There is nothing more important than stopping Trump from taking power

There are eight people, beyond President Biden, who hold my children’s fate in their hands. They hold all of our futures — and our nation’s — in their hands. We should know their names. 

There is Jill Biden, the First Lady, Ted Kauffman, the 85-year-old best friend, Valerie, the sister and my friend, Steve Ricchetti, the lobbyist turned WH adviser, Mike Donilon, the strategist, Ron Klain, the consiglière and former chief of staff, Anita Dunn, the media consultant, and her husband Bob Bauer, the lawyer. 

Often people will call me and ask questions premised on the concept of some powerful “THEY” or “THEM” who wield ultimate influence, and can make absurdity stop at the proverbial water’s edge. The people above are the “they” and “them” when it comes to President Biden and the immense decision ahead that must be made for the sake of the United States of America. 

President Biden was smeared by a convicted felon as a criminal, liar, failure and fraud, without the ability to adequately defend himself because of the obvious ravages of age that fall upon all of us. There is something that can be said of Joe Biden today that will be lost if his quest for four more years of power continues and ends in certain defeat: 

"I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”

There is no higher calling for an American president than duty to the oath that they swore to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States. Each president is a custodian, a guardian and a trustee of something sacred, noble and alive. It must be protected, nourished and defended. America exists because a single man had the character and humility to walk away from a chance to become an emperor or king.

It is time for Joe Biden’s team to ask themselves a deep question: what would George Washington do?  It is an astonishing question for consideration for a blue-collar kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who achieved his life ambition and became Washington’s peer. Joseph Robinette Biden is a president of the United States, and as such, so long as he maintains his faith and does not succumb to the darkness that swallowed his predecessor, he will do what must be done because duty requires it and he is the president. It is as simple as that. 

Here is what President Biden’s hero and inspiration for a life of public service said about the American presidency in a speech pondering its qualities in 1960. JFK said:

Despite the increasing evidence of a lost national purpose and a soft national will, F.D.R.'s words in his first inaugural still ring true: "In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory."

Roosevelt fulfilled the role of moral leadership. So did Wilson and Lincoln, Truman and Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. They led the people as well as the Government – they fought for great ideals as well as bills. And the time has come to demand that kind of leadership again.

And so, as this vital campaign begins, let us discuss the issues the next President will face – but let us also discuss the powers and tools with which we must face them.

For we must endow that office with extraordinary strength and vision. We must act in the image of Abraham Lincoln summoning his wartime Cabinet to a meeting on the Emancipation Proclamation. That Cabinet has [sic] been carefully chosen to please and reflect many elements in the country. But "I have gathered you together," Lincoln said, "to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter – that I have determined for myself."

And later, when he went to sign, after several hours of exhausting handshaking that had left his arm weak, he said to those present: "If my name goes down in history, it will be for this act. My whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign this proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say: 'He hesitated.'"

But Lincoln's hand did not tremble. He did not hesitate. He did not equivocate. For he was the President of the United States.

It is in this spirit that we must go forth in the coming months and years.

There is nothing more important than stopping Donald Trump from taking power, and implementing the Project 2025 plan to “Orbanize” the United States into an illiberal system, in which Trump is all powerful and his cronies can do as they please.

Trumpism must be opposed by something better. It must be opposed by a positive vision for the future and a plan for peace and prosperity.

Here are the names of some Democrats who could all be part of a national ticket coming out of an open Democratic convention if the delegates are able to choose victory over suicide: Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Ginny Raimondo, Jared Polis, Josh Shapiro, Kamala Harris, Andy Beshear, Chris Murphy, Corey Booker, Abigail Spanberger, JB Pritzker, Phil Murphy. 

The small and insular Biden team should take a walk together. 

They should start at the west front of the United States Capitol where Joe Biden swore the oath. They should pause at the immense statue memorializing Ulysses Grant in front of the Capitol, and contemplate Donald Trump’s assault and incitement against America on January 6. 

They should walk past the Washington Monument, and contemplate the humility of the man who could have been a king, but walked away from power — twice. 

Next, they should proceed to the Vietnam Memorial, and contemplate cynicism. There they can walk by the more than 58,000 names of young Americans who died for a lie in a war that could not be won, sent there by men afraid to tell the truth. 

Over at the Korean War Memorial the team could remember the forgotten war, and reflect on both Eisenhower’s secret plan to end the war, and Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War. They should understand the appeal of Trump’s secret plan.

When they get to the FDR Memorial they can reflect on the life of the only president who was Lincoln’s peer. He was a communication genius and world historic visionary, who was the architect of the world order that is crumbling 80 years after he breathed life into it at the edge of death. His fervent hope was that it would endure until now. Trump’s election will end FDR’s vision and the legacy of the American century, as well as the 12 American presidencies that were trustees of his epic creation. 

Dr. King should remind them about longevity and its purpose, which is not endurance but justice. King did not tell America how steep or how high the climb to the mountaintop would be — only that we would get there. Great progress has been made, and it is all at risk of being snuffed out in a fascist avalanche when Trump takes power with menace, hate, contempt, retribution, malice and corruption as his Polaris. 

Across the river on the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s former estate is America’s most hallowed ground, where the story of the last full measure of devotion is played out in a symmetrical garden of stone, where patriots rest in permanent peace as a great experiment endures around them. Here is the place to put the country first, ahead of all considerations. Here is the place to visit the final resting places of the brothers that were Biden’s inspirations, and the one that was his lifelong friend.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.”

When they cross back across the Potomac they should head to the “temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

I hope it is early in the morning when they arrive with the sun just starting to glow on the horizon, lighting up the marble and Freedom Monument, as if they are somehow alive. They should read the greatest words ever spoken by an American president. The language is etched in marble for eternity: a prophesy, warning, call-to-action and summons towards greatness.

Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Second Inaugural Address:

Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself and it is I trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it ~ all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war ~ seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen perpetuate and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Next, they should stand at the spot where MLK shared a prophetic vision, and where Barack Obama stood on the eve of a historic inauguration. They need to realize the vandalism Trump intends to do to the ideals and values represented at these majestic places. The team must understand good intentions alone cannot defend them. They must be defended with strength, vigor and eloquence. Americanism is a gospel of faith that requires an evangelist who can make the people sing. 

Finally, they should walk back towards the Capitol — what Joe Biden called the “citadel of democracy” — and stop at the World War II Memorial. They should walk to the side where the Pacific theater is remembered, and the quotes recalling the decisive battle of Midway from 1942 — the year the president was born. They should think about the fact that it was that baby who stood on the Normandy Coast with the last formation of World War II veterans 80 years on from D-Day and the saving of humanity, is the president of the United States. 

It is more than an achievement or ambition fulfilled. The presidency is a duty and responsibility. Joe Biden’s candidacy is an abdication of his duty as president. Fifty-one million Americans watched the tragedy in real time, and saw the green room chatter revealed fully and irrevocably by a performance that was shattering for President Biden. The rest saw a worse version a bit later on social media and in the right-wing media ecosystem. What occurred is not survivable. The deeds required to try and save the patient will only spread the cancer of distrust, mistrust, and thus Trumpism. 

The Biden team wanted the debate like Custer wanted Sitting Bull. The result was disaster. There is no escape, and only annihilation ahead. 

What must happen is perfectly clear. The chaos of an open convention is not to be feared. Excitement is the cure for lethargy. The Democratic Party needs an infusion of energy, and the spark will be the wisdom to acknowledge that the future starts now. 

President Biden and his core team face a great test of character in the days ahead. It is a binary test, and it is pass/fail. Ceding honesty as an issue against the most prolific liar in American history is lethal, and the Biden team has achieved the surreal and impossible by turning the world upside down and making the liar the truth teller. When it comes to the outcome of a gaslighting Olympics, there is no doubt that Trump will prevail against Biden’s team, who differ from their opposites in the sense that their gaslighting is obvious, while Trump’s is impervious to feebleness and incoherence.

Trump’s cynicism has always been a naked and transparent attribute, which has helped him define his persona in an era of anti-heroes. He rails against plots seen and unseen, while making a torrent of allegations and accusations wrapped in layers of nonsense, delusions, fantasies and lies. What greater gift could there possibly be for him to be proven entirely correct about the virtues of cynicism. He will have seized the high ground, where his opponent — who claims idealism and patriotism as his shield — relies on a strategy steeped in the dogma of Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Sean Spicer’s angry denunciations against reality, photographic evidence and truth. It won’t work — in addition to being dishonest, disgraceful, undignified and unpatriotic. 

A great crisis has befallen the Democratic Party at a moment of great crisis for the United States and the world. 

The first instinct for the Biden team may be to tighten the grip and that is okay, but it can’t last. The grip must be loosened to pass the torch, which must be done so the fight may be won. 

Idealists who practice cynicism are always punished. The greatest piece of political advice I ever witnessed was offered by Mark Salter to John McCain before he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. McCain talked about winning, and Mark Salter said that there are things worse than losing an election. He looked McCain in the eye and said, “You could lose your reputation.”

The country was never at risk from Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Now, it faces an existential risk from the return of Donald Trump, which is certain against President Biden. That is what makes this moment so dire, and the danger so acute. 

There is something else that must be said that will start to weigh heavily on the small Biden team in the days ahead. Perhaps they will rationalize to themselves that together they are so important that they are irreplaceable and entitled to power. This would be a tragedy, and it will be rebuked at the cost of a demagogue taking power from what will be remembered by history as a Weimar presidency that abandoned humility and patriotism for pride and greed. The people mentioned above won’t just be villainized, but will become villains in a tragedy about loss not yet realized at any level. 

We must stop the gaslighting in America.  

It must end. There are no kings in America, and no man is above the laws of the US Constitution, mortality, physics or age in the United States.  

I’d like to share a story about time and its fast passage. I remember President Bush 41 like most Americans with respect and admiration. He was the youngest fighter pilot in the United States Navy during the Second World War, and like President Jimmy Carter, another great American patriot, was born in 1924. Both men were 18 years old when Biden was born. Ronald Reagan was 31, John Kennedy was 25, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were 29 and Lyndon Johnson was 34. 

One hundred years before Carter and Bush were born the United States was angry and ungrateful at the edge of the 50th anniversary of independence. Disunion hung in the air and questions about whether Andrew Jackson would yield power to John Quincy Adams in a close election were unknown. The year was 1824 — two hundred years ago — and it matters a great deal. 

The American experiment had endured for nearly 50 years when the last surviving major general of the Continental Army who had won American independence travelled to each of the 24 states of the Union to say farewell. When the great tour was over, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States of America, ordered the United States Ship Brandywine, a 44 gun heavy frigate of the young US Navy, to bring him home. 

The ship was rechristened for the long journey across the Atlantic. It was named for the bloody battle in which the old general had bled for American independence. He would sail home to France under the American flag into which he breathed life and American guns that were ready, but still. The American Union was thriving and growing. The political system invented by the Revolutionary generation had endured. Power had been transferred peacefully between political competitors and factions for almost 30 years amidst all manner of turmoil, disagreements and whiffs of rebellion. 

The Missouri Compromise, which could not, and would not hold, was four years old and slavery was front and center in American life. America was becoming, straining, growing, evolving and remembering with the deepest gratitude the great gift it had been given by men like Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Montier. He was a one name superstar in 1824-1825 America. Lafayette. The Marquis de Lafayette was America’s first and greatest friend. 

He was no friend of slavery and he foresaw its end, if not the violence that ended it. He was a philosopher who knew violence, cruelties, suffering and despotism. America’s founding sin would not be solved philosophically or by reason, but rather by a spasm of bloodshed that lay ahead — and if not unimagined was incomprehensible in its totality. 

The grandchildren of the Americans who suffered, died, starved and were freed during that war — black and white — would become the core of the first American Army to leave American shores in 1917 and fight in Europe. When it arrived in France, the American battalion marched on July 4, 1917 to Lafayette’s grave under the command of Colonel Charles Stanton, who famously said, “Lafayette, nous voilà.” (“Lafayette, we are here.”)

Among those American soldiers were the Harlem hell fighters, who brought jazz to Europe. They fueled the Harlem renaissance when they returned home, having tasted dignity and decency for the first time in a foreign land. 

Lafayette had prophesied the ending of slavery, but more. He said this of the young America:

The perpetual union of the United States. It has always saved us in times of storm; one day it will save the world.

The children of the American Expeditionary Forces, who arrived in France in 1917, would become known as the “Greatest Generation.” They liberated France and saved the world. Many of them — like the 41st president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush — were born exactly 100 years after Lafayette arrived in America for his farewell. 

When American independence was won at Yorktown, Lafayette was there. He understood the magnitude of the event. He said:

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country. 

It was human civilization’s before and after event. It ruptured history. It began a new epoch of mankind and human civilization. 

This is what Lafayette understood so clearly. He foresaw the end of slavery and colonialism as certain, and set in motion by the birth of the United States. He also accurately predicted America, and specifically the Deep South, would be among the last places on Earth to abandon the abominable practice. 

Wherever Lafayette went in 1824-25, he was greeted by vast crowds of ebullient and grateful Americans. When he arrived in New York Harbor, he was greeted by the old Revolutionary War veterans who were quickly dying out. He took one look around at New York and the scene around him and burst into tears. He would meet with veterans of the War of 1812, including black troops who fought under Andrew Jackson in Louisiana. 

He would be overcome with emotion many times on the trip. He descended into the crypt where George Washington lay, to pay his respects to the man who was his commander, friend and inspiration. Lafayette had named his son George Washington Lafayette.

His visit to the African Free School, founded in part by his friend Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and the recently refurbished Independence Hall, were epic events in the young country. Independence Hall had fallen into disrepair because the US capital was in Washington, DC. It was renovated and fixed for Lafayette to use as his office, and he was delighted to be in the place where so many of his friends had signed the Declaration of Independence. 

At this time, the country had found itself roiling in a grubby and vicious political campaign between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. The nation’s newspapers were filled with vituperations and accusations as northern and southern interests began to collide with ever increasing intensity. Even then, the contours of American society’s fixed positions and trench lines were being carved like mountain valleys by the glacier of slavery and racial animus. 

When the election was decided in the US House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams, Lafayette was overjoyed to see Andrew Jackson take a stage, and congratulate the new president with goodwill and good wishes. The experiment was succeeding. It has never not been fragile. 

Lafayette was a contented man. He believed that the spread of human freedom was inexorable. He believed he had advanced it and was content that there was unfurnished work in the spread of freedom that he would not live to see. 

He was similar to Martin Luther King in that regard. Both men shared an incandescent faith about the inevitability of justice and freedom at the end of a long and inevitable arc. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on America’s 50th birthday. They had reconciled. The United States was brought together by an epic visit and an epic journey by a great friend. He reminded a nation of what it had in common, where it had come from and where it was going. The visit marked the passing of an era and a generation.  

A new American generation was rising. There was a 15-year-old teenage boy named Abraham and a four-year-old boy named Ulysses, both from Illinois. There was a five-year-old slave boy named Frederick, and a two-year-old slave girl named Harriet, both from Maryland. Outside of American territory, Sitting Bull’s father, Jumping Bull, was a 21-year-old Lakota warrior. Civilizations were colliding. The last was giving way to the future and a new frontier was beginning. 

Two hundred years have passed since Lafayette came to say goodbye. Soon America will celebrate its 250th birthday. We are a nation of 333 million people that stretches from the shores of Maine to the western Pacific Ocean and Arctic Circle. The United States is the greatest experiment in human freedom in human civilization. It is a glorious and triumphant achievement that is worthy of celebration, preservation, strengthening and renewal. There is no society on Earth that is more vital, vibrant and complicated. There has never been an untroubled hour in America’s history — and there won’t be one. Ever. There is no heaven on Earth, but there is America — and for that we must be grateful. We must all feel obligated and responsible for its preservation. 

America turned 200 years old when I was five years old. I will be 55 at 250, and won’t be here for 300, but my children will be. America will be. The 250th birthday of the United States should be a cause for the greatest celebration in our history. The achievement should be honored with reverence, humility, and joy. Our ancestors have given us a great gift. They have given us purpose. They have left us unfinished work. They have given us an America that is still becoming. 

Can we imagine making it better? Can we see the future? This will be the great test ahead in American politics, and seems to be the root of profound disconnection between the American people and its corrupted political mandarins in Washington, DC, who increasingly make King George III look like a man with a common touch. 

American politics has become cynical, small, stupid, unimaginative, sclerotic and stale. It is corrupted, obtuse and eminently fixable. There is a word that has tremendous power in America. The word is “change.” Change is in the air in America. The last people likely to see it are the politicians who think politics stands at the headwaters of American culture, and the American media that delusionally reports that view as fact. 

When Lafayette left America aboard the Brandywine he knew that he would never return. He didn’t. He was at peace. He knew America would endure. It did. It has. It will. 

It is time to believe and imagine again in America. Isn’t it? America was invented by believers, not cynics. The presence of cynics amongst the believers doesn’t diminish the believers. It simply tests the character of the undecided. There are great choices ahead. There always are. While we wait, perhaps it is worth taking stock and remembering, if but for a moment, how it feels to be a member of the luckiest group of people on Earth. Americans. This is a place where anything still remains possible. Two hundred years ago at a moment of division a friend visited and reminded a young nation of its unlimited future. America is a young nation with old politicians. That problem can be fixed. It should be. It’s time to start building tomorrow again in this country.

Joe Biden has served America well and honorably. He has done nothing wrong, but he is edging towards an irredeemable disgrace in a high stakes moment. Ahead on the current path is dishonor and loss. It cannot be wished away. 

History is made by an accumulation of moments and events that offer in the final analysis a verdict. 

The next generation of Americans is ready to lead. It is a generation forged by lost wars, empty promises, public lies, greed, technological wonders, scientific achievement, invention, corruption and existential threats caused by pollution and totalitarianism. The CNN debate did not mention poverty, nor did it talk about artificial intelligence, but the future will not be delayed or postponed by political corruption or insanity. 

How did the Biden team find itself in this position, and how did the Democratic Party find itself yoked to Jim Clyburn, who at age 83 has decided that the thing to do is “stay the course?” 

The obstinacy evident in the aftermath of the debate catastrophe is a preface to political oblivion and electoral obliteration and that is why it will all crack up because 57 days is a long time to contemplate national suicide. The election has become about Biden — or rather about the obvious realities juxtaposed against the deliberate, purposeful gaslighting of the entirety of the Democratic Party’s elected leadership now at war with reality every bit as much as the clowns at NewsMax and OAN. They are defending the indefensible for power, profit and privilege, and it is grotesque. 

Bravery is required in this moment. 

Truth telling is required in this moment. 

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