Dear President Biden,

Thank you for being such a good President – not good for your age or all things considered but good flat-out. History, I’m betting, will rate you near the peak. What will debar you from that altitude, please God, is the absence of national calamity. Lincoln, Washington, and FDR were great because we needed them to be and they rose to the occasion. “Near-greats” took care of business, kept the peace, moved the ball forward – don’t you love cliches! – but America, under their watch, wasn’t shopping for a savior. Fame depends on luck. Shakespeare needed a fledgling theater industry, Michelangelo patronage and Florence, Napoleon an exhausted France, Jesus the ontological dread of his moment, war heroes their wars, etc. Many the might-have-been giant of humanity who perished young or trudged through dreary days.

I’m not writing to butter you up. The butter you’re slathered with must turn your stomach. Only sickos get off on sycophancy.

I’m writing to assure you you’ve done enough to earn posterity’s gratitude and to alert you, if you try for more, you may screw up. America faces its scariest threat ever – scarier than King George’s redcoats, the South’s Secessionists, Depression, Hitler, the Soviets. Scarier than Putin, Xi, Orban, or even Tucker Carlson, though they are faces of it. That threat, while personified by Trump, isn’t Trump per se, but the end of humanity’s six-century experiment in freedom, which took root in the Renaissance, picked up steam through centuries we label Enlightenment, and culminated in the USA. Yes, culminated. For it seems America and the so-called “free world” we helped shape have “gone about as fur as we can go,” as Will Parker sang in Oklahoma. The evidence of this is the rejection of democracy by a substantial swath of Americans. They’d be OK with a dictator, they think, who’d make their life less complicated and/or aggravating. They’re wrong, but by the time they wake to their error, it will be too late.

It’s not clear that America’s – and the developed nations’ – avalanche toward tyranny can be arrested, but if it can, the place is here and the time is now. Armageddon isn’t usually scheduled but this one is, November 5, 2024, when Americans decide whether to keep making their own decisions or implore daddy to do it for them. Trump promises the end of democracy and, while his word is garbage, his actions prove he aint kidding. Not only will he be “dictator for day” – a day that lasts decades – he’ll be the worst sort, because he doesn’t give a hoot for his nation or the folks he governs and doesn’t know squat. Good dictators can happen – Augustus and Napoleon, say – but they’re rare as hen’s teeth.

Trump must be stopped – more than stopped, stomped – he and his – for to acquiesce to tyranny is to endorse it. You know this, I’m pretty sure, though you dare not blurt it. The question is how to stop him.

One’s eighties are a tricky decade. Bodies and minds fall apart – not inevitably, but probably. You lose a step. You forget. Everybody knows this, dreads it.

You can’t help your age. You might be one of those paragons who run marathons in their nineties. But your people don’t believe it. And a vote against you – no matter how dopey the reason – is a vote for Trump.

Having clinched the nomination, which you’ll do soon, please feel free to step aside, entrusting the choice of nominee to a convention you’ll control. We love you, sir, but pass the torch, it’s time. Greatness is within your grasp.