Dear President Trump,

When I read last week that you’d been planning a 16-day golfing vacation down at Mar-a-Lago I told Laura that it might be worth the $5 billion dollars in wall money if it meant you’d be preoccupied with lowering your handicap for over two weeks. I was actually kidding – the whole wall idea is just dumb, divisive politics with a hefty side of government contract monies for whoever kisses your butt best – but I am really, really sad that we didn’t get your vacation.

And today it seems likely that dozens of Navy Special Operations military personnel and their commanders are also really sad you didn’t take your all expenses paid Florida vacation since you may well have just ended their Special Ops careers by Tweeting video of them. The Newsweek article, which took about 10 minutes to load because so many people were trying to access it, explained that Special Ops personnel are not ever supposed to be identified as such because it compromises them and their missions if they are captured by enemies. So, depending how many troops you managed to show in your precious video stream, you may well have not only cost them their personal careers, but you may have cost the US government millions (billions?) of dollars in lost operations potential.

What were you thinking? Were you thinking? The most charitable explanation is that you truly are a narcissistic idiot who was preening for the attention and had no idea that it was against military regulation to publicly share images of Special Ops personnel (and didn’t think to ask anyone). A much scarier, more sinister explanation is that you were giving someone a late Christmas present by outing all those soldiers and ruining whatever mission they were on in Iraq. I honestly don’t know which explanation is more plausible. Of course it’s possible that this was a personality disorder twofer – your narcissism was fed and your antisocial itch was scratched at the same time. The antisocial part would be the case even if this turns out to have been another on-demand show of loyalty for Vladimir and not a straight up “I want to screw my own people” deal, since whatever it is you did to end up being beholden to Vladimir must have been sick and awful. Whatever was/is going on with this, I hope you get reamed for it.

May we all be safe from our Commander-in-Chief.
May we all be willing to scrutinize his patterns of behavior.
May you not expose people to unnecessary risk.
May we find a way to take the nuclear codes away from you.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson