Dear President Trump,

Well, I made something of a boo-boo yesterday in laying out an impeachment avoidance plan for you since that horse is well out of the gate and nearly into the homestretch. Impeachment is pretty certainly going to happen to you, it’s the removal piece that you still have some hope of avoiding. So please revisit yesterday’s letter with that in mind since it will serve as a perfectly good guide to avoiding removal from office.

You may, however want to work out a strategy to deal with the contingency that your GOP props might just go ahead and contradict you by admitting that there was in fact a quid quo pro deal. Even though it looks like they plan to follow this up with a loud, breathless “butthere’snothingwrongwithit,itisn’tanimpeachableoffense” defense, it still crosses you up and makes you look a fool and is if, perhaps, there are some mistruths being told here. Bet some free lunch buckets will get kicked over in response to that one.

Honestly, I’m not really sure why there’s so much fuss about whether what you and Rudy tried to pull off with Zelensky constitutes a quid pro quo. The official meaning of the phrase is pretty benign:

“a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something”

Ok, yeah, so?

Obviously there could be nefarious versions of this (as we all well know, whether some of us will admit it or not), but it could also be something along the lines of “Hey if you’ll feed my cat over the weekend while I’m gone, I’ll cut your grass for you.” Sure, it would be nicer if the speaker was not making the grass-cutting contingent on the cat feeding, but sometimes it feels important for things to square up fairly.

Right? This is what you and Mulvaney are claiming, isn’t it? Even though it’s been critically important to you that it not be framed as a loaded quid pro quo, you all are insisting that it’s only fair to require that the newly elected president of a foreign country publicly announce that he’s authorizing a corruption investigation into your main political opponent in exchange for you deigning to grant him an audience and agreeing to release hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress already allocated for said country to defend itself against your BFF’s country. I mean, any one with half a brain and no heart would see that this is perfectly reasonable.

So what are you going to do if this GOP “yes, it was a quid pro quo” scramble gets legs? One option would be to brashly insist that you never said it wasn’t a quid pro quo. This is a tried and true strategy of yours – it doesn’t matter whether there is copious recorded audio of you saying something, you are perfectly comfortable flatly denying you’ve said it and your stalwart base is only to happy to play right along with you. As long as there is GOP-wide agreement that there was nothing wrong with this particular, perfect quid pro quo, it seems like that option might fly.

But really, why do we need to think about such things? Why in the world did our president use his office to take down a political opponent? Why in the name of whatever is still good in the universe is someone like you in public office of any sort, let alone in the presidency? This is f*cking insane. You just need to go.

We are taking each other out at parties, in churches, at malls. We are crisping the planet. We are keeping more people locked up per capita than any other country in the world. We are dying from overdoses and succumbing to poor behavior choices in record numbers. And we are dealing with a mad man in the Oval Office who doesn’t give a shit about any of this, and worse, with a posse of assholes who claim to represent us but who also don’t give a shit about any of this and who are willing to sell America’s soul for another day in power.

May we be safe from the awfulness that is the current American political landscape.
May we be willing to hold on and fight for what we can and should become.
May we do what we need to keep ourselves healthy and engaged.
May we be the peace we need for ourselves and one another.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson