Dear President Trump,

I think you know by now that my usual practice is to start, if not fully draft, my letters to you early in the morning and then clean them up and send them to you in the evening. This works well from a time management standpoint, but on days like yesterday it most definitely doesn’t work well from an information management standpoint. Here I was musing about the link between how eggs are cooked and unbeknownst to me, you were busy taking out Iran’s top military leader. I was too tired and freaked out last night to write a new letter so I just added the lame entreaty at the end of the loving-kindness prayer that you stop trying to start a war. Tagging this in was obviously a spitting-in-the-wind exercise since nothing any of us says or does will influence your calculations (more likely order-following) at this point, but I still feel compelled to tell you what I think.

The night before last I got to the point in Seth Abramson’s book, Proof of Conspiracy, where Jamal Khashoggi was introduced. Knowing what happened to him, I stopped reading for the night as I couldn’t bear having details about him and his fate be the very last things I thought about before turning out the light. When I picked the book up again yesterday I learned the gist of what led Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (MbS) to exile Khashoggi from Saudi Arabia. Basically, Khashoggi called out your illogical approach to the Middle East, particularly as it had to do with Russia’s relationship with Iran, and this apparently touched a very raw nerve. I haven’t gotten to Abramson’s take on why MbS had Khashoggi assassinated (we all know this is true), but I imagine it was more of the same – truth telling is dangerous.

This section on Khashoggi coupled with your wildly provocative assassination of Qasem Soleimani, loops back to the beginning of Abramson’s book and the revelation that George Nader coordinated with the leaders of Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt to support your election. Many of them met in late 2015 on a yacht in the middle of the Red Sea (MbS; MbZ, United Arab Emirates; Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt; Prince Salman bin Hamad, Bahrain, and King Abdullah II, Jordan). Abramson argues convincingly that these leaders conspired to get you elected because they thought you would be much more positively disposed towards them and their machinations than Hillary Clinton would ever be (basically a “duh” deal). He also argues that one of their main objectives was to further isolate and destabilize Iran. Apparently even though Russia and Iran have been aligned for a long time, Russia was desperate for sanctions relief and was apparently willing to throw Iran under the bus to get it.

To be honest, I don’t have the mental scaffolding to understand how all this fits together – the book is full of dozens (really, it’s more like hundreds) of names of people and places that aren’t familiar to me so reading it feels like a wash of gritty, icky water that’s hard to get a handle on. But the gist comes through loud and clear – people with strong power/greed aspirations thought you would be a useful tool and so they helped install you and you’ve been coming through for them spectacularly, from pulling out of the Iran nuclear accord to killing of Soleimani, the latter delivering one of the key objectives set out by the Red Sea Gang and also distracting from the impeachment/removal situation here at home. Another one of your despicable two-fers.

I realize all these words do nothing useful about the horrible threat that now hangs over the Middle East and could very well spill over to us, but it felt important to bring in Abramson’s work to provide context for what is going on (and to let you know, I know).

May we all be safe.
May we be willing to pull back all the veils.
May your GOP props see that you are imperiling everyone’s health and well-being.
May we commit to peace.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson