Justin Russo

**Justin Vincenzo Pepé Russo**was a politician and academic best known for being the 26th President of the Magical Congress of the United States.

## History

Russo was born on Jul 6, 1990 in Metropolis, being the oldest son of Jerry and Theresa Russo, the former having given up his powers to marry a mortal. Russo was a half-blood wizard by birth, but owing to the Addams administration's magic-rationing policy, Jerry Russo did not have the right to practice magic himself and thus owned and operated a deli in Gotham City. Russo, along with his sister Alex and brother Max, were largely homeschooled rather than attending the American Wizard Schools such as Ilvermony or Brakebills (though they did spend several months studying magic at WizTech). During the Wizard Competition to determine which child had the right to practice magic, Russo technically emerged victorious but passed the right to be the family wizard to his sister. However, Russo was allowed to retain capacity for using magic due to being recruited onto the faculty at WizTech, where he would briefly serve as headmaster from 2011 to 2013.

Following the Awakening of Magic in 2011, Russo was an early advocate of integrating the supernatural community into society as a whole. He would form the Solidarity Alliance with fellow advocates of integration Sabrina Spellman, Scott Howard, Kitty Norville and Ethan Morgan. The Solidarity Alliance's core platform was gradually assimilating MACUSA into the overall structure of the US government. This was a controversial position among many baseline American and supernatural Americans alike. The likes of Peter Petrawicki, Duke Roscoe, Curtis Swint and Bob Barbas regarded supernatural Americans as a threat to the 'true American' public, much as they had with mutants in prior generations. Swint in particular openly advocated the genocide of all supernatural beings in the US in the name of public safety. Meanwhile, the Solidarity Alliance faced hostility from figures such as Bella Cullen and Henry Thornmallow, who held that maintaining the separation of the scientific and supernatural worlds was crucial to protecting both. Despite this opposition, Russo continued to push the merging of the two governments together. He additionally sought to help spread goodwill towards the supernatural community by assisting with magitech research programs. He was a part of the team responsible for creating the first publicly ready working flying cars in 2014, alongside Dr. Sheldon Cooper and Dr. Dexter Milo Cavanaugh. Russo additionally was a supervisor of psionic research for XCOM during the Furon invasion of 2015.

Russo fully began to come into his own as a leader in the late 2010's and early 2020's. Following the end of of Samuel G Quahog's second term in 2016, he would be replaced by Harry Dresden, who vanished on a mission. Russo's friend and ally Sabrina Spellman would take over as President of MACUSA. During her first eight year term, Spellman had Russo serve as her liason to the non-supernatural government of the United States. Russo's efforts to negotiate integrating MACUSA into the American government initially went well during the Meyer, Winters and Nolan administrations, especially following MACUSA's key assistance in defeating the Tethered. However, negotiations became more difficult as megacorporations grew in power and lobbied against the full assimilation of the magical community, as companies like Rossum and Wolfram and Hart feared that this would stymie their activities. This ultimately culminated in the total collapse of negotiations during the presidency of David Jefferson Adams, who outright opposed assimilating MACUSA. Russo remained as liason to the baseline government until 2020, when Dresden returned. While Spellman was allowed to keep the position, Dresden had Russo removed from his post.

Despite the risks, Russo was a public critic of Adams and encouraged Spellman to run for second term for both president of MACUSA and the United States as a whole to achieve the unification of the two governments. However, Adams' allies on the Supreme Court disqualified Spellman from running again on the ballot alongside all other major potential opponents to the Adams administration.

Russo would lead a protest in Gotham City against Adams. The protest he headed was indirectly responsible for saving Gotham City from the Inauguration Day bombings that wiped out 22 cities across the US. An attendee at his rally, Mike Wheeler, would discover the truck containing a nuclear device intending to target Gotham City. Thanks to Wheeler's discovery, the bomb was destroyed and the city survived. Following the outbreak of the Second American Civil War, Russo was reappointed as a liason between MACUSA and the government of John Shaw in Columbus, though this time it was on behalf of the mortal leadership rather than MACUSA. Russo was able to get Spellman to throw MACUSA's weight behind the Columbus government and assist in fighting the Greater Hun Chiu Republic, the European Union and the Russian Federation as well as rebel groups such as Julian Felsenburgh's Left Eye insurgency, Paul Deutscher's American Socialist White People's Party, John Rumford's Christian Marines, Joseph Seed's Eden's Gate cult and other would-be rulers of America. Ultimately, though Shaw would die in 2027, the United States would be reunited by 2028 and the cooperation between MACUSA and the US government bolstered support for the Solidarity Alliance. Spellman chose to step down after the fighting and Russo would run and win MACUSA's resulting 2028 election alongside fellow integration advocate Andrew McAlister.

However, Russo would soon run into significant bad luck as he attempted to finally fulfill his vision. While Thomas Kirkman also supported integrating the magical community into the overall US government, this came too late as he was already preparing to leave office when Russo rose to the position. Meanwhile, theocratic sentiments were growing in America in the wake of the Second Civil War, the mass sterility epidemic and the various alien invasions that had ravaged the 2020's (especially the Ceph and Combine). This ultimately culminated in the reactionary preacher Nehemiah Scudder becoming the president. Scudder, an advocate of genocide against magical beings, quickly pulled out of negotiations with MACUSA for good. Russo was approached by the nascent resistance movement headed by Leslie Knope, Simon Spier, Callie Adam Foster, and Fox Mulder to join in efforts to overthrow Scudder, who the group believed was on the cusp of becoming dictator. Russo, worried that by joining he would facilitate that transition, initially declined to ally with the resistance. Shortly afterward, the Sons of Jacob would carry out the President's Day Massacre,. In addition to killing many members of Congress including former President Lisa Simpson, the Sons of Jacob also murdered as many members of MACUSA as they could something accomplished through a combination of the destruction of Magic in 2016 by the Royal family of Mewni, which depowered many sources of Magic, the Death of Magic which Doctor Strange struggled to prevent, and the Sons use of Sentinels among the weapons. Russo would be among the many victims of the massacre, which wiped out over half of MACUSA. The remaining members of MACUSA, led by Willow Rosenberg, quickly aligned themselves with the resistance and in some cases fled into exile. Despite his death, Russo's ultimate goal of merging the supernatural and baseline governments would come to pass following the overthrow of Gilead in 2040 (whose excesses pushed most of the country back towards accepting the magical community as equals) and the establishment of the 30th Amendment to the restored US Constitution declaring that all sentient beings would be granted the same citizenship and rights as other Americans and added three 'shadow Senators' to represent the supernatural community's interests in Congress).

## Author's Note

Username: CapitalistHippie on AlternateHistory.com should get credit for this entry. it's been changed slightly from his post for "TheWorldsWeWeave: A Megacrossover Timeline.