Dear President Trump,

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m blogging my letters to you in addition to posting them to your contact page. I don’t think I’ve told you, though, that the WordPress hosting site I use makes it super easy to track the action that individual posts do and don’t get. Maybe it’s because I’m not reaching out on social media platforms or maybe it’s because people are so sick of you that a blog called “Daily Trump Letters” is a turn off, but whatever it is, my site doesn’t get a ton of traffic. It’s a good day when an individual post gets 15 views, or even just 10.

I’m bothering to tell you all this because lately I’ve been clicking along with most posts getting between 7 and 10 views (plus however many reads by people who are following the blog), but the response to the post two days ago predicting there would be crickets regarding E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegation has been especially underwhelming. Only 4 non-followers have read that post.

It doesn’t make sense for me to take any of this personally and so I won’t, but it’s interesting. And it does fit the larger pattern that Paul Waldman (WP) and Emma Gray (HP) lay out so well in their respective articles today, which is that Carroll’s credible allegations didn’t make the front page in a lot of the national papers and it didn’t get any airtime at all on the Sunday morning talk shows. It was gratifying to see that Gray pulled in what you said about being able to get away with shooting someone on 5^th Avenue, though I’m sure she thought of it on her own (it’s a pretty dang obvious analogy) and didn’t get it from my blog. But anyway, they both lament the lack of attention and care regarding Ms. Carroll’s allegation and both look beyond you to what it means about the collective us that we are inured to reports of such atrocities committed by anyone, let alone the POTUS.

Gray did include some more hopeful commentary from Kristen Houser, who is the spokesperson for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center: “Change is slow. We’re not gonna see a tidal wave that is reflected in the formal systems of our culture after 18 months of awareness.”

She’s right of course. But for the people who’ve been holding shitty secrets for decades, who’ve been waiting all their lives to feel safe, who worry about their daughters’ safety (boys too, but the sexual assault rates for girls and women are astronomically higher than they are for boys and men), it’s horrifying that no one is even considering holding you accountable for doing the awful things to women that you bragged, on tape, about doing. Waldman especially calls out the hypocrisy of the GOP and their willingness to find the sexual assault allegations against Bill Clinton so believable that they had to be shouted from every Republican rooftop. But these ones about you, uhm, not so much. Not even a tiny chirp out of the lot of them. Craven assholes.

Next door to the hotel is a huge Presbyterian church and in the side yard is a relatively new bronze sculpture that includes four nearly full size naked people, two men and two women. All of them are sort of contained by big angular slabs of metal that form something of a V-shape but with the top of the right arm taking a jog in. One of the men is in the middle and he seems to be about to float away in some sort of ecstasy. The other male figure is sitting down at man #1’s feet and looks to be trying to shield his eyes from the brilliance of man #1. To the left, one of the women also looks like she’s levitating but she’s all twisted up and is awkwardly hovering around man #1’s knee. And where do you suppose woman #2 is? I didn’t see her at first because she’s cowering down in the very bottom of the crux of the V with her arms clasped around to her back as though she’s trying to make herself as small as possible.

May we all be safe to be our full, large as life selves.
May we keep speaking up even when no one seems to be listening.
May we know that speaking up makes for a healthier world right now and tomorrow.
May we know the peace that comes from telling hard truths (even as doing so stirs up all sorts of shit).

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson