Alan Zendell, December 6, 2023

We’ve finally put all those Thanksgiving leftovers into the past, but not, I hope, a clear understanding of what we should be thankful for. Most years it’s loving family and friends. This year was no exception, yet there was a higher priority. Because it faces its greatest threat in more than a century-and-a-half, what was foremost in my mind was what growing up under the Constitution of the United States has meant to the grandchildren of immigrants who fled oppression in Eastern Europe a century ago.

Rather than languish in the between-holidays purgatory of early December, we should be making our New Years Resolutions now. Instead of waiting until we’ve gained ten pounds of holiday weight and then righteously vowing to take them off, why don’t we focus on what each of us can do to save our democracy? If we wait until January to get involved, the heavily funded MAGA pros will have already laid the groundwork for a Trump march through the Primaries.

Yesterday, addressing what a 2024 Trump victory would look like, former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) warned Americans that if Trump wins, our 2024 vote may be the last one we ever cast. Cheney, a principled conservative, reminded me that a leader’s integrity is far more important than her political ideology. As Rachel Maddow said about interviewing Cheney, any issue on which two people whose governing philosophies were as opposite as theirs could agree must be critically important and dangerous.

Maddow and Cheney are both correct, and I was encouraged when Heather Richardson’s Letters From an American reported that their interview was watched by sixty percent more viewers that Sean Hannity’s interview with Donald Trump. On the other hand, despite Hannity trying his best to give Trump an offramp from his recent autocratic rants, when Trump was offered a chance to assure America that he would not be a dictator, he said, “Not until day one.”

If Trump is re-elected, future historians will liken Americans to lemmings following the Pied Piper over a cliff. The future couldn’t be clearer. Trump’s entire governing philosophy can be expressed in three words: self over country. Remember his tour of the Normandy battlefields with his former Chief of Staff, John Kelly? The latter reported that Trump viewed all the GIs who perished on D-Day as losers and suckers. “What was in it for them?” he asked Kelly.

Everything Trump does is transactional. Every decision is based on what will increase his power and wealth. The welfare of the nation and the rest of us only matters when they happen to coincide with whatever satisfies Trump’s desperate narcissism on any given day. Trump lobbied the House to shut down the government because he thought it would weaken President Biden, no matter what harm it would have done to our economy and international standing. He’s lobbying Speaker Mike Johnson to withhold funding for defending Ukraine against Russia, because he is more concerned with having Vladimir Putin as his political ally than protecting NATO and Europe from Russian expansionism. If Trump arranges for Putin to occupy Ukraine, he might even get to build a hotel with his name on it in Moscow.

We’re used to making hard decisions; we’ve been doing it all our lives. Who should I marry? Where should I live? Which cruise line is best? But our biggest decision in 2024 will be a no-brainer. Every court at every level that has had a role in verifying Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 has ruled that Trump’s claims of fraud and election hijacking were false, and we all saw and heard his attempt to undermine the Constitution and our democracy on January 6, 2021. He boasts continually that if he wins in 2024, his second term will be a bloodbath of retribution against anyone he perceives as an enemy. If that doesn’t sound familiar, let me direct you to Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping.

Ironically, our best hope for the future may be in whether Liz Cheney’s lesson applies to the Trump-stacked Supreme Court. He appointed three extremist justices, clearly expecting them to pay him back with loyalty whenever a case involving his power comes before them. His likely criminal and civil trial convictions will ultimately be appealed to SCOTUS as will challenges to Trump’s presence on several state ballots.

No one can predict what the Supreme Court will do, but in the end the responsibility to save our democracy lies with us. I’ve never had an easier decision in my entire life. Any vote against Donald Trump, any action, short of the kind of violence he would support, that reduces the chance that he will ever hold power again is more important than anything else we do next year.