Dear President Trump,

I can’t believe I missed it yesterday when I was going on about #100, but a friend texted this morning to let me know he’s happy to be one of the 99 (%) still in the fold, which was quite nice on a couple of different levels, don’t you think?

Ah, “don’t you think” – that’s a loaded phrase for you, isn’t it?

Whether you’ve thought it through is debatable, but you do seem pretty darn firm when it comes to refusing to release your tax returns. You’ve rolled out the trolls to take up the “hell no, Trump won’t release his taxes, but trust me, he is as pure as the driven snow and so are his finances!” litany. I especially loved it when Mulvaney said that the voters spoke in 2016 and made it clear that they didn’t care about seeing any stinkin’ Trump tax returns (ok, he didn’t say it quite like this, but you get the gist).

Me being me, I did a little Google research this morning to drill down on the “voters spoke” claim and in addition to Hillary Clinton having won 2,868,518 more votes than you, there were an additional 8,286,698 votes cast for candidates besides you. In fact, there were 74,140,350 of us who voted against you and only 62,985,134 who voted for you, though we don’t know how many of the latter were manipulated by trolls of the Russian variety and we also don’t know how many sat out the election in the wake of manipulation by those same trolls. So no matter what, “the voters spoke” rationale is bullshit. You all are just throwing up smoke screens and buying yourselves yet more of our precious time.

Unfortunately, though, I give you terrific odds of getting away with the stall tactics through the 2020 election cycle (and I’m also betting that Barr will do a bang-up job of keeping the details of the Mueller report locked down tight through then as well). Even if the stakes for our country and the world weren’t so high, it would be incredibly troubling that our president apparently has so very much to hide that he will go to such lengths to avoid releasing his taxes (and his henchmen will go to such lengths to keep us in the dark about his campaign’s dealings with our primary foreign adversary). Actually, “incredibly troubling” doesn’t begin to touch it.

May we be safe from a POTUS whose corruption knows no bounds.
May we be willing to hang in and refuse to lower our standards.
May we be kind and respectful to one another so we have something to build from when this is over.
May we have the courage to commit to peace.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson