Dear Europe

Hold strong against this madness

Dear Europe,

I reject everything that Donald Trump is doing.

And there are millions of Americans who feel the same way. But we understand your fear and frustration at what looks like our acceptance or complacence, even our complicity, in our own undoing and the undoing of the world.

So I’m writing this in the hopes that it will reach our friends in the greatest alliance the world has ever known, one that is on the verge of collapse at this moment, to both acknowledge what Trump is doing to America and the world and to share what I believe we can do about it.

To be clear, we see that he is destroying our country and everything that we have fought for and built at home and around the world. If he is left unchecked, we will no longer exist as a democracy, we may well descend into civil war, and the world at large will have lost an imperfect but powerful partner in the struggle against barbarism. In its place will be an America that attempts to lead the world into a new era of barbarism. “Might makes right,” and not the rule of law or self-government, will be the defining feature of our country and our contribution to the world. And it will be a darker, deadlier place for it.

He has already illegally used our military to murder civilians in the waters of the Caribbean, to kidnap a foreign head of state, to seize the natural resources of that country and use the proceeds of their sale to set up a slush fund independent of Congress, held in yet another foreign country. He has threatened to seize, annex or invade sovereign states and autonomous territories. He has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children around the world by illegally stopping foreign aid without the consent of the American people through their elected representatives. He has unconstitutionally and without the consent of Congress levied tariffs against our friends and allies, threatened to withdraw from treaty obligations including NATO and encouraged the mortal enemy of freedom and democracy in Europe, Vladimir Putin, in his war of conquest against Ukraine, a war that will be pursued against other European states before long.

He has used federal police to exert authoritarian control over U.S. cities and U.S. citizens, illegally detaining them, abusing them, killing them. He has deployed the Guard to states against the express wishes of their popularly elected governments. He has used the office of the president to enrich himself by more than a billion dollars, and that’s only in the first year of his second term with three more to go. He has undermined independent elections and laid the predicate for illegally intervening in future ones, both in his incitement of an insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021, and his publicly stated desire to have armed forces seize voting machines.

I write all this – a fraction of the total threat posed by Trump and his regime – to acknowledge the gravity of the situation from the perspective of an American and to make clear that we understand how bad this is and how much worse it is going to get unless something changes.

I also acknowledge that many of the traditional centers of independent political power in America have folded. Big law firms, Ivy League universities, social media platforms, broadcast news networks and media corporations. They’ve accommodated themselves to Trump’s power and left the rest of the country to fend for itself.

Best to see it clearly and for what it is so that we understand what it will take to overcome these challenges.

Everything hinges now on winning political power in November. A Democratic majority in Congress will be a check on his lawlessness and corruption and it will offer us the best chance of fair elections in 2028. If we fail to win these midterms, however, this descent into authoritarianism and, yes, fascism, will be almost unstoppable.

Winning will be especially challenging in the current circumstances because under Trump we are quickly sliding into something far less than democracy. Though Trump is deeply unpopular, and in any normal year that would mean deep losses for his party in Congress, he has been working to rig the elections in a number of ways to thwart the will of the American people. Please know that we see this and are responding aggressively.

When he ordered the Texas governor to redraw five Congressional districts in his favor, against the wishes of the people of Texas but with the aid of the Republicans in power, the governor and the people of California redrew five of their Congressional districts to favor Democrats. When he did the same thing in North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio, Democrats organized to match the threat by beginning to draw new Democratic districts in Virginia and Maryland.

As he threatens to seize voting machines, to do away with elections altogether, to exert authoritarian control in states and cities that peacefully contest his corrupt political grasp, we are organizing the candidates, voters and volunteers to win overwhelming victories in November, that no amount of lying and thieving can overturn.

For example, for the first time in Texas history, there is a Democrat running for every State House seat (150 of them), every State Senate seat (31) and every Congressional seat (38). This bodes well not only for the Democrats in these races, but for the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee who will benefit from this unprecedented level of organization and whose victory would mean that Trump would no longer have a majority in that chamber. Grassroots groups are registering voters throughout the state to ensure that, despite its earned reputation for voter suppression, we bring enough net new Democratic voters to the fight to take advantage of these historic opportunities.

And that’s just Texas.

Americans across the country are also channeling the anger and frustration that we feel into public demonstrations that are breaking through to our fellow citizens. In October, more than seven million of us marched in No Kings protests across the country. And on a daily basis, ordinary Americans are protesting on street corners, risking their lives to document ICE abuses, and organizing their friends and neighbors in big cities and rural counties alike. It is no coincidence that as we publicly share the truth of Trump’s massive failures – like kicking tens of millions off of public medical insurance to pay for tax massive breaks for the wealthiest Americans – his popularity declines and Republicans running for Congress see their hopes for winning in free and fair elections fade.

Our work is to ensure that when – not if – he tries to steal this November’s elections, that the dominance of our candidates, the overwhelming majority of voters casting ballots for Democrats, and the power of public sentiment against Trump will be so great that the institutions that still have ability to uphold the law, like the federal courts, will do so; and that if military service members are asked to defy the Constitution in service of one man’s pursuit of political power, that they will refuse any and all illegal orders.

We are going to do everything we can, with what we have, wherever we happen to be across this great country. Whatever it takes. We are not about to lose what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”

I would ask two things of our European friends.

First, do not give up on us. Many more Americans than you can imagine are fighting this corrupt administration, this would-be tyrant, with everything we have. It may not always make the headlines, or match the insanity of this administration, but we will not go quietly… in fact we will not go at all… into the dark night that Trump is preparing for us and the world. We are fighting to win power, to defeat him, and we won’t stop until we do. We will replace this nightmare with a government that lives up to the highest ideals and achievements of this country.

The odds may be tough, but we’ve been up against them before and have come through. We are the same people who won our independence from the most powerful empire on the planet; who defeated the armies of the Confederacy to end slavery; who landed on those beaches in Normandy to help defeat fascism and make freedom possible for so much of the world; who overcame the armed thugs of Jim Crow to more fully realize our foundational creed, that we are all created equal and shall be treated equally under the law.

Don’t bet against us.

Second, hold strong against this madness. You must understand that there is no amount of appeasement that will placate Trump. As the world learned at Munich in 1938, sacrificing territory, sacrificing the key principles of our societies and alliances, to purchase security in the short term will only embolden the aggressor at the cost of your security over the long term. It’s as true for Putin as it is for Trump. European leaders who justify their acquiescence by pleading pragmatism deny the unique power and responsibility the continent possesses to rally the world to something better.

As a German lawmaker told me last year, America once came to the rescue of Europe, to save it from dictatorship, authoritarianism, madness. Now it is your turn. By holding strong, by not submitting to this thuggery, you become a beacon of hope around the world, including here in America.