The good news is that Trump has a deservedly dismal 22% approval rating among independents now. The bad news is that the full tonnage of his scandals - the combination of chaos, corruption, cruelty, and rising costs - can become background noise and blur into one another.

That’s why I decided to wade through and catalogue his deformation of American democracy over the last two years in a long column for Rolling Stone. It’s replete with links and I’m reposting it below for my Substack readers (and thank you for subscribing!) to serve as a timely reminder - but also to send to your friends who might’ve been fooled into thinking that a second Trump term would be any better than the disastrous first. See how many of these insults even you’ve forgotten.

It is essential to remember so that we comprehensively reject this colossal mistake we made as a country. Then we can begin building back America’s credibility as a leader of the free world. But it starts with repudiating Trumpism at the polls in this election. The whole column is below:

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“Flood the zone with shit.”

That’s how Steve Bannon once described Donald Trump’s attention-overload strategy. It’s designed to overwhelm your senses, so the latest outrage erases your ability to remember the avalanche of outrages past. The “shit” part matters as well — because the goal is to make politics seem so dirty and indecent that no sane person would ever get involved in the political arena. This cedes the civic ground to hyper-partisan sociopaths.

That’s why combating the memory hole is essential as voters head to the polls. The 2026 midterm elections are the only structural opportunity to put guardrails on this runaway train of a president who seems hell bent on destroying our democratic norms, dividing the American people, and alienating our allies. The result is a tsunami of sleaze: unprecedented corruption, rising costs, and governmental chaos.

But the voters who most need to remember are the ones most likely to forget.

Independents are the largest block of American voters, and they decide who wins elections. They’re fed up with both parties and tend to be fiscally responsible, socially tolerant-to-libertarian, and strong on national security. This election, their number-one issue is affordability. They voted for Trump in 2024 but now his approval rating among independents is a pathetic, record-low 22 percent.

Here’s the catch: independents are also the voters least likely to pay attention to politics on a regular basis. That’s why they are so susceptible to the trap set by the Trump team: sliding from healthy skepticism into the corrosive cynicism that says all parties and politicians are equally corrupt. While no party has a monopoly on virtue or vice, Donald Trump’s reign is in a heated feces class by itself.

Below is a reminder of Trump’s second term insults to American democracy. You’ve probably forgotten most of these amid the doomscroll of our daily lives. But the damage doesn’t disappear because our attention drifts. Share it with your independent friends and neighbors who may have quietly voted for Trump in 2024. It’s a timely reminder that Trump’s billionaire cabinet and his democracy-deforming presidency is an insult to their wallet, their health, their government, their safety, and their values.

Your Wallet

Trump promised that “when I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” He promised gas below $2 a gallon. But, of course, prices did not come down. Instead, Trump now calls the affordability crisis a “hoax.”

Gas now averages $4.28 a gallon, up 38 percent since his inauguration, and diesel is $6.28, up 69 percent. The main cause is the $47 billion war with Iran he launched without offering the American people a reason or an exit strategy, let alone getting congressional approval. So much for no new wars.

Trump’s tariff obsession is costing American households more than $1,000 a year. And Trump has inexplicably aimed some of his harshest tariffs at America’s closest democratic allies and trading partners, including the European Union and Canada.

Health care costs are also spiking because of Trump’s actions. After the longest government shutdown in American history, enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits were allowed to expire in the Trump-Republican budget. As a result, in 2027, premium payments are expected to more than double, from $888 to $1,904 a year, and as many as 5 million people may drop coverage. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Trump’s budget will add roughly 10 million Americans to the uninsured over a decade.

Food aid for kids wasn’t spared in the GOP budget either. ProPublica found that more than 770,000 children in 12 states lost SNAP benefits.

But surely all these cuts will help get America’s debt and deficit under control, right? Wrong.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” adds an estimated $3.4 trillion to deficits. For all the chaos unleashed by the DOGE cuts that threw career civil servants and programs into the “wood chipper”, less than $1.5 billion in savings have been verified and government spending actually increased. This year’s $2 trillion deficit is the highest ever outside a war or recession. The US debt just hit a record $40 trillion. Moody’s downgraded America’s credit rating from its top AAA grade. As Trump assaults the independence of the Federal Reserve, America is careening toward a fiscal cliff.

All this has happened while the Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in some 30 private companies, from 10 percent of Intel to 15 percent of rare-earth miner MP Materials, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, and a stake in a magnet maker backed by Don Jr.’s venture capital firm. Conservatives used to call that socialism or crony capitalism. Now it’s business as usual in the GOP.

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Your Health

In 2024, many independent voters were swayed by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

But once in office, the Trump administration that promised to take on pesticides actually sided with Roundup’s maker at the Supreme Court against cancer lawsuits and won. Yep, that happened.

On Day One, Trump withdrew the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, while banning any mention of climate change from U.S. government websites — because ignoring a problem always makes it better.

That’s not all: the Trump’s administration rolled back limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water and on mercury and arsenic from power plants. It also eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s research office. You can’t make America healthy while making our water and air dirtier.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised the Senate that he was not an anti-vaxxer, despite boatloads of evidence to the contrary. But he turned around and fired the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced it with hand-picked successors. Then he fired the new CDC director after just 29 days. She testified that she was ousted for refusing to preapprove the new panel’s vaccine recommendations without reviewing the evidence.

Kennedy’s founding MAHA report cited studies that do not exist. He then canceled nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research. Meanwhile, measles has come roaring back under his watch. Once considered an eradicated disease, the U.S. has recorded more than 4,400 confirmed cases so far this year, nearly double last year’s total - with 96 percent of this year’s cases among people who were unvaccinated.

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Your Government

In his last inaugural address, Trump pledged to restore competence to the federal government.

That’s the punchline. The Trump administration has consistently chosen loyalty over expertise. In addition to an anti-vaxxer with no medical experience running the health department, we’ve got a self-styled Secretary of War who was a Fox News weekend host with no experience running a large organization, now in charge of the world’s largest military. FBI Director Kash Patel is a conspiracy theorist who one senator credibly called the “least qualified and most partisan FBI director in our nation’s history.”

Personnel is policy and the pattern runs all the way down the ranks. At Homeland Security, the job of safeguarding elections went to Heather Honey, an activist whose faulty voter-data claims Trump cited in trying to overturn the 2020 results. The DHS terrorism-prevention hub went to Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old Heritage Foundation intern a year out of college with no national security experience. FEMA put disaster response in the hands of Gregg Phillips, an election denier who claimed he had been teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles away. He was removed from the post only after months of embarrassing headlines. The White House hired “Stop the Steal” lawyer Kurt Olsen to reinvestigate the 2020 election, then ordered the nation’s spy agencies to share intelligence with him. Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to run the office that protects federal whistleblowers until texts surfaced in which he admitted to “a Nazi streak.” When Republican senators sank the nomination, Trump simply moved him to the General Services Administration, where he is now acting general counsel overseeing more than 100 government lawyers. These are not “the very best people.”

The problem isn’t just incompetence, it’s corruption. On her first day in office, former Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the task force pursuing Russian oligarchs and told prosecutors to deprioritize foreign bribery cases. Five days later, Trump froze enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. By spring, the department slashed its Public Integrity Section, the unit created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, and scrapped its crypto enforcement team.

This has unleashed a wave of corruption and presidential self-enrichment without precedent in U.S. history. His net worth has increased by billions this term, compounded by frenetic stock trading. The Trump family made at least $2.3 billion from crypto ventures while investors lost a combined $2.3 billion, in an industry his administration regulates. He pardoned the founder of Binance after a UAE fund used the family’s stablecoin to buy a $2 billion stake in that company.

Trump even tried to shake down $230 million in taxpayer dollars from his own Justice Department. The White House asked the Pentagon for a record $620 million loan to a company Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm had invested in three months earlier. Despite that windfall, a Putin-allied oligarch helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations. The administration accepted a luxury 747 from Qatar, with ownership slated to pass to Trump’s library. All this makes the case of Trump’s border czar, who was recorded in an FBI sting accepting $50,000 in cash in a takeout bag, seem like a sin of small ambition.

As I’ve written before in Rolling Stone, presidential pardons are being sold. A nursing-home owner whose collapsed chain left grieving families with tens of millions in unpaid judgments spent more than $1 million on lobbyists and then received a full pardon. This month, The New York Times reported that a billionaire banker’s family hired Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba under a contract worth more than $50 million. Trump pardoned him weeks after she started. The dizzying full list includes pardons of corrupt partisan cronies and several violent drug dealers.

The one promise Trump kept was “I will be your retribution.” The January 6 pardons were just the start. A Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters analysis documented at least 470 targets of retribution in Trump’s first 10 months alone.

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Your Safety

In his inaugural address, Trump said his success would be measured by the wars America ends and, most importantly, the ones it never gets into. But the president who petulantly demands a Nobel Peace Prize has ordered military strikes on at least seven countries in his second term, including Venezuela, Yemen, and Iran. He even threatened to seize Greenland from our ally Denmark at a NATO conference.

At the same time, Pete Hegseth is purging the U.S. military leadership with a political agenda, boasting to troops that he had fired 10 percent of the military’s generals and admirals, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the top uniformed officers of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Five weeks into the war with Iran, he fired the Army’s chief of staff. Defenestrating decades of military expertise during a war does not make America safer.

While Trump bragged that he could end Russia’s war on Ukraine in a day, he has not only failed to deliver peace but seems intent on rewarding the aggressor. The United States shamefully voted with Russia and North Korea against a UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion. Then Trump and JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, and days later the administration paused all military aid. Putin got a blood red-carpet welcome in Alaska, while Trump keeps on insisting that it is “time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

While Russia has been losing on the battlefront, this month Trump threw Putin a lifeline by listing sanctions on the sale of diesel which The Economist described as “scandalous” and “shameful for America,” explaining: “Putin terrorises his own people, kills Ukrainian civilians and is helping Iran fight America. Mr Trump’s repeated acts of indulgence towards him, supposedly in pursuit of peace, undermine deterrence, hastening further crimes.” Six Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, joined six Democrats in calling it “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our allies.” Trump responded by waiving every Russian provision of a new sanctions law named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, finding a way to betray an ally beyond the grave.

Trump’s team often sold his softness on Russia with a promise to be tough on China in return. But the long-promised toughness never arrived. He also announced that he would ignore the bipartisan law banning the CCP-controlled TikTok that the Supreme Court had unanimously upheld.Trump cut sanctions put in place to punish China for the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. and suspended Radio Free Asia, which for decades brought uncensored news to Chinese audiences. China has benefitted economically from Trump’s tariff wars with U.S. allies, and despite arguing that the AI race requires no guardrails on development as a way to block China’s advances, Trump let Nvidia and AMD sell advanced AI chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the revenue. The administration blocked Taiwan’s president from a New York stopover after Beijing objected and Trump called a pending $14 billion arms package for Taiwan “a very good negotiating chip.” And amid increasing cyber-attacks, especially from China, Trump has inexplicably cut America’s cyber-defenses when we need to be ramping them up.

At home, “law and order” has too often meant order without law. Trump sent National Guard troops into American cities, and the courts repeatedly blocked him. The government deported a Maryland man to a Salvadoran prison in violation of a court order, called it an “administrative error,” and then resisted a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. In Minneapolis this January, federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in 17 days: Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA. When federal prosecutors in Minnesota began investigating the killings, Washington told them to stop and the Trump Justice Department cut off access to the evidence.

But perhaps the most dangerous violation of basic safety occurred on day one of this term, when Trump legitimized political violence by pardoning roughly 1,500 of his followers charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including some convicted of assaulting police officers.

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Your Values

Character is the single most important quality in a president. But Trump’s contempt for the truth, evidenced in his singular impulse to lie all the time, has translated into a sustained assault on the basic values of our democracy.

Every patriot ought to flinch when confronted with the photos of a wrecking ball being taken to the East Wing of the White House. Trump did the demolition without the independent reviews, congressional approval and public comment required for even minor changes to historic buildings in Washington. He does not believe that rules apply to him.

But that was just the start: His administration gutted the U.S. Institute of Peace, fired its board and seized its building, bolting Trump’s name onto the facade while the legal fight was still underway. Trump purged the Kennedy Center board and his lackeys voted to rename it the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” attaching his name to a living memorial to a slain president. Blocked by the courts, now he is threatening to tear the Kennedy Center down.

The narcissistic impulse extends to Trump putting his face on our money as well. One-dollar coins bearing his likeness are now in circulation, and the Treasury has prepared a $250 bill with his portrait. Nearly every country that isn’t a monarchy declines to put its sitting leader on its money. The U.S. is in the ugly company of a rogue’s gallery of regimes including Marcos, Assad, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Mobutu.

Speaking of ugly company, let’s talk about Trump’s longtime friend, Jeffrey Epstein. Trump promised to release the Epstein files as a candidate. But as president, he spent months fighting it. His team even summoned a Republican congresswoman to the White House Situation Room to pressure her to drop her support for releasing the files. The Trump Justice Department then withheld or redacted some 200,000 pages, which a federal judge found likely violated the law. Once Trump had the power to deliver the truth to the victims of a convicted child sex trafficker he used to pal around with, he tried to bury it.

That tracks with his promise to “bring back free speech to America.” Out of the gate, the White House barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office for refusing to say “Gulf of America.” It kept the ban in place after a federal judge called it unconstitutional retaliation. He has since tried to ban CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House, while repeatedly suggesting negative coverage of him and his administration should be illegal.

At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth demanded that reporters pledge not to publish even unclassified information without approval, and nearly the entire press corps, Fox News included, walked out rather than sign. In just one chapter of Trump’s war on media, hours after Trump’s hyper-partisan FCC chairman warned ABC that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Jimmy Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air. Even Ted Cruz called it “dangerous as hell.” Trump sued The New York Times for $15 billion, and a Bush-appointed judge threw it out. He issued executive orders punishing law firms that had represented his opponents, and three federal judges struck them down as unconstitutional. The United States has now fallen to a record low 64th in the World Press Freedom Index.

But perhaps the weirdest window into Trump’s twisted psyche comes in the form of the 80-year old’s unhinged late night social media revenge benders, where he posted 2,249 times in the first four months of this year. One night, he posted more than 160 times, including a post branding Sen. Mark Kelly, a Navy combat veteran and astronaut, a “traitor” who deserved death. His account also shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Amid a feud with Pope Leo, he posted AI images of himself as a Christ-like figure. Finally, after millions of Americans joined peaceful “No Kings” protests, he posted an AI video of himself in a crown, flying a jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping feces on the marchers.

If an aged family member behaved this way, you’d schedule an intervention. If a CEO did, the board would remove them. The presidency deserves to be held to at least the standard of conduct we expect in daily life, and patriots of every party should insist on it.

The Choice

This is nowhere near a complete list of Trump’s assaults on American democracy. This election has provided a constant stream of insults to the integrity of the office, from Trump’s call for red states to do a mid-decade redistricting so Republicans could hold onto Congress, to his endorsement of buffoonishly corrupt Texas AG Ken Paxton over conservative incumbent Jon Cornyn, to using $22 million taxpayer dollars for campaign ads, to his absurdly propagandistic videos at rallies about how “God Made Trump,” to ogling asses on the campaign trail to his latest gambit of offering a bribe of $5,000 for each vote - are all just signs of how deep the rot has gotten a decade into the Trump era. This year’s midterms are the only chance we have to restore some basic guardrails on this unhinged president and redeem our country’s once-respected leadership in the free world. The question for independent voters is whether you will now hold Trump to the same standard you’d apply to any other president, regardless of party. You don’t have to join a team. You just have to remember the damage Trump has done over the past two years back in office and vote. Don’t let the memory hole win.

The road to a broad and durable Democratic majority doesn’t run through safe seats in Berkeley or Brooklyn. It runs straight through the middle of America and the middle of our politics.

While Democratic Socialists have sucked up the oxygen this cycle with primary wins in deep-blue districts, the real stars of the 2026 election are flying below the radar and reaching out beyond the base to bring new seats into the Democratic column.

If you take a closer look, you’ll see a consistent story. These purple state warriors are a mix of military veterans and pastors, former Republicans and red state independent candidates — actively undercutting negative stereotypes of the Democratic brand. They are calling out the wingnuts, keeping the focus on working families, and bringing much-needed populist energy to the center left while taking the fight to Trump’s corrupt establishment. They are blazing the trail to a Democratic majority and pointing the way toward how to win the White House in 2028.

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The Senate

Let’s start with the Senate, where a Democratic majority seemed unthinkable a year ago.

Democrats’ strongest pickup opportunity is North Carolina, where popular former two-term governor Roy Cooper is running for an open seat and holds a lead of nearly eight points in the RealClearPolitics average. Cooper’s pitch is relentlessly focused on affordability, reflected in his “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour, telling crowds, “I’m going to be a senator who’s going to put the people before power, the people before party.”

In Alaska, Democrat Mary Peltola, a former member of Congress, got a boost from the state’s nonpartisan top-four primary, where she finished first — ahead of Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who has proven a dependable Trump vote in a state with a strong independent streak. Peltola’s message is “Alaska First”: putting partisan politics aside to work together, like the independent-minded Republican Lisa Murkowski, while calling out the polarization and higher prices coming from Trump’s Washington. “I am right down the middle,” she told Gray Television after the primary. “I’m as moderate as a person could possibly be.” Recent polls show the race a coin toss.

In Texas, James Talarico is perhaps the most exciting pick-up candidate of the cycle. A state representative and Presbyterian seminarian — a pastor in training — he is facing Attorney General Ken Paxton, a man impeached by his own party’s Texas House and whom Talarico calls, with a great deal of evidence, “the most corrupt politician in America.” Talarico is a soulful, pragmatic progressive and an avatar of an emerging religious left — a candidate whose faith informs his politics rather than the other way around. “We will not defeat the politics of division with more division,” Talarico says. “When you extend an open hand rather than a closed fist, you’ll be surprised by who takes that hand.” A half-dozen September polls have Talarico leading Paxton between one and six points.

Another faith-based Democratic Senate candidate gaining traction is Adam Hamilton in Kansas, an author and pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country. He is defiantly moderate in his approach to politics. “Here in Kansas, we’re proud of being in the middle politically,” he said in remarks reported by the Kansas Reflector. “That puts us about a million miles away from the extreme politics of Washington that are tearing us apart and driving up prices.” An Emerson poll showed him edging Republican incumbent Roger Marshall, 45 to 43. This is in a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932.

Even Ohio is a battleground, with the OG heartland economic populist Sherrod Brown in the lead while battling to regain a Senate seat from JD Vance replacement Republican John Husted, telling voters in a Marietta diner, “I don’t believe politics is left or right. I’ve always been on the side of the middle class and workers and people struggling.”

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The Independents

In search of an offramp from hyper-partisan polarization, three independents are running serious Senate campaigns in deep-red states across the Plains and the Mountain West. All three are military veterans. All three have pledged not to caucus with either party.

Dan Osborn is making a return run in Nebraska, this time against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, after holding Sen. Deb Fischer to a single digit win in 2024. A Navy veteran, mechanic and former union president, he told CNN: “We have to stop looking left and right and pointing fingers, and we have to start looking up.” Democrats have stood down in the race, and a recent SurveyUSA poll showed Osborn four points ahead, 46 to 42.

In Montana, Seth Bodnar, a former Green Beret and Rhodes Scholar who served as president of the University of Montana, is also running as an independent. “I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States,” he told me in an interview for How to Fix It. “I didn’t swear loyalty to a political party.” His race is complicated by the fact that, unlike in Nebraska, the Democratic nominee remains on the ballot. One summer poll found Bodnar beating Republican Kurt Alme head-to-head, 50 to 44 — but Alme leading when the anti-Trump vote is split. The Democrat should drop out.

Finally, in nearby South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, is challenging Republican Sen. Mike Rounds. His goal is an independent coalition that could serve as a bridge across the partisan divide. Deny either team a majority, he told CNN, and “we become the fulcrum” which can force bipartisanship in the Senate.

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The House

These same trends are clear in the crucial toss-up races for the House, where Democrats are most likely to win their majority.

In always tight Wisconsin, Rebecca Cooke is making her third run for Congress in the third district, arguing that folks in D.C. “are either too far left or too far right, and we need more people in the middle that want to work across the aisle to get things done.”

It’s a message echoed by strong female candidates across the country, many of whom are military veterans. In New Jersey’s 7th District, Rebecca Bennett — a former Republican, a former Navy helicopter pilot and business leader — is challenging Rep. Tom Kean Jr., who went MIA for months and later revealed his unexplained absence was due treatment for depression. “In the aircraft, you’d never ask your crew if they’re Democrats or Republicans,” Bennett says in her first general-election ad. “We’re all there to serve our country and do the mission.” Notably, in New Jersey, she also pledges to stand up to corruption in both parties.

In New York’s 17th District, Cait Conley — a West Point graduate and 16-year Army officer with three Bronze Stars — is challenging Rep. Mike Lawler. “Government’s job is to deliver for the people, not a party, not people of a party, but people and we’ve gotten way too far away from that.” Likewise in Arizona’s 6th District, JoAnna Mendoza, a retired Marine with 20 years in the service, is challenging Rep. Juan Ciscomani. “We need servant leaders today,” Mendoza says. “A new generation of patriots who are going to put people first. Who are going to put our country first and put politics aside.”

Even in South Carolina, Nancy Lacore — a former Republican, and a retired three-star Navy Reserve admiral — is running for the 1st District seat Nancy Mace gave up. A poll this month showed her within a point of her Republican opponent. “We need to get folks in there who are a little bit closer to the middle who are willing to work across the aisle,” she told Charleston’s Live 5 News. And in Pennsylvania’s 10th District, Janelle Stelson — another former Republican — is battling MAGA loyalist Rep. Scott Perry in a rematch of their close 2024 race. A longtime television journalist, she draws the continuity between her old job and the one she is aiming for. “My job was not to answer to a political party. It was not to defend the rich and powerful,” Stelson explains. It was to hold the powerful accountable on behalf of her community.

The Governors

The trend extends to pick-up races for governor.

In Iowa, Rob Sand has led by wide margins in recent public polling and would be the first Democrat elected governor of the Hawkeye State in 20 years. Sand, the current State Auditor, focuses on fiscal responsibility while his campaign signs across the state also promise to make Iowa “better and truer, not redder or bluer.” He takes partisan politics to the woodshed: “I think our political system is broken largely because it’s run by two private clubs,” he told a town hall in Iowa City. “Neither the Democratic or Republican parties do a very good job of solving our problems,” he said on PBS’s Iowa Press. Instead, Sand opens town halls by leading the crowd in the first verse of “America the Beautiful.” He focuses on what unites us rather than what divides us in a way that feels rebellious and common-sense Americana at the same time. Sands’ strength is also putting the Senate seat in play, with centrist Democrat state rep Josh Turek squaring off against GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson, in what few previously thought would be a pick-up opportunity.

In Florida, David Jolly — a former Republican congressman from Tampa Bay is the Democratic nominee, squaring off against hard-core MAGA Rep. Byron Donalds after two terms of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ MAGA mimicry, in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994. The latest St. Pete Polls survey has the race a dead heat. Jolly makes the case that there is continuity between the old-school Republican he was and the Democrat he is today, saying: “I think we should get politicians out of the classrooms, out of the doctor’s offices.”

In ruby red Alabama, Doug Jones — who defied political conventional wisdom by winning a Senate seat in 2017 — is running as a pragmatic, Alabama-first candidate against the dull-bulb Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville has spent the campaign fending off challenges to his Alabama residency while reporting has found no evidence he kept his promise to donate his Senate salary to military veterans; and Jones has raised ethics questions about Tuberville’s personal investments in the deeply unpopular data-center industry he champions. Doug Jones is arguing for a different kind of state government: “One that actually belongs to the people of Alabama. One that listens before it lectures. One that solves problems instead of staging distractions.”

Finally in Ohio, Dr. Amy Acton leads Vivek Ramaswamy, 48 to 45, in the latest Bowling Green State University/YouGov poll, by highlighting her bipartisan, common-sense credentials — leaning on the fact that she served as director of the Ohio Department of Health in Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration during the COVID crisis. “As a doctor, I never asked my patients whether they were Democrats or Republicans,” she said in pledging to put Republicans in her cabinet. “My job was to listen, understand their concerns, and help solve their problems.”

The Winning Formula

That’s a lot of names and data, but you don’t have to squint to see the overlap. These Democrats who are competitive in the purple districts and red states embody the broader coalition Democrats need to win beyond their base and turn the tide against Trumpism. Unlike the DSA, they can win in places where Democrats have lost for too long.

Yes, the wind is at the Democrats’ backs right now. Donald Trump’s approval sank to 25 percent among independents in an Economist/YouGov poll this summer, and independents now favor Democratic House candidates by two to one. Independents decide who wins elections: they are a clear plurality of Americans, at 44 percent according to Gallup, compared with 31 percent for Democrats and 25 percent for Republicans. And it isn’t just how people describe themselves: registered independents outnumber both Democrats and Republicans in 10 states.

But the biggest mistake Democrats could make is to take these short-term gains for granted and assume a swinging pendulum has fixed the damage to the Democratic brand. Half of Americans say the Democratic Party is too liberal and as a recent report from Welcome PAC showed, and analysis by Blue Rose Research has echoed, most Americans think Democrats put too much emphasis on liberal social issues and not enough on economic and security issues.

These candidates are focused on fighting Trump’s corruption, yes, but also on blasting through the paralyzing polarization that has stopped the American government from working for working families.

They are speaking to the middle class, and they are claiming the middle ground in a forceful way that brings populist energy to the center-left.

They are the key to bringing Democrats the gavel for the last two years of Trump’s term while paving the way for something bigger: a broad and durable Democratic majority that helps reunite America.

This article was initially published in Rolling Stone.

Three hundred and forty-one New York City firefighters. Twenty-three New York City police officers. Thirty-seven Port Authority police officers. Three court officers. Two EMS workers. Thousands of innocent civilians. Numbers alone, of course, cannot do them justice.

A whole portrait of America was taken from us in an instant: individuals of every race, religion, and ethnicity; fathers and mothers, children and newlyweds, brothers, sisters and best friends. Amid our grief we now see that New York had been distracted by flash and wit and cash for too long. The heroic actions of those we lost reawakened us to the essential importance of personal courage. Overnight, and somewhat to our surprise, New York has been embraced as the nation’s symbol of resilience, the indomitable heart of America.

On my desk is a list of every firefighter, police officer, and uniformed service member who died in the line of duty on that day. Their names fill forty-seven pages. As Mayor Giuliani’s speechwriter, it has been my responsibility to write or edit each of their eulogies. The New York City Fire Department had lost seven hundred and seventy-eight men from its founding in 1865 until September 10, 2001. In the course of one morning, it lost nearly half that historic total. Nothing had prepared the city or the department for this volume of loss. And so it fell to four of us in our small office to do the best we could to do them justice, to say thank you, to provide some measure of comfort to their families on behalf of their city.

It should not be forgotten that September 11th began as a beautiful blue sky day. Primary elections were being held throughout the city, and as people were lining up to vote at polling places or dropping their children off at school, suddenly they stopped and turned their heads toward a rumble in the sky. It was 8:46 A.M. The pilot of the first hijacked airplane, Mohammed Atta, was flying American Airlines flight 11 low and loud down the length of Manhattan with the lives of ninety-two passengers in his hands, above stores, churches, and finally past the Washington Square Arch as he aimed for the heart of the Twin Towers.

The first plane flew by my window. I was sleeping late after a long weekend of work, when my girlfriend heard the roar of its engines approaching. She shook me and we both saw its silver underbelly pass by the window of my fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village. We assumed it was going to crash, but the plane seemed strangely in control to be flying so low. We waited for impact, heard a faint sound, and then saw the beginning of the black smoke curl above the trees, beyond the church steeple of Our Lady of Pompeii. Then the first sirens of that long day sounded in the distance. I recalled that a plane had once crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. Despite the cloudless sky, I tried to convince myself that this also could have been an accident.

At 9:03, the second plane banked sickly toward the south tower as the world watched on television. An orange blossom of flame exploded on our screens as a new reality dawned. As I left the apartment for City Hall, fire companies from around the city were already racing to join those who had already arrived at what would become ground zero.

On the streets people stood frozen in mid-commute, gathered at street corners, talking to strangers or on their cell phones, gazing at the blazing scars cut into the sides of the Twin Towers. I passed a kindergarten playground opposite a firehouse where children were still playing as their teachers looked over their shoulders at the buildings burning in the distance. The steel seemed to have melted around the impact zone and it reflected the sunlight, giving the edges a quicksilver sheen, like an overwrought special effect. Despite the horror of the scene there was an assumption that the worst had already occurred; few people thought that the towers would actually come down. After all, they had been bombed before in 1993, and though six people had died and thousands were injured, the Twin Towers still stood.

Subways were shut down and taxis proved impossible to find, so I made my way down Broadway against a sea of people evacuating uptown. Black smoke now filled the sky, evident from anywhere on the island. I expected to see mass panic, but instead the exodus was relatively calm and orderly. It was the response of a civil society to a massive attack.

Friends and colleagues were standing on the steps of City Hall, staring up at the towers burning less than three blocks away. Inside the hall there was concern and controlled panic — grim glances passed between co-workers as rumors spread that sites like Times Square and the United Nations would be targeted next. Reporters were calling the press office for comment. I looked at a newspaper someone had thrown across the desk and committed the date to memory. Its contents were instantly irrelevant, news from another century. Three blocks away, people were throwing themselves from upper floors of the World Trade Center. One observer recalled them hitting the ground “like melons,” as the music piped into the plaza played “How Deep Is Your Love?”

Firefighters in full bunker gear were rushing up the stairs of the trade center as workers tried to get down to safety. This was the image that survivors would repeat over and over, “as we were going down, as they were going up.”

In City Hall, we received word that the mayor was getting ready to do a press conference on a street one block from the burning buildings. The purpose was not only to get information out to the general public but also to get information up to those who were still trapped above the flames in the Twin Towers. They were calling out to family and friends, asking if there was anything that could be done, and in some cases, saying good-bye.

At 10:05 the south tower shuddered and collapsed; twenty-three minutes later the north tower fell as well. It was an avalanche in lower Manhattan, reaching 2.4 on the Richter scale. The rumble of the buildings coming down was like a thousand jets taking off at once. Below the roar you could almost hear the collective sigh of human life, the disbelief, horror, and resignation as the steel finally buckled and 110 stories imploded, floor upon floor.

A gray cloud of debris rolled violently toward us across City Hall Park, an unforgiving wall of pulverized concrete against the still briefly blue sky. Then it hit City Hall, and everything became dark as night and quiet, except for the patter of debris hitting the roof of the old stone building. For a moment, we thought that we might all die, if not from the building collapse itself then from some biological agent swirling around in the air. Base alloys of emotion bubbled up to the surface. Tough women with children at home curled up in the rotunda at the foot of the grand staircase. Some men grew silent, scared. Others shouted conflicting orders. After several minutes, the dust cleared enough to let some light through, and we could see that Lower Manhattan had been transformed into a gray wasteland of ash and smoke pierced by sirens.

It seemed that every New Yorker knew someone in the towers. In City Hall, we worked alongside the uniformed services every day: they were friends and, in some cases, family. Captain Terence S. Hatton was the leader of Rescue One, the city’s elite rescue unit. He and the mayor’s executive assistant Beth had been married four years before in a ceremony at Gracie Mansion. His photograph on her desk—face covered in soot after fighting a fire— was a constant reminder of who we really worked for and what real courage looked like. Terry Hatton could have been anything he wanted to be. He was six-foot four, with the inner dignity of a young Gary Cooper. He could have been a movie star. But if he had been a movie star, his job would have been playing people like Terry Hatton — impossibly courageous and down to earth, possessing both integrity and intelligence. Like his father before him, Terry Hatton loved being a New York City firefighter. He had been decorated for bravery nineteen times in his twenty-one-year career. In August 2001, Terry had rescued eight people perilously stuck in an elevator shaft near the 80th floor of the World Trade Center. Rescue units were among the first responders, and on the 11th of September they were presumably the highest up the towers, racing to put out the fires and save the people who were stranded. Rescue One lost ten of its men that day.

We lost so many of the best of New York’s Bravest, including sixty off-duty firefighters who rushed to the towers when they heard of the attack. The legendary Captain Paddy Brown was by some accounts the most decorated firefighter in the nation. He’d served two tours as a Marine in Vietnam, come back home to Queens and devoted his life to fighting fires and saving lives; lately, he’d taken up yoga and teaching blind people martial arts. We lost Father Mychal Judge, the beloved Department Chaplain who shepherded families through the tragedies ranging from fires to the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. We lost Chief of Special Operations Ray Downey, a 40-year veteran who led the recovery mission after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, and then FEMA’s rescue effort after the attack at Oklahoma City. In return for his heroics and battlefield expertise, Ray Downey had been appointed to serve on the president’s antiterrorism task force. His sons, also in the FDNY, would spend the better part of the next month digging through ground zero, looking for their father.

In the hours and days immediately following the attack, New York City was transformed into something like Battle of Britain-era London, with whole sections of the city evacuated and a military presence on street corners. The acrid smell of smoke and ash hung in the air, and people walked around shell-shocked — a mixture of adrenaline and despair — as they waited for what many assumed was the inevitable next attack.

Four hours after he had almost been killed in the collapse of the south tower, Mayor Giuliani appeared in front of reporters at the Police Academy on East 20th Street. He was asked how many people had been killed. “More than any of us can bear,” he said promptly. He spoke without notes and inspired confidence in a hurt world because of his directness, honesty, and compassion. That evening he returned to ground zero to supervise the recovery effort and strode around the wreckage of the city he loved like a latter-day Churchill. In his morning and evening executive staff meetings away from the cameras, the mayor transformed himself into a wartime leader, decisively organizing massive amounts of information and directing the recovery effort. The mayor was now spontaneously applauded when he walked down the street. His tireless courage inspired us to rise above the devastation. Working around the clock, we met whatever challenges we faced — after all, the extraordinary is ordinary to the people experiencing it. The city’s emergency command center had been destroyed in the attack, but seventy-two hours later, a new command center was fully operational within a pier near 52nd Street by the Hudson River. Outside the mayor’s office in the new command center we pinned a Revolutionary War-era flag to the wall bearing the phrase, “Don’t Tread On Me.”

The morning after the attack, I returned to City Hall. The FDR Drive was closed to all traffic except emergency vehicles, and we drove down it with lights and sirens flashing. The beauty of the blue-sky day ignored what had occurred 24 hours before. The absence of the Twin Towers in the skyline was jarring, as was the sight of tanks and humvees posted along Park Row. Crushed police cars were lined up along the side of the road. On storefront windows, messages had been written into the dust on the glass: “Rest in peace to all the people who died today 9/11/01.” City Hall was dark and empty except for a few guards. In the mayor’s office, the portrait of Fiorello La Guardia stared intensely into the tomblike silence. Outside, somebody had taken care to lower the flags to half-mast.

I wandered down to St. Paul’s Chapel off the southern tip of City Hall Park, passing rescue workers trudging back from the smoking skeletal wreckage of ground zero, discouraged to their bones that so few survivors had been found. When St. Paul’s had been built in 1766, the land around it was considered countryside. George Washington had walked there to pray after he was inaugurated the first President of the United States. Since 1973, St. Paul’s had stood across the street from the World Trade Center. Now in the chapel’s graveyard, trees were torn out at their roots, two-hundred-year-old tombstones were cracked or knocked over entirely, ripped sections of Venetian blinds rattled amid branches, and six-inch-thick blanket of papers, debris, and ash coated the ground. Upon closer inspection these were pieces of bills, bank statements, old photographs, and company ledgers from people who had worked in the World Trade Center. What once seemed important was brutally exposed as irrelevant. Outside the gates of the graveyard, on the edge of ground zero, an advertisement for Investor’s Business Daily above a subway entrance was still intact: it read: “choose success.” One minor miracle was apparent amid the devastation — St. Paul’s Chapel had escaped the towers’ collapse without a single broken window.

As city government mobilized to overcome the effects of the attack, the speechwriting department began to plan for the inevitable memorial services. Remote historic figures such as Churchill and Roosevelt gained new relevance with their themes of courage, defiance, and freedom from fear. A biblical quote, John 15:13 — “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” — resonated because hundreds had laid down their lives for thousands of strangers. But for us, the greatest inspiration by far came from the deep grief of ordinary New Yorkers: makeshift memorials of notes and melting candles in parks outside firehouses; the American flags that hung from almost every apartment building; the steadfast souls who stood along the West Side Highway every hour of the day and night for more than a month, holding handwritten signs and cheering the rescue workers on their way to and from ground zero. This was the spirit of a resilient city — outraged, engaged, and unified. Slowly the eulogies began to take shape, common themes woven through the contours of their extraordinary individual lives.

On September 15th, four days after the attack, the first funeral was held. It was for Father Mychal Judge, the beloved Fire Department Chaplain who had been killed by debris as he administered last rites to a fallen firefighter. Three months later to the day, we laid to rest Chief Ray Downey. In between, there were more than four hundred other heroes of the uniformed services and thousands of civilians from eighty-three different nations. Their stories were told again and again in an attempt to assimilate the tragedy, to comprehend the incomprehensible.

There was the middle-aged woman from Kazakhstan who had reported early for her first day of work in America, and the young bond trader who was killed on her one-month wedding anniversary. Firefighter John Chipura had survived the 1983 terrorist attacks on the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 of his colleagues and then served seven years as a member of the NYPD before joining the Fire Department. John O’Neil spent a career serving as a counterterrorism expert for the FBI and leading the search for Osama bin Laden after the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole, before taking a job as director of security for the World Trade Center in August 2001. Henry Thompson was a court officer who commandeered a van and raced to the towers with two of his co-workers. Chief of the Department Pete Ganci had ordered his men to move the FDNY command post away from the trade center and then walked toward the burning buildings minutes before their collapse. Glenn Winuk was a respected lawyer who also served as the commissioner of the volunteer fire department in his hometown of Jericho, New York; after the attack he helped evacuate coworkers from his law firm and then headed toward the towers to help the rescue effort. Captain Timothy Stackpole was a father of five who had recently returned to the job after recuperating from burns of 90 percent of his body that he sustained in a fire that killed two of his friends. Police Officer Moira Smith had been among the first to report that a plane had smashed into the towers, and hours later this mother of a two-year-old and wife of a police officer became the first female NYPD officer killed in the line of duty. The legendary seventy-one-year-old First Deputy Fire Commissioner Bill Feehan, who had held every position in the department, became the oldest New York City firefighter in history to die in the line of duty. Firefighting and police work tend to be family traditions in the city of New York, and the attack affected some families and communities disproportionately: the brothers Joseph and John Vigiano; brothers Thomas and Peter Langone; brothers Timothy and Thomas Haskell; cousins Manuel and Dennis Mojica; and the father and son Joseph Angelini, Sr. and Joseph Angelini, Jr. — all died together on September 11th. This was more than just the fraternal bond between firefighters and police officers; this was family.

Their services have been held in small chapels, ornate synagogues, simple firehouses, and grand cathedrals. More than a dozen have been held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. It is there that you get the fullest sense of majesty and tragedy of this city transformed.

Thousands of firefighters in their dress blue uniforms line the street. Hundreds of friends, admirers, and fellow citizens crowd the steps of the cathedral. Two fire trucks are parked side by side, with their ladders raised and extended as a large American flag hung between them waves in the breeze. Everyone falls silent as the black limousines carrying the family arrive. Then the faint sound of bagpipes and drum rolls grows louder as the Emerald Society pipe band marches closer, announcing the approach of an engine truck rolling mournfully slow with a flag-covered coffin and flowers placed on top. When the truck reaches the door of the cathedral it slows to a halt, and simultaneously a thousand firefighters snap into a salute that is held until the coffin and family are led inside. During the service, prayers are read; family and friends offer eulogies, followed by the mayor or surrogates such as Fire Commissioner Tommy Von Essen and Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. After the final blessing is given, the coffin is carried out by brothers from his fire company and lifted onto the waiting truck, on the back of which is written “we will never forget.” The salute is held again as the engine disappears down Fifth Avenue, preceded by the bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace,” “America the Beautiful,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Going Home.”

One unseasonably warm night in early December I went walking down from my office toward ground zero. I walked without a coat, wanting to take a break and refocus my mind. We had written nearly four hundred eulogies for the mayor and his surrogates to deliver over the past three months, as many as forty-five in a single weekend, with the mayor attending up to nine wakes and memorials in the course of each of his marathon 18-hour days. The relentless pace required us to impose a certain degree of emotional distance to get the job done. But now the feelings of heartache increased as the workload diminished.

Rescue workers had been laboring at ground zero every hour since the disaster. At night the site was lit by spotlights, like a movie set. Fires had burned there for eighty days, rekindling when a lower level of the underground fire was exposed to the oxygen in the air. Now tourists and well-wishers on pilgrimage sought out the site, standing at great distances, taking pictures of the hulking wreckage and skeletal spires looming over the fences. There were flowers left against every gate and poetry scribbled on paper taped to the lampposts. The missing-person posters that had appeared around the city in the days after the attacks had given way to heart-wrenching good-byes, handwritten cards with photographs promising them that we would never forget. Family members still gathered at the platform set up on the edge of the site and gazed at their loved ones’ last resting place with haunted eyes. The largest mass grave in America existed uneasily as both hallowed ground and deconstruction site. The scope of the destruction, the size of the wound cut into the heart of our city, remained humbling and retained its ability to inspire calm outrage, cold purposefulness.

On my way back from ground zero, I stopped by St. Paul’s Chapel. It now served as a shrine of sorts, its metal gates covered with posters and canvas tarps upon which people wrote notes urging faith, expressing sadness, and calling for courage. Inside, the chapel had been transformed into a sanctuary for rescue workers with beds, food, clothing, and massage tables, and occasionally a string quartet to help soothe their souls. The pew where George Washington had prayed now served as a nurse’s station, full of bandages and medications. The sheer functionality of this sacred space was heartening — democracy and theology effortlessly intertwined. Most startling and beautiful was this: along all the walls of the church, posted on pillars and taped in pews, were letters and cards written by children from across the United States, covered with brightly colored drawings of eagles, firemen, the towers, and messages of gratitude: “Thank you… you were my heroes… I am sorry the people died…. Thank you for saving the people… I love the city… God Bless America.”

These notes sustained the spirits of the men who each day would sift through the debris, finding body parts that, as often as not, would disintegrate at the touch. Their actions and those cards were powerful examples of why our city and nation would triumph over terror: in ways both large and small, we had met the worst of humanity with the best of humanity.

After leaving St. Paul’s Chapel that silent New York night I walked down Broadway, past Wall Street and Trinity Church, past Bowling Green and into Battery Park. I stared out into the dark waters of New York Harbor for a time and then looked up and was almost surprised by the sight of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island still standing serenely in our harbor.

And then, for a moment, I saw the city through history’s eyes. I remembered that this was the same body of water into which Henry Hudson had sailed the Half Moon in 1609. He could not have imagined the wilderness he saw becoming home to 8 million people from all over the world. He could not have imagined that buildings taller than mountains would one day crowd the island. In less than four hundred years our city has grown more than other cities have in a millennium, fueled by the energy, resilience, and innovations of each successive generation.

Our great symbol of world trade is now gone — what was intended by its architect to be a symbol of world peace was destroyed in a vicious, unprovoked act of war. But what was really attacked on September 11th was the idea of New York City and America itself — a beacon of freedom, diversity, and equal opportunity. That spirit is intact and undaunted. In fact, our devotion to those ideals has only been strengthened by the selfless heroism we have seen.

We now recognize that we are all part of a larger narrative, and while our city may never be the same, we will be better and stronger as a result of all we have experienced. Much has been taken from us, but much remains; and even in the dark, a great deal of light still shines upon the city of New York.

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The answer, of course, is any sentient being not blinded by partisanship who lived through the first four years of Trump’s presidency, which included more than 30,000 lies, a mismanaged pandemic that killed a million Americans, and culminated with his attempt to overturn an election on the back of a big lie that led to an attack on our Capitol.

The dangers were so obvious that even the Founding Fathers could see them coming a quarter of a millennium ago.

The Constitution was designed to protect the rights of the people against the rise of a would-be tyrant. The founders understood they were embarking on a rebellious project that had never succeeded before. As John Adams scowled, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” It was their aim to build a structure that could withstand the forces that destroyed democracies in the past.

That’s why the founders explicitly warned about the dangers of a demagogue, the poison of hyper-partisanship, the corrosive effects of corruption and foreign influence, the politicization of religion, and the erosion of the separation of powers.

Yes, by those basic standards, we are living through the founders’ nightmare. But the right response is not civic despair but a defiant resolve to reclaim American patriotism and fix what’s been broken so that we can strengthen our democracy to survive the next 250 years.

So skip the saccharine Trump nationalism and “Dear Leader” iconography this July 4th. Instead, read the founders’ own words to serve as a north star in chaotic and divided times.

Start with the Declaration of Independence — itself an anti-colonial screed against a mad king — and read through the list of grievances against King George. The echoes are unmistakable: The founders accused him of “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world ... He has obstructed the Administration of Justice ... He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us ... sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.” Just in case we missed the point, the founders added this line: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson pored through history in an extended document called “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies,” studying the ways that ancient Greek republics collapsed. That research directly shaped the checks and balances of the separation of powers into three co-equal branches of government.

As the primary author of the Constitution, Madison had an engineer’s understanding of the weakness of the system he was trying to build. A democratic republic rests on the foundational principle that “the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom,” he said at the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Constitutional Convention. “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks —no form of government can render us secure.” Character is key in a democracy — and its degradation through the acceptance of lies and absurd sycophancy from Trump appointees expose how far the rot has got.

The Danger of a Demagogue

In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay repeatedly warned that the greatest danger to a democracy was a demagogue who divided fellow citizens into warring tribes. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Hamilton perfectly anticipated the figure of Donald Trump in a letter to George Washington in 1792:

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents ... despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ”

Read that a second time to let it sink in.

“Unprincipled in private life”: Check. “Bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents”: Check. “Known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty”: For sure. “Embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day”: Well, that’s almost too on the nose — so much so that it was cited by now-Sen. Adam Schiff during Trump’s first impeachment.

Another relevant Hamilton quote argued that “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”

That is where we are as a nation right now — as a president deploys populist appeals to prejudice that pit Americans against one another, amplified by algorithms that increase suspicion and confusion. Now, we’re left anticipating the next civil commotion created by the Trump administration’s incompetence or malevolence.

Hyperpartisanship Is Poison

George Washington, our first and, to date, only independent president, set the precedent for the peaceful transfer of power after two terms. He announced this decision in a Farewell Address, written to his “friends and fellow citizens.” It was a warning to future generations of Americans about the forces he feared could destroy our democratic republic. Chief among these were what we would call hyperpartisanship, followed by excessive debt, foreign wars, and foreign interference in our elections — all threats we face today.

Washington’s warning against hyperpartisan polarization was most urgent. “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it,” he wrote. “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

This reads like a clinical description for the fevered unreason that has swamped American politics in the Trump era. It is crippling the ability of our government to function for the good of the people, as extreme ideologues and conspiracy theorists staff the administration in positions from the FBI and Homeland Security to Health and Human Services. Our country is beset by ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, as insane rumors are spread by elected and appointed officials.

But when my book, Washington’s Farewell, was published in 2017, the phrase about “riot and insurrection” felt like a distant concern. Four years later, on Jan. 6, 2021, we lived through exactly that — a partisan mob storming the United States Capitol in a violent attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power. With Trump’s 2024 reelection, the pardoning of his duped shock troops was followed by an attempt to whitewash that history entirely — part of an administration-wide effort to censor inconvenient facts.

Foreign Interference and Corruption

It is the almost throwaway line at the end of Washington’s warning — “It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption” — that speaks to the cause and effect of foreign influence and the unprecedented corruption we are witnessing.

America’s overseas autocratic adversaries are trying to weaken our country without firing a shot. Trump is at the very least considered a useful idiot in this effort.

Foreign influence on our elections has been clear since Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation in the 2016 election — detailed in athis multivolume report from the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. One of the classic examples of foreign disinformation in that campaign came in the form of competing protests outside of a Houston mosque, where both sides were recruited and inflamed by Russian disinformation half a world away.

In 2024, Trump’s abrupt flip-flop on TikTok after receiving a massive cash donation from one of its parent company’s biggest American investors, led him to outright ignore a bipartisan law — and a 9-0 Supreme Court order — banning the CCCP-owned social media giant. To the surprise of exactly no one, pro-Trump content was boosted around the election. The disinfo continues as AI efforts to normalize Trump are proliferating online today — trying to create the illusion that the deeply unpopular president has a broad, deep, and diverse base of support.

The foreign interference is increasingly connected to outright corruption. This was such a core concern of the founders that they put in prohibitions on what they called “emoluments” in the Constitution. This was the Constitution’s anti-corruption architecture.

But while past presidents have worked to avoid the appearance of a conflict — with Jimmy Carter even putting his peanut farm in a blind trust — “Trump has expressly organized his business interests in his second term to facilitate the receipt of foreign gifts,” as a scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute has noted. By some measures, Trump has enriched his family by billions of dollars since his second inauguration, much of it from foreign sources, from Qatari jets to cryptocurrency hustles. He has even been credibly accused of selling presidential pardons to benefit allies and supporters.

IMAGE by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

Separation of Church and State

The founders also warned us against the use of religion as a political weapon. Consider Trump’s posts comparing ­himself with Jesus, or the repeated invocation of Christian nationalism by the self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who sometimes mistakes scripture for the script of Pulp Fiction.

This is not what the founders wanted. Jefferson emphasized the freedom of religion portion of the First Amendment to the Constitution — which states that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — by explaining that this amounts to “building a wall of separation between Church [and] State.” Just in case any current official tries to state that this freedom was intended to be limited to the predominant Judeo-Christian tradition, the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli has an answer for that: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Undermining the Separation of Powers

The separation of powers was designed to be a check against a tyrannical executive. As Madison wrote, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” but he didn’t bet on the pervasive hyperpartisan polarization that has made Republicans in Congress subservient to this president in particular. Because the number of swing seats with competitive general elections has plummeted by partisan design, we have a Congress of cowards who are afraid of the base of their parties because they might lose a primary. All of this creates a disincentive for constructive compromise across the aisle — and so little or no legislation gets passed. Added to this dynamic is an actual fear among many Republicans that their families’ safety could be at risk if they buck Trump.

But we’ve never quite seen the degradation of Congress as it exists today under the spineless Speaker Mike Johnson, who openly delegates his powers to the president, abandoning oversight of tariffs and war powers. That is a dereliction of constitutional duty.

This problem is compounded by the rise of an increasingly ideological Supreme Court, which is less likely to reason together with broad majorities and more likely to advance narrow partisan agendas even at the expense of precedent, as they did by overturning 50 years of a woman’s right to choose. This politicization of the judicial branch has led directly to the declining trust in the Supreme Court.

How to Reunite the Nation

It is a dark irony that men who pretend to be superpatriots are the ones who have most violated these fundamental warnings from the Founding Fathers. George Washington warned us to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” But then these Trumpists repeatedly confuse patriotism with partisanship and invoke a blood and soil nationalism that is the opposite of the American promise. This puts us in a dangerous place.

The worst response to this threat is civic despair: to look at the wreckage and conclude that the Republic is broken beyond repair, that American democracy was always a sham, that the whole thing isn’t worth defending. That is exactly what those who would dismantle our institutions want. Cynicism, depression, and apathy are their most powerful weapons.

The truly patriotic response is to push back. Celebrating America’s independence is to celebrate a rebellion of citizens, who rejected the rule of a mad and distant king, who rose up to build a self-government where the people rule with both rights and responsibilities.

Recent history shows us that successful pro-democracy movements are patriotic, positive, peaceful, unified, and inclusive. We need to claim the founders’ wisdom for our own and resolve to rebuild the guardrails that have been broken. We have been given a great unifying cause: to strengthen American democracy for the 21st century. It will be a generational effort across governmental and cultural, providing an inspiring new founding agenda for the next president.

To combat the conditions that have enabled a demagogue’s rise, we need to take power back from the extremes through election reforms, like ending the rigged system of redistricting and instituting open primaries where independent voters can participate. We also need to tame the algorithms that elevate the most confrontational and conspiratorial voices among us through transparency and other social media reforms, like the Kids Online Safety Act.

To rein in corruption, we need to overturn the destructive Citizens United Supreme Court decision, to get big money out of politics and strengthen the emoluments clause to ensure that no other president can enrich himself off the power of the office. To reassert presidential accountability, we need to pass the No Kings Act and reform the presidential-­pardon process so it cannot be abused.

To heal our nation’s divides we will need to rebuild the middle class by reshoring essential manufacturing, aided by vocational training, while developing a more inclusive form of capitalism that incentivizes profit sharing. We need clear rules of the road around AI so that it can make government more efficient and effective without undermining our democracy or economy. Finally, we need an expanded version of national service to restore our common bonds while bringing back civics education so that each rising generation learns our full history as well as the rights and the responsibilities that come with being an American citizen. This is an ambitious and partial list, but all of the elements are broadly popular and would help reunite the United States rather than fuel further fragmentation.

Since the earliest days of our republic, America has been torn between a defiant native optimism and a profound pessimism about democracy’s prospects for success. But citizens are not subjects, and we cannot wisely wait for someone else to come save us. Government is us. So our charge this ­Independence Day is to draw on the best lessons of the past, determined to fix what’s broken, as imperfect people working to form a more perfect union. The United States remains, as Benjamin Franklin said, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

Presidential history is often the gateway drug for a love of American politics and civics. And while we have survived presidents of bad character and bad judgement before (with those Lincoln bookends, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, always rattling around the basement), there has always been the redeeming sense that character is ultimately destiny. That virtue matters. But that belief is being tested. Because while no past president was perfect, none of them actively tried to divide the United States. The deeper tremor is the fear that We the People will ultimately pay the price for Trump’s endless failures of character.

When you look back at history, it’s clear that character matters more than any other quality in a president. All the other distinctions and differences fade away with time – perhaps especially which political party they belonged to. The question of character is pre-eminent because it determines whether they can be trusted to lead the American experiment with courage and compassion; if they can be trusted to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies – foreign and domestic.

Our country has been through difficult times before but never have the wounds we suffered felt more self-inflicted. The rabid hyper-partisan polarization which enabled the rise of Trump – even after he tried to overturn an election on the back of a lie that led to an attack on our capitol – is a self-inflicted civic sin that we will have to learn from. So is the greed-is-good impulse that he gleefully embodies. We will need to devote ourselves to strengthening American democracy going forward, rebuilding guardrails and restoring trust.

Faith in America has been broken. The hard fact is that we are not seen as the good guys on the world stage at the moment – and that is heartbreaking for any patriot. But that’s why we need to be resilient and determined – it’s why We the People cannot let patriotism be claimed by a cadre of kleptocrats, extremists and cowardly careerists who rationalize away every breach of American honor, excellence, and decency that used to define us at our best.

Keep the faith because our forefathers have been through worse: Revolution; Slavery; Civil War; World War and Depression (David Frum speaks eloquently to this on this week’s How to Fix It). Our is challenge now. Let’s meet it with grace and grit and determination – secure in the knowledge that this too shall pass.

Let us keep faith also in the wisdom expressed by past presidents, who understood that character is the essential factor for citizens and leaders and nations alike. And let us work to restore the expectation set by John Adams, carved into a mantlepiece in the White House: “may none but Honest and Wise men ever rule under this roof.” Honest and Wise – the capitalizations are his. It is not too much to ask. In fact, our democracy depends on it.

Hunkered down in the freezing cold, without a victory call our own, George Washington’s ragtag bunch of rebels seemed doomed that winter.

There was little food, little shelter, and little money - the stock jobbers in Philadelphia were engaging in speculation with the soldiers’ scripts. Washington felt abandoned by the petty states-rights selfishness of the Continental Congress. But through sheer grit, we persevered to redeem something useful from those darkest and coldest of days. We emerged as an army with more resolve. more unity and more determination.

There is an otherwise obscure detail I’ve always found fascinating that I wrote in my book Washington’s Farewell: The General’s request that his soldiers put on a performance with the play Cato while at Valley Forge.

It was Washington’s favorite, a reminder of Roman republican virtue in the struggle against tyranny. While Washington was a devoted reader of Shakespeare, filling his letters with paraphrased lines from Julius Caesar and Othello, his favorite play was Cato’s account of the last day of Rome’s greatest Stoic hero, committing whole sections to memory.

First performed in 1713, Cato was the work of the celebrated British essayist Joseph Addison, capturing a vogue for Roman history by dramatizing the rivalry between Cato the Younger and Caesar amid the fall of the Roman Republic. Published in eight American editions before 1800, it was also perhaps the best-known contemporary play among the founding fathers. It was not a musical comedy.

Cato was a symbol of personal virtue and republican principle, despite the play’s downer of an ending (spoiler alert), when Cato chose to commit suicide rather than live under a tyrant.

But Cato provided Washington comfort in his darkest hours. Throughout the revolutionary war, when things were bleakest, Washington repeatedly wrote his fellow generals with variations on the line, “‘Tis not in mortals to command success; but we’ll do more…we’ll deserve it.”

This pep talk was sometimes combined with a rueful reminder to himself about the loneliness of ethical leadership: “the post of honor is a private station.” And when Washington wrote about his hope of repose under his Bible inspired “vine and fig tree” he often added another line about achieving mental peace in “the calm light of mild philosophy” – borrowed directly from Cato.

In the frozen dark of Valley Forge, Washington staged a command performance of Cato to rally the troops, with soldiers playing the parts to warm their collective courage.

Washington’s references to Rome would have been as well understood by his contemporaries as movie references are today, and he was far from the only member of the Revolutionary generation to find inspiration in Cato’s words.

Many of the other signature phrases of the American Revolution – Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”; Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty, or give me Death” – were echoes of Addison’s Cato.

The revolutionary generation’s love of the play and its Roman namesake spoke to its reverence for classical texts, especially those re-imagined for contemporary ears, emphasizing the ideal of civic virtue. The Stoic virtues of wisdom, courage, justice and moderation remain sources of renewable strength we need to draw on today.

I want to thank you all who have engaged with me about The Good America - for example, one reader on the East End said that she was buying a Join or Die flag would hang it in front of her home in response to her first column in the series. Love that. Stay in touch, spread the word, and keep the faith

Yesterday, on the streets of Minneapolis, masked I.C.E. agents killed another American citizen – this time, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse named Alex Pretti. Falsely characterized as a domestic terrorist by the Trump administration, Pretti had no criminal record. He was shot 9 times on the ground after being disarmed, caught on camera.

This disregard for the constitution, this divisive bullying and reflexive lying flows directly down from Trump to his administration. It is entirely predictable but it cannot be normalized. It is beneath the American presidency, it undermines the rule of law just as it undermines the American experiment.

Abroad, Trump’s rambling tantrum at Davos was a national embarrassment. He continues to come up with absurd assertions of American dominance over other lands that violate our most basic values, alienate our oldest allies and delight our autocratic adversaries because they see the world as a brutal power grab as well.

This is not the American way. And so this week, I’m offering up two timely quotes from real leaders to remind us of The Good America.

The first is a timely reminder that being a patriot in no way means supporting every president or every administration. They must be judged on their actions and a fair reading of the facts. That’s what former president Theodore Roosevelt said in a column in the Kansas City Star during the First World War:

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

The second quote is a simple but powerful explanation of American exceptionalism in foreign policy when seen against the backdrop of human history. It comes from US General Mark Clark, who wrote this after the Italian campaign in WW2 and seeing a military cemetery at Anzio:

“The curving rows of white crosses that spoke eloquently of the price that America and her Allies had paid for the liberation of Italy. If ever proof were needed that we fought for a cause and not for conquest, it could be found in these cemeteries. Here was our only conquest: all we asked of Italy was enough of her soil in which to bury our gallant dead.”

It was later more famously paraphrased by General and Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps most fittingly in 2013 at The World Economic Forum in Davos:

The United States believes strongly in what you call soft power, the value of democracy, the value of the free economic system, the value of making sure that each citizen is free and free to pursue their own God-given ambitions and to use the talents that they were given by God. And that is what we say to the rest of the world. That is why we participated in establishing a community of democracy within the Western Hemisphere. It’s why we participate in all of these great international organizations.

There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in our culture that suggests we want to use hard power...[But] it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild...We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.

It’s essential to remember the values of The Good America today, when they are under assault by this particular president and his lackeys. Remember this: they don’t get to define American patriotism or the American Character. We the People do.

Keep the Faith.

If the Good America seems distant right now – and it does, if you’re paying attention - then it helps to remember that as bad as these times are, we’ve been through worse and ultimately emerged stronger as a result. Always, it was because enough people with courage decided to unite and stand up for what’s right - even against long odds.

That’s the not-so-subtle message behind one of America’s earliest symbols. You’re probably familiar with the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag – the Gadsden Flag - that was waved in the War for Independence. It was an evolution of an earlier rallying cry, a political cartoon published in the Pennsylvania Gazette by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 – more than two decades before the Declaration of Independence

It’s a strange fact that the OG symbol of the United States wasn’t a bald eagle but a badly chopped up slithering snake conjured up by a newspaperman. Franklin created the image as the French and Indian War loomed, when the British colonies faced a danger they were too divided to confront on their own. Each segment of the snake represented a colony or region - South Carolina to New England, running south to north like a map of the Atlantic coast. Patriots saw the snake as representing vigilance, wisdom, and justified self-defense - the rattlesnake that warns before it strikes.

The image captured Ben Franklin’s genius for practical persuasion. It wasn’t soaring rhetoric about liberty or natural rights. It was an argument about survival and self-interest. It made a visual case for why unity mattered and why disunity could bring disaster. Clear messaging is necessary for movements to gain momentum – they need signature images to get sticky.

Franklin published the cartoon as he prepared to go up to Albany, New York, for a first-of-its-kind conference that brought together civic leaders from all the British colonies to sign a treaty with the Iroquois against the French.

Inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace, which enshrined balances of power and had been in place for centuries, Franklin proposed a new loose union between the colonies to help coordinate commerce and common defense.

Called the Albany Plan, this vision of federalism was ratified by the assembled representatives but ultimately rejected by the competing colonial state legislatures, which did not want to give up even a modest degree of autonomy. To Franklin’s frustration, this larger vision of enlightened self-interest was too much for the local politicians to comprehend at the time.

But the exercise seeded the idea that sprouted in the Continental Congress and later at the Constitutional Convention, when the Articles of Confederation proved too weak to compel collective action. Franklin was ahead of his time, but he got to see the ultimate success of his ideas.

Today, Franklin’s snake appears on flags, bumper stickers, and protest signs. I saw it often during reporting on Tea Party rallies alongside warnings about government overreach – which does not seem quite as much a concern from that crew when the right wing is doing the over-reaching. Franklin might be amused by the larger irony – after all, his cartoon was a call for stronger collective action and shared governance. He wanted the colonies to tax themselves for common defense. He wanted them to balance local interests with the necessity of a larger strategic vision.

Today, the Join or Die flag should be flown alongside the American flag at rallies and protests. We need to reclaim our patriotic history as a positive good, as a source of pride and inspiration.

I have a Join or Die flag on our car and flying in front of our house, alternating with Old Glory. It’s a reminder of the need to unite in the face of common threats to our founding values – rooted in the belief that there is always ultimately more that unites us than divides us as Americans. It is a reminder that we are on the right side of history, armed with the understanding that there is there is power in peaceful and patriotic collective action that even mad kings are ultimately powerless to defeat.

We have seen the bulldozing of the East Wing, extra-judicial killings and deportations, a perversion of presidential pardons, amid a dozen daily insults to the ideals of unity and decency from the president. Overseas, we have alienated our allies, empowered autocrats and decreased faith in US democracy.

Seen through the eyes of history, the re-election of Donald Trump looks like an act of self-immolation by our nation. That’s exactly why we need to be firefighters rather than arsonists to counteract its impact in the years ahead.

As the United States enters its 250^th year, we need to remember that American Democracy is an outlier. We are the world’s longest lasting large democracy and the first nation founded upon an idea rather than a tribal identity. We’ve always been imperfect people working to form a more perfect union.

At the heart of the ideal of American democracy was Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that “right makes might.” It’s such a simple phrase that we often ignore its revolutionary premise: that the law of the jungle can be replaced with the rule of law in a civil society.

At its core, Trumpism is the belief that might makes right. Money and power are the coin of the realm, not something as simple and profound as treating other people as you’d like to be treated.

This is intoxicating to its adherents. It empowers their worst impulses. The group-think thrill of “owning the libs” replaces love of the constitution. The law of the jungle, too long subsided under the niceties of the liberal order, has been unleashed.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. As the New York Times’ Opinion Page cogently stated before the ’24 election: “Donald Trump says he will prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, abandoned allies, play politics with disasters. Believe him.”

All this has come to pass, along with assaults on the free press via media capture and a new national security strategy that Russia praised as being “largely consistent with their vision” (both topics of recent columns I’ve written for Rolling Stone). Trump’s voters may have felt they were voting to reduce the cost of living, reduce the national debt or combat identity politics that felt like an assault on common sense. They’ve gotten tariffs, unprecedented corruption and an assault on the constitution while the debt and daily prices keep climbing higher and long-time allies turn to China for trade.

This makes no one happier than authoritarian leaders around the world. They have always viewed liberal democracy as an insufferable pretense. Now they have an American leader who, like them, believes that the ends always justify the means. It’s revealed that we are susceptible to the same forces of fear and greed that have propelled demagogues to power throughout history. Corruption proliferates. In the process, Trump has succeeded in doing what they could not do: discrediting the idea of American exceptionalism in the eyes of the world.

America became great precisely because we chose—however imperfectly—right over might. Our Constitution, our rule of law, our commitment to democratic ideals, free markets and free people: these are what make us exceptional. When you abandon these principles, you don’t restore greatness. You accelerate decline.

This is where the deeper danger sets in: it will be difficult to resist the political temptation to pursue an equal and opposite reaction. There is certainly a need to undo the excesses of the Trump administration. But the next president will need to take strong and decisive action in the direction of rebuilding the guardrails of democracy that have been damaged.

That’s why the constructive response will be a positive, patriotic and inclusive resistance that ditches the excesses of identity politics and ideological litmus tests. It will focus on rebuilding the middle of our politics and the middle of our economy. It will focus on finding market-based solutions to address the affordability crisis. It will require immigration reforms that strengthen our border while increasing the paths for legal immigration and restoring the value of assimilation. It will restore civics education and advance a new vision of national service. And yes, we will need to vote to restore checks and balances in Congress while working for political reforms that reign in the power of the imperial executive and finds a federal solution to stops the escalating state redistricting wars – accelerated by Trump - which have reduced the number of swing seats to a few dozen and moved power to the extremes.

In 2026, I’ll be telling the stories of The Good America on this Substack as a way of reminding people how patriotism is different from nationalism during the celebration our nation’s 250^th birthday. Hint: real patriots don’t coddle autocrats. On a broader level, we need to devote ourselves to a comprehensive effort to strengthen American democracy for the 21st century. This is a long-term effort, as I have discussed with multiple guests on my How to Fix It podcast with The Bulwark, but a movement we need to build focused on finding solutions.

Together, we need to redeem something useful from the wreckage we have already seen. In 2026, we need a renewed, rebellious focus on the real meaning of July the 4^th – a rejection of the rule of kings that made generations of freedom-loving and opportunity-seeking immigrants come here in the first place.

You’ve probably heard that Cos-Play SecDef Pete Hegseth has been blowing up alleged drug running boats from Venezuela in extra-judicial killings that give new meaning to the phrase “war on drugs.”

But you might not have heard that his boss recently pardoned the former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a US prison for abusing his office by leading what prosecutors called “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

If the cognitive dissonance gives you whiplash, that’s because you’re paying attention.

For a guy who talks a lot about how much he hates drugs – and is now floating it as a pretext for knocking off the odious Maduro regime - Trump has developed a strange habit of giving pardons to drug dealers. A day after his latest inauguration, Trump pardoned the founder of the Silk Road website, which was notorious as a dark web drug den. This was followed by the strange commutation for the founder of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, who flooded the Windy City with cocaine.

This weirdness is part of a wider pattern. Because Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year – more than 10x the number he pushed through in his first term.

The presidential pardon is written into the US constitution, but Donald Trump is not aiming for mercy or addressing objective injustices, as the founders intended. He is abusing the power to reward partisan political allies, enabling pay-for-pardon schemes and attempting to decriminalize corruption.

Right out of the gate, Trump offered pardons to all the January 6^th MAGA minions who attacked the US capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. This list included violent individuals who assaulted police officers and those with criminal records. Last month, he added blanket pardons for the white-collar instigators and fake electors who advanced those election lies – including his lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Sidney Powell. The rule of law doesn’t apply to Trump loyalists.

A boatload of connected big businessmen have also been getting presidential pardons. A former nursing home executive who was set to report to prison for tax crimes found himself off the hook after his mother attended a $1 million fundraiser for Trump that promised face-to-face access with the president. As the New York Times’ Ken Vogel reported the curiously timed pardon spared Paul Walczak from: “having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there ‘is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.’”

The judge spoke too soon. There are get out of jail free cards available to Trump supporters, for the right price.

The Trump-backing CEO of the failed EV Truck company Nikola, a Utah billionaire named Trevor Milton, received a full pardon after being convicted for defrauding investors. It was surely just a coincidence that Trevor Milton and his wife gave almost a million dollars each to a Trump-backing Super-PAC less than a month before the 2024 election. That’s expensive, but pardons are priceless.

More notorious is the case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed “crypto’s richest man,” who had previously pled guilty to money laundering that US prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao “rehabilitated” himself by helping to boost a Trump-family backed crypto venture which “raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year...far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,” according to the Wall Street Journal. When Trump was asked about this shady pardon on 60 Minutes, he said he didn’t know who Zhao was.

But perhaps the most consistent beneficiaries of Trump’s pardons and commutations have been corrupt politicians. This includes notorious names like George Santos, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Grimm, Duncan Hunter and Duke Cunningham. It covers local elected Trump loyalists like Tennessee Statehouse Speaker Glenn Casada, who was convicted of fraud and Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore, who was convicted of using money raised for a memorial to slain police officers on personal expenses. You can add to this list conservative Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for accepting nearly $600k in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank.

This list is exhausting but nowhere near exhaustive. Trump’s pardon-palooza is not just fueled by his own bitterness at being America’s first felon president, but also a desire for obsequious signs of fealty from the people he’s let off the hook. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s disastrous presidential immunity decision, there remains the specter of more pardons for anyone who puts loyalty to Trump ahead of loyalty to the constitution.

There is sickening rationalization creeping across our nation which says that bending the knee to Donald Trump is just the cost of doing business in America at the moment. This decays the integrity of our democracy like acid. When this insane era is over, we will need reforms that rein in the power of the executive, because many of the unwritten guardrails were rooted in a belief that virtue and character would be a corrective. The founders did not apparently anticipate an era in which shamelessness was considered a political superpower

Trump’s pardon spree is a daily scandal that deforms the norms of our democracy. Populist anger at corruption is historically one of the forces that takes down would-be autocrats. That’s because the people understand that corruption is fundamentally unfair. So as you take in this list, just remember this: the rich, connected and powerful are getting out of jail free cards under President Trump.

It can be tough to keep up with the Trump administration’s constant abuses of power and corruption. It’s also exhausting. That’s part of their stated strategy – to (in their words) “flood the zone with shit.” This is designed to overwhelm, disorient and demoralize normal Americans.

That’s exactly why we can’t give in or give up. For these assaults on common sense and common decency to not get memory-holed, I’m starting a weekly roundup of their most egregious actions. It’s a way to separate the signal from the noise – and even engaged citizens probably miss many of these milestones that weaken American democracy (for example, did you happen to catch that the US debt increased by $1 trillion since August?)

This matters because successful pro-democracy efforts always focus on corruption in the would-be regime. As Senator Andy Kim and I discussed in a recent “How to Fix It”, we need to build an anti-corruption coalition to take on what he calls “Trump’s Mob Boss” politics. Combatting this corruption in court is also the subject of this week’s “How to Fix It” with Professor Larry Lessig.

Here’s the list. Subscribe and send it on. Don’t let them normalize assaults on our democracy. Because this too shall pass, and when it’s done will need to rebuild the guardrails and strengthen American democracy to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again.

Welcome to the inaugural Week in Corruption and Abuse of Power:

Trump destroys the White House: Without any public announcement, deliberation, or approval, President Trump literally destroyed the East Wing of the White House. During a government shutdown, a private contractor from Maryland was called in knock down what has been part of the White House complex since the days of Theodore Roosevelt (the subject of my next book). This was after Trump insisted that East Wing would not be damaged during his construction of a new ballroom, paid for by private corporate funds. The ballroom will reportedly be named after Trump himself. It is of course striking but not surprising that some of the same people who argued that history should not be destroyed when confederate statues were taken down are more than fine with destroying the White House to impose Trump’s gaudy vision of grandeur on the White House grounds. This building belongs to the people of the United States. He destroyed it anyway.

Trump demands the Justice Department pay him $230 million. This is another one of those sentences that sound absurd when you’re writing them. Yes, the president of the United States is shaking down his own government for the transfer of $230,000,000 in taxpayer dollars. While the founding fathers were very clear that they did not want an executive chief executive to enrich themselves, there is apparently little constraint around this request other than common decency and common sense. Nobody thought that the president would demand the plunder of taxpayer money for his own benefit without their being a righteous response. I discuss this and more with Larry Lessig but it’s clear we need a whole of government effort to rebuild the guardrails after this monstrosity and of course no transfer of taxpayer money into the Trump family coffers should be permitted.

Trump demands the prosecution of political opponents: In a late night social media post, Trump demanded the prosecution of his own former FBI director Christopher Wray, Biden attorney general Merrick Garland, and special prosecutor Jack Smith as well as former Department of Justice official Lisa Monaco. This is after days after Trump publicly demanded the prosecution of California senator Adam Schiff at a press conference alongside his Attorney General Pam Bondi, who uncomfortably seemed to indicate that a grand jury might be looking into this, presumably at the president’s request.

Trump Pardons Crypto-Boss after George Santos: This pardon of Binance CEO “follows months of efforts by Changpeng Zhao to boost the Trump crypto company” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Trump family has gained over $3 billion since in the nine months since Trump entered the White House, according to estimates by the New Yorker, due largely to their crypto ventures. This pardon, to a powerful individual who pled guilty who failing to provide an anti-money laundering program, builds on the persistent efforts to cut anti-corruption efforts by the Justice Department since the early days of this administration. It also came days after George Santos walked free - more normalization of fraud and lies.

The Justice Department announced it would monitor elections in New Jersey and California. Again, not a typo or a line from a dystopian novel. The administration that is currently trying to overturn the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court to gain as much as 19 new seats is very concerned about voter fraud in the blue states of New Jersey and California. This could very well be a pretext for challenging the results of those elections while red states employ the rigged system of redistricting to try to hold on to power in the midterm elections.

North Carolina GOP Steals Another House Seat: Speaking of that hyper-partisan power grab, North Carolina became the latest republican state to impose an even more hyper partisan gerrymander on its citizens destroying a democratic seat. The estimated result would be 11 safe Republican seats and three Democratic House seats, despite the fact there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, with Independent voters making up a plurality. North Carolina has elected a democratic governor for the third consecutive time and a democratic attorney general. Nonetheless the state legislature has tried to successfully tried to rig house results at Trump’s request.

The National Debt increased $1 Trillion Dollars in the Past 180-days:

It should’ve been clear in the 2024 election that Republicans only care about the deficit and the debt when a Democrat is president. But that doesn’t mean that excessive debt isn’t dangerous to our long term strength and independence as a republic. And despite all that DOGE, the US debt increased by $1 Trillion in the past 180 days – an unprecedented acceleration that puts out debt above $38 trillion for the first time in our history.

None of this is normal. All of it is dangerous. That’s why we cannot allow it to be normalized. Memory is a form of resistance.