As a deeply patriotic American who has spent my entire professional life building bipartisan consensus around critical issues, I am deeply concerned by what is happening in our country. In fact, I believe we stand on the verge of losing our democracy. If we don’t come together to save our system of governance, our 249-year-old experiment in self-rule will come to an end.
Few people appreciate the blessings of America more than the children of refugees whose lives have depended on the realization of American ideals. That’s what I am. A majority of my relatives on my father’s side were murdered by the Nazis, after many of them tried, without success, to get to America. My father and grandparents were the lucky ones, escaping to Switzerland in 1938 and finally reaching America a decade later. They kissed the ground of this great country upon their arrival and never looked back.
When I served in the US National Security Council, State Department, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I recognized that, as a beneficiary of what so many Americans had contributed to making my opportunity possible, I had a sacred obligation to help build an even better future for our country. When I launched my Congressional campaign in Kansas City two decades ago, I did so from the platform at that city’s train station where my father and grandparents had arrived 55 years before as bewildered refugees.
Over my career, I have worked tirelessly with colleagues and counterparts across the political spectrum. I did this when working for then Senator Joe Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after 9/11, where we worked closely with the staff of his highly conservative Republican counterpart, Senator Jesse Helms. In 2005, I was a co-founder of Partnership for a Secure America, a non-profit organization seeking common sense, bipartisan solutions to our country’s greatest foreign policy and national security challenges. When Joe Biden threatened our nation by not renouncing his candidacy following his tragic self-immolations in the June 27, 2024 presidential debate, I organized a petition of former Biden staffers calling on him to immediately drop out and allow for the competitive primary our party and nation so desperately needed.
As one of the first people to raise the possibility of a research-related origin in Wuhan of the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked closely with Republicans (and at odds with many in my own party) to get to the bottom of that issue. I was the lead witness in the March 2023 congressional hearings on COVID-19 origins after being invited by the Republican chairman of that committee. I also served as the lead Democrat in the Heritage Foundation Nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19. Even though I was fiercely opposed to many of the provisions of Project 2025, I joined the Heritage commission because I believed then, as I do now, that we Americans must find ways to work together for the common good in spite of our many differences.
Because I believe that blind tribalism is one of the greatest threats to our nation, one of the worst things any of us can do is simply hold positions to align with our party. That’s why I believe we must carefully and dispassionately review the evidence regarding what’s happening today instead of jumping to rash conclusions.
When Donald Trump started claiming widespread fraud in America’s electoral system, I examined the evidence and found those claims to be baseless. After the mobs attacked the US capital on January 6, 2020, I examined the context and came to my own conclusion that Donald Trump’s incitement betrayed his presidential oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and spoke up. When the Trump campaign last year again started making claims of widespread fraud, I looked into those allegations and, again, could not find any supporting evidence. The campaign similarly did not appear to find any either and dropped the issue after Trump’s reelection.
All of this is to say that I am not a partisan or a tribalist, but an American, albeit one with liberal democratic sensibilities, who believes in the promise of our great country and of our democracy, norms, values, and institutions. Are we perfect? No. Can we be better? Yes. Must we continually strive to be better? Yes. Should our system be burned to the ground? Absolutely not.
In the frenetic weeks since the Trump administration has taken office, most Americans (not to mention others around the world), are trying to get a sense of what is going on. For many of us, the pace and scale of pronouncements from Washington have become so overwhelming as to be virtually inscrutable. For others conditioned by nihilistic extremists on both the political left and right, the US government has become so rotten and corrupt that it needs to be proverbially razed to the ground. In this sense, those calling to defund the police, globalize the intifada, and throw US government agencies into the wood chipper are all on the same team.
Others who have taken Trump’s word that he is trying to “Make America Great Again” are now struggling to reconcile that goal with the steps his administration has so far taken such as firing the inspectors general of US government agencies, gutting federal law enforcement, attacking America’s closest allies while coddling our adversaries, driving America’s most effective (and otherwise employable) federal officials from the government, undermining our government’s consumer protection functions, and attacking our protective systems of co-equal branches of government in the name of virtually unlimited executive power. Donald Trump has been given a strong electoral mandate but it’s not entirely clear to most people how dismantling key aspects of our governmental system and brazenly violating our laws will make America and Americans stronger.
This is made all the more complicated because most Americans don’t really know how our government works or how its actions benefit them. In higher trust environments, like many but not all people in our country used to have, this is less of an issue. In low trust environments like America today, where politicians and extremists on the left and right have been calling government the problem for decades, where extremist perspectives have been exponentially amplified by toxic and dehumanizing social media incentives, and where we’ve given up on teaching civics or instilling any meaningful collective narratives, the lack of informed self-awareness by most Americans is cataclysmic. Most Americans have no idea, for example, what inspectors general do in US government agencies, why we’ve not had any world wars over the last eight decades, why our constitution is enforced more meaningfully than the superbly written constitutions of lawless countries, or even why the water we drink is, by and large with some very notable recent exceptions, safe. These things just happen.
Many Americans have been trained by cynical elected officials and self-interested influencers to believe that taxation is a form of organized theft by the government and government officials are, by and large, freeloading parasites. They don’t associate the FDA with safe drugs, the Fed with limiting inflation, USAID for promoting our interests abroad, or US government agencies with doing much of anything. Most people have no sense that our governmental system was set up to solve the problem of succession that has been the Achilles’ heel of most societies over time. Given all of that, why would anyone care about giving an executive too much power or about losing something they never valued in the first place?
In fairness, two of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, took extraordinary measures to help save our nation in times of peril. In both cases, they articulated what they were trying to achieve and why those measures were necessary. Today, we hold them in highest regard because their courage and leadership saved the nation (Lincoln) and world (FDR). But even that doesn’t mean we should cede our constitutional system willy-nilly. That’s why evaluating the administration’s intent is so important.
Rather than evaluate the Trump administration (or, frankly, anyone) by what they say they are doing, I believe it’s better to see what story the actions they are actually taking is telling.
When I do that in today’s context, I do not see the new administration working to make America as a nation and all Americans greater in ways that I recognize (if Kayleigh McEnany is correct that while “President Trump is playing four-dimensional chess, you all are playing checkers,” that might explain my lack of vision). If the administration were seeking to strengthen America, I would imagine it doing things like:
- Countering our adversaries, particularly China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, more aggressively than our friends, allies, and partners;
- Passing comprehensive immigration reform that de-incentivizes illegal migration, enhances legal migration, including for the most talented people in the world;
- Working to strengthen the coalition of the US, Canada, and Mexico in ways that maximally leverage American innovation, Canadian resources, and Mexican labor to become a comprehensive counterweight to Chinese manufacturing;
- Measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of all government activities and working to make America’s government as lean and efficient as possible;
- Striving to keep America’s most talented officials working for our government and recruit America’s best and brightest to government service;
- Strengthening structures for weeding out any fraud or abuse in US government agencies;
- Working to reduce America’s debt burden;
- Investing in urban development and quality local policing to foster healthy communities and safe streets; and
- Working to ensure the unique talents of all Americans can be realized in ways that help themselves individually and our nation collectively.
This is just a representative list, and a make America great agenda might not include all of them, but I believe we’d be able to see this kind of through-line if making America great was their predominant goal. When I line up all the actions take to date, however, I don’t see that. That does not mean I don’t believe the Trump administration taking some positive steps or reigning in some clear excesses of the past administration. I do. That’s just not the central armature.
The story that I see when I look at the totality of the available evidence to date is of a small group of people consolidating power and seeking to rapidly undermine present and future opposition to that power.
By uniformly pardoning all the January 6 insurrectionists, including those who had attacked police, and rebranding January 6 as a “day of love,” the administration is making a very clear statement that political violence in support of Donald Trump will not only be tolerated in America, but actively encouraged.
By issuing an executive order saving TikTok, the administration made clear it felt no obligation to implement a law passed by both houses of congress, signed by the president, and affirmed by the Supreme Court. If this single US law could be invalidated by executive fiat, so could every other law.
By firing the agency inspectors general and gutting the US consumer protection and financial regulatory agencies, the administration was making clear that regular Americans do not merit the protections past generations have fought for since the progressive era.
By eliminating the systems trying to protect consumers from crypto scams just when the $Trump coin, issued a few days before the inauguration, was stealing billions of dollars of wealth from unsuspecting Trump supporters in a Madoff-level pyramid scheme, and by establishing a US sovereign wealth fund that will almost certainly be similarly used to inflate the value of assets that smart insiders will dump at highs and leave unsuspecting suckers retaining at lows, the administration appears to be inviting a model of state capture by private interests that we’ve previously seen in countries like Russia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and South Africa. It seems increasingly likely that America’s generational wealth will be looted in front of our eyes and most Americans will be left with the bill of crushing debt, reduced social-services, and zombie-like hellhole cities even worse than what San Francisco has become (under catastrophically awful Democratic leadership).
By demoting the US congress into a cosplaying subsidiary of the executive branch, the administration and its Vichy Republican congressional enablers are subverting the intent of the founding fathers.
By aggressively going after US media outlets and forcing weak-kneed US business leaders from Mark Zuckerberg to Bob Eiger to, in Superman terms, “kneel before Zod,” the administration has made clear that no level of meaningful opposition will be tolerated.
So far, opposition to all of this has been muted.
With America’s congress so far rendered irrelevant, many people are hoping our federal courts can play a role. This seems a possibility but not a probability. While federal judges have put stays on the implementation of a number of executive orders, it’s not clear the extent to which these orders are currently being enforced and will be enforced in the future. The Republicans keep quoting former president Andrew Jackson, also a disrupter. After receiving word that the then US Chief Justice had issued a decision contravening Jackson’s plans, Jackson is alleged to have said: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
Will America’s highly politicized and already deeply compromised Supreme Court stand up for the constitution when it has already afforded US presidents almost unlimited license to break the law? I hope so but doubt it.
Few Americans with the opportunities to do so are speaking up because they fear the potential costs of raising their heads above the parapet. From a narrow perspective, they are not wrong. It’s entirely reasonable to believe that cultural leaders who aggressively oppose Trump will be attacked and neutralized and that any business leaders who do so will see their access and resources stripped. Taylor Swift’s treatment at the Super Bowl may have been a first indication of where things are heading.
People of all stripes who play ball, today’s Herbert Von Karajans, Alfred Hugenbergs, Leni Riefenstahls, and Yevgeny Prigozhins, will see their fortunes rise (and, as with Hugenberg and Prigozhin, sometimes rapidly fall).
Right now, the biggest Trump riser is, of course, our Dear Leader.
If a Chinese state-owned enterprise were to buy the state broadcaster of Zimbabwe for far more than its market value, then take control of the company’s editorial process to highlight its own voice, then do a deal with an aspiring Zimbabwean dictator trading the use of this voice and platform to help bring the aspiring dictator to power for control over the country’s natural resources, we would rightly call foul. But that, essentially, is what Elon Musk has done to America.
In October 2022, Musk purchased Twitter for 44 billion dollars, an amount considered almost double the company’s market value at the time. He then had Twitter engineers manipulate Twitter’s algorithm to promote his voice over all others. With that following in place, he then essentially traded full support for Donald Trump’s candidacy — including by spending 290 million dollars in direct support of Trump’s campaign — for an implicit commitment from Trump to place Musk functionally in charge of a quasi-governmental initiative overseeing America’s regulatory state. Regardless of what any of us may believe about Musk’s technological and entrepreneurial prowess and America’s need for regulatory reform, it was hard to miss the essential point that Musk, a private citizen, was being given tremendous power over his own regulators and over our democracy.
US markets also recognized these implications, adding over half a trillion dollars to the market value of Tesla alone in the two months after Trump was re-elected. Musk’s personal wealth increased by an estimated 200 billion dollars during that same short period, a 700-fold return on his direct financial investment supporting Trump’s campaign. Now, Musk is denuding his potential US government regulators and ending pre-existing investigations into his companies.
The wealthiest man in the world, Musk is clearly not doing this for the money. So, what’s in it for Musk and for Trump?
Even though Musk is getting wealthier, he’s getting a lot more than money. Trump is making Musk one of the most powerful people in the world, with an almost unbridled ability to shape America and the world to his will. Whatever anyone may think of the Nazi salute Musk delivered at Trump’s inauguration, there can no doubt he is supporting the Nazi sympathizing party in Germany’s upcoming elections that is also pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, and overtly racist. Unless Trump can find a way to either run for a third term or, like Putin, secure a lackey like Dmitri Medvedev as a placeholder president, Musk will become America’s kingmaker after Trump becomes a lame duck in November 2026. Any Republican seeking the presidency will need to kiss Musk’s ring and make promises elevating his power. Ambitious people have been conspiring to become emperors for millennia. It’s not absurd to believe Musk is no different, including as he populates his palace with competing offspring and oversells the eternal opiate of (interplanetary, in this case) imperial conquests.
What’s in this for Trump? Musk played a central role in getting Trump where he is today. Musk is also disposing of Trump’s perceived enemies and decimating the capacities of America’s government in ways that would probably be impossible for any even modestly accountable government official. Musk is also Trump’s extreme extra-legal political enforcer who has promised to use his wealth to fund primaries against any Republican lawmakers who dare oppose Trump. That’s one of the reasons why so many Republican elected officials are taking actions they know to be unpatriotic, immoral, and dangerous such as confirming disloyal Americans for extremely sensitive national security positions.
We’ve seen this kind of state fusion before. We saw it in Nazi Germany and we see it today in Putin’s Russia and in China, where every important company ultimately serves the state. We’ve not seen this level of collusion in America since eras of machine and Gilded Age politics, when the federal government had only a fraction of its current power. Perhaps we saw it during World War II when America’s government and industry came together to achieve a national goal of great meaning and purpose around which the country was largely unified. I do not see any evidence of an equivalent national emergency or unified purpose today.
What appears to be happening is that a small group of people is consolidating and usurping national power and wealth to build an impregnable fortress to enshrine their vision of America — and of hierarchies within America — for decades to come. Those who play ball will have a chance at participating. Those who don’t, won’t.
This isn’t a new story. In fact, it’s a very old story our founding fathers knew all about. They drafted our constitution largely to avoid the monarchial over-centralization of power they believed violated their inalienable rights (even while many of them knowingly disenfranchised large groups of people and shamefully exploited and expropriated slaves and native populations).
Because this expression of democracy poses an inherent threat to autocratic systems, it seems extremely likely the Trump community will continue attacking our electoral processes to ensure future elections will not meaningfully alter power realities on the ground. If these efforts are successful, we will still have elections but, like Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the outcomes will be largely predetermined. Alternately, like Turkey, they will be so heavily manipulated as to make meaningful change all but impossible. I will not be at all surprised if we see meaningful levels of political violence and intimidation in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections. Opposition figures may not necessarily be hurled from balconies like in Russia, but the January 6 insurrectionists and their ilk have already been given the green light to take violent action. If the election is tight, expect polling sites in key districts to be attacked. Expect the administration’s leadership to give these attackers a wide berth.
When the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire in 27 BC, nothing changed for most people. The buildings looked the same. The people of Rome ate the same food and wore the same clothes, but they had lost their Republic and would never get it back. As Anne Applebaum, Masha Gessen, and Timothy Snyder so clearly lay out, we’ve seen this story before in authoritarian takeovers of democratic societies. “Of course it’s a coup” Snyder writes, “miss the obvious, lose your republic.” If General Zod was flying down through the roof of the burning White House, we’d be able to see things more clearly.
If you’ve read this far and I’ve depressed you, let me remind you that I am an incurable optimist by nature. If you’ve read my books and other writings or listened to my podcast interviews with Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and others, you already know this to be true. I’m the founder of the global interdependence movement OneShared.World, an essential impossible cause if ever there was one. If my Oxford history Ph.D. taught me anything, it’s that history has ups and downs, twists and turns, and that all of us must keep working toward a better tomorrow. I recognize that there are people on all sides of our various communities, political and otherwise, who share these aspirations. I recognize that America has some very real problems that some people in the Trump administration are working in good faith to address. I certainly do not claim any type of monopoly on truth.
But that is the essential point.
The reason we have democracies in the first place is because none of us has a monopoly on the truth. The reason America’s founding fathers created our system of checks and balances and why subsequent generations have expanded our democratic electorate is so that the process itself would require us to find common ground. I would oppose the imposition of any autocracy in the United States, whether it came from left, right, or center.
That’s why I believe Democrats and Republicans alike must work together to save our system of governance. If we don’t have another meaningful election, that may not matter for a while, but eventually it will. An American autocracy would eventually lead to one or another bad outcome. It could be the breakup of our nation. If another party should assume power and remake our system using unbridled executive power in the same way as is happening today, I have no doubt mass violence will ensue. Autocracy will only lead to dead bodies in our streets, revolution-inspiring inequality, the massive waste of our human capital, the decimation of our national sense of purpose, and the destruction of the great American experiment in self-rule. I, for one, refuse to accept these as our inevitable future.
None of us can turn this ship alone, but, together and working across our differences, we have the potential to save our democracy.
We (meaning we Americans) need to find four Republican senators willing to come together to form a unified Save American Democracy Bloc. Articulating a set of core principles they will apply when reviewing all legislation to assess whether the actions proposed or nominees seeking confirmation support and defend the principles of our constitution and democracy.
Democrats need to focus energies on starting the 2026 campaigns right away, do everything possible to plan for and counter the inevitable future attacks on the integrity of our elections, and identifying unofficial “shadow secretaries” for each government agency who can become primary points of contact for speaking to the American public and media, explaining what’s going wrong and how they would propose to do it better.
Everyone needs to keep ourselves from tuning out because we feel exhausted and overwhelmed. We need to keep speaking up, even when there are costs. It’s easy to spot the “kneel before Zod” people among us, but harder to identify those who turn their moral dials by 20 degrees instead of 180.
I, for example, have been associated with the Aspen Institute for many years. The former CEO, Walter Isaacson, trained us all in the “moral compass” of leadership. Walter is also Elon Musk’s biographer. If he’s said anything about Musk’s dangerous and destructive power grab now threatening America’s democracy, I’ve not seen it. I don’t mean to pick on poor Walter, whom I greatly admire, but if people like Walter are afraid to speak up, what can we expect of everyone else?
There’s no single action everyone can take that will be determinative, but everyone has to figure out for themselves and in conjunction with their families and communities what course they believe makes most sense for them. It might involve delivering cookies with loving and encouraging notes to any friends you may have who are government or elected officials, federal judges, or election workers. It might include volunteering or providing financial support to assist some of the most vulnerable people in our country and world who are having essential a life-saving support from food aid to HIV medications, cut off, or it might involve joining protests in front of government buildings. It might involve demanding courage, even risky courage, of ourselves and those around us. Everyone needs to decide what to do but everyone should do something. The one thing we can’t be is complacent.
Someday future generations will ask what we did to save our democracy in our time of crisis. Now is the time to make our future selves proud.
We are not fighting for any one truth or any one philosophy, but for our government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” a government that past generations fought and died for in Yorktown and Gettysburg and on Omaha Beach, that will empower us and generations to come to build an even better future for everyone.
Brilliant Jamie well done
Tony