What He’s Taken From Us; And Hopes To Give Back August 4, 2022August 3, 2022 PART I: What Trump Has Taken From Us He has made civic involvement a life-threatening proposition. By Tom Nichols . . . I’ve spent most of my career studying authoritarian governments, and I’ve spent a lot of time in some repressive places, from Greece under a military junta as a boy to the Soviet Union as an adult. I always felt, on returning to the United States, that I had returned to a fortress of democratic stability and civic cooperation. I no longer feel that way. . . . Our elections work because they are run by ordinary citizens at the state and local level who either were elected or volunteered to help administer the vote as a matter of civic duty. This is a wondrous thing: community volunteers overseeing the vote and counting the results. I love voting in person for just this reason; having seen people in other nations too terrified even to talk about politics, it always filled me with quiet joy to have my fellow townspeople hand me a ballot and protect my privacy while I voted. Trump and his people, however, have made it clear . . . they will hurt anyone who gets in their way. Their goal is to make public service a hazardous undertaking, to create an environment in which people working on elections—their fellow American citizens—fear for their lives if they don’t cough up the results they want. . . . Worth reading in full. PART II – What He Hopes To Give Back: A radical plan for Trump’s second term Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios. . . . . . . The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition. Even more important to read or skim in full. Should he run and win, we will have a whole new form of government. And unlike Windows 11, you won’t be able to switch back if you don’t like it. Which is one more reason to make every effort to keep control of Congress, win Secretary of State races — and more — 96 days from now. Have you joined your local chapter of the League of Women Voters? Joined Field Team 6? Joined Vote Forward? Done all you can to fund the organizing effort that is our best chance of saving democracy and moving the nation forward? BONUS Federsmith has dropped four new tracks. Are you ready to dance?