Dear President Trump,

There is one little positive thing that someone somewhere on the fringes of your administration did three days ago that I appreciate very much – they flipped whatever the switch is on your contact page to allow the full auto-fill function to return. For months it was in this weird in-between space where if I typed the first letter for each field the option of clicking on the correct entry was there, but it had to be done field by field. Now, thankfully, all I have to manually enter is that I am directing the message to you (and not a federal agency), what my salutation is (for some reason this puppy is required, which makes no sense to me, but then it’s your site…), and my street address. Plus, of course, whatever it is I want to say to you that day. Starting with “T” for Tracy, the rest auto-fills so thank you to whomever it is who decided to make contacting you a bit more streamlined. For those of us who are frequent flyers it saves some meaningful time.

Last night Laura and I made ourselves watch 9 minutes of Rudy Giuliani yelling over and at Chris Cuomo on CNN after a Twitter user commented that it was one of Rudy’s more spectacularly desperate meltdowns yet. Before we turned it on, we agreed to only watch as long as we could stand but the spectacle was pretty darn compelling so we ended up watching the entire clip. Besides doing all sorts of reversals and launching a variety of bizarre counter-accusations to distract, Rudy allowed that he was in the business of digging up dirt on Joe Biden (and Hillary Clinton) from Ukraine and that he thought it perfectly reasonable for you to withhold promised military support until you got the dirt you wanted. He’s done shit like this before and since we don’t live in an even nominally logical universe anymore, you apparently don’t find him to be a liability when he keeps doing this kind of thing. Go figure.

The following Tweet of yours this morning is pretty terrific from a strategic standpoint (I’m picturing that old game “Battleship” where the opponents have their fancy bending game-boards set up so the other can’t see and they are each wildly trying to figure out how to land at least a glancing blow):

“Strange that with so many other people hearing or knowing of the perfectly fine and respectful conversation, that they would not have also come forward. Do you know the reason why they did not? Because there was nothing said wrong, it was pitch perfect!”

You’re positing that there’s a disconnect between your people not raising alarms in response to the conversation in question and someone in the Intelligence community having read the transcript and submitting the complaint to the IG. This Tweet will surely appease your masses, which I’m certain was your intent, but anyone with an iota of critical thinking skills will wonder to themselves whether your people are 1) really capable of questioning much of anything you do, and 2) even if they did, whether they could realistically bring it up in any meaningful way. As in duh – of course your aids didn’t say ‘boo’ about this – they couldn’t. And, duh – of course someone outside your little coterie is going to have a different perspective and perhaps the backbone to be willing and able to call out unethical behavior on your part.

But here’s the really scary part, you’ve managed to install people as heads (or acting heads) of key government agencies who thus far have given you full cover (aside from Rudy, who means well but can’t keep it together). It’s like we are stuck in a very sick, very scary redo of the 2016 Russian interference nightmare where you’ve somehow managed to get a lot of people to do a lot of insanely unethical things to save your butt.

Taken together, I think all of this boils down to one very simple, very basic question: If you have nothing to hide and your communications with Ukraine’s President have all been as pure as the driven snow, what is the harm in allowing Maguire to release the content of the whistleblower complaint to the appropriate Congressional committees? Huh?

May we be safe from conniving “leaders.”
May we be willing to impeach them.
May we all accept that you are systematically shredding the health of our democracy.
May we all make peace with the need to get your ass out of the White House (and Pence’s too).

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson