Dear President Trump,

Laura laughed last night when I told her I’d finally gotten to chapter 7 in the Abramson’s Proof of Conspiracy (the Kindle says I’m about 52% of the way through it). I’ve already been reading it for months now and it will probably take another few months to steadily plod through the damn thing. The maddening part is having the Kindle tell me it will take me 22 (or however many) minutes to finish a chapter and to know full well that it’s lying to me – that it’s really closer to three times that long before I finish the chapter. Apparently it doesn’t adjust its estimates based on one’s history with a particular book and apparently it’s taking me almost three times longer to read this one than the average of all the others I’ve ever read on the Kindle.

So imagine my delight (tongue is almost poking out of cheek right now) when I finally got to read about familiar situations having to do with you. It almost felt like the good ol’ times since I finally had at least a modicum of internal framework upon which to arrange what I was reading rather than just constantly swimming in a morass of names of mostly men from mostly far flung corners of the world who were mostly doing bad things that I could mostly only vaguely fit together except insofar as they all had to do mostly with installing and propping you up.

This chapter I just finished focused primarily on your inauguration festivities. We went over how many (or really, how few) there were compared to other presidents, how much you raked in to pay for those festivities, and how oddly disproportionate that amount was to how few shindigs actually happened. We also took a quick (for Abramson) look at who made out like bandits and how much money is still unaccounted for (i.e., tens of millions of dollars). We examined which inauguration donor entities appear to have been shells for laundering foreign people’s monies and which foreign people were likely angling for what favors/dispensations.

There was also a brief mention of the number of major inauguration donors who later got plum ambassador appointments (N = 14) and there was a run down of various festivity guest lists. With regard to the latter, Abramson takes pains to point out that the guest lists to the fanciest, most exclusive parties were very detailed, and listed, by name, all the Western people but curiously omitted the names of almost all the Middle Eastern invites. Apparently the lists would say something like “7 Saudi Arabia emissaries” or “3 UAE representatives” – kind of weird, huh? Of course you can pull out your handy dandy plausible deniability card and claim total and utter ignorance as you were only focused on the color of the tablecloths and not on who might admire them.

Finally, chapter 6 touched on those first few, painfully memorable days of your administration, highlighting the then inexplicably odd January 27, 2017 decision to institute the “Muslim Ban” on seven countries that had never engaged in any terrorist activities directed at the US. Now, juxtaposed with the list of Middle Eastern countries that were represented at your inauguration festivities and knowledge of who was (and who wasn’t) part of the Red Sea gang, your choice to ban people from Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and Syria (and not to ban people from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan) makes tons more sense.

It occurs to me to wonder whether calling for this ban a week after taking office was you responding to a test of some sort or maybe just trying to prove, right out of the gate, that you were grateful (beholden) and would do “right” by your benefactors in elevating them by quashing their enemies no matter how illogical. Actually, it’s possible that the more it didn’t make sense, the better it met the conditions of the bargain. It’s one thing for someone who’s being pressured or has something to prove to go ahead and do things that make sense, but it’s a completely different thing if you can get that someone to do things that don’t make sense – then you know you’ve got them by the short hairs. Ouch, huh?

May we be safe from undercurrents we can’t see.
May we be willing to test the waters to scope out what might be lurking.
May we believe in our ability to see and call out things that are illogical.
May you stop your warmongering and face the consequences of your actions.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson