Dear President Trump,

Robby Mook has a strong Op Ed in the WP this morning. He lays out how it’s been clear from the get go that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. As Clinton’s campaign manager he appeared on numerous news shows right after the first DNC email dump and told the nation that US cybersecurity experts were clear that Russia was behind the hack. He reminds us that we knew your team was talking with Russians before the election and that Russia was making no bones about wanting you to win. Mook’s points are that while the information coming from Mueller’s investigation is connecting more dots, the big picture was well known in 2016 and as a country we didn’t care all that much.

This is relevant not only with regards to Russian election interference and you having at least welcomed it, if not aided it. Here’s a (very) partial list of other painfully obvious things that many of us don’t seem to be able to take seriously or mount solid opposition to: climate change and the unsustainability of our current practices; GOP power grabs that are trashing the agreed upon norms of peaceful transfers of power; that you are an inarticulate nincompoop (and a lying crook); the appalling murder rate of women by intimate partners even when domestic violence was a known aspect of the relationship dynamics (see today’s WP extended article on this); thousands of people with nowhere safe and dry to sleep; extreme racial bias at all levels of the legal system; extreme imbalance of racial and gender representation that persists at all levels of government, and so forth.

Maybe the sheer number and magnitude of all these extremely obvious problems has us whistling Dixie and looking the other way. Or maybe we are looking to each other for how to respond and when we see most everyone else going along with their days as though things are reasonably ok, we think we must be over-reacting or down right crazy to worry so much. Or maybe just getting through our own days is so hard we don’t have the energy to worry about societal issues let alone do much about them. To be sure, there are some among us who are working tirelessly on one or more of these issues and they are true heroes, but the vast majority of us are staying pretty dang complacent, which I bet suits you and Vladimir just fine.

May we be safe even when we are oblivious.
May we be willing to pull our heads out of the sand.
May we have a healthy respect for the problems we face.
May we make peace with reality and do something to make things better, even if it’s super tiny.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson