Now Is Our Time

Courage in an age of cowardice

We are living in uniquely dangerous times, which is why we all need to start showing up in different ways from what we might be used to—ways which might be well outside of our comfort zones.

When I published my first book, “Too Much and Never Enough” back in July of 2020, I was in a very privileged position. Many people thanked me for standing up to Donald. Some thought I was brave. While I appreciated that, I also dispute it.

I am in this fight because it’s necessary. It has, from the beginning, seemed to be my responsibility. I felt it was an obligation because I was one of five people on the planet who could speak to the dangers of another Donald Trump term. It would have seemed cowardly for me not to accept that challenge. Not doing so would have been incomprehensible to me, so I did it happily.

It wasn’t always easy, but I considered it an honor—not an act of bravery. There are many brave people in the history of this country who suffered much and risked everything. I was acting from a place of comparative safety.

Now here we are, almost five years later, still in this fight because in the wake of the Big Lie in 2020 and the insurrection on January 6^th, we still didn't get the message. One of the reasons we’ve arrived at this treacherous point in our history is because it has been so difficult for many of us to comprehend what we're dealing with.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, I was asked a couple of questions repeatedly. One was: “How do we talk to people who are going to vote for Donald, especially for those who are voting for him for the second time?”

My answer then is the same as my answer now: Don’t. Do not waste your time. There are many other people we should be talking to. Many other people we can perhaps convince—if we get the message right.

The other question I was asked often was: What happens if Donald gets a second shot at the presidency?

To which I said—and I so wish I had been wrong: If Donald Trump gets back into office, it will be the end of the American experiment.

Of course, it took over four years to find out that that may indeed be the case.

It can be demoralizing to be in the position we're in—it can be extraordinarily demoralizing to know we were right, that we are on the right side of everything, and yet it still doesn't seem to matter.

Seventy-four million people voted for this. For decades now, people on the left have been making an assumption about voters on the right—that for reasons we can’t fathom they continue to vote against their self-interests, but I think it’s more accurate to say that we often mistake what people's self-interests actually are.

Because sometimes the self-interests of other people are incomprehensible to us—we find them unspeakable. We mistakenly believe that that their self-interests align with our own. That, for example, like us, they want their children to do better than they did; that they want health care and child care and clean air and water.

And perhaps they do want those things, but they want other things more. They want white people to have more rights than minorities; they want to marginalize further those who are already marginalized; they don’t want to do better than such people, they simply want those people to do worse. They like it when the people in power—those they support, those who represent them and them alone—are cruel to the most vulnerable among us.

Those are the self-interests of way too many Americans. We don't want to face that reality because it is a very difficult thing to face.

In 2016, as Donald’s niece I took the results of the 2016 election very personally as . First of all, it felt like 62 million people voted to turn this country into some version of my deeply dysfunctional and awful family; to give the worst possible person the most power, the most advantages, the most support, and allow him to run roughshod over much worthier people.

But taking these things personally is not tenable in the long-run, so I don’t make that mistake anymore.

What I take personally now as an American is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party—the party of fascism—are hellbent on taking away something that is extraordinarily precious to me and to everybody reading this: our democracy—our imperfect, striving-to-be-more-perfect democracy.

But we haven’t done enough to protect it, because we never understood what we needed to do to make it better.

We are at something of a crossroads here and we have some choices to make. The first thing we need to do is look ourselves straight in the eyes and ask where we are, who we are, and what we're facing.

I always believe there's hope. I wouldn't continue doing the work I do if I didn't. None of us would keep showing up and staying informed if we didn’t have hope. But we can't lie to ourselves. These are, as I said, treacherous times, certainly the most dangerous we've faced in my lifetime. I believed this was true in 2020—it is infinitely more true now. The choice is fascism or democracy. Right now, the people in power are the people who want fascism. We do ourselves no favors if we don't name it.

What does that mean?

Democrats are out of power. Yes. That doesn't mean we can't work around the edges. That doesn't mean we can't plan ahead.

The first thing we need to do, therefore, is oppose Republicans every step of the way. And that means showing up—showing up consistently, showing up constantly to throw sand in the gears, to shout them down, to make our voices heard.

We cannot afford to continue to squander the few opportunities given to us and many Democrats in office to fail to understand that as if what is at stake weren’t so painfully clear.

A few weeks ago, Senator Cory Booker spent over 25 hours standing up in the well of the Senate to make the case that democracy is under threat. It was extraordinarily well done and it was an important demonstration of how to slow the destruction down while calling it out.

But as soon as I realized that there was not a line of Democrats waiting to take Booker’s place, that told me something about how our party leaders misunderstand this moment. Not only do we need to be honest about what is happening with the fascist Republican Party, we need to be honest about the ways in which the Democrats are falling short.

I'm not talking about performing an autopsy of the 2024 election. Perhaps someday we’ll have that luxury, but now is not the time. We need to figure out how we can be better, how we can be stronger, so that when we are in the position to do so, we can move from opposing the fascists to stopping them.

Because if we can stop them—then and only then we can build. And notice: I didn’t say rebuild. We need to start from scratch. And that's another thing we can no longer delude ourselves about.

Our institutions are failing us and one of the reasons that's the case is because the Democratic Party has convinced itself for far too long that our institutions did not need to be strengthened, they did not need to be protected.

We failed to recognize what was coming, and we failed to create a counterbalance to the right's onslaughts that have been coming at us from every direction because of their vast media infrastructure, their phalanx of think tanks, their infiltration of higher education over the last 40 years.

I see this when Democrats continue to choose collegiality over fighting for the American people, when they ignore that their colleagues in the Senate are trying to take so much away from us including our ideas about who we are as a people.

And who are we as a people?

Well, some of us are so disconnected, so disenchanted, so disinterested that we don't even vote at all. And the non-voter is the largest voting bloc in this country: 80 million people just couldn't be bothered to show up, because they didn’t care or didn't understand or didn’t feel spoken to.

Then there are the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024—many of them for the second or third time. I’m skeptical that none of them knew what they were voting for and I suspect a significant number of them got exactly what they wanted.

But does this mean there is nobody in that group who can be reached? No.

I don’t like appealing to people's self-interest. It makes me uncomfortable. And I don't believe that that's the way it should be.

We have to work with what we have, however, and there are plenty of people who voted for Donald on 2024 who are in the "finding out" phase of having “fucked around.”

They’re beginning to understand that if you cast a vote for somebody for a specific reason and you're willing to overlook the racism, the misogyny, the anti-immigrant hatred, the Islamophobia, the promises—the explicit promises—that that person is going to destroy the most valuable things about this country it may not work out well. On a more practical level, if you’re willing to overlook the track record of failure, the lies, the destruction simply because inflation was slightly higher than normal and eggs were slightly more expensive at the end of Biden’s term, you may find out that there are more important things and being a supporter of Donald Trump will not make you immune to the devastation he’s spreading.

Let’s appeal to the self-interest of those people because it’s effective and we have a very easy case to make.

It’s an easy case because the economy matters more than anything else to most people and there are massive amounts of indisputable data showing that Donald and his policies have been utterly disastrous for the economy—both here and globally.

But the Republicans are giving us another advantage as well.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but it turns out that a lot of Americans—even Republicans—really do care about the rule of law.

When they're worried that the right to due process is restricted to one class of people, they understand that even if they don’t care that an undocumented worker is illegally detained, disappeared, and incarcerated in a foreign gulag, they do understand that denying due process to one person, even somebody who’s not an American citizen, means that they themselves may no longer have due process.

We need to make that case too.

Then what about us—the people who did show up, those of us who continue to show up and continue to make it as clear as possible that everything is at stake?

We all have power. We are all on the right side of history. We are angry, and we have every right to be. And our anger is righteous.

If we focus our anger, if we come together and understand that any differences we have are irrelevant compared to what we are fighting for we can unite effectively to win that fight.

We live in harrowing times. We need things that for many of us will take the kind of courage and bravery we never imagined we’d need to summon.

But I absolutely believe that this is a fight we can win. This is a fight we will win because we, together, have the courage that is required.

Let’s recognize who the enemy is, let’s call it what it is, and let’s understand that the only way forward—the only way through—is to be brave in ways we never thought we would have to be.