Dear President Trump,

Hey, I owe you something of an apology. Laura pointed out last night that you aren’t a “would-be demagogue” but rather a very real one. I had the meaning of demagogue confused with words like despot, autocrat, and dictator and didn’t want to suggest that you are in complete control and thus the “would-be” bit. However, she is absolutely correct – you are a full on demagogue and there’s no “would-be” about it so I apologize for the vocab fail. For the record, a demagogue is:

“a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument”

Fits like a million dollar suit doesn’t it? I don’t even have to squint to see the NRA pin on the lapel.

The other mistake I made is one that your contact page actually flagged (whereas Word and WordPress didn’t) – I accidentally used the word “waivered” when I meant “wavered” – so thank you contact page programmers for that one.

Moving on now, although it looks very much like you, Melania, and Barron should be putting out the call for cardboard boxes (it’s never a good idea to wait until the last minute on such things), what I really want to find out is what Pence did and did not know about the Ukraine shake-down. Laura read me William Taylor’s opening statement on Monday night and when she got to the bit about Pence having met with Zelensky in Warsaw on 9/1/19 (see pg. 10 of the statement) my ears perked up and I did a little internal happy dance. You see, it’s not enough to impeach and remove you – and I’m not just being greedy here – if justice is to be served and our democracy restored, the whole lot of you need to be shown the door. We can neither move forward as a country with your VP elevated to the presidency nor can we have him issuing pardons and using the remaining time in the term getting rid of evidence of all your other misdeeds. That’s just not a tenable situation and so I hope to hell that the impeachment inquiry people are tracking down Pence’s role in all this as assiduously as they are yours.

I just saw a short HP article about Rachel Maddow’s musings on MSNBC yesterday regarding how your lawyers keep inexplicably (explicably) bringing up Pence out of the blue to say that VPs don’t enjoy immunity from prosecution while in office and that it’s legal for the country not to have a sitting VP. Maddow was pointing out how nervous Pence should probably be and while that’s true enough, it’s also important to point out that no one is going to buy it that Pence was leading the dirt-digging charge. Basically, it’s fine if you want to throw him under the bus (it could save us some time and headache), but there’s no way that fingering Pence is going to get you off the hook. If you and your lawyers are thinking this is your lucky Get Out of Jail Free card then you all are even dumber than I thought possible.

Apparently desperate times require desperate (destructive, backstabbing, stupid, illogical) measures, eh?

May we be safe from wildly flailing misanthropes.
May we be willing to look under all the rocks and in all the crevices to unearth all the booby-traps you all laid.
May we figure out how to get enough sleep to keep ourselves healthy through this ordeal.
May we re-vision and re-claim a future where we’ve figured out how to peacefully take care of all beings.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson