How the hell can the race be tied?

Two weeks before an election in which America should be sending Trump home (and then to jail), he and Harris are in a statistical tie in the battleground states.

Friends,

With two weeks to go before Election Day, Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump are essentially tied. Neither candidate is ahead by even a single point in The New York Times’s polling average of five critical battleground states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina).

How the hell is this possible? Even if polls were systematically off and Harris were actually ahead of Trump by, say, 5 percent, I’d still be appalled that so many Americans in swing states were supporting Trump.

A personal note. I’ve spent most of my life fighting bullies, from the grade-school bullies who teased and threatened and occasionally pummeled me, to the white supremacists of the 1960s who murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner when he was trying to register Black voters in Mississippi, to Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War, to Richard Nixon, whose henchmen broke into the Watergate complex and who then tried to cover up his illegalities.

I watched Ronald Reagan bully Americans into accepting the cruel hoax of “trickle-down” economics and legitimize corporate bashing of labor unions. I saw George W. Bush insist on invading Iraq on the basis of a lie that it contained “weapons of mass destruction,” invading Afghanistan because it contained terrorists, and establishing a gulag of torture chambers across the world.

When I was secretary of labor, I fought Republican bullies who wanted to make it easier for CEOs and their major investors to become richer by shafting their workers. Later, I fought Wall Street bullies who gambled away other people’s money and then, when their bets turned bad, got bailed out by taxpayers.

I recently wrote a column proposing reforms to limit the power of billionaires like Elon Musk. Musk responded by telling his 200 million followers on X that I was a “miniature wanker” and calling me “Robert Reichtard.”

But in all my years, I have never come across a bully more squalid than Donald Trump. He is the bully of all bullies. He emits dangerous lies like most people breathe. He has demeaned and degraded our system of self-government, attempted a coup against the United States, divided Americans with venomous bigotry, and rewarded his rich backers with tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Trump created a Supreme Court that took away women’s rights over their own bodies and immunized presidents from criminal liability.

In recent weeks, he has become even more untethered from reality, more unhinged, even less coherent.

He says that if he gets back in power he will wreak vengeance on his political opponents — including many loyal Americans who have stood up to him — calling them the “enemy within” and openly threatening to use the U.S. military against them. He says he wants to cleanse America of “scum” and “vermin,” including immigrants, refugees, and Democrats like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.

He is threatening to strip television networks of their ability to broadcast news because of coverage he doesn’t like. On Sunday, he said he’d subpoena the records of CBS, claiming that the network’s edit of Harris’s recent appearance on “60 Minutes” was misleading.

He refuses to be bound by the results of the upcoming election. This means that America will likely suffer weeks or months of litigation following Election Day, perhaps even accompanied by violence.

I felt hopeful in late July, when Joe Biden selflessly bowed out of the election and passed the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris.

I’ve felt even more hopeful as Harris proved herself a tough, exuberant, powerful campaigner and force for positive change. Her debate performance against Trump was the best I’ve ever seen.

But at this moment, I’m frankly worried. How is it even possible that Trump is tied with Harris in the battleground states that will determine who becomes president? How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he intends to do?

I cannot accept that it’s all due to misogyny and racism. Surely, gender and race continue to play a large part in our politics, but they alone cannot explain what is happening.

Nor do I think it’s because of our collective amnesia about the chaos Trump wrought during his presidency. Most of us recall how horrific he was, including the pandemic that for months he refused to acknowledge or act on.

Part of it may be that we desperately want to normalize our politics, to pretend that this election is like any other, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. To accept the reality of who Trump is and what he aims to do is simply too frightening.

Yet all these explanations let people off the hook who are in part responsible for bringing us to the brink of disaster.

High on my list is Rupert Murdoch — whose Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal have amplified Trump’s lies, spreading them repeatedly to tens of millions of Americans.

There’s also Musk, the richest person in the world, whose X platform has become a font of disinformation, incendiary conspiracy theories, pro-Trump garbage, and hateful lies about Harris. Musk continues to claim, for example, that Democrats are flying huge numbers of undocumented immigrants into swing states to vote illegally. One such post got 34 million views.

Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC now has an estimated 400 staff on the ground in the seven key battleground states. He’s hired a small army of top Republican Party operatives and is personally overseeing operations from a home base in Pittsburgh. The New York Times reports that Trump and Musk are speaking directly multiple times a week in clear violation of campaign finance laws barring coordination between candidates and super PACs.

Trump’s other major financial backers include a cavalcade of billionaires — Miriam Adelson (wife of deceased casino magnate Sheldon Adelson), Liz and Dick Uihlein (owners of packaging-materials company Uline), Timothy Mellon (scion of the robber-baron Andrew Mellon), Linda McMahon and her husband, Vince (who built World Wrestling Entertainment), Diane Hendricks (whose building materials company, ABC Supply, pulls in $20 billion in yearly revenue), Kelcy Warren (whose Energy Transfer is best known for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which Trump helped expedite in one of his first acts in office), Timothy Dunn (CEO of CrownQuest, one of the nation’s largest private oil companies), Jeff Sprecher (owner of the New York Stock Exchange) and his wife, Kelly Loeffler, and many more.

Another reason Trump is running neck-and-neck with Harris is because of the silence of respected business leaders. Heading the list is Jamie Dimon, CEO and chair of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, who calls himself “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan” and who regularly speaks out about the injustices and inequalities of contemporary America. A lifelong Democrat, Dimon is considered the “spokesman” of American business. Yet when it comes to denouncing the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, Dimon’s silence has been deafening.

I also need to mention a few people now surrounding Trump who make his threats more credible, should he regain power. They include Charlie Kirk, who runs Turning Point USA and said recently that “if you’re a Christian that votes to the Democrat Party, you are voting for things that God hates”; Russell Vought, former Trump budget director who wrote much of Project 2025; Stephen Miller, the mastermind behind some of Trump’s most hard-line immigration policies; and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who describes America as being in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

Who else? I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Vladimir Putin is again seeding the election with hackers and bots favoring Trump, as Putin did in 2016.

My friends, this is no ordinary election. This is no ordinary time.

At this juncture — two weeks from Election Day with the race virtually tied in battleground states — none of us who cares about the future of this country can any longer afford to be a mere spectator.

If you can spare the time, I urge you to travel to the battleground states and knock on doors.

If you cannot, you may want to write letters and postcards and make phone calls.

If you’re financially able, I urge you to contribute to Harris’s campaign.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. A five-alarm fire. A Category 5 hurricane.

Please do whatever you can.