Dear President Trump,

Still no sign of Melania. Can you even imagine how up in arms you and the GOP would be if Hillary Clinton had been in office 500 days and instead of Melania not having been seen for over three weeks, it was Bill Clinton? You all would be accusing Hillary of having killed Bill in a Satanic ritual and eating him for breakfast. Seriously, you all would be freaking out if this sort of thing were happening on her watch and yet you and your staff are playing this like we are completely over-reacting and should just trust you that she’s fine. Well, I don’t trust you with anything so I don’t trust you that she is fine. Let’s call me “Doubting Tracy” because I’m not going to believe she’s ok until I see her moving around and talking coherently. Once that happens I might begrudgingly believe she is ok, but at this point I will almost certainly remain concerned that she was truly not ok for a time.

As I’ve been sifting through my emotions and thoughts about you having been in office 500 days I’ve been thinking about the adage “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s obviously not an adage I ascribe to all the time, but I do try to avoid being overly negative and gossipy. In the spirit of commemorating this big day I’m going to list some positives of having you as our president:

• We can now better appreciate most all the other presidents we’ve ever had
• We can see where we must tighten up on the executive branch to thwart crooks that somehow make it into office
• The scary underbelly of politics is coming into ever sharper focus
• It is clearer than ever the vast amount of work we need to do to address the deep-seated racism and sexism poisoning this country

There’s more but this is a good start. You really have shown us our weaknesses and vulnerabilities and some distant day from today, we may truly, sincerely thank you for this. A presidency like yours was bound to happen at some point. I just hope to whatever is good in the universe that we’ll be able to come through this trial intact. I’m not sure the adage “whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger” is really true. I hope it is, but at this point when it comes to you, I’m willing to go with “whatever doesn’t kill us, doesn’t kill us.”

May we make it safely through the rest of your time in office.
May we experience happiness as acts of resistance.
May we help each other stay healthy and strong.
May we never make peace with tyranny.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson