What "MAGA" really means The phrase has troubled liberals who think it is a call for a return to an America before civil rights, gay rights, and women's rights. But I have a more generous interpretation, one that is truer to my experience of Donald Trump as he is today. "Make America Great Again" recalls a nation brimming with vitality, with a can-do spirit, with hope and a belief in itself. It was an America that was beginning to confront its darker shadows, could acknowledge the injustice in its past and present, yet at the same time could celebrate its successes. It was a nation of broad prosperity, the world's most vibrant middle class, and a idealistic belief (though not consistently applied) in freedom, justice, and democracy. It was a nation that led the world in innovation, productivity, and technology. And it was the healthiest country in the world. I have talked to many Trump supporters. I have talked with his inner circle. I have talked to the man himself. This is the America they want to restore.

I commend President Biden for stepping down. His infirmities were evident to any unbiased observer from the beginning. It was this progressive deterioration — and his abandonment of Democratic Party principles — that prompted me to enter the race and ensure American voters had a viable, vigorous alternative to Donald Trump. Yet the response of the DNC was to try and hide President Biden’s degeneration from the American public and disable democracy to ram him through to his party’s nomination. Many Americans fear that the same DNC elites are about to rig the nominating process again to get a monumentally unpopular vice president to step into President Biden’s shoes. I call on the Democratic Party to return to its traditional commitment to democracy and exemplify it with an open process. Instead of anointing a candidate hand-picked by DNC elites, the party should use neutral polling to identify the candidate who can best beat Donald Trump. The delegates should then select a nominee based on this information. If they had done this to begin with, I would not have had to leave the Democratic Party.

Just to quell any speculation, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES will I join Donald Trump on an electoral ticket. Our positions on certain fundamental issues, our approaches to governance, and our philosophies of leadership could not be further apart.