Every so often, a video of mine so triggers the right that I start getting called names and accused of being a lesbian, which is an honor, really, but that’s another story.
This isn’t the insult you think it is. I would be absolutely honored to be a lesbian.
What follows is some of the discussion I had on “Morning Joe” this morning that touches on something critical: How the threat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance represent is not just about the economy, or the erosion of norms, or even the curtailment of specific freedoms by some abstraction of fascism.
It’s about the erasure of the institutions you’ve depended on all of your life, that make your future malleable, your plans possible, and let you live as you’ve dreamed. In their place, they promise nothing but the chaos of a failed state.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
I think if you think about some of the great presidents we've had in this country, obviously they were interested in winning and losing, but it wasn't necessarily the sum total of their being or understanding of the world.
They were interested in policy. They were interested in the country. They had a certain feeling for history.
I think Donald Trump is someone so small, so limited in a way that winning and losing is really the only thing he understands. There's this kind of thing that his father supposedly said to him.
There's two kinds of people in the world, you know, killers and losers, killer being a good thing in this moral landscape.
And so you can imagine the 2020 loss was a trauma for Donald Trump, because it's the only kind of meaning he has, is to have ratings higher than the other person.
And his ratings were lower, the ultimate rating in this country, which is votes.
And then J.D. Vance, I actually met J.D. Vance the first time here. We were both on the same day — this is 2016. I thought he was charming, kind, interesting, with a different worldview. We spoke, messaged a little bit after that, and he became what I think the founders a couple hundred years ago used to call men of ambition.
Ambition didn't used to be a good word the way it is now. It used to mean people who have such a design on power, that there's nothing they won't say, do, become to have power. This is a person who is now willing to throw out constitutional democracy.
He studied at Yale Law School, where I believe they actually have courses on the Constitution. He's willing to throw out everything he took time to study, to be that kind of man of dark ambition.
And I think what's really important now is for people across this country who may not be diehard for Kamala Harris or diehard for Donald Trump, but who love the country, who have been blessed by the many gifts of this country to say this country is what it is.
It has given you whatever it's given you because of institutions, institutions you take for granted, prospects of a peaceful transfer of power that you take for granted so you can go live your life. You can go start that restaurant. You can go do that job. You can go drive your kid to that college.
You can do all those things in a way that you cannot in Somalia because the institutions are just working in the background. You don't even have to think about them very often. You have to vote every so often and then they work.
And what is at stake now is you possibly not being able to do all those things you've done all your life, not be able to chase your dreams, not be able to make your plans, because what works in the background is not going to be working in the background in a Trump administration politics, government persecution would become your life. This would become the the full drama of our country.
That's what happens in these countries that go in that illiberal, unconstitutional direction, and what they are proposing is not just you know an abstraction of fascism it is a kind of political project where politics would eat our dreams, eat your plans, and I don't think most Americans want that.
Watch the full conversation below:
Your support makes The Ink possible. We’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section.
A video to share with the undecideds and the apathetic