The author has obtained an advance copy of a speech that the Democratic president-elect plans to deliver in three years on Nov. 17, 2028.
My Fellow Americans:
I would like to thank the 89 million voters who provided the largest victory margin for president since 1972, entrusting me with the protection of their liberties and indeed their very lives.
Yet as everyone saw, our national elections were undermined by roving MAGA mobs triggered by my predecessor’s repeated attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act in blue cities. These efforts to reverse a century of social progress brought America to the edge of the cliff of Caesarism …which generated a big backlash once voters had an opportunity to weigh in on what they were witnessing: monarchical overreach combined with higher prices and job losses, sweeping corruption, sharply rising health care premiums, the repulsive Epstein disclosures, unthinking DOGE layoffs and surging millions at “No Kings” protests.
All combined first to signal a great shift away from Trumpism in the 2025 off-year elections, second to erase the GOP congressional majorities in 2026 and third last week to enlarge my electoral landslide.
To preempt any reactionary sequel, today I am proposing a dozen principles to help our country recover, define my mandate and provide a scorecard for accountability. They’re all grounded on the core premise that, according to the late Norman Cousins, “no one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.”
The principles that follow comprise a Declaration of Progress that will likely take not months but years, perhaps decades to accomplish. But our recent close call demands an emphatic about-face starting even before Jan. 20.
1. No racial division. Tolerance is the glue that binds together our multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-faith nation. The recent back-sliding on race, to the contrary, included renaming military facilities after Confederate generals, assaulting and deporting Brown people without due process and pretending that a country soon to be majority-minority can somehow survive by opposing diversity after centuries of exclusion.
People of color should expect better than the refrain that they succeed only because of DEI favoritism, a slur that proved to be little more than Jim Crow without Bull Connor.
2. No political prosecutions. Criminalizing politics based on retribution is a crime.
Instead, I will choose an attorney general with demonstrated integrity. And I won’t abuse my power by ordering the Department of Justice to file or drop particular prosecutions — nor will I pardon only convicted Democrats and big donors. I’ll also appoint an independent special counsel to consider criminal charges against former officials who openly betrayed their oaths of office and where there’s the appearance of a political conflict-of-interest.
In my administration, crime won’t pay.
3. No lying or gaslighting. I’ll make mistakes…but they will not include distorting the truth when it is personally or politically convenient. A democracy based on Dr. King’s “web of mutuality” cannot function if the public loses faith in their elected representations and institutions. You won’t hear me declare that Portland and L.A. are burning down or that an ethnic group is eating dogs and cats or any other polarizing accelerant.
When it comes to public truth-telling, I am guided by the words of the moral philosopher Sissela Bok. “Imagine a society,” she wrote, “where word and gesture could never be counted on. Questions asked, answers given, all would be worthless. Trust however is a social good as much as the air we breathe.”
4. No sacrifice of science on the altar of ideology. The vaccine skeptics who endanger the health of our children will not be celebrated in my administration. And climate deniers who place our planet at risk will have to find work elsewhere. Sunlight beats drilling no matter what fossil fools claim.
5. No federal military invasions of our neighborhoods. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act explicitly prohibits using federal troops against U.S. citizens, unless — like the Whisky Rebellion of 1794, the Civil War in 1861 and state-sponsored terrorism in the South in the 1950s and 1960s — there’s a bona fide rebellion that overwhelms local authorities. That won’t include peaceful protests broken up by tear-gassing ICE agents.
6. No federal resources to suppress speech. I will never use the huge hammer of the federal budget, military contracts or selective prosecutions to extort universities, law firms, museums and media platforms. As a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court concluded in NRA vs. Vullo in 2024, “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties to suppress views that the government disfavors.”
My constitutional portfolio won’t include attempts to silence Bad Bunny or Jimmy Kimmel. Nor will I govern based on a template of tweets/gaslighting/executive fiats in the expectation that a compliant Supreme Court will reverse dozens of lower court rulings in an unsigned sentence. Speaking of “originalism,” does anyone think the Founders intended that?
It will be harder to enact comprehensive policy solutions than to resist the ad hoc abuses above. But to keep the promise of “a more perfect union.” my Declaration of Progress will include “Do’s” as well as “Don’ts”:
7. More Affordable Economy. The country just saw what happens when multi-billionaires and “greed-is-good” corporatists grab the steering wheel of government — can anyone seriously defend an economic system where four individuals have as much wealth as 150 million others…and may shortly crown our first trillionaire?
Given our very broken economy, my progressive populism should include five cornerstones: anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement so that big business can’t impose big price increases; world trade unburdened by self-immolating and illegal American tariffs; a significantly increased federal minimum wage that hasn’t budged in 16 years; new revenue-raising provisions — including a small stock transfer tax and a 2% wealth tax on the ultra-rich to recapture some of their vast gains of the past decade — to help finance essential child care and health care; and a related “Wealth Impact Statement” that would require the OMB to disclose how major bills passing Congress might widen already staggering wealth disparities.
Enough should be enough.
8. Break up Big Media. We saw what happens when a handful of oligarchs and conglomerates buy up major media platforms to control what we read and think.
Congress enacted the 1933 and 1934 Federal Communications Acts at the start of the broadcast TV and radio era. Now we must update them to better diversify media ownership and provide a larger say to local communities. As we broke up railroad monopolies a century ago, we will split up powerful media monopolies. Earlier restrictions on cross-ownership worked until the other party ended them.
9. Public Service is not Self-Service. Our conflict-of-interest laws apply to all public servants except ironically the president — since Congress never imagined a chesty grifter in the Oval Office. Yet many voters bought into the reality TV storyline that we needed a businessman to run the government.
For the bottom-line of a democracy is not profits but fairness. We were reminded of this when the Saudis gave a president’s son-in-law $2 billion to start his investment firm, when his family cashed in on their own branded digital coin fund (after switching his policy position to favor crypto), and when — with an in-your-face violation of the Hatch Act — he filmed a Tesla car commercial on the White House lawn with his biggest contributor.
Since constitutional provisions against emolumental excess have proven ineffectual, I’ll propose new conflict laws so future presidents don’t leave office worth billions more than when they entered it.
10. Re-balancing the Court. As a result of the abuse of the Senate confirmation process, ethical lapses by some justices and a disdain for consumer and labor values, today’s Supreme Court supermajority has unfortunately been losing public trust — plunging by a third in just five years.
While the Constitution provides for life-time tenure, there is no provision establishing the number of justices. To help assure that we have a Supreme — not an Extreme — Court, let’s consider new ideas for term limits and additional jurists to make sure the court better reflects the values of all citizens and not just those in the Federalist Society.
11. Democracy — More Voters, Less Money. By abolishing the Voting Rights Act, unleashing unlimited secret corporate contributions and permitting extreme gerrymandering, free and fair elections have become very expensive and unfair.
At least since Standard Oil did everything to the Pennsylvania legislature in the 1880s except, said one reformer, “refine it,” money has been a thumb on the political scale…though Elon Musk’s $290 million donation to Donald Trump was unusually elephantine.
So we will seek to overturn the very unpopular Citizens United decision, prohibit extreme gerrymanders (one algorithm would do the trick) and re-establish the constitutional right to vote.
In America, business and democracy should be two sides of the same coin. But it’s one thing for wealthy interests to purchase private companies, quite another to purchase politicians. Pay-to-play is a game working families can’t afford.
12. A National Truth Commission. We’ve recently suffered from a level of lies that commentators feared could turn us into a “post-truth” society, approaching Orwell’s fictional “1984.”
In response, I will be proposing an independent “Truth & Reconciliation Commission” to verify history and answer two big questions: How did so many falsehoods nearly sink our democracy? What institutional changes can now help slow or stop future attempts to demand loyalty to royalty?
The commission will be composed of ethicists, scholars, authors, ex-electeds, business and labor leaders, and clergy. It will have investigatory but not prosecutorial authority.
* * * *
Finally, to those who didn’t vote for me — know that I too have been angered by economic elites who froze average Americans in place. And while I get the appeal of cinematic anti-heroes — Dirty Harry, Bronson, “Breaking Bad” — I intend to educate voters that there is nothing charming about defiling our 250 year covenant of self-government and turning it over to the whims of a few reactionary tech titans.
My irrevocable pledge to all Americans is to spend every day in office un-normalizing one-man rule, lawlessness, disinformation, cruelty, violence and corrupt self-enrichment. But I can’t do that alone.
So I invite everyone to join our movement to make progress patriotic. Please consider pursuing high-level appointments, applying to be civil servants or giving us your best ideas.
And in your daily civic lives — in your neighborhoods, workplaces and boardrooms, voluntary associations, houses of worship — I urge you to resist measuring everything through old-hat categories such as Us-Them or Left-Right-Moderate. Rather, let’s look up to the horizon of who’s for or against majority rule…because a robust democracy assumes that none of us is smarter than all of us.
Green was New York City’s first elected public advocate and author or editor of a couple dozen books, including most recently, “The Inflection Election: Democracy or Fascism in 2024?”
