Dear President Trump,

He’s been gone for 26 years now, but I can almost hear Laura’s dad saying “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy” like he’s right here sitting in the living room with us. He’d always say it when he was incredulous about something someone had done; he’d shake his head slowly back and forth as he uttered the “Lordy”s real slow, like he was enjoying rolling the l’s and r’s over his tongue. And you just knew that whatever it was that got his attention like this was something really over the top.

Laura’s dad was also a diehard Republican. I think I told you a while back that his funeral was held on election day in Texas (11/8/94) when Ann Richards was up for re-election running against W and we were hopeful that there’d been enough of his friends at the ceremony who couldn’t make it to the polls that it might give Richards an edge. Sadly, W won anyway.

Moving on though – we’ve established that Laura’s dad did not suffer fools and that he was a Republican. I would like to think that the first part of the preceding sentence would mean that if he were still alive (I’m pretty sure he’d be 100) and cognitively intact he would have at least become an Independent 2-3 years ago. But in this totally hypothetical little yarn I’m spinning, if he were alive, cognitively intact, and had stayed a Republican until this morning, I bet he would have been changing his party affiliation by this evening and saying “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy” while he was filling out the form.

You and I both know why he would have wanted to distance himself from anything remotely having to do with you and why today would have been a last straw if he hadn’t already jumped ship over any of the other thousands of straws that might have been lasts in their own right. Basically, your horribly corrupt behavior is out of the bag and you are so hosed. And Lev Parnas is in so much danger. I think it generally doesn’t go well when rats rat each other out; I think the ratter usually ends up at the bottom of some murky river wearing cement shoes.

And what timing – the drama of it all is definitely “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy” material. Was it just a coincidence that Rachel Maddow scored the interview with Parnas on THE day that the articles of impeachment were ferried from the House to the Senate or was that somehow planned? Was he waiting in the wings to do the interview on whatever day the articles were going to be launched for maximal high stakes press? I remain a Twitter non-user and we don’t have cable so I’ve just been trying to piece things together from the bits that the HP has shared and the snippets MSNBC has posted on YouTube.

The timing intrigue will probably be addressed in the next day or two in some more central place that I can access, but gosh do I wish I had magical fly-on-the-wall powers and a transporter so that I could have beamed my tiny fly-self into whatever room you were in at the beginning of that Maddow episode. “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy” do I wish I could have seen and heard how you reacted. And while I’m at it, it would have been pretty great to have bugged (ha!) all the rooms that all your buds were in (Pence, Barr, Bolton) when the interview was airing. Let’s throw McConnell onto the list too since he’s now got himself a seriously un-fun situation as he faces somehow soldiering on in lockstep with the White House on the impeachment trial. Sadly, we’ll probably never know just what kind of smack the shit made when it hit your fans, but I bet it was loud and I bet it was messy.

May we be safe as you all come unglued.
May we be happy that human rats have little sense of loyalty.
May those of us who need to make hard changes be healthy enough to do so.
May you not start another war.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson

p.s., I really have considered that Parnas could be lying. However, it seems very unlikely that any amount of money from whatever book deal he’s going to get could possibly be worth the danger he’s put himself and his family in so I think he’s telling the truth. Plus, it’s consistent with all the House testimony (under oath) we heard. ts