Photo by visuals, Unsplash
Photo by visuals, Unsplash
The people decide who governs them. They can withdraw their trust. They can strip a president of his puppet majority, and require him to face a Congress that remembers its obligations.
Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
I voted today, and it made me happy.
I have been waiting since the first moments of Donald Trump’s grotesque inaugural to mark this ballot. Waiting to express my contempt for the fascists and the cowards who serve him. Waiting for my turn to deliver a judgment they could neither interrupt nor shout down.
I voted against every candidate with an “R” next to their name.
In the MAGA alphabet, “R” stands for puppet.
There was satisfaction in every mark.
I thought about the joy Jon Ossoff delivered with these words:
Never before has so little effort been made to cover up so much corruption.
There it was. The brazenness of the moment, captured in a sentence. The confidence that there will never be consequences. That we will become exhausted, look away, and accept the taking as the price of being governed by thieves.
I smiled when I heard it. Someone understood that this shamelessness deserves contempt and knew how to express it.
Today, I expressed mine on a ballot.
I thought about Renée Good and Alex Pretti. I thought about their families, their friends, and the lives they should still be living. I thought about the federal government withholding evidence from the Minnesota officials investigating their killings. Even answers have become something their families must fight to obtain.
The officers responsible should understand something about the protection they enjoy today: it can end.
In Minnesota, there is no deadline for prosecuting a crime resulting in someone’s death. If the evidence establishes murder, bring the charges, prove the case, and send the guilty to prison. Anyone counting on a lifetime of Thanksgivings with their family after unlawfully taking someone else’s life should consider that possibility. A badge cannot confer immunity from justice. Neither should a president.
I thought about children in immigration detention. About families describing unsafe and unsanitary conditions. About the smallness of a child inside a system whose power must seem limitless, and the terror of having no idea when it will let you go.
I thought about detainees’ accounts of beatings, denied medical care, and guards preventing contact with lawyers and families. I thought about the American flags on the uniforms of people accused of those abuses.
Our flag. Our country. Our responsibility to demand an accounting.
I thought about all the corrupt dealings and all the taking. The grasping sons. The courtiers. The billionaires who apparently wake each morning tormented by the possibility that something remains beyond their ownership.
How much is enough?
For these people, there is no answer. There is only the next deal, the next favor, the next public asset to treat as private property.
I thought about Elon Musk spending to help elect Ken Paxton, whom I regard as the most despicable candidate of this cycle. The richest man in the world helping another Republican acquire power, while the movement calls itself a rebellion against the powerful.
Ossoff had their number.
So did my ballot.
I thought about the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, finally home after 321 days deployed. About the families who waited and the fathers meeting babies born while they were away. About the reports of dwindling supplies and deteriorating morale aboard a ship whose crew kept doing its duty.
I thought about the Americans killed in Trump’s war. Their families will carry its consequences for the rest of their lives. They are owed an honest accounting of why their loved ones were sent, what they were asked to accomplish, and whether the people who gave the orders knew what they were doing.
A tally of sunken enemy ships cannot answer those questions. A president can destroy a navy and still fail to achieve the political purpose for which he sent Americans to war.
I look at the treatment of our military and see desecration. An institution whose strength depends on discipline, competence and trust has been subjected to vanity, ideological fanaticism and political interference by men who mistake their authority for wisdom.
The people in uniform deserve better. Their families deserve better. The country deserves better.
I thought about government from top to bottom. DOGE. The contempt for public service. The celebration of destruction by people who have never had to depend on what they are destroying.
I thought about public health and scientific research, about the work of people who spend their lives trying to prevent suffering and discover cures. About what it means to put such work at the mercy of political loyalty, ignorance and spite.
We will be paying for this damage long after its authors have moved on to their next self-congratulation.
I carried all of that into the voting booth.
And then I marked my ballot.
There was happiness in it. Real happiness. The release of finally giving the anger a purpose and the judgment a consequence.
For all his demands for attention, all his threats and all his efforts to occupy every waking moment of American life, Donald Trump had no authority over that act.
My vote belonged to me.
He could not buy it. He could not command it. He could not make me admire him, excuse him, or consent to what he has done.
I used it against him and every puppet of his movement on my ballot.
I believe we are about to take away his congressional majority. We have to finish the work. Every seat we take from his willing servants is a chance to put the people’s power back into hands prepared to exercise it.
Investigations. Hearings. Subpoenas. The recovery of records. Witnesses under oath. Public answers to questions that have been met with lies and contempt.
He will hate it.
Too bad.
The election result is not Donald’s to accept or reject according to his pleasure. He is entitled to lawful challenges supported by evidence. He is entitled to the protections afforded every citizen.
He is not entitled to an outcome.
The people decide who governs them. They can withdraw their trust. They can strip a president of his puppet majority, and require him to face a Congress that remembers its obligations.
We are standing at an abyss. I voted to help turn this country around.
The will of the people includes mine.
And damn, it felt good to express it.
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
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