
2017 was weird, but now it's over.

2017 taught us a few important lessons: President Donald Trump is just as bad as we predicted. The craven soullessness of the Republican Party literally knows no bottom. The White House is staffed with incompetent racists. Mike Pence is complicit.

The other lesson we learned is the one that frankly I was terrified we couldn't ever get right. But we did. We learned we can fight back.

We organized, we got in the streets, we got loud. We started the long slow work of centering women — specifically, the black women who were right all along. We acknowledged the chase for the "white working class" as the retro red herring it's always been for the Democratic Party. We punched Nazis.*


We got out the ever-loving vote. And we won. (And won and won and won and won, and I am so not tired of all the winning.)

And somewhere in Washington, Bob Mueller is working. I like to picture him in a darkened office, all alone after hours, with just the light over his desk on, a stack of file folders obscuring his view, pen in hand.

So 2018 is gonna be another doozy. But we're ready for it. We can meet this tsunami of suck with truth and humor and overwhelming numbers.

We can start taking back Congress right now. We're in position to do it. If we keep showing up the way we did in 2017, then we flip the House, displace Paul Ryan, take back the Senate, and find ourselves a very long way down the road to stopping the worst of the Republicans' agenda to impoverish America. We find ourselves with subpoena power. We find ourselves whispering the "I" word in rooms where that word carries actual weight.

So my resolution for 2018 is to start right away, and not let up until November. I'm going to talk to my neighbors, conscript my family, show up for the big moments and the small ones, and tell the stories of the heroes all over this country protecting our democracy and fighting for American values.

And thanks to the lessons of 2017, I know there are millions and millions of you right there with me.

*(With words.)