Trump is Following Putin’s “Dictator’s Checklist” and Tonight is the Next Step on the List

Control information. Intimidate opponents. Capture institutions. Rewrite reality. And the final box may be closer than Americans think...

Tonight at 9 p.m., Donald Trump will commandeer prime-time television for what he’s billing as a speech about “free and fair elections,” promising “really big news” and reportedly planning to unveil what his people describe as “newly declassified intelligence” about “foreign (Chinese Communist Party) interference” in the 2020 election.

Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion:

“We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”

He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!”

The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring.

Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.

Every day now brings another story like these, and every one of them gets reported as if it was just a new, fresh outrage, each completely disconnected from yesterday’s new, fresh outrage.

But these steps Trump and his lickspittles are taking aren’t even remotely random. They’re part of a classic dictator’s checklist, and we know exactly what the checklist looks like because Vladimir Putin already worked through it, step-by-step, between 2000 and 2012, converting a struggling democracy into the police state that Russia is today. And he wasn’t the first; this goes from the days of Machiavelli through 20th century Europe to here, now.

Putin’s first move was the media. In 2001, masked “tax police” raided NTV, Russia’s last independent television network, and handed it to a state-controlled company; within a few years every national network answered to the Kremlin.

Here, Trump began by suing the networks for “defamation” (just like Putin did). Next, the FCC became a weapon aimed at broadcasters, the president slanders reporters from news organizations he dislikes, and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon imposed press restrictions so severe that dozens of reporters turned in their credentials rather than sign away their independence, all while media consolidation shrinks the number of independent newsrooms every year. Trump’s loyal toady at the FCC is trying to blow up the 39% of ownership rule so a billionaire nepo-baby Trump ally can take over CNN along with CBS and dozens of other media outlets.

Putin’s second move was the oligarchs. In 2003 he arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, and the message was instantly understood: wealth in Russia would henceforth serve the Kremlin or be confiscated by it. Loyal oligarchs got massively richer as I pointed out last Friday; disloyal ones got prison or exile. Here it’s more subtle, but the message is the same.

Senate and House Democrats are now formally investigating whether Trump’s pardons operate as a pay-to-play scheme, and the roster of the pardoned reads like a donor list: Forbes documented a $3.5 million contribution to Trump’s super PAC followed by a pardon for the donor’s father, and a pardon for Binance’s founder after his company steered literally billions of dollars through the Trump family’s crypto venture.

Crypto policy, fossil fuel policy, chip exports to foreign governments bearing gifts: it’s all for sale, and the morbidly rich are paying off Trump and the GOP to expand their fortunes.

Third came the security forces. Putin spent years building police and paramilitary units loyal to him personally rather than to Russian law; then in 2016 he created Rosgvardia, a national praetorian guard of some 340,000 troops answering directly to the president to “fight terrorism” and track down “illegal immigrants” within Russia.

Here, the Pentagon has ordered every state to stand up “quick reaction forces” totaling roughly 23,500 National Guard troops trained in batons, body shields, stun guns, and pepper spray, ready to deploy to American streets within hours of a presidential “emergency” order.

ICE has also grown into exactly the kind of federal force Putin would recognize, holding a record 70,766 people in a nationwide network of more than 200 “detention facilities,” with the American Immigration Council reporting that the administration’s stated goal was at least 100,000 detainees. Nearly all of this year’s detention growth has come from people with no criminal charges or convictions at all.

Seventy thousand human beings are now warehoused without meaningful due process in violation of the 4th through 8th Amendments, with billions being spent right now to expand that capacity for tens of thousands more. There’s a word for camps like that: history will use it even if today’s newspapers won’t.

Fourth, Putin criminalized the opposition. His “foreign agent” and “extremism” laws turned political dissent itself into a “security threat,” so that by the end even holding a blank sign in a public square got you beaten, arrested, or shot.

Here we have NSPM-7, the national security directive that treats progressive political activity as an “indicator of terrorism” (I’ve covered it in detail here). Trump spent his America 250 speech at Mount Rushmore calling on the nation to “vanquish communism from our shores,” and just this week he’s demanded that democratic socialism be “criminalized” and its elected leaders “deported.”

Like Putin did with the Duma (the Russian parliament) that threat includes sitting members of Congress, as well as the mayor of New York City and millions of American voters, all now reclassified by Trump and the GOP as an “enemy” to be imprisoned or removed from the country.

People brush it all off, saying Trump’s “merely being hyperbolic”; he’s not. He’s serious, just like Putin was and Hitler was before him when he ran the exact same playbook.

Then came the courts, the history books, and the public square. Putin perfected what Russians bitterly call “Basmanny justice,” courts that reliably rule for the Kremlin.

Our Supreme Court’s Republican majority now routinely uses the so-called “shadow docket” — a procedure invented for actual time-sensitive government emergencies — to hand Trump, oligarchs, and the GOP wins without briefing, argument, or explanation, while expanding the flow of dark money that keeps Republican and (too many Democratic) politicians in fear of or in debt to “donors” who fund elections and give them what the Republicans on the Supreme Court now call “gratuities.”

Putin then imposed unified patriotic history textbooks; here in America we’re watching schools, universities, and libraries being bullied into teaching a white Christian nationalist version of American history while the America 250 celebration was converted into explicitly partisan pageantry, complete with banners of Trump’s face draped across federal buildings in Washington the way Stalin’s once papered Moscow.

And Putin fenced off the squares. This month the Secret Service, the Interior Department, and the White House released a plan for permanent fencing around Lafayette Park, the most storied protest ground in America. The official rationale is security after assassination attempts, but when you read the plan’s own language you see that it identifies the park as a “focal point” for demonstrations and promises that a permanent, properly anchored fence “would assist in de-escalating most potentially violent protest.”

In plain English, they’re walling off the place where Americans have gathered to petition their presidents since Jefferson’s day, over the objections of members of Congress, sixteen weeks before a midterm election.

And finally, there’s the foreign policy aspect of it all, because aspiring autocrats always have each other’s backs.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a campaign to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (which has indicted Putin and Netanyahu) “brick by brick,” pledging a “whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the one tribunal on Earth that could someday prosecute the war crimes this administration keeps getting away with.

Then the State Department posted grant applications offering millions of dollars to European groups that share the administration’s “political philosophy” on “migration, sovereignty, and Western civilizational heritage,” aka rightwing white male Christian supremacy, presumably complete with Nazi salutes.

So now our United States government is funding far-right movements inside allied democracies to pull them toward authoritarianism, precisely the operation Putin’s Internet Research Agency has run against us since the 2016 election, but now reported by the Financial Times as official American policy against other democracies.

Meanwhile Trump and Putin have spoken by phone fourteen times (that we know about) since Trump returned to office, most recently an 85-minute conversation on the Fourth of July, three weeks after the previous call, with another already scheduled. During that Independence Day call, Putin took the occasion to remind Trump of “Russia’s contribution to the formation of American statehood.” He’s enjoying his new role of mentor to the guy running our country.

I spent decades doing international relief work in countries run by despots and what struck me then, and haunts me now, is how little the formula varies from one country to the next. The details change with the language and the flag, but the architecture stays the same:

Control the airwaves, buy or break the rich, seize the legislature, build security forces loyal to one man, name an internal enemy, tame the judges, rewrite the schoolbooks, fence the squares, and befriend the world’s other strongmen and oligarchs.

I’ve worked in at least a dozen countries where every one of those boxes was checked, and the air feels different there. People lower their voices in restaurants. They glance around before they finish a sentence.

Which brings us to the one box Putin checked that Trump hasn’t yet, but it appears tonight’s address will be all about.

Many Americans don’t realize that Putin never abolished Russian elections. Russians still line up and vote in every cycle. He simply made the elections incapable of removing him: opponents disqualified or imprisoned or poisoned, ballot access controlled, observers expelled, the Russian equivalent of extreme gerrymandering, and vote counting supervised by loyalists.

His ideologist Vladislav Surkov dressed it up as “sovereign democracy.” And Putin’s method for capturing the machinery was always the same: manufacture or exploit an emergency, then present the seizure of the election as the remedy.

After the Beslan school massacre in 2004 — his first major effort — he used the nation’s grief to abolish the election of Russia’s governors entirely and appoint them himself. From there it was a straight line through oligarchy to dictatorship, as has happened so often in other countries throughout history.

Now look at what is predicted by insiders for tonight.

A primetime address about “free and fair elections,” built around supposedly declassified intelligence of foreign interference, delivered by a president who spent Monday claiming fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral primary and who has spent months demanding tighter federal control over how Americans vote in November.

All this while his House Speaker declares that this fall’s ballot question isn’t affordability, inflation, or wages but communism versus the republic. His administration games out ICE at polling places, put in new mail ballot restrictions through the Post Office, and will tonight provide their excuse for creating the machinery to challenge results they don’t like (when they can swing an election).

Emergency first, “reform” second. It’s Putin’s Beslan strategy almost to the last detail.

Have we gone so far down the road to fascism/Putinism that it’ll work? There are some concerning indicators, including what people at the highest levels of our government and within the most hallowed halls of American power have simply told us straight out.

In September 2022, the broadcast networks refused to air President Joe Biden’s Independence Hall speech about “threats to American democracy,” deeming it too “political”; one ran a game show and reruns instead.

That night, after receiving official, top-secret security briefings from American intelligence agencies that so alarmed him that he felt he had to alert the public, then-President Biden said, in part:

(The entire text is pasted below the end of this article)

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. …

“But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

“These are hard things. …

“And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.

“They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

“They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

“They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

“And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the [next] elections.

“They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”

It’s not like we weren’t warned. By the president of the United States, for G-d’s sake. And none of the corporate press said pretty much a single word about his speech or the networks’ refusal to carry it.

And none bothered to mention Biden’s warning when it was fulfilled this year as Donald Trump set about systematically firing tens of thousands of people from the Justice Department and its investigative and law enforcement divisions, and attempted to put the FBI Director in prison.

Last December, however, all four networks cleared their primetime schedules, interrupting the Survivor finale, for a nakedly partisan Trump address.

As of this moment, Poynter reports, the networks say they haven’t decided about tonight. AOC, among others, is explicitly calling on the networks to refuse to carry his address this time.

Watch what they do. Networks whose parent companies face federal investigations and merger reviews have a way of discovering the newsworthiness of whatever the man controlling those reviews wants them to say about him and his message.

Putin never had to nationalize every channel; after NTV, the rest fell into line on their own.

In every country I worked in where the formula succeeded, however, it succeeded because it was completed before enough people recognized the pattern, and America hasn’t yet reached that point.

Just listen to AOC or Sheldon Whitehouse or Bernie, among others; most real Democrats have already or are just now figuring this all out.

The pattern is increasingly obvious, even if the media never reports this holistically. The last box is still unchecked, and the machinery for protecting the vote still exists: courts that haven’t all capitulated, secretaries of state in both parties who take their oaths seriously, and most of all an electorate that just spent the spring primaries demonstrating it can turn out in numbers no one can quietly “manage.”

Putin’s system worked because most Russians didn’t see it coming and when it was finally there they (correctly) concluded that resistance was largely pointless. The single most dangerous thing Americans could do right now is reach that conclusion sixteen weeks early.

So listen carefully to what Trump says tonight and what Democrats and experts on fascism, Putin, and the future of America say in response.

We can discuss it all tomorrow on my radio/TV show and in the comments here and the comments to tomorrow’s Hartmann Report op-ed.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Authoritarian Playbook”

Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:

Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment it Doesn’t

I’ve often wondered about the 2024 election given that Musk was trump’s best pal and musk had a crew of boy geeks -- the majority of whom could probably do some serious hacking of . . . yes, voting machines or the lines that connect voting precincts w/home offices . . . or however its done

~ Margaret Rivera

There may have been no record of hacking and Puerto Rico, but there is definitely a record.If you dig of hacking in other states. I totally agree with all that you have stated here , but I think there’s more to see if only we could do a hand count of 2024 ballots for even a handful of the swing states and counties therein.

~ Elena Schott

Read the Article | See all Comments

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Here is the entire text of President Joe Biden’s speech which our networks refused to air:

THE PRESIDENT: My fellow Americans, please, if you have a seat, take it. I speak to you tonight from sacred ground in America: Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This is where America made its Declaration of Independence to the world more than two centuries ago with an idea, unique among nations, that in America, we’re all created equal.

This is where the United States Constitution was written and debated.

This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known with three simple words: “We, the People.” “We, the People.”

These two documents and the ideas they embody — equality and democracy — are the rock upon which this nation is built. They are how we became the greatest nation on Earth. They are why, for more than two centuries, America has been a beacon to the world.

But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.

So tonight, I have come this place where it all began to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats, and about the incredible future that lies in front of us if only we choose it.

We must never forget: We, the people, are the true heirs of the American experiment that began more than two centuries ago.

We, the people, have burning inside each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall — a flame that lit our way through abolition, the Civil War, Suffrage, the Great Depression, world wars, Civil Rights.

That sacred flame still burns now in our time as we build an America that is more prosperous, free, and just.

That is the work of my presidency, a mission I believe in with my whole soul.

But first, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.

But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

These are hard things.

But I’m an American President — not the President of red America or blue America, but of all America.

And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.

They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.

They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.

That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.

But while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can: We are not powerless in the face of these threats. We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy.

There are far more Americans — far more Americans from every — from every background and belief who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it. (Applause.)

And, folks, it is within our power, it’s in our hands — yours and mine — to stop the assault on American democracy.

I believe America is at an inflection point — one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.

And now America must choose: to move forward or to move backwards? To build the future or obsess about the past? To be a nation of hope and unity and optimism, or a nation of fear, division, and of darkness?

MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

But together — together, we can choose a different path. We can choose a better path. Forward, to the future. A future of possibility. A future to build and dream and hope.

And we’re on that path, moving ahead.

I know this nation. I know you, the American people. I know your courage. I know your hearts. And I know our history.

This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. (Applause.)

This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. (Applause.)

This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it. (Applause.)

And this is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool. We do not encourage violence.

We are still an America that believes in honesty and decency and respect for others, patriotism, liberty, justice for all, hope, possibilities.

We are still, at our core, a democracy. (Applause.)

And yet history tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.

For a long time, we’ve told ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed, but it’s not.

We have to defend it, protect it, stand up for it — each and every one of us.

That’s why tonight I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology. (Applause.)

We’re all called, by duty and conscience, to confront extremists who will put their own pursuit of power above all else.

Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to — to destroying American democracy.

We, the people, will not let anyone or anything tear us apart. Today, there are dangers around us we cannot allow to prevail. We hear — you’ve heard it — more and more talk about violence as an acceptable political tool in this country. It’s not. It can never be an acceptable tool.

So I want to say this plain and simple: There is no place for political violence in America. Period. None. Ever. (Applause.)

We saw law enforcement brutally attacked on January the 6th. We’ve seen election officials, poll workers — many of them volunteers of both parties — subjected to intimidation and death threats. And — can you believe it? — FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens.

On top of that, there are public figures — today, yesterday, and the day before — predicting and all but calling for mass violence and rioting in the streets.

This is inflammatory. It’s dangerous. It’s against the rule of law. And we, the people, must say: This is not who we are. (Applause.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we can’t be pro-ex- — pro-ex- — pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. They’re incompatible. (Applause.)

We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country. It’s wrong. We each have to reject political violence with — with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster. Now.

We can’t let the integrity of our elections be undermined, for that is a path to chaos.

Look, I know poli- — politics can be fierce and mean and nasty in America. I get it. I believe in the give-and-take of politics, in disagreement and debate and dissent.

We’re a big, complicated country. But democracy endures only if we, the people, respect the guardrails of the republic. Only if we, the people, accept the results of free and fair elections. (Applause.) Only if we, the people, see politics not as total war but mediation of our differences.

Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today. (Applause.)

They don’t understand what every patriotic American knows: You can’t love your country only when you win. (Applause.) It’s fundamental.

American democracy only works only if we choose to respect the rule of law and the institutions that were set up in this chamber behind me, only if we respect our legitimate political differences.

I will not stand by and watch — I will not — the will of the American people be overturned by wild conspiracy theories and baseless, evidence-free claims of fraud.

I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost. (Applause.)

I will not stand by and watch the most fundamental freedom in this country — the freedom to vote and have your vote counted — and — be taken from you and the American people. (Applause.)

Look, as your President, I will defend our democracy with every fiber of my being, and I’m asking every American to join me. (Applause.)

(A protestor disruption can be heard.)

Throughout our history, America has often made the greatest progress coming out of some of our darkest moments, like you’re hearing in that bullhorn.

I believe we can and we must do that again, and we are.

MAGA Republicans look at America and see carnage and darkness and despair. They spread fear and lies –- lies told for profit and power.

But I see a very different America — an America with an unlimited future, an America that is about to take off. I hope you see it as well. Just look around.

I believed we could lift America from the depths of COVID, so we passed the largest economic recovery package since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And today, America’s economy is faster, stronger than any other advanced nation in the world. (Applause.) We have more to go.

I believed we could build a better America, so we passed the biggest infrastructure investment since President Dwight D. Eisenhower. And we’ve now embarked on a decade of rebuilding
the nation’s roads, bridges, highways, ports, water systems, high-speed Internet, railroads. (Applause.)

I believed we could make America safer, so we passed the most significant gun safety law since President Clinton. (Applause.)

I believed we could go from being the highest cost of prescriptions in the world to making prescription drugs and healthcare more affordable, so we passed the most significant healthcare reforms since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. (Applause.)

And I believed we could create — we could create a clean energy future and save the planet, so we passed the most important climate initiative ever, ever, ever. (Applause.)

The cynics and the critics tell us nothing can get done, but they are wrong. There is not a single thing America cannot do — not a single thing beyond our capacity if we do it together.

It’s never easy. But we’re proving that in America, no matter how long the road, progress does come. (Applause.)

Look, I know the last year — few years have been tough. But today, COVID no longer controls our lives. More Americans are working than ever. Businesses are growing. Our schools are open. Millions of Americans have been lifted out of poverty. Millions of veterans once exposed to toxic burn pits will now get what they deserve for their families and the compa- — compensation. (Applause.)

American manufacturing has come alive across the Heartland, and the future will be made in America — (applause) — no matter what the white supremacists and the extremists say.

I made a bet on you, the American people, and that bet is paying off. Proving that from darkness — the darkness of Charlottesville, of COVID, of gun violence, of insurrection — we can see the light. Light is now visible. (Applause.)

Light that will guide us forward not only in words, but in actions — actions for you, for your children, for your grandchildren, for America.

Even in this moment, with all the challenges we face, I give you my word as a Biden: I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future. Not because of me, but because of who you are.

We’re going to end cancer as we know it. Mark my words. (Applause.)

We are going to create millions of new jobs in a clean energy economy.

We’re going to think big. We’re going to make the 21st century another American century because the world needs us to. (Applause.)

That’s where we need to focus our energy — not in the past, not on divisive culture wars, not on the politics of grievance, but on a future we can build together.

The MAGA Republicans believe that for them to succeed, everyone else has to fail. They believe America — not like I believe about America.

I believe America is big enough for all of us to succeed, and that is the nation we’re building: a nation where no one is left behind.

I ran for President because I believed we were in a battle for the soul of this nation. I still believe that to be true. I believe the soul is the breath, the life, and the essence of who we are. The soul is what makes us “us.”

The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God. That all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity, and respect. That all deserve justice and a shot at lives of prosperity and consequence. And that democracy — democracy must be defended, for democracy makes all these things possible. (Applause.) Folks, and it’s up to us.

Democracy begins and will be preserved in we, the people’s, habits of heart, in our character: optimism that is tested
yet endures, courage that digs deep when we need it, empathy that fuels democracy, the willingness to see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.

Look, our democracy is imperfect. It always has been.

Notwithstanding those folks you hear on the other side there. They’re entitled to be outrageous. This is a democracy. But history and common sense — (applause) — good manners is nothing they’ve ever suffered from.

But history and common sense tell us that opportunity, liberty, and justice for all are most likely to come to pass in a democracy.

We have never fully realized the aspirations of our founding, but every generation has opened those doors a little wider to include more people who have been excluded before.

My fellow Americans, America is an idea — the most powerful idea in the history of the world. And it beats in the hearts of the people of this country. It beats in all of our hearts. It unites America. It is the American creed.

The idea that America guarantees that everyone be treated with dignity. It gives hate no safe harbor. It installs in everyone the belief that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve.

That’s who we are. That’s what we stand for. That’s what we believe. And that is precisely what we are doing: opening doors, creating new possibilities, focusing on the future. And we’re only just beginning. (Applause.)

Our task is to make our nation free and fair, just and strong, noble and whole.

And this work is the work of democracy — the work of this generation. It is the work of our time, for all time.

We can’t afford to have — leave anyone on the sidelines. We need everyone to do their part. So speak up. Speak out. Get engaged. Vote, vote, vote. (Applause.)

And if we all do our duty — if we do our duty in 2022 and beyond, then ages still to come will say we — all of us here — we kept the faith. We preserved democracy. (Applause.) We heeded our wor- — we — we heeded not our worst instincts but our better angels. And we proved that, for all its imperfections, America is still the beacon to the world, an ideal to be realized, a promise to be kept.

There is nothing more important, nothing more sacred, nothing more American. That’s our soul. That’s who we truly are. And that’s who must — we must always be.

And I have no doubt — none –– that this is who we will be and that we’ll come together as a nation. That we’ll secure our democracy. That for the next 200 years, we’ll have what we had the past 200 years: the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.

We just need to remember who we are. We are the United States of America. The United States of America. (Applause.)

And may God protect our nation. And may God protect all those who stand watch over our democracy. God bless you all. (Applause.) Democracy. Thank you. (Applause.)