personality cult, the man’s authoritarian personality and policies will define the GOP. It takes a political party — not just party committees and allied SuperPACs — to ultimately mount national campaigns of political education, persuasion, and elections.

Trump made it seem otherwise, but the alien nation that emerged from the rallies and online chat rooms of MAGA is not a party; it is a cult. The GOP of today is the Baath Party, not the Republican Party. Your party loyalty was commendable in the beginning but is risible now.

Your belief that unless you stick with the GOP, you’ll lose all influence over whatever comes after Trump is simply wrong. You do not influence the MAGA party now, nor will you, me, or anyone else from the Before Times, and we never will. They are not conservatives. They are radical members of a personality cult. You’ll have a stronger voice in the days to come precisely because you abandoned Trump’s apparat.


He Puts Our Enemies Over American Interests

Trump’s dictator fetish, his obeisance to Vladimir Putin, his contempt and loathing of NATO and other alliances, his radical belief that America’s military is a pay-for-play protection racket, the loathing in which other countries, both allies and adversaries, viewTrump, and his inability to hold American interests and secrets from the predations of our worst enemies in Russia and Iran make him radically dangerous.

I’d argue that Harris has revived the Scoop Jackson strain in the Democratic Party, which was dormant for some time. She’ll be tougher on Russia, China, North Korea, and ISIS than Donald Trump. When a Democrat promises to build the most lethal military in the world, it means something.

This isn’t speculation: it’s his and Biden-Harris administrations' records. The old cliche of Democratic weakness on foreign policy falls apart when Trump’s profound corruption (to wit, foreign loans, cash gifts, and “investment” in Trump properties and Jared Kushner’s hedge fund) is given even the most cursory examination.

Trump will end American support for Ukraine to give his friend and master Vladimir Putin a win that will destroy the NATO alliance and place Europe’s free and democratic nations firmly in the gunsights of a resurgent Russia. The end of this war must be in Russia’s capitulation and Putin’s removal.

Refusing to support Harris gives Putin hope and runway to continue his campaign of civilian slaughter in Ukraine. If he can survive until January 2025, Trump will hand him the victory that demonstrates American leadership in the world is at an end.


Our Veterans Deserve Better

Trump’s contempt for the mean and women he calls “suckers and losers” is boundless, obvious, and ugly. Trump should've been disqualified from the moment he condemned John McCain in 2016; his behavior since then, including his grotesque antics in Arlington National Cemetery in a campaign stunt, has only descended further.

For veterans and those who care about their fate, endorsing Harris is the only choice.

Trump Is An Enemy of Free Markets

For free-market Republicans, Donald Trump‘s promise to impose massive national tariffs—a move that every rational conservative economic thinker would never even begin to entertain—is one more reason why an overt embrace of Harris is imperative. Beyond being utterly wrong as an economic policy, it’s disastrous.

Once again, we have Harris as the conservative choice and Trump as the radical. Will marginal tax rates on billionaires move up by some tiny fraction?

Protectionism, tariffs, stacking the deck for his cronies and allies, targeted tax cuts for donors, picking winners and losers is again a radical mindset for anyone who believes in free markets and economic liberty and should have no place with anyone who believes in free markets and free trade.

If Character Counts, Harris Is The Only Choice

All of you withholding an endorsement of Harris know Trump’s personal character isn’t simply deficient; it is degenerate.

I do not address myself to evangelicals in this matter because I believe them to have been by and large lost into the cult of Trump and lust for their socially desired outcomes to compromise with him at every level.

No, the question of character is for mainstream Republican leaders with daughters, wives, and granddaughters.

Trump is a rapist, he is a moral degenerate, sexual predator, and one of the most loathsome species of abusers imaginable. You know this. Even if you’ve only seen the tip of his greasy, abusive iceberg, you still know this in your hearts. Not one of you would want Donald Trump around your daughters. Not one of you wakes up hoping your sons will treat women as Donald Trump has and does treat women.

One endorsement holdout is Mitt Romney, the very definition of a family man, with children and grandchildren by he loves and adore. Why he cannot take the final step and say he will endorse Kamala Harris, a woman with a boundless love of her blended family over Donald Trump, a man whose loathing of his own children, serial adultery, and his close friendships sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, and P. Diddy is profoundly baffling.

Those who refuse to endorse Harris while opposing Trump out of pure party loyalty, and tribal affinity can look no further in history than elite Germans, who supported Hitler because he was “at least not a communist.”

The Von Papens of our time made their beds in 2016 and continue to back Trump. History will judge them with contempt. Their legacies are those of cowards, men who placed fear and ambition over the country they swore to serve and oath to the Constitution they took in vain.

If you’re seen to have provided Trump even a modicum of political cover, you will be remembered as an ally of the architects of the chaos and pain to come. Suppose you’re unwilling to take a step that could persuade even a few of your followers, supporters, and allies to cross party lines just once. In that case, you’ll be remembered as a true and profound failure as a leader.

Make Country Over Party Great Again

By endorsing Harris, senior Republicans could position themselves within a historical context of bipartisan support that transcends traditional political divides. This is the big legacy move: You can be remembered for putting the country before the party, potentially influencing future political norms towards more cooperative governance.

In a coalition that spans from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, there’s plenty of room.

This race will be close once again. We need every vote, and many of you can help move Republican voters to Harris. Those of you who care about the country, its future, the rule of law, American leadership, our prosperity, security, and dignity have one line in the most significant decision of your political lives.

Say it with me:

“As a Republican, I’m endorsing and voting for Kamala Harris.”