Why I Fight

Trump’s Threats Are Literal, Not Locker Room

I’ve been in this battle for eight years now.

Some mornings, I wake up with a blunt reminder why:

It’s the “once and for all” line that’s both the literally and metaphorical kicker.

In those eight years, I’ve gone for being a man in my early 50s to being a man about to turn 60. I’ve seen my kids graduate from high school and college and both get married.

I’ve had tremendous highs and some horrific lows, personally and professionally. I have allies and adversaries, friends, and critics. (More of the former in both cases, I’m happy to report.)

Since the moment I committed to Donald Trump‘s defeat in 2015, I’ve never doubted the justice of the cause. When he won in 2016 I didn’t let it break me.

Instead, I let it teach me and learned how to defeat him. Those lessons paid off in 2020 and will again in 2024. Did I feel like all the warnings I issued in -15 and -16 were for naught? Sometimes.

Was I disappointed how many friends and colleagues I once admired bent the knee and slipped into the warm bath of Trump’s personality cult of proto-fascism?

Every damn day.

The difference though between 2016 and today is that I’m not just one of a handful of people warning you. In 2016 his accidental election gave official Washington plenty of time and cover to pretend he would be a normal Republican. That delusion was beautifully crafted and took in not only officialdom, but a meaningful portion of the media

Given what he’s done in the past and what he promises for another term, it is easy, cheap, facile and lazy to frame it merely as Republican versus Democrat, Biden versus Trump.

It’s America, or Trump.

By the time Trump had been in office for less than a year, it was abundantly clear that he was profoundly unsuited to the job not only because he lacked even the most vague sense of intellectual curiosity or judgment, but because he embraced a set of values so profoundly corrosive to the Constitution, the rule of law, and America’s great political tradition that his continued retention of the office was an existential threat to the future of the Republic.

Now, if Trump keeps even a fraction of his promises of retribution, the American Constitution, our political system, and the country itself will not survive. No one in today’s Republican party, certainly not anyone holding, elected office, will stand against him, no matter how grotesque his reign becomes.

Every single time he posts on his Dollar Store social media platform, every rally, every speech, every utterance from his campaign is a warning, not just a boast. He has always had a species of feral cunning about how to stoke the rage and ugliness of his audience.

He knows them better than the pro-democracy movement, the Democrats, and the American press do. The manner in which she is stoking the fires of violence that will make January 6, 2021 look like a warm-up act could not be more evident. How do you think they interpret something like that Truth post?

That Never Trump critics and political opposition figures should get a stern talking-to? A firm reprimand that goes down in their permanent record? Do they think it means that anyone who has ever investigated or prosecuted Trump will get a bar complaint?

Of course not.

They interpret his words as an order. They see them as a permission slip for violence. For retribution against the “elites.” His eager, educated Bannonite apparatchiks will take all of that, and implement it as policy, using the full force of the state to please their master.

After all, we’re just vermin.

Read him literally.

God knows, I do.

And that’s why I fight.

Written on my phone. Will correct typos shortly.