IMPORTANT NOTE FROM HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Five years ago, on
September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote
a Facebook post that started: “Many thanks to all of
you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having
been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!).
I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready
to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard
to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the
White House look to me, today....” I wrote a review of
Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling
of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates,
stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to
help his 2020 reelection. Then I noted that the
chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA),
had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph
Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower
had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence
community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This
meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence
Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required,
Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand
it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by
the president or his closest advisors. And I added: “None of
this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.” “This is the story of
a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent
branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.” Readers swamped me
with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain
the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace. And so these Letters
from an American were born. In the five years
since then, the details of the Ukraine scandal—the secret behind the
whistleblower complaint in Schiff’s letter—revealed that then-president Trump
was running his own private foreign policy to strong-arm Ukraine into helping
his reelection campaign. That effort brought to light more of the story of
Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign, which until Russia’s February 2022
invasion of Ukraine seemed to be in exchange for lifting sanctions the Obama
administration imposed against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine in
2014. The February 2022
invasion brought renewed attention to the Mariupol Plan, confirmed by Trump’s
2016 campaign advisor Paul Manafort, that Russia expected a Trump
administration to permit Russian president Vladimir Putin to take over
eastern Ukraine. The Ukraine scandal of
2019 led to Trump’s first impeachment trial for abuse of power and
obstruction of Congress, then his acquittal on those charges and his
subsequent purge of career government officials, whom he replaced with Trump
loyalists. Then, on February 7,
just two days after Senate Republicans acquitted him, Trump picked up the
phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a
deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained,
and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is
deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other
Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting
the economy. More than a million of
us did not live through the ensuing pandemic. We have, though, lived
through the attempts of the former president to rig the 2020 election, the
determination of American voters to make their voices heard, the Black Lives
Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd, the election of Democrat
Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the subsequent refusal of
Trump and his loyalists to accept Biden’s win. And we have lived
through the unthinkable: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob determined to
overrule the results of an election and install their own candidate in the
White House. For the first time in our history, the peaceful transfer of
power was broken. Republican senators saved Trump again in his second
impeachment trial, and rather than disappearing after the inauguration of
President Biden, Trump doubled down on the Big Lie that he had been the true
winner of the 2020 presidential election. We have seen the
attempts of Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress to move America past
this dark moment by making coronavirus vaccines widely available and passing
landmark legislation to rebuild the economy. The American Rescue Plan, the
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation
Reduction Act spurred the economy to become the strongest in the world,
proving that the tested policy of investing in ordinary Americans worked far
better than post-1980 neoliberalism ever did. After Republicans took control
of the House in 2023, we saw them paralyze Congress with infighting that led
them, for the first time in history, to throw out their own speaker, Kevin
McCarthy (R-CA). We have watched as the
Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with religious extremists, has worked to
undermine the proven system in place before 1981. It took away the doctrine
that required courts to defer to government agencies’ reasonable regulations
and opened the way for big business to challenge those regulations before
right-wing judges. It ended affirmative action in colleges and universities,
and it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to
abortion. And then we watched the
Supreme Court hand down the stunning decision of July 1, 2024, that
overturned the fundamental principle of the United States of America that no
one is above the law. In Donald J. Trump v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be
prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. We saw the reactionary
authoritarianism of the former president’s supporters grow stronger. In
Republican-dominated states across the country, legislatures passed laws to
suppress Democratic voting and to put the counting of votes into partisan
hands. Trump solidified control over the Republican Party and tightened his
ties to far-right authoritarians and white supremacists. Republicans
nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 2024 to advance policies
outlined in Project 2025 that would concentrate power in the president and
impose religious nationalism on the country. Trump chose as his running mate
religious extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance, putting in line for the
presidency a man whose entire career in elected office consisted of the
eighteen months he had served in the Senate. In that first letter
five years ago, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy
do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its
people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other.
Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the
aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good
lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have
never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic
oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.” And we have made
noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have
stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans
to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as
people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters, and in
this election where the issue is not policy differences but the very survival
of our democracy, we are working to elect Democratic presidential nominee
Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. If you are tired from
the last five years, you have earned the right to be. And yet, you are still
here, reading. I write these letters
because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human
self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and
ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of
government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I
know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by
fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false
narratives. And so I write. But I have come to
understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by
millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the
principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical
thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate
that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our
nation. To those who read
these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer,
award medals (!), and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me
along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey. |
