1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. Because we’re so numbed to the outrageous I’m pretty sure any October surprise that would cause us to wake up would have to be particularly horrific. How about that one of the world’s richest men, who is contributing obscene amounts of money in questionable ways to the re-election of our worst president ever, who controls a vast amount of the world’s communications, who has a billion with a B dollars of federal technology contracts, who has high-security clearance, has also been in secret talks with Putin since 2022? Does that pique any interest? As the Wall Street Journal reports, the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”  Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, won a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies in 2021. It is the major rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon, and Musk has a security clearance; he says it is a top-secret clearance. And he’s talking to Russia. Jeff Bezos, billionaire, assisting democracy to die in darkness at the WaPo by killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Patrick Soon-Shiong, billionaire, doing the same at the LA Times. The Trump campaign (and Musk) lauded both decisions. It’s not for nothing that scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls this “obeying in advance” the demands of an authoritarian leader. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” History shows, scholars of authoritarianism know, that rather than winning favors, such a demonstration of weakness invites further abuse. Your presidential candidate is a textbook example of this. The GOP was offered many and varied and constant opportunities to weaken DJT’s destructive power. Instead the choices continued to be made to enable him. Now you’ve lost any control you think you may have had. Over him. Over his voters. Over your own party. You had the power. Now you are powerless. So my question is…why do you want to hang on to power you seem incapable of using for the good of the country you took an oath to protect? And instead sacrificed to a loser who has destroyed the GOP? You have created an American emulator of everything you were supposed to stand against. A puppet for Putin. And a growing class of American oligarchs who want to control us all. And now you do nothing but stand in silence in the shadows. Or worse, justifying the unjustifiable. That may be the biggest October surprise of all.