We Know How This Ends

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If I close my eyes, I can still see all the people I protested the Iraq War with when I was a kid—in high school or on the campus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha—laying small American flags down on the field to remember the fallen. I can still remember being in the crowds protesting around Carter Lake with the handmade signs, the chants for peace, and that feeling that maybe, just maybe, we could stop something catastrophic from happening.

A lot of us were just kids who believed our country would eventually learn from its mistakes.

And now I’m sitting here, stuck on my couch recovering from surgery, watching horrific images out of the Middle East again, and I feel like I’ve been dropped back into 2003. It’s the dumbest time loop imaginable—except this time we know exactly how the story ends, and we’re marching anyway.

I say this a lot, and people roll their eyes at me sometimes, but it keeps being true: every Republican president in my lifetime has crashed the economy and dragged us into a Middle East war. And Donald Trump is no different. In fact, he may be the first to do it twice, given the state of the American economy. And what’s maddening isn’t just that it’s happening—it’s that we’ve seen this exact movie before.

It’s so abundantly clear to me, after watching these press conferences and these attempts by Trump and Hegseth and Vance and the rest of his administration to explain this, that they have no idea what the hell they’re doing—no defined objective, no clear authorization from Congress, no exit strategy, and no honest explanation for the American people. They have no plan in Iran. They have no plan to explain it to the American people. They have no exit strategy. They are just being dog-walked by Bibi Netanyahu, and that’s not right.

Our United States military should never be sold out to other countries in this way. I believe in a strong military. I believe there are moments when force is necessary. But if you cannot clearly explain the mission, define victory, and tell the American people why their sons and daughters might die—you have no business starting a war.

And then I’m watching the callous way that the Trump administration is talking about those who have already lost their lives. And by the way, I do not believe for a second that this administration is being forthcoming with the number of American military personnel who have been killed in the last couple of days, because we’ve seen this before—minimized numbers, delayed disclosures, and families finding out the truth after the headlines move on. It’s maddening. It’s the kind of thing that should turn 100% of Americans against this administration.

And to be honest with you, I recognize that we’ll never have 100%, but I do think there is a growing coalition of people who are just fed up and fucking done with Donald Trump and his administration and his people—domestically, in foreign policy, culturally. These people have got to go. And you see that fatigue basically everywhere now including throughout MAGA world.

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Endless Urgency is free to read—thanks to our paid subscribers. If this work has been useful to you, please help keep it available to everyone by becoming a paid subscriber. Just $8/month makes a huge difference:

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This is a president who has lost the plot, lost the vast majority of the American people, and even the people who are supposed to prop him up—the MAGA influencers, the Matt Walshes of the world, Megyn Kelly of all people, who are soulless and will just say whatever—even they are breaking right now because they can’t justify or defend these actions.

And unfortunately, we’re trapped with these guys for another three years. I get these comments all the time when I post this stuff: we’re not impeaching him. We’re not invoking the 25th Amendment. We’re stuck with these assholes for three more years. That’s reality, and I wish it wasn’t. I simply cannot imagine a situation where we would be able to have the votes to remove this president and Vance and everybody else.

However, I do foresee a scenario where we elect a strong Democratic Party in 2026 and 2028 that holds these people accountable. Because even now, as I think back as a millennial to all the things that I’ve experienced—from the Iraq War to 9/11 to the Wall Street financial crisis to the COVID pandemic to all of these moments where a powerful class of wealthy people have steered our country over a cliff while making more money and gaining more access and more power for themselves, the Epstein files being the other obvious example—nobody’s ever been held accountable.

Moment after moment, powerful people drove the country into a ditch and somehow came out richer and more powerful. And no one at the top ever pays a price. The pattern is always the same: chaos for everyone else, insulation for the elite.

Well, goddamn it, if I have anything to say about it, here’s the only way out of the loop: win power—and more importantly, use it to permanently rein in executive war authority. Restore Congress’s constitutional role. Require real authorization before sustained military action. Demand automatic transparency on casualties. Make it structurally harder for any president to freelance a war like this. We’re going to build a Democratic Party that holds people accountable. We’re going to drag these fuckers in, and we’re going to hold them accountable for this illegal war that they’ve put together and more (re: Epstein).

We have to make sure that we rein in this power. We can’t have an unfettered executive with no Congress to hold them accountable. We have to reassert that authority, and it starts with electing the right kind of Democrat in November. And I hope you go out and find one that you believe in, because that’s when I’ll get out of bed in the coming days and be useful again. That day is coming sooner, I pray, because I’m sick and tired of fucking sitting here recovering from this surgery.

That’s what I’m going to be doing with it, and I hope you do it too, because that’s the only way to channel this anger. Power shifts under pressure. And although it’s exhausting, we have to keep applying it. There’s a major shift happening in our country—and persistence is how we reach accountability.

We’re out of power right now, but we will not be out of power for long. And then it’s a matter of how we use that power when we take over. And I’m ready to see Democrats use that power in a way that’s in line with where this country is, where this country needs to go, and the group of people we need to break and destroy if we’re ever going to get this country back on track.