Bring It, Donald. We’ll Win — Even When You Cheat.

We face a determined and powerful adversary that’s cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government and will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections. We can beat him.

Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It’s The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. Subscribe to his Substack.

How many of you have heard someone say, “Donald Trump is doing __________ (fill in the blank) and no one cares.” Or someone asks, “Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

I’ve heard a thousand variations of these complaints. And it isn’t just from Americans. My wife responded to a post on Bluesky saying that we stand with our Canadian friends. What she heard back was, “That’s not good enough. Do something about it.”

It is hard to witness our country torn down, our treasury pillaged, our military purged and abused, our legal structures undermined, our economy sapped, neighbors pitted against neighbors, our scientific leadership squandered, our shrinking status in the world.

Many of us saw this coming when Donald Trump was returned to power by voters longing for change and by the money of corrupt oligarchs. Nearly two years later, the bitter complaints that he has not been stopped are understandable.

But they are also unfair. We live in a democracy, flawed as it is. Ours is not to overthrow the government by force of arms but to oust its leaders at the ballot box. Meanwhile, with discipline and in accordance with our laws, millions of Americans have resisted the worst. We have protested. We have organized. We have signed up to run for office. We have litigated. We have built entirely new media organizations to sound the alarm. We have stood up to protect our neighbors.

And now, our time of choosing has come. Now, all eyes are on us.

Unlike the millions of Americans I just described, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have given up all pretense of fealty to democratic norms. They are engaged in massive and historic election manipulation. They launched and carried out an unprecedented midterm redistricting process across red states. In GOP-controlled states, they also executed massive voter roll purges. Texas closed nearly 100 polling places in Tarrant County, which they’re afraid they’re about to lose.

Trump instructed the United States Postal Service not to deliver mailed ballots unless the sender is on a list he controls. He’s threatened to send troops to polling places. He said he might order the military to seize ballots.

This is the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

And the world wants to know, are Americans up to the challenge. Are we still a people who will do what it takes to preserve our freedom.

The Whole World Is Watching

China sees a sinking America and hope we fail to right our ship. Russia is watching, too. With his guy in our White House, Putin’s unprovoked military assault on Ukraine earned him a red-carpet summit and a trip back to the G20 Summit. Meanwhile, Trump tells Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy that he doesn’t have the cards and shouldn’t count on American military support.

Russia and China are both allied with Iran, sharing intelligence and arms with the nation we’ve been at war with for over six months. All three countries see America’s government as unable to stand up for itself and wonder whether that’s now true of Americans, as well.

Europe is watching. Allied nations that sent their soldiers to die for us after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq want to know whether America has now become their adversary. They wonder what the American people will do when their President threatens to take Greenland by force, threatens their economies with punishing tariffs, and threatens their values, as Trump and J.D. Vance did when they essentially argued the continent was not white enough.

Africa wants to know if Americans are okay with their President calling them “shithole countries,” ending life-saving foreign aid, and making commercial ties contingent upon whether they will accept our shackled deportees.

Latin America wants to know if we will use our military to launch a new colonial era, where our army goes to war to enable American companies to take their natural resources, as Trump did in Venezuela.

Canada, our great neighbor for centuries, now finds the house next door sold to a mob boss and wonders whether Americans will do anything about it or just watch like it’s The Sopranos.

For 250 years, people yearning for freedom anywhere in the world looked to America. Now the whole world is watching to see if that light is extinguished.

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The Midterms Final Push

But here at home, there is no time to watch. There is no room for bystanders who say, “What can we do, they’re cheating?” Our democracy is not a spectator sport. It is not a social media meme. It is, as it ever was, a struggle for freedom.

We face a determined and powerful adversary. One cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government. One that will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections.

Ordinary Americans look at all the power arrayed against us and we say: is that all you’ve got?

That’s what we said in Chicago and Minneapolis last year when over-armed and under-trained ICE agents tried to intimidate us. Americans poured out of their houses and into the path of peril. We were willing to die for our freedom. Renee Good and Alex Pretti did.

This year, tens of millions of us will check our voter registrations and overcome their purges. We will cast our votes in ways to be sure they get counted. We will guard the counting process, and we will demand the winners be seated.

They have power. They have money. We have only ourselves. Bring it on.

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