The Family Cookbook

Sometime around the turn of the millennium my mother decided that what this family really needed was a cookbook, a collection of recipes from all across the family, and that she was the person to make this happen.

It turned out she was right about that.

In that pre-social-media age she sent out emails and made phone calls and in the end she collected a fair number of recipes including more than a few from her own parents, who had recently passed away. That might have been part of it, now that I think of it – a desire to see those old favorites preserved and passed down. My mother was a storyteller and she put little introductions in front of most of the recipes sharing some of those stories and had a forward to talk about the project, and at some point we all got a small package with a 3-ring binder full of family favorites.

It proved to be very useful, in the end. Not only was it a nice way to honor the various family members who contributed, but we’ve been making things out of that cookbook for nearly a quarter century now.

Three cheers for Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple, without which no holiday meal is complete!

But that was a surprisingly long time ago, and some of the people who contributed to that cookbook are no longer here and some other people in the family who are routinely cooking meals for themselves and others these days weren’t even born yet, so last Christmas my cousin Chris and I decided that what this family really needed was a Revised & Expanded Second Edition of the family cookbook and that we were the people to make this happen.

We were right about that too. I tell you, this family has some pretty good fortune-telling skills. It’s a shame we don’t play the lottery more often.

Chris and I put out a call to all of the various branches of the family early this year – or at least as many as we could. There were some we inadvertently missed and not everyone was interested, but over the next few months recipes came pouring in from all over the US – we’re a pretty spread out bunch these days, especially when you expand out to include all of the various in-laws who have made our lives richer over the years.

We are legion.

Chris is a graphic designer by trade so he handled all of the layout and artwork for the book. I’m a word guy who actually enjoys copy-editing, so a fair amount of that ended up as mine, and I ended up in charge of soliciting and receiving recipes though in the end both of us did that anyway. Chris also understands how Google Docs work so all I had to do was send him everything I received and then log in and make edits.

I found a printer here in Our Little Town who would put it all together for a reasonable sum, and they did a very nice job of it. It’s nearly two hundred pages long, this revised edition, and nicely coil-bound. I gave them the pdf that Chris finalized and then picked up the completed cookbooks a couple of weeks ago.

The printers also advised me to get it copyrighted, to avoid some copyright troll with a bot scraping Google Docs and publishing it as their own. That process turned out to be fairly simple, so now all three of us – me, Chris, and my mom – are listed as the copyright holders for the book. Family can share it, of course. But no bots.

There are two post offices here in Our Little Town – a big one out in the mall sprawl land, and a much smaller one downtown that’s only open around lunchtime. Not many people even know it exists, which is why I went there to mail them all off. It’s much nicer when you’re not holding anyone up and you can stand there and have a conversation with the postal worker who’s cranking out the mailing labels, one at a time.

They started to land last week and so far people seem to like them. This makes me happy.

This is the picture Chris chose for the cover. That’s my grandmother – my mom’s mother – and my dad in the little yard behind my grandparents’ house. The white building in the background was an octagonal gazebo that my grandfather used as a tool shed. It’s Labor Day, 1967, and the family has gathered to celebrate and eat, there being precious little distance between those two activities as far as my family is concerned. I’m somewhere running around the yard, a toddler dressed in something adorable no doubt. Neither Chris nor any of our siblings have been born yet, but my second cousins are both there. I can tell that my dad made the hamburgers because he firmly believed that hamburgers should be roughly spherical objects and dismissed anything more disc-like as “hockey pucks.”

I’m older now than my grandmother was in that photo. So is Chris. Time flies.

I love that they look happy. I love that we can continue this tradition of sharing good food with good people.

News and Updates

1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is wasting no time in assembling the Worst Cabinet Ever – a motley collection of suck-ups, Fascists, pedophiles, white supremacists, delusionals, and blistering incompetents chosen solely for their sycophantic loyalty and guaranteed to make any situation worse – and it’s going to be a very, very long four years for anyone with more than six working brain cells. But even in the midst of collapse, life goes on. And sometimes you just have to look away from the horror show and focus on other things.

2. We got to celebrate Lauren’s birthday last week – rather later than her actual birthday, but there is never a bad time for a birthday celebration, really. We had a lovely dinner and lively conversation and then stopped over at Max’s house to say hello to David S. Pumpkin, and there are good things in the world, yes there are.

3. I have spent most of this week grading exams and discussion posts because last week was kind of a lost cause for focusing on anything other than the current crisis and students really don’t need that kind of thing reflected in their exams. I’m almost done now – I just have to get my last batch of exams scanned and sent off to all of the various places that my US1 class beams out to. They did pretty well, and that’s always a nice thing to see.

4. Facebook has decided I’m boring and honestly kudos to them for figuring that out but I have to say that I don’t think I’m boring in precisely the way that Facebook seems to believe. For much of the last month it has been showing me vast amounts of content from a site called “Death Stairs,” which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin – apparently there are people who go out and photograph unsafe staircases and post them online with descriptions ranging from prosaic (“You could fix this with a couple of two-by-fours and a good set of pliers, you know…”) to purple (“…and then the Angel of Death shown ‘round about me …”) and then other people comment underneath. These posts compete for space with various reels showing people doing household projects in new and presumably innovative ways, which is a genre that might as well be in Sanskrit for all I can make sense of it. I find it kind of compelling that I have so soundly defeated the algorithm’s attempts to understand anything at all about me. Some AI overlords these guys are.

5. Kim and I have been discussing getting a new TV for a while now, or rather Kim has been doing that and I’ve mostly been nodding approvingly since I don’t watch enough television to have it matter one way or the other and she might as well get one she likes. The one we have is getting antiquated – they do that faster than they used to do now that they’re essentially computers – and with the Grand Tariff And Trade War in the offing we figured it was a good time to take care of such a purchase. They’re even on sale at Costco now, right in time for the holidays, so we went down and picked the smallest one they had and it seemed like a good fit until I tried to get it into the van, which should have been my first warning. Fortunately, three-dimensional chess with objects being stuffed into vehicles is one of my hidden talents and we did get it home, where we discovered that we’d been Warehoused. Things don’t seem big in a warehouse. You think the thing you’re buying is a perfectly reasonable size. Then you get it home where the ceilings are a normal height and realize that no, whatever is the proper word for the size of this thing it isn’t “reasonable.” And then you feel really, really grateful that you didn’t succumb to temptation and get any of the larger sizes on offer. We haven’t had time to set it up so it’s just sitting in a box in our living room, slowly deforming the joists underneath and blocking the cat’s path up to the window. Perhaps we’ll get to it this weekend.

6. We’re also trying to get the new showerhead put in. The old one finally died of lime poisoning and old age so Kim found one she liked and put it mostly in before calling me up to finish the tall parts. This didn’t go well and a small plastic gasket – the sort of thing that probably cost them three cents to make – snapped in half. It turns out that this brand of shower heads doesn’t allow replacement parts to be sold by third parties such as your local hardware store. Also, their customer service center is only open during weekdays for forty-five minutes a day, and their website was designed by Neolithic goat herders who had heard of the idea of exchanging money for goods but wanted nothing to do with it. In the end I finally did speak with a customer representative who told me that the gasket was “not a replaceable part” so they were going to send me an entirely new showerhead. “You realize that this is not a sustainable business model,” I told her. “I know,” she said, “but it will be there in a few days.” It’s sitting in the dining room now, not all that far from the television, and someday we’ll get to that as well.

7. We are deep into this year’s rendition of Great British Bake Off and so far so good even if my personal favorite was just voted off. They’ve cut down the nonsense (so far no “tackos”) and focused more on actual baking, which is nice. And the contestants are the usual assortment of decent people who get along and try to help each other. It’s nice to know that such a place exists.

8. It may actually be autumn now, halfway through November. I finally started wearing long sleeve shirts anyway, though the rabbits are still outside since we have not really had any extended freezes that would force us to bring them in. Honestly if we’d covered the garden for those two nights in early October we’d probably still be harvesting tomatoes and peppers.

9. Over the last two weeks of my classes I have gotten to tell three of my all-time favorite history stories – all of which have, at one time or another, been featured here in this space – and they never get old.

A Note for the Future

In the end they didn’t even need to stage a coup. The voters of the United States simply handed power back to a twice-impeached convicted felon running on a platform of open fascism, a man who tried to overthrow the government and who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2019. An adjudicated rapist, self-declared sexual predator, and serial adulterer who publicly lusted after his own daughter and buried his ex-wife on a golf course. On and on.

If this election proved anything it is that the American public would rather elect a fascist than a woman. That 71 million Americans do not regard committing rape as a disqualifier. That 71 million Americans would gladly trade the rights of their fellow citizens for the illusion of a future with cheaper eggs.

How cheaply my fellow Americans sell their rights and freedoms.

We had four years of conclusive evidence that the man was unfit for office, that he was a small, petty little grifter incapable of rising to any occasion larger than his own personal greed, and yet here we are.

You will notice that the American left (as much as the US has anything even remotely like a left) is not throwing a toddler-level tantrum over this – not claiming that it was somehow rigged, not threatening violence over the results, not filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits alleging hallucinatory conspiracy theories and fleecing donors to fund it all. Adults understand that sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to.

We just understand, in a way that the rest of the country hasn’t figured out quite yet, that this isn’t going to go well for anyone, not just us.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and everything the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight, and yet in January he will be installed into power. He has no grasp of law, Constitutions, morals, or anything other than raw power and insatiable greed.

Look for reprisals against “the enemy within.” Look for pogroms against anyone not Just Like Him. Look for the darkness spreading out like a cancer from his supporters.

We’ve seen this movie. It didn’t end well in Germany in the 1930s and it won’t end well here.

So what do patriotic Americans do now?

We resist.

We stand for the things that make this country better, not worse.

We do whatever we have to do to keep fascism at bay.

And in the end we will see if the American republic still stands in January 2029 or not.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

An Election and a Warning

Sometime Tuesday night, probably around 9pm Eastern Time, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will declare victory in the presidential election.

He will do so in the same rambling, semi-coherent monotone he has used for the last few years as his mental condition has deteriorated into an angry and paranoid dementia, smug with the reassurance of a man who feels the world owes him whatever he wants whenever he wants and who has never once in his life faced any consequences for his actions.

He will do so regardless of the actual vote totals. He will likely do so more strenuously if the results show him losing, in fact. It’s not about reality. It’s about creating a pretext for action.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not been trying to win a majority of the votes, after all. He has tried twice before and been overwhelmingly rejected both times, though once – thanks to the partisan gerrymandering of the Electoral College – he slithered into power anyway. He knows he cannot win the majority of the votes of Americans. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes, just as he has always done. It’s been eight years with this sad clown. Nobody has changed their minds about him in his favor. He has made no effort to broaden his base of supporters or reach out beyond the hardcore MAGA cult. His entire campaign has instead been a setup, laying the groundwork for the next stage of the ongoing right-wing coup against the United States.

When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump makes his declaration, the extremist right-wing machinery that surrounds him and props him up like the hollow man he is will shift into high gear and launch its all-out war on the electoral process. There will be lawsuits. There will be threats. There will be hoarsely shouted assertions that the only acceptable alternative is to install Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump into power because any result that doesn’t do that must by definition be fraudulent.

There will be blood.

Make no mistake, folks. The neofascist right has been gearing up for this moment for years, ever since they were forced to back down in January 2021. They recognize no laws but their own privilege. They recognize no morals but their own desires. They think they can shoot their way to power. It has happened before, after all, in other places and other times, and the United States is not immune to history. The FBI and US intelligence agencies have reported that the chatter in right-wing circles online almost exactly mirrors what it was in early January 2021 when the neofascists nearly overthrew the government and installed their dictator into office against the will of the American people. The leaders and masters of that insurrection have walked free so far, and an insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal.

They have the support of millions of GOP voters who think they’re not neofascists but are deluding themselves - a PRRI survey conducted in the last couple of weeks noted that 24% of Republican voters think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the actual outcome of the election. That’s what dictators do. That’s what Fascists do. That’s what 24% of Republicans think is appropriate in the United States.

One out of four, more or less.

The neofascists do not control the levers of power at the moment, however. They do not control the military. They do not control the security forces. And most Americans want to see this country continue the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next, a tradition that was brutally shattered in January 2021. The flip side of that PRRI poll, after all, is that three out of four Republicans – along with near unanimous majorities of Democrats and Independents – reject the idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the election results, as all Americans should do. Unless all of that changes the neofascists cannot win, but they can do damage.

Americans must be prepared to face this onslaught and see it defeated. Americans must be prepared to block those who would destroy the republic and replace it with dictatorship.

Americans must be ready.

We will say to the neofascists, we outnumber you. We will say to them, we will see you fail. We will say to them, we will see you forgotten, your plans turned to dust, your names turned to ashes, your memory erased.

Watch your back, my fellow Americans. Tomorrow is not the end of this contest, but simply the beginning of the next phase.

Birthday Wishes

There aren’t many milestones in American culture once you get past the age of 21.

There’s a few, of course. You can rent a car at 25. You can also run for the House of Representatives. You have to be 30 to be a Senator, and 35 to be president, if that’s something you think is interesting. You start to qualify for senior discounts at 50, and sometime after 60 you get to retire though they keep pushing that date back and eventually it won’t happen at all so be quick about it.

But there’s a long gap after 21 and to be honest not many of those other things are all that exciting to most people. Either way there are no milestones associated with turning 22. It’s one of those years where it’s kind of more of the same only older.

Those birthdays are worth celebrating as well, though.

It is a lovely thing to have made it one more trip around the sun, a thing guaranteed to nobody so it should be celebrated when it happens after all. You learn new things, experience new things, and grow in new directions. Those trips have added up over the years, and it’s always a strange thought to realize this vibrant, interesting adult isn’t a child anymore because it all happened so quickly. From one year to the next it doesn’t seem like anything changes but then you look at the cumulative effect and suddenly things really are different and you’re not sure how .

That’s why I write things down.

We’re not going to see Lauren tonight – it’s Halloween on a big college campus and there are more than enough other things going on to keep her occupied – but we’ll get together next week to celebrate. Holidays happen when you have time, and the important thing is to celebrate them together. Eventually she will hare off into her own life far from here and these opportunities will grow few and far between so we’re going to enjoy them while we have them.

And we will celebrate, because Lauren is worth celebrating.

Happy birthday, Lauren.

I’m proud of you.

The Reviews are In!

You know what I think of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for him since he first metastasized across the American body politic in 2015. But what do the people who know him best think? The people who have worked in his administration? Who are members of his own party? Who support conservative causes in general? Perhaps even part of his family?

Let’s find out, shall we?

--

General James Mattis (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Defense

Trump's use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.

General John Kelly (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Chief of Staff

He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world, and by power I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.

He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.

General Mark Milley (US Army, ret), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Trump is a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America - and we're willing to die to protect it.

A fascist to the core.

Fiona Hill, former advisor on Europe and Russia

He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president. And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism.

Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense

I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet.

Trump is not fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor

In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security. His short attention span (except on matters of personal advantage) renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.

Mike Pence, former Vice President

I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.

It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Communications Director

He is wholly unfit to be in office.

Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of State

There were multiple occasions where, in my view, the actions the president wanted to take were not consistent with our national security objectives. ... His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.

Miles Taylor, former official in the Department of Homeland Security

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.

Dick Cheney, former vice president for George W. Bush

In our nation’s 246-year- history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power, after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.

Representative John Boehner (R-OH), former Speaker of the House

Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY)

The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), former Senate Majority Leader

Many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors. ... That’s different from what we saw. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff

I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee.

Anthony Scaramucci, former Director of Communication

Trump's going to make things rougher for people. He has already said he's going after his adversaries using the Department of Justice. When someone's telling you they're going to flex and be a dictator on day one and go after their adversaries, this is against the 200+ year experiment of America.

Open letter signed by 13 former Trump administration officials

Donald Trump's disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power. This is a man who threw his own Vice President – Mike Pence – at a violent mob in a desperate bid to hold on to power. When Donald Trump says he wants to be a "dictator" on "day one" and deploy the military against American citizens he deems “the enemy from within" - he means it.

Open letter signed by 233 mental health professionals

Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators. … To make matters worse, Trump appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up, including an MRI and neuropsychological testing. These symptoms include: a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait). We suspect the results of such an evaluation would be disqualifying.

Open letter signed by over 100 former national security officials (including ambassadors, admirals, generals, and civilian officials)

Mr. Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes. He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again. That alone proves Mr. Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

William T. Kelley, professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Donald Trump was the DUMBEST GODDAM student I EVER had.

The American Conservative Magazine

Trump has basically made himself into Putin’s prison bride.

Tara Setmayer, former Communications Director for Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)

He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.

J. Michael Luttig, conservative former US Circuit Court of Appeals judge

Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. They would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us

Mary Trump, niece and a trained mental health professional

I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.

Doing My Bit

I have done my bit for democracy.

I have cast my ballot in this most critical of elections – the most recent of them, anyway. It is easy to get jaded by all of the “most critical elections” that we’ve been having recently, but the sad fact is that whenever an outright Fascist has a chance to win it really is critical that he be destroyed at the ballot box so that we don’t need to do that in the inevitable violence that will result if he wins. Fascists do not tolerate dissent well, and they like the Big Shiny of jackbooted thugs enforcing their whims. We’ve seen this movie before. It didn’t end well. It needs to be cut off before it starts.

Do not be jaded, because it really is that important. Do not be discouraged by the prophets of doom who see no hope, because while there is life there is hope and if they want me they can goddamn well take me themselves because I’m not turning myself in. Do not be misled by the propagandists who tell you that your vote doesn’t matter, because they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from voting if that were true.

Do not go gently into the long dark night of Fascism, but rage against the dying of the light until the fading stops and the light returns.

I left work a bit early today, as it is a Friday and for long and frankly rather aggravating reasons that I will not go into here there are vanishingly few classes taught at Home Campus on Fridays and therefore equally few students who want to make appointments with their advisor on that day, and I headed over to City Hall. Here in Wisconsin we’ve been able to do early in-person voting since the beginning of the week and I have to say that this is an idea that has definitely found its audience.

I got there at 3:30 or so on a Friday afternoon, about an hour before the place closes, and there was quite a line in front of me. 

It took me over an hour to get to the voting machine.

It has to be said that the line moved pretty briskly. It wasn’t stagnant – it was just that long. If nothing else, this gives me some hope for the survival of American democracy.

They’ve redone the process since the last election where I voted early. You used to get a big paper ballot and you’d fill in the bubbles by hand with a marker and then you’d fold it three or four times to get it into the envelope and turn it back in to the clerk. Now you get a thin blank ballot – maybe 4 inches by 11 inches or so – and you take it to a touchscreen computer. You feed it into the slot, then vote on the computer and when you’re done it gives you a chance to say “Yes, that’s what I wanted to do” or “No, let me change that one” and then when you say you’re done it prints out the ballot with your choices on it. You fold that in half, stick it in the envelope, and then give it to the volunteers at the next table. You have to sign it in front of them, but then you can go.

They did give me the traditional sticker, which I appreciated.

We are facing a future where an outright Fascist, a 34-time convicted felon facing more than four dozen other criminal indictments, a self-declared sexual predator, a coddler of dictators and spiraling dementia patient whose previous term in office was marked by blistering incompetence, overt bigotry (not surprising, given the endorsements he received from every major neo-Nazi and white supremacist group in America), a response to a global pandemic so deliberately botched that peer-reviewed scientific papers attribute the unnecessary deaths of over a quarter million Americans directly to his leadership, a recession that started even before that, an unprecedented two impeachments, and a treasonous insurrection, somehow has an even money chance to be reinstalled into power.

This cannot happen if the American republic is to survive.

I have done my bit.

If you value the republic, you will do the same.