Gilding the horses
July 11, 2026
The challenge of being an American in 2026
I don’t remember exactly what I was doing on October 18th, 2023. I do know I’d been swimming in the river the day before. I remember taking an underwater photograph—the one above— the camera pointed up at drifting maple leaves drifting beneath an October-blue sky. It can be invigorating to swim in cold water, and all the more so to be pleasantly out of reach, in free-flowing wonder.
Things were different on shore.
Palestinians in Gaza were under a brutal siege by Israeli Defense Forces. There was disarray in Congress following the ouster of the Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy at the hands of zealous Trump supporters. Despite having been publicly denounced by McCarthy and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell for instigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Donald Trump was already the leading Republican candidate for the presidential election a year away.
The American historian Heather Cox-Richardson was in Austin, Texas on October 18th, having flown in from Michigan as part of a book tour. She was joined by fellow historian Mark Lawrence and the two began a conversation in a packed auditorium at the LBJ Presidential Library. In addition to her new book, Cox-Richardson by then had more than a million followers for her daily Letters from an American posts, which are now also delivered by podcast. Apart from being prolific, Cox-Richardson has the bandwidth to be both bitterly critical of American travesties (i.e. the contradictory slow dance with slavery and the brutal oppression of Native Americans) and an unabashed patriot on the subjects of civil rights, constitutional law, and participatory democracy. She loves the country she writes about.
The conversation between her and Lawrence was light-hearted at first, with Cox-Richardson encouraging people to visit the LBJ library if, for no other reason, to see LBJ’s well-preserved Cadillac. Lawrence asked about the genesis and history of the daily letters.
Historians Mark Lawrence and Heather Cox-Richardson, in Austin, October 18, 2023
Ten minutes in Lawrence reached for his glasses and read the opening lines from her then-new book “Democracy Awakening.”
“Here are the first two lines,” Lawrence said—‘America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as a global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.’ So as we watch which way the United States will go facing this crossroads,” he continued, “how important is what’s going to play out next year, in 2024?
“THE most important,” Cox-Richardson replied without hesitation. “If Trump or a Trump-like figure..is elected President or takes the presidency in 2024,” she added, “we will lose American democracy for our lifetimes.”
She said there several reasons behind her warning. But she gave two examples of where Trump had clearly voiced the view that, as president, he was supreme—signaling authoritarian ambitions that would become the signature of his second term were he to regain office. She cited his vocal animosity toward General Mark Milley—the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—because Milley had put his loyalty to his country ahead of his loyalty to Trump, something Trump regarded as “treason.” The other was the work underway, involving several past and future Trump appointees, on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—to completely re-orient the federal civil service such that its leaders and employees would owe their loyalty to the president, not the nation; not the Constitution, as they have since 1883.
But it was the unequivocal tone in her voice, in her first two sentences, that froze me. It was her prediction that a Trump resurgence, in the wake of the insurrection he fomented in January 2021, would end American democracy in my lifetime and my children’s lifetime. Those two sentences had packed quite a punch—the loss of our democracy; the long road to restoring it.
Fast forward…
The even in Austin was BEFORE the Roberts’ Supreme Court’s stunning ruling eight months later, in Trump v. USA that extended presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a president’s official acts. And it was before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter—just two weeks ago, giving the president the power to fire, without cause, members of nearly all federal regulatory bodies, effectively turning regulatory boards and commissions into partisan agencies to implement the president’s will.
Last Thursday, Trump used his new Slaughter powers to dismiss the three remaining members of the federal Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel Congress created a quarter century ago to assist state election officials in training, installing best management practices and certifying electronic equipment. Together the two developments were just the most recent belt notches in a decades-long power-grabbing project—the “unitary executive” initiative forged in Republican-oriented think tanks—to infuse the presidency with partisan control over powerful federal agencies.
The new blockbuster book—Regime Change—by the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan—vividly confirms Cox-Richardson’s blunt prediction in Austin, 32 months ago.
To access the remainder of this post, become a paid subscriber to The Daily Rhubarb at the link below…
—tjc
