Dear President Trump,

Some days it seems like Jennifer Rubin (WP) is one of only a small handful of reasonable media-type people left amongst us. I don’t always agree with her, but she does have a knack for cutting through the B.S. and getting to crucial bottom lines. She did it again this morning in her editorial calling out both the vacuousness and danger of spilling gallons of ink over how tired and at times unsure Robert Mueller appeared during the hearings yesterday. Yes, he was clearly out of his element and the emotional and cognitive load on his system was pretty clearly more than he could comfortably handle, but holy moly people (to include you), the established facts are f*cking damning. Here’s what Rubin had to say about this (albeit out of sequence):

“The “failure” is not of a prosecutor who found the facts but might be ill equipped to make the political case, but instead, of a country that won’t read his report and a media obsessed with scoring contests rather than focusing on the damning facts at issue.”

And this:

“To spend hours of airtime and write hundreds of print and online reports pontificating about the “optics” of Mueller’s performance — when he confirmed that President Trump accepted help from a hostile foreign power and lied about it, that he lied when he claimed exoneration, that he was not completely truthful in written answers, that he could be prosecuted after leaving office and that he misled Americans by calling the investigation a hoax — tells me that we have become untrustworthy guardians of democracy.”

Rubin seems to be supporting Pelosi’s position that impeachment is too dicey because she closes with a warning that the Democrats need to get it together and identify and support a strong candidate who can defeat you in 2020. Well, she doesn’t actually come out against impeachment (and in other columns she lays out strategies for going there), but she is a realist and likely has concluded that even if the House moved to impeach you, the Senate will never do so and that this means we have to get you out via the 2020 election.

So yes, we need to put on our big girl and big boy Defend Democracy drawers and stop fretting over the size of the bags under Mueller’s eyes. We need to get on with the dual pronged approach of checking your ass via impeachment hearings and putting together an unbeatable campaign to send you packing (ideally for a long prison stay). If we are smart about it, those two efforts should work together to achieve the goal of a major reset because despite the near certainty that the GOP will freak out even more and get even uglier, impeachment hearings will provide a steady drumbeat that keeps many (though not all, by far) of your more egregious transgressions in the public eye.

We need to go back to the old communication device – the classic broken record – that you and yours have buffed to a blinding shine, but instead deploy it for good. We need to keep replaying that tape of Mueller explaining that you have not been exculpated, there are credible criminal cases to be made against you once you leave office, and that the crimes you will be accused of typically result in substantial jail time (which, would be a nice, nice rejoinder to the “lock her up” shit you hurled at Clinton for so long). We’ve got to keep the clear case for impeachment in front of the American people even if it doesn’t end up resulting in your removal by that mechanism.

May we be safe from dangerous distractions.
May we be willing to keep playing the broken record of your wrongdoings.
May we forgive one another when we are tired and worn down.
May we make peace with the truth and stand by it.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson