The threat is Trump. PERIOD.

There are three questions that have been asked from within our The Warning community that deserve direct answers.

The questions, and the answers to them, are as follows:

1. Do I believe that President Joe Biden is a threat to American democracy? It was posed as a result of a reporter asking Congressman Dean Phillips that question last week.

   The answer to this question is: I DO NOT.

2. Did you advise Congressman Phillips to say this?

   The answer to this question is: I DID NOT. I helped Phillips to launch his campaign for the reasons I explained here. I was involved in the initial campaign launch, but am no longer involved. I have not advised the congressman since then.

3. Did Congressman Phillips pay you to launch his campaign?

   The answer to this question is: HE DID NOT.

Donald Trump is a threat to the American republic that is severe, unique and exceedingly dangerous. In fact, his danger is singular. He is the most dangerous individual who has ever lived during the history of the United States when it comes to posing a direct threat to the survival of the America republic.

Donald Trump has sojourned from crooked real estate developer and Manhattan tabloid supernova to the leader of a fascist movement via the fast lane of reality TV. His fascist movement is crystal clear about its ambitions to impose a dogma of control over vast geographies of American life that were previously off limits to government intercession and overreach.

The Texas abortion case is just one example of this. Things will become much darker for America’s women, particularly poor women, if Trump returns to power with a theocratic tailwind and fascist main sail.

There is a difference between knowing things and believing things. I know the following to be absolutely true: there has never been a dictator who toppled a democracy in an election in which he promised to destroy everything in front of him, including the rule of law, who didn’t follow through on the promise. None. There is not a single one who promised mass deportations, concentration camps and the arrest of his political opponents who did not deliver on the promise. None.

There is an awful truth about Donald Trump. He is politically stronger than he has ever been. He hasn’t been boosted because of the Phillips’ challenge to Biden.

The MAGA cause is better funded, organized and stronger than ever. There is a vast and organized effort that is underway that seeks to completely dismantle the federal government within months of Trump taking office.

It should also be noted that Donald Trump has promised to invoke the 1791 Insurrection Act at his inauguration, and to deploy the world’s most powerful military as a police force to be used to suppress the rights of the American people. General Mark Milley has already made it clear that Trump wanted to know whether the military could shoot to wound Black Americans peacefully protesting in front of the White House.

The undelivered resignation letter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should make clear the dimensions of the Trump threat. 

Think about this picture:

Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

This photo is a historical record. It is not fake and the participants aren’t actors. The reality is that many are convicted felons serving prison terms for their role in a violent insurrection that sought to destroy the republic.

Here is what will be lost if Trump returns to power: every step of progress that has ever been made towards a just society, including the expansion of civil rights and human rights to all people. Additionally, what will be lost is every possibility of perfecting the Union and any hope of ever reaching the peaceful valley of justice foreseen by Martin Luther King in his prophetic vision at the edge of his patriotic martyrdom.

The Trump movement is a threat to world peace and global security. It is a threat to the existence of NATO and the alliance of freedom that has been maintained under American leadership since 1945. The MAGA movement calls itself the “America First” movement, which is a perfectly apt metaphor for them to embrace.

Where the original America First extremists were Hitler’s useful idiots, these America First-ers are those of Vladimir Putin. Each group disdains the US constitution and is easily manipulated by the siren song of their leader’s madness and lies. Their patriotism is hollow and cancerous. They are the scourge of Americanism because they disdain it and will destabilize the world until it starts burning again. America First was a threat in the 1930s, and it is a threat today. 

This threat must be effectively opposed on a constant basis with absolute ferocity and an indefatigable fighting spirit. Americans who love liberty and decency can’t give an inch to those who want to experiment with fascism and dictatorship. Make no mistake, Donald Trump is a domestic enemy and he is on the march. He is winning. He is coming.

Donald Trump is the threat to democracy. President Biden is NOT.

President Biden is a sentinel of democracy. He is an honorable man who has recorded significant accomplishments, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS Act and the lowering of prescription drug pricing. The infrastructure spending will help build 21st century America.

When I agreed to help Dean Phillips launch his campaign there were two key issues upon which it was centered:

1. Whether it was time to “pass the torch” to the next generation of leaders based on Biden’s consistently low approval ratings and his advanced age. I believe that this is a moral issue in the United States, and it always has been. Each generation must make way for the next. This is essential for the health and vigor of society.

2. Biden’s inability to extinguish an ever-growing fascistic threat, which is hotter than ever, in the country.

The primary challenge wasn’t ideological or issue-based.

President Biden has been assailed, smeared and swallowed by the most vicious propaganda machine that has ever existed in American history. His White House team has been overwhelmed by Trump’s MAGA operation. In poll after poll, Biden is losing to a man who is currently facing 91 felony counts and running on a platform of revenge and retribution. It is deeply worrying because national catastrophe and death are what follow Trump’s return to power.

When Andrew Yang’s former campaign manager Zach Graumann and Senator Sanders’ chief strategist Jeff Weaver came aboard the Phillips campaign I left and started an outside group to launch the first wave of messaging in support of the effort. The message was not about a Biden threat for two reasons:

1. A Biden threat does not exist.

2. It is terrible political strategy.

Now, a new outside group, calling itself “We Deserve Better,” and run by Matt and Scott Krisiloff, two Silicon Valley CEOs who represent OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has opened up its doors for business. The second that occurred signalled the completion of my work focused on Congressman Phillips. Pass the Torch has passed the torch.

I hope Phillips’ comments about Biden being a threat to democracy do not indicate a gratuitous and hard edge from his campaign in the days ahead. It is unnecessary and self-defeating. The impulse towards mean and ugly can be very strong in a campaign’s darkest days, particularly in the long, dark New Hampshire winter during which future presidents are tested by a process that is ingenious in part because of its accidental brutality.

An American presidential campaign is the singularly greatest non-lethal competition anywhere on Earth. It is a spectacular contest. David Axelrod has accurately called the process an “MRI for the soul” of the candidate.

In the end, I always tell political candidates that a campaign is a character test on a long journey. A very long journey.

Many people have asked me over the years what a presidential campaign is like from my vantage point. I can tell you that there is no shortage of ambitious men and women who have pondered running for president.

What I tell them is that the test is relentless and surprising at every turn. It is simultaneously simple and infinitely complex. It plays out in the thin air where cynicism and idealism collide. This is the psychological battlefield where accommodations, compromises and shortcuts get rationalized into justifications that were refuted by convictions just weeks earlier.

There are hard and lonely days on the campaign trail where, in the low light of short days, there can be a type of optical illusion that confuses the best of intentions from the best of men and women. This makes it hard to tell the difference between public interest and self-interest in the vertigo that comes with the long middle hours of any campaign journey.

When Dean Phillips launched his campaign, I gave him an assignment, which I don’t think he will mind me sharing with you. I handed him John Kennedy’s 1960 announcement speech, and told him that he needed to write his own. The guidelines I gave him were simple. It couldn’t exceed the paragraph or word count of JFK’s speech.

He struggled with it for a week or so, and then called me one morning, and said that he had written it, but that he had not followed the guidelines. I told him that he passed the test. I asked him what he thought John Kennedy would have thought if someone told him his announcement should be constrained by Alf Landon’s 1928 speech structure?

I thought that Phillips’ speech and its delivery were excellent. My views about that are unchanged, including what was said about President Biden in the speech:

Holding steady in the current is very hard in a presidential campaign. It can pull good people far from the banks where they planned to anchor the effort.

Soon, New Hampshire voters will make a judgement of whether Dean Phillips made his case. One thing I will never change my mind about is the fact that democracy must be practiced to be preserved.

Here is what I am going to do in the months ahead.

I will continue to use this platform to rebut the fascist message and spread a gospel of Americanism as far as I can carry it. I hope you will all help me in that endeavor.

I will do everything I can conceivably do to make the argument against Donald Trump. I hope that President Biden and the Democratic Party will do the same. Biden is like an old tiger hanging out on a rock. He needs to leap off the rock and devour some prey. The prey is MAGA. Over the past few weeks, he has increased his attacks against Trump and is finally filling that space. The Democratic Party needs to step this up in a big way.

Let me be clear about what my hopes are for the country, the Democratic Party, and all Americans who love liberty in a way that I think can be appreciated by someone of Irish lineage from Scranton, Pennsylvania. There is an old Irish saying that Joey Biden was definitely taught before he was 10 years old, by word and deed. It’s this:

Is this a private fight or can anyone join?

Our sensitive times obscure an urgent necessity. America needs a brawl, and it needs to be a decisive one at the ballot box. It is time to end the madness in the political equivalent of a chair-breaking, full spectrum bar brawl on a Friday night in Scranton at the Irish pub back in the good ‘ole breaking proverbial bottles over the head of your misguided friends, relatives and co-workers type of way. It’s a fight with love between right and wrong for the good, but it is definitely a brawl.

A genteel people we have never been, never will be, and can never be. We are Americans and defiance is our national character. It is time for the president to show he can throw down or not. It’s time. There can be no diversions from the singular threat. The choice is America or Trump. Everything is on the line. 

I will do everything I can to raise money and help elect Democrats to the US House who can defund Trump’s fascist government and stop the destruction of democracy through the checks and balances that cannot be erased but by surrender. The Democratic Party is the pro-democracy party. It must hold the Congress.

I will do everything I can to help a couple of US Senate candidates who are likely to be ignored and cut off from Democratic Party funding.

Everyday I will use this platform to celebrate America and warn about the danger. 2024 will be a momentous year.

What will you do? Here’s what I ask of you:

You must be in the fight and you must be in the fight to win. The fascist cause cannot be allowed to take power in America.

I will help to try and frame the argument against Trump, warn about the potential catastrophe ahead and support pro-democracy candidates and causes.

Should the campaign be between President Biden and Donald Trump it will be a race between America and something very dark.

Joe Biden isn’t a threat. He’s the president of the United States.

The threat is Trump and MAGA.

I will do everything and anything I can do to play my small part in stopping it.

During the lonely hours of a campaign it is easy to veer off course. The important thing is to straighten out and move forward again. Challenging President Biden and saying the “quiet part” out loud — that the Democratic establishment is terrified about a Biden defeat against Trump — was courageous of Phillips in my view.

Saying things that aren’t true is always misguided at best — and often worse. There must be absolute clarity about the threat at hand. It isn’t ballot access or gerrymandering, though those issues have great merit and should be at the forefront of a reform agenda.

The issue is singular. It is liberty.

The threat is singular. It is Trump and MAGA.

The purpose of The Warning is to warn and teach lessons about Americanism in an hour where they will be needed.

---

---