Hey gang, it's Reid. Before we get going, I just want to say thanks again to everybody for your hard work this year and for listening.

And I hope that everybody gets a chance to spend time with friends and family and take a little bit of time to reflect on what we were able to accomplish this year.

And what we have to get done in the coming two years. I know that we'll do it together and I cannot say thank you enough.

And now on with the show. Welcome back to the Lincoln project. I'm your host, Reid Gil. You know guys, as 2022 comes to an end, I want to take just a few minutes to share some year in thoughts with you all.

So I'm going to come to you solo today and talk about where we are in the fight for our nation's democracy.

What's at stake and how you all, the listeners of this podcast and those folks who consider themselves part of the pro-democracy coalition can help.

So let's get into it. So where are we in the fight guys? Let's start from 2015. When a guy named Donald Trump came on the scene, we all thought he was a joke.

No one more than me. And we didn't quite know what to do with someone like this. We'd never seen anything like this in living memory.

And so the first thing you do is ridicule. And then by the time we understood what we were up against, it was too late. He was the Republic of nominee.

And then he was president of the United States. And for four years, Americans got to experience up close what it meant to have and unqualified to say the least.

Malignant narcissists sitting behind the Resolute desk in the White House. We've all been through that. I don't want to replay it too much other than to remind ourselves how much we all want to go back to some semblance of normal.

And the normal that we knew in 2015 certainly, but since then is gone. And that's not a bad thing necessarily, but it's only a bad thing if that's the starting point at which we say if we could just have it like it used to be.

Gang, it's not going to be the way it used to be. It never can be. First, you know, simply time marches on.

Next is so much has happened in this country politically, culturally. We've had a pandemic that's killed a million Americans that I don't think that any of us individually or collectively have processed unless we have a family member or someone close to us who was lost to an ongoing pandemic.

Educationally, the pandemic twisted everything we knew about education, whether or not that was elementary middle school high school or college. What does it mean to get an education? What does it mean to work remotely? What does it mean to only go to an office two days a week? What does that mean for a generation like mine of generation X who spent their entire careers going to an office and for a generation like Gen Z who might never go to an office regularly.

What does it mean economically that we've had stubborn inflation for the first time since many people listening to this podcast were either young adults kids or don't remember it at all.

And so the idea that somehow we can go back to this magical before time is really the same kind of thinking that goddess into the trouble with this whole make America great again thing to begin with, which is America is a great country.

But we should not mistake a great country for a nation that has to make a choice. And so let's fast forward to 2020. We saw what happens when someone who is fundamentally unserious and inhumane is at the reins of the largest collection of assets humanity is ever known that could have combatted a pandemic early Donald Trump chose to make it a political issue not a public health issue.

And we are still living with the effects of that today whether or not it was masks or vaccines or prevention. Whatever it was this is a man who chose not to believe it was real because it wasn't in his best interest even though we knew because remember that Bob Woodward released an audio tape of him I think in late 20 where Trump said this thing could be a hundred times more deadly than the flu he knew what he was doing and he did it anyway as did the coterie of family.

Family members strap hangers sick offense around him remember it was his son and law Jared Kushner recent of the $2 billion Saudi loan who said if they live in a blue state let him die right think about that are these the kinds of people that we could ever allow to be back in the White House ever be allowed to run the greatest government that humanity's ever known.

The answer to that is no unequivocally no so let's forward to 2020 you know the election thank God for Joe Biden and thank God for the pro democracy coalition that came together to make sure that Joe Biden got over the line did we get everything we certainly didn't we ended up with a 50 50 Senate and much closer US House of Representatives but even with that Joe Biden has been amongst the most successful presidents we've seen in decades both legislatively.

On the pro democracy front and from a national security perspective but remember before he was able to take office Donald Trump and again this same group of people around him attempted to overthrow the United States government and a free and fair election.

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