Dear President Trump,

On the evening dog walk I noticed a bedraggled Shasta daisy at the edge of a neglected yard. The daisy is clearly left over from last summer; it’s missing a bunch of petals and looks pretty cock-eyed. But – it’s still standing and that’s both kind of awesome and kind of disturbing. We’ve had several hard freezes so it’s not as though the winter weather has been consistently balmy, but it sure seems odd that a summer flower could still be intact this far into January.

Moving on from this, for now, I want to lambast you over the horrible wall battle. I thought maybe I’d already accused you of using it for distraction purposes, but I checked my file and apparently I haven’t, so I will now – I think you are making such a stupid-ass big deal over the wall because it’s a terrific distraction from all the shit that’s hitting all the fans pertaining to the Mueller investigation and the shady, “what the hell is that about?” decisions you’ve been making that are good for Russia.

It would be one thing if you were using something flashy, but not especially impactful, as a shiny object with which to manipulate everyone’s attention. You’ve done that so many times that it would be just one more annoying, frustrating episode of the D. Trump reality show. But this is different. You are f*cking with real people’s ability to feed their families and keep roofs over their heads and you are causing vital government functionalities to fail, compromising the health and well-being of millions of people and vast tracks of wild lands. For what? Yes, nominally to appease your base with the prospect of a wall you’ve convinced them they personally need. But really, truly, you couldn’t ask for a better shiny (abhorrent, disgraceful, pathetic, vile) object with which to batter the American peoples’ morale. We are beside ourselves with impotent rage, desperately trying to hold things together so we can’t pay much attention to what else you are doing. Both the withdrawal from Syria and lifting sanctions on Russian players got buried in nanoseconds and these are just two recent examples of things that probably make Vladimir smile that creepy “I know where your child goes to preschool” smile of his.

May we be safe from you and Vladimir.
May we be happy to check your powers and get you out of office.
May we recognize that everyone’s (really, truly – everyone’s) health depends on limiting your powers.
May you not start a war if your current shiny object fails you.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson