Dear President Trump,

The other day I wrote in reference to you: “We’ve got to focus on damage control, removal, and renewal and we can’t do all this incredibly hard work if we exhaust ourselves worrying about dumb shit.” I still think this is correct, but after further consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that we cannot effectively do damage control or start getting real about renewal until you and your regime are removed. I get that this is a “duh” sort of deal and most people who perceive you to be a threat are probably way ahead of me in realizing that you have so perfected the “unpredictable” bad boy shtick that nearly all efforts at damage control are futile. [I do maintain, however, that some forms of damage control remain critical. For example, parents need to continue to correct their kids when they are acting like you. They need to be clear with them that lying, bullying, manipulating, intimidating, and generally being a messed up jerk is not ok even if the POTUS acts this way all the time.]

And in terms of renewal, although there is merit to harboring hope and envisioning a future in which we use the lessons learned from this mess to push the goalposts further on justice, accountability, and governmental integrity, we can’t even get onto that playing field when you and yours have the gates to the stadium locked and the perimeter guarded by GOP lackeys and illegitimately installed court officials ready to do your bidding.

So clearly if damage control and renewal are not viable paths for us to take at this time, removal has to be the order of the day. As weird and questionable as it was that Nadler et al. chose to have John Dean testify yesterday, he did remind us all yet again (we’ve got it now so I hope we can move on) that the Mueller report laid out a roadmap for Congress to initiate impeachment inquiries, just like the Watergate report did in its day.

I’ve not seen it reported in either the WP or the HP, but Laura saw on Twitter that Nadler is trying again to get Pelosi to ok impeachment inquiries, arguing that it would consolidate the various efforts to investigate your wrongdoings (emphasis on the plural here). It would do this, for sure, but more importantly, it would compel you to stop stonewalling and would more quickly shake loose your tax returns, verbal testimony from McGahn’s lips, etc.

Time is critical here – we’ve got to wrest the narrative from you, the Mercers, McConnell, and Vladimir as quickly as possible, and getting those directly involved with you and with the investigation on TV is the way to do it. The people you’ve been gaslighting will need time to come around and to wake up to what you’ve been doing and why you’ve been doing it, and this is true whether we ultimately have to vote you out of office or enough Republican voters can lean on their Senators to have a successful Senate vote to impeach. Either way, the sooner your peeps can see and hear for themselves the mountain of evidence against you all, the sooner we can get to the hard work of rebuilding.

May we be safe from those who skew the narrative for their sole benefit.
May we be willing to stay on this and push to have the details presented clearly, on air.
May we accept that we all need to be exposed to the sickening details before we can move on.
May you not start a war.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson