Dear President Trump,

A few days ago a very large, very heavy box was delivered to our door containing the makings of an 8-drawer wooden bureau that will hold my messiest art materials – the hundreds of dried leaves, flowers, crumpled paper, and random bits of cardboard that I use for printing. All this messy stuff has been cluttering the top of some waist-high shelves in a room off our kitchen for months (years, maybe….). About a month ago it was finally too much for Laura (it really was threatening to take over the room) so we went on the hunt for an appropriate piece of furniture that would allow me to organize it all and get it out of sight. We didn’t have many options since I need pretty shallow drawers and what we ended up with is not the loveliest thing in the world, but it’ll do.

The main reason to bring this odd topic up is that we kind of desperately needed a good, two-person project today. Between the news that Epstein took the coward’s route to hell (really, to oblivion, but if there were a hell, that’s where he’d be now) and the sense that there is very little wrong in this world that either of us, personally, can fix, we needed a concrete project that was doable.

“Laura-n-Tracy” projects used to be a prime way we spent time together, whether it was painting the interior of a new house, figuring out curtains for a bedroom, or weeding a garden bed. Some of that stuff we still do, but we don’t generally have very demanding projects to work on together anymore so it was a treat to spend three (four?) hours today diddling with eight drawers that needed to be assembled and a case that wasn’t super straightforward to build. At the end of it we agreed that Ikea should hire us to test out their assembly kits and instructions since we are both reasonably smart and handy and if we can’t do it, there’s probably something wrong with the kit, the instructions, or both.

I bet you miss having doable projects, too. Oh, like having beautiful stone fountains and patios built on eight or ten of your golf courses by undocumented people. Those were the days, weren’t they? You could put your visionary Trump-brain into high gear and come up with ideas, snap your little fingers, and voila! you could have your very own whatever built to specs at a steal since you could underpay vulnerable undocumented people.

Wait, those days were really earlier today, weren’t they?

Even as hundreds of workers were arrested at their jobs across Mississippi this past week, your company (companies?) continues to employee undocumented people to do both skilled and unskilled labor on the cheap. This was discovered to be an “issue” several months ago and you all made a big show of firing a lot of people, claiming you’d been duped by their awesome forged papers even though there was proof a-plenty that this was no surprise, that your managers (and no doubt you) knew full well that undocumented immigrants had been working for the Trump empire for years on end.

Your son said the company is moving to E-verify (at an apparently glacial pace – oh, wait, glaciers are actually moving and melting super fast now so we better say at a snail’s pace) and that it would all be right as rain any decade now. You all are so full of horseshit.

What’s your base going to say? Nothing, right? Fox News will almost certainly keep this latest deal on the q.t., which means most of your peeps won’t hear about it. Besides, most of them accepted long, long ago that you are an A-1 hypocrite and if their favorite guy can be a hypocrite, than darn it all, they can be too.

For the love of Pete. Or Maria. Or anyone. This is such a sick, nutso (f*cked up) situation; our POTUS lives to denigrate and vilify undocumented Latinx immigrants to score points with his base while he and his business have employed undocumented Latinx immigrants on the sly for years and his base isn’t going to care one whit.

May our First Amendment rights remain safe so we can keep calling out hypocrites.
May we be willing to keep doing the work of calling out hypocrites.
May we take on some doable projects to protect our mental health.
May we accept that fighting the good fight is righteous even if we may not win it in our lifetimes.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson