Dear President Trump,

You have some messed up ideas about strength. Your statement that strength necessarily means one doesn’t have a heart is absolutely nuts. It’s like you’re living inside a primitive comic book where strength is expressed only within a “might is right” framework. I realize you have to keep saying how strong you are since you’ve trained your base to believe whatever you say a dozen times no matter how ludicrous. It’s hard to believe, though, that even half of them think you were looking strong when you had armed border patrol agents taking small children from their exhausted, unarmed parents and then caging them each hundreds of miles away from one another. The other half of your base is going to see your decision to stop the family separations as nothing but a weak betrayal of your campaign promises no matter how many times you insist you are strong. Basically, you might just have succeeded in alienating a big chunk of your supporters with this one. We’ll see. We’ll also see what new horror you pull out of your sleeve to distract people from this and to reassert your mighty might.

One of the situations I think we absolutely have to keep a close eye on is what happens over the next couple of weeks to the reporter who dared to call you on your lying ways. Before this past week, reporters have stayed away from directly asking you why you are lying, but Andrew Feinberg finally did it. I think he deserves a medal. And I am worried for him. In the world of strong-he-man dictators (and aspiring dictators), once people start publicly confronting him and his regime they immediately endanger themselves to stem the tide of revolt. So nothing better happen to Feinberg. No sidelining, no demotion, no job loss, no one stalking him or his family, no mystery callers threatening him. Nothing. I’m sure if anything were to happen to Feinberg or anyone in his family, you would claim you had nothing to do with it, that it must be a rogue patriot who couldn’t stomach anyone accusing their man of lying. But really, nothing better happen to him.

May we keep journalists safe when they call out your lies directly.
May we be happy to vote you and your posse out of office.
May we do the work we need to do to address the ills that allowed you to become president.
May you not start a war.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson