Choose Your Country. Ten Days To Save America

Rick Wilson - Oct 24

A note: I’m solo this weekend, which is probably to the good, because I’m in that frenzy of last-days of the campaign calls, ads, writing, and fundraising. Things will feel very fast for the coming week, then time will creep until Election Day. I dictated this into my phone while driving, so I hope you’ll pardon any weird formatting.

For ten years, Donald Trump has made this country smaller than it is.

Smaller than it can be. Smaller than it should be. Smaller than the people who built it could have imagined it would ever let itself become. He found a nation that, for all its flaws and all its fights, still believed it was one people with a future: uneven and hazy at times, but a future we still felt deep in our bones, with that old providential confidence.

Tallying what Trump has destroyed is not for the faint of heart. He has spent a decade tearing America apart for his own profit and amusement.

He divided us. As Americans, by party and region and faith. As human beings, by color and accent and the country somebody’s grandmother escaped from. He looked at the melting pot that made us, the endless churn of strivers and dreamers and refugees who gave us our scientists and soldiers, our ballplayers and bakers, the people who built your town, and he pissed in it.

He has grown fat on stolen wealth while your life gets ground down to the point where just getting by feels like a dream. Prices roar. Rent climbs. The ladder your parents climbed has lost its rungs, and the security that used to come with an honest day’s work now feels like something out of an old movie. His family gets richer every quarter. Yours gets told the economy has never been better while you stand in line at the food pantry.

He is a graceless man, and his ugly soul changed ours. He made us uglier. Coarser. Crueler at the Thanksgiving table and the school board meeting, quicker to snark, slower to forgive. Less able to love and be loved in our families, in our communities, and in a world that once looked at America and saw something worth hoping for.

And he did something worse.

He tricked tens of millions of our fellow Americans, decent people, our neighbors and cousins and coworkers, into believing lies and conspiracies so grotesque that a decade ago they’d have been laughed out of any room in the country. He trained them to distrust their own eyes. That number is shrinking now, thank God. A few more of them wake up every day, and the most fervent of the lot are already aging out of society and politics. But the damage is real, and it is everywhere.

That’s the man. Now look at what he’s done with the keys to the nation.

The President of the United States sells a meme coin, sneakers, Bibles. He took a $400 million flying bribe from the government of Qatar and called it a gift to the nation. His family’s crypto ventures have turned the Oval Office into a Venmo account where foreign royals and billionaires with something to buy can line up and pay up. He sells pardons to criminals. He promised to drain the swamp. He put in a gift shop.

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And you’re footing the bill. His tariffs are a tax on your groceries, your car, your kid’s school clothes, not on some foreign power “ripping us off.” One conservative think tank puts the cost at about $820 per household this year.

He swore he’d bring prices down on day one. Day one came and went. So did day six hundred. More than half of Republicans now tell pollsters he’s broken that promise.

Then there’s the war with Iran, by now a Forever War by any definition: no goal the nation can understand, no finish line, no resolution even on the far horizon. With the polls turning, Trump says he won’t strike Iran again before the midterms.

Before.

He’s ready to spend the lives of the young Americans who serve on a fruitless war. He’s just holding off until after the votes are counted, as if their lives were a scheduling problem.

At home it’s the same story, told with fear. Masked federal agents grabbing people off sidewalks. Border Patrol agents entering polling places. Prosecutors aimed at his enemies like a loaded gun. Lunatic lawsuits trying to invalidate elections before they happen. Judges threatened for ruling against him. Generals pushed out for insufficient loyalty, dictators welcomed with a smile.

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But remember the main lesson of this election: he can’t do it alone. Every tariff, every broken treaty and broken promise, every strike, every grift runs through a Congress willing to look away, and ours has done far more than look away. They have damned themselves, morally and politically.

The Republican majority has become the most servile, most corrupt collection of politicians this country has ever produced: grown adults who know exactly what he is, say so in private, then walk onto the floor and vote however they’re told. They held the the door while he robbed the bank. They held it for the war. They’ll hold it for whatever comes next, because the only thing they fear more than Trump is a primary in 2028.

Those people are on your ballot on November 3rd. That’s the whole ball game.

If they keep their Senate majority, they’ll call it a mandate to finish the job, and they’ll walk us into 2028 with the guardrails torn out and the people who tore them out writing the rules for the next election.

We like to think democracies die in a single dramatic night. Usually they go quietly, when the people sworn to protect them decide it’s easier to go along and everyone else decides somebody else will handle it. These people chant about norms and institutions, guardrails and decency and the rule of law like ancient, nearly forgotten spells from a dead civilization.

Nobody else is coming. It’s us.

This can be stopped, and the tool is waiting in your mailbox or at your polling place.

A Democratic House gets subpoena power. The books get opened. The crypto deals, the foreign money, the jet, the pardons, all of it, under oath and on camera. Where laws were broken, the evidence goes to the people whose job is to prosecute, and some of these characters will learn what a courtroom looks like from the defendant’s chair.

A Democratic House can refuse to fund a war nobody voted for. It can take back its power to impose (and revoke) tariffs, a vote Republicans have spent two years hiding from, along with plenty of others. Flip the Senate and the rubber stamp is gone for good.

The whole Trump operation rests on one bet: that nobody will ever make them answer. In ten days, you can make them lose that bet.

This is how we get the country back to the size it’s supposed to be. Big and messy, sure, but strong where it counts. Generous again. Decent again. A place people risk everything to reach, and a place we’re proud to hand our kids and grandkids.

I think a lot more about the far future lately. I’m 62, and our grandkids are two years, and three months old, respectively. The work we do now decides the country they inherit twenty years from now. Nothing is more important.

I know how tired you are. I’m tired, also. You’re worn down by a machine willing to burn every good thing in America to keep the Elon class rich and Trump happy.

They have been bold in their evils, proud of their chaos. It’s time to turn it back on MAGA and Trump.

Pain is the only teacher in politics. We need a landslide. A historic ass-beating. A smackdown that leaves the MAGA party hiding in the wilderness for a few months while we get back to doing the good work of America. They won’t stay gone, but this election is a chance to cut enough heads off the hydra that we can start purging this vile man and his movement from our lives.

So make a plan today. Know where you vote.

If your state lets you vote early or by mail, do it now, before anything can get in your way. Then go get your people: the cousin who always means to and never does, the neighbor without a ride, the kid who just turned eighteen and thinks one vote doesn’t matter. Drag them if you have to.

And if you’re voting on Election Day, show up on Tuesday, November 3rd. Show up by the millions, in numbers so big they can’t spin it or steal it. How hard Trump tries to steal this election depends on how close it is. Win so big he retreats to his little fantasy world of ballrooms and arches.

There are two countries on the ballot on November 3rd. In one, the president’s family gets richer every time you buy groceries, masked men decide who belongs, the courts answer to a single phone number, and your grandkids grow up thinking that’s just how America works, a gaudy kleptocracy with a flag on the lapel and nothing behind it.

The other is still out there, battered but breathing: the country of town halls and union halls and Little League bleachers, of immigrants who show up with nothing and build American lives, of neighbors who still bring a casserole when somebody passes, of hope and ambition, of a future we earn, not that is imposed upon us.

That America isn’t gone. It’s waiting on us, the way it waited on every generation that got handed a hard moment and chose to answer. It’s calling now. Pick up.

It’s America, or Trump.