Dear President Trump,

There’s a lot of excitement and relief coming over the liberal airwaves after yesterday’s victories for Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. Predictably you came out all peevish, blaming the Virginia loser, Gillespie for not “embracing” you fully even though he duly aped all your divisive, hateful rhetoric. I don’t really understand why the Democrats are saying this is such a strong signal that voters are rejecting you since Virginia went for Clinton in 2016. If you had turned enough Virginians to vote for the guy who was channeling you or suppressed enough Northam votes to give Gillespie the win, it would have signaled us all that even historically solidly blue states aren’t safe despite now having seen you in action for 9 months. That is an incredibly scary scenario. And looking at the map of Virginia by country, I don’t think we should get comfortable at all. Fully 45% of Virginians chose Gillespie. This means that tens of thousands of people endorsed, or were at least willing to tolerate, a race-baiting candidate who all but wore a Trump mask. You all also probably did not get the same kind of assist from Putin this time around, so the 45% figure is all the more scary.

It’s great Northam won and it’s a relief we didn’t need a perfect, super strong candidate to do it, but we can’t get complacent. Even with your flip-floppy ways of treating your party’s candidates who do their best to follow the branding rules you and Bannon established, you all are still a mighty force and we can’t let up for a second. As I was writing about what a force you are I was seeing both a hollow saggy air bag and a huge metal ball studded with razors, broken glass, and slimed with lethal germs; in other words a morally corrupt mass of self-serving fury that is willing to fight as dirty as necessary. And now you are wounded and bleeding so you are likely to come out even angrier and dirtier than before when you thought you could coast for a while.

How do we engage such an opponent effectively while keeping our integrity intact? I don’t really know, but we have to figure it out because the world and all the future generations of the world are counting on us.

May you see that keeping the world safe keeps you safe.
May you see that your happiness is tied up with ours’.
May you see that your health would be better if you were nicer.
May you see that dealing honestly and respectfully with others is the way to go.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson