Why I Am Voting for Kamala Harris & Tim Walz

In ordinary times I think who one votes for should be private. These are not ordinary times. That is why I want to explain why I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.?

This is a love letter to my country–and to my fellow citizens, no matter how they vote. I know that whatever happens in this election we have a lot of healing to do . I do not condemn the tens of millions of people who will vote differently than me. I have close relationships with many people who are going to vote for Trump, people whom I love and respect.

Their vote doesn’t change my regard for them. A core part of my philosophy is that when you respect people, you tell them as clearly as possible and with compassion what you think, and you listen to what they think. I am sharing my perspective and remain eager to hear your perspective.

As a result of having lived and worked in the former Soviet Union and in Kosovo, I have a perspective that may be helpful for people who have not lived under an authoritarian regime to hear.

My hope in writing this is that if I can explain exactly what I am afraid of and why, maybe it will spark some kind of productive conversation. Maybe it will help build solidarity with those who agree with this point of view–and a bridge to those who disagree. Maybe it will do nothing except help me process. Writing makes me feel better, and I hope that my articulation might help you feel better too. Whatever happens, I will always remain deeply committed to building a better future for our country.?

The first thing that worries me is the connection between Vladimir Putin and Trump. The authoritarian political and kleptocratic economic system in Russia creates untold human misery, and I believe if Trump wins our system will start to look a lot more like the one in Russia.??

Between 2010 and 2015 a group of Russian officials came to Silicon Valley, where I worked, to try to understand how to create a center of innovation outside of Moscow. Because I had lived in Moscow from 1990-1994, I was invited to meet with them. At one of these meetings, a Russian official told me that he believed Trump would be president, and that it would be very good for Russia because, “on nashe ,” which means, he is ours because we have bought (bribed) him.”?

At the time, I dismissed this as ridiculous. I did not think that American politicians could be bought the way that Russian politicians were bought. Now I fear that some of the horrors I thought I’d left behind in Russia when I left and returned home are coming for us in the United States.??

Maybe those Russians were just talking nonsense. But there is a very public, very troubling pattern that makes me think I was wrong to dismiss what those Russians told me. In 2016 Trump publicly asked Russia to supply Clinton’s emails . There is plenty of evidence that the Russians supported Trump’s campaign in 2016 , and are doing it again now .

Steve Bannon, who led Trump’s first campaign and who was just released from prison a week before the election, and Alexander Dugin, who advises Putin, have met and bonded over a Russian Caste system called Traditionalism . Elon Musk, who has been supporting Trump , has also been having conversations with Putin .?

Fiona Hill , the former Trump adviser who is one of the world’s top experts on Russia and Putin, told POLITICO, “She sees the American political system already drifting into autocracy .”

Anne Applebaum, who was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote in her book Autocracy, Inc . that: “At least 13 people with proven or alleged links to the Russian mafia are known to have owned or don’t business in condos in Trump-branded properties. Even while he was president of the United States, companies with mystery owners were still buying property in Trump’s buildings; if that was a form of campaign contribution, we will never know.”

What happens when oligarchs with ties to the Russian government “invest” their money in the U.S.? Ask the workers at the Warren Steel Plant in Ohio. First, the oligarchs fired many employees, leaving a skeleton crew who could not operate the plant safely. Two explosions sent many workers who kept their jobs to the hospital.

Author Casey Michel describes in his book American Kleptocracy what the plant looks like now: “Cavernous holes gouge the siding…Vacant lots and missing windows, crumpled cabinets, and offices in disarray…The mill sits like something out of a dystopic future—or like something out of certain parts of the former Soviet Union.”

That is what kleptocracy looks like.

Why are we allowing Russian money to have such undue influence on our election? We have the power to put a stop to this. Let’s use it and vote him away! Trump thinks he’s smart to do business with such people no matter what harm they do to Americans and the American economy. Harris has no history of doing business with such unsavory characters. She has a history of prosecuting them.?

Trump has made the quid pro quo for supporting him and the risk of opposing him clear. Offering financial gain to supporters and jail time for those who oppose a candidate in and of itself should be disqualifying. But rather than confronting this violation of the American political system, powerful people are caving bizarrely fast.

Jeff Bezos, who is worth over $200 billion and owns the Washington Post, blocked the Washington Post’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris. This came on the heel of Los Angeles Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked that newspaper's editorial board from endorsing Harris.

This is particularly chilling behavior if we recall that Putin began consolidating his power and enriching himself and his cronies by jailing media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of one of Russia’s largest newspapers.?

If Bezos was capitulating to fear of retribution from a would-be authoritarian who has not and I hope won’t be elected, it is hard to understand. What’s the point of being a billionaire if you’re so easily muzzled? Bezos and the others who are so quick to be silenced by a threat from a man who has not been elected should heed a warning from Audre Lorde: Your silence will not protect you.?

Of course, if Bezos made this decision because he thinks he will benefit if Trump wins, it’s also hard to understand. The billionaires who caved to Putin became his ATM. If Trump follows Putin’s lead, as seems likely, U.S. billionaires will long for the good old days when they just had to pay taxes (and damned low taxes) and had no fear of being jailed, or simply tossed out of windows.

These billionaires would do well to consider a Russian anecdote about a scorpion who persuades a frog to ferry him across the water. Midway across the scorpion stings the frog. The dying frog asks why, and the scorpion says “it’s in my nature.” Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The problem is, their whirlwind will harm us all.

I believe that the rich and powerful people who support Trump either because they fear being punished or expect to be rewarded are making a terrible miscalculation.??

I have more understanding of why folks who’ve been on the poor-get-poorer side of our rich-get-richer economy might choose to cast a “burn it all down” vote for Trump. The 1% should not be allowed to continue to take a bigger and bigger share of our economy.

Between 1948 and 1979 the richest 1% of people controlled about 10% of the U.S. economy. The economy grew a lot faster in those years than it did after changes to the tax code between 1980 and the present allowed the richest 1% to control ~30% of the wealth in our country; a tiny group of people, the 0.1%, control a whopping 13.5%. The bottom 50% of people in our country control just 2.5% .?

What does this mean? In many American cities, you can see people with nowhere to live defecating on the street just a block away from your too-expensive apartment. We’ve got to fix this, and we’ve got to acknowledge the Democrats have not done enough to fix it. But the tax and tariff policies that Trump has promised will benefit the rich (at least the ones not thrown out of windows) and hurt the disadvantaged even more than the ones we have in place currently.

Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Prize-winning author of Power and Progress explains that an economy where such a small number of people own so much wealth is bad both for the poor and for growth overall because it stifles opportunities for broader economic participation, ultimately hindering innovation and social mobility.

Harris has plans to address these inequities with her Opportunity Economy , which includes working with the private sector to build more housing, offering first-time home buyers $25,000 toward their downpayment, and a $50,000 federal tax incentive for small business startup expenses.

Trump’s alma mater has commented positively on Harris’s plans. Trump’s plan, on the other hand, “would cost jobs, ignite inflation, increase federal deficits, and cause a recession. It would also shift the tax burden away from the well off, substantially increasing the tax burden on the poor and middle class. ”?

Harris’s policies do not carry with them the risk of economic chaos or jail time for those who disagree with her. They will help us move forward together. If folks in the 1% have to pay slightly higher taxes to get all that, my math shows is the highest return on investment one could possibly get for one’s money.

Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland said it well: "Trump is a vessel for the frustration, but he is not a vehicle for the solution ."

I can understand why many might feel that Harris’s proposals are “too little too late,” and relish the kind of chaos that Trump will unleash as an expression of outrage. Who cares if he burns it all down even if women lose their rights to reproductive healthcare?? After all, how much worse can it get? This is a fair question. My answer is, it can get a lot worse.?

Here is a little insight into what chaos felt like when I lived in Moscow from 1990-1994. The ruthlessness and the violence that erupted during those chaotic years were unspeakable. Rival banking mafias literally beheaded one another and left heads on stakes in the Moscow suburbs.?

Even if you were not trying to start a bank, it was hard to get through the day. You had to pay bribes to the nurse if you wanted her to give you the medicine you needed in that shot, rather than replacing it with water, to the grave digger if you wanted your loved ones buried. People disappeared after having been unjustly arrested.

Food disappeared from the grocery stores and went directly to government officials. So if you wanted meat you had to bribe the butcher. That was illegal so you then had to bribe the bureaucrat who paid the butcher to inform him that you paid a bribe to get your meat. I once had a soldier with a Kalashnikov rifle appear at my door one night. I thought he was going to shoot me, but he went away contented after I gave him a few bottles of vodka.?

It wasn’t even good for bureaucrats who had powerful positions. I was hosting one such official in New York and he mentioned he needed a new hinge for the shutters at his dacha (country house). I took him to the nearest hardware store–no Home Depot, just a small hardware store in Midtown Manhattan. He looked around in amazement.

“There is a solution to every one of life’s problems in here!” he exclaimed. I want to continue to live in a country where our hardware stores have the things we need in them. That doesn’t happen in an authoritarian regime.?

I was grateful to return home to the United States where I believed that such corruption would never be tolerated. However, I believe this kind of corrupt dysfunction is where we are headed if we elect Trump. It won’t happen all at once, obviously. It didn’t happen all at once in Russia either. But corruption and authoritarianism are absolutely corrosive over time.

I will never forget taking a train ride from Moscow to Paris and watching out the window what it meant to live under a corrupt authoritarian regime and what it meant to work in a well-functioning Western economy where checks and balances were put on political power. In the corrupt authoritarian regime, people were living in ramshackle huts carrying sticks around on their backs to burn for heat.

In the Western democracy, there were houses and apartment buildings with central heating. Why did the Soviet Union’s leaders allow this to happen? Because they personally benefited from the corrupt economic system, and they had effectively no checks on their power, so people could not rise up and vote them out. This is why the efforts to suppress voting are so disturbing.??

I recently had a conversation with a young Latino about his family’s experience with a corrupt autocratic regime.?“I can’t understand why anyone whose family had to flee a corrupt authoritarian regime would ever support Trump. We know what happens when corrupt judges and political favors rule the day.”?

Before Chavez became Venezuela’s authoritarian leader in 1998, Venezuela, a strong democracy, was the wealthiest country in South America. By 2019, 41% of the population reported they often went whole days without eating. Death by starvation was common enough that reports of it were repressed. It doesn’t take that long for corruption and autocracy to destroy a strong country.

Most Americans are lucky enough not to have first-hand experience of how absolutely terrible life is under the kind of authoritarian regime that Trump has told us over and over again that he wants to create. Maybe some people think Trump is “just kidding .” I don’t believe he is. As Maya Angelou wrote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

There is another confounding factor to all this: social media. Part of the reason why so many of us are so vulnerable to the propaganda that has been churned out by social media. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, and Trump’s growth on the platform has been explosive . Meta is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg,? whose early motto was “company over country” and who did nothing to prevent the Cambridge Analytica scandal that tilted the election Trump’s way. And Elon Musk has not had any hesitation tilting X toward Trump and personally reposting disinformation. If you want to test out the validity of what you're seeing, you can check it here .

Why are we allowing propaganda to have such free rein? Why are we allowing two centi-billionaires and a Chinese company to skew public opinion? We don’t have to do that. Early in my career, I worked at the FCC, which was created in recognition of the risk that broadcast media could be used to spread dangerous propaganda. It’s time to regulate.

The oldest trick in the book of ultra wealthy people trying to solidify their power over the rest of us is to use hatred to divide the population and conquer it. That is why racism and misogyny are playing such a big role in Trump’s propaganda. We know that this strategy works tragically well. But that doesn’t mean we have to let it work. We do not have to go down this path. My personal experiences and my reading of history convince me that a terrible darkness awaits us if we do.

Trump has supported policies that are already invading our most private and precious decisions. His stance on abortion robs women of bodily autonomy and robs us all of the freedom to plan our families.

Recently at least two Texas women have been denied miscarriage care and died .? No one can deny that these women were alive when they were denied life-saving services. Furthermore, there have been more, not fewer, abortions since the laws forbidding it were passed .?

Abortion is healthcare. So is gall bladder surgery. The fact that I support a patient’s right to have gallbladder surgery does not mean I want more gallbladder surgeries. The fewer we need the better. The same is true of abortion. I care about abortion for my son’s sake as surely as I do my daughter’s.?

Men become parents as surely as women do.?But the thought that Donald “grab 'em by the pussy” Trump would have any say over the health decisions any woman makes for her own body is enough to get me marching in the streets. Harris has been a steadfast supporter of a woman’s right to choose her entire career and will push to codify women's reproductive freedom.

Harris fights corruption. Trump invites it. Harris prosecutes crooks. Trump admires them. Harris has spent her whole career supporting the rule of law and representing the people in our legal system. Trump has broken the law and used his wealth to weaponize our legal system. When Trump’s crowd chants “lock her up,” he encourages them. When Harris’s crowd chanted “lock him up,” she paused and reminded them that the legal system would make that decision, not her and not a mob.?

To function properly, capitalism needs the kind of checks and balances that our democratic system offers, not an oligarch who encouraged his followers to storm the capital after he lost the election. Trump has given every indication he will be an autocratic kleptocrat. Harris has proved throughout her career that she is a capitalist who supports American democracy.

No matter who wins this election we have a lot of work to do to get our economy and our country back on track. If Trump wins, we make our job immeasurably harder, if not impossible. If Harris wins we can expect an administration that seeks to unite not divide us, protects our freedom, strengthens our democracy, creates better opportunities for people who are hurting economically, and grows the overall economy.?

I invite you to join me in supporting a continued democracy in the United States of America.