Dear President Trump,

Turns out I was missing a critical element of your distraction technique; Rachel Maddow called it out in her interview with the New Yorker. You don’t just distract with something silly or benign, you throw something down so offensive and outrageous that you force engagement because silence would be interpreted as complicity. It is really very clever. Although there are plenty of times when you say off the wall things and people wonder how far your dementia has gone, but when you are aiming to distract from Russia or legislative failures you are laser focused and vicious. Seeing all this more clearly really helps shore up my argument that you know exactly what you are doing with all this.

At least to a point.

I don’t think you really know what you are doing with North Korea and how your use of that situation is going to play out with Kim Jong Un. There, I think you are in over your head and are risking escalating an already very dangerous situation. Even though you are planning a trip to the region soon, which has led some analysts to conclude you aren’t going to push it too far or actually attack North Korea, I think it is still legitimate to worry about two bullheaded boy-men who have things to prove and many, many things to distract their people from, getting totally carried away and pulling us into a nuclear war.

I realize this is shifting off the main distraction topic and may be too much of a reach, but the situation between you and Kim Jong Un feels a whole lot like Bill O’Reilly’s comments about the second amendment when he said the price of freedom (for who exactly? surely not those killed) is that “violent nuts” have the right to roam free with their guns no matter how threatening they are. You and Kim Jong Un have a much larger platform and the stakes are astronomically higher but here we have two violent nuts who feel quite free to threaten annihilation and pretty much all the rest of us can do is alternate between horror and denial. Insecurity, especially of the male variety, sure has some awful, nihilistic manifestations.

May we simply be safe.
May we eek out some happiness in spite of the crazy stuff you are putting us through.
May we stay sane and not be distracted by you.
May we all find some constructive way forward together.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson