Dear President Trump,

I am reading things besides editorials and I am reading editorialists besides Jennifer Rubin, but I want to make a quick note that in her piece this morning about Buttigieg’s decision to leave the race, she calls on Klobuchar and Bloomberg to step up and step out as well (by this evening Klobuchar had done so) – she doesn’t suggest Warren do this. Maybe she does see a viable path to the nomination for Warren; if so, I sure as hell hope she’s right.

Just after reading the JR piece, I switched over to the HP and saw this headline below a picture of Buttigieg “Some Californians Regret Voting Early.” I bet. No doubt hundreds of thousands of Californians’ primary votes and millions more across the country will count for exactly nothing because the candidates they voted for when the ballots arrived in the mail are no longer in the race. It’s a colossally asinine system – unless all states hold their primaries (not, caucuses) at the same time, states that vote later may as well not bother. The field has inevitably already been winnowed tremendously and we have situations like this where the situation is so fluid that making one’s pick at the end of February for an early March deadline may mean one’s pick is out of the race and one’s vote means nothing.

I get that at the primary level it’s unrealistic to expect candidates to be able to mount viable national campaigns given the money issues so if we went to an all-states-on-one-day system there would have to be serious campaign finance reforms (which are needed anyway). Another possible solution that’s being floated is that we rank order our choices down through the list until we come to a gaggle of candidates who we can’t differentiate among. This way, if our chosen candidate is no longer in the race, our vote goes to our next ranked candidate who’s still in the race (or if our first choice snagged no delegates, our highest ranked candidate who did snag delegates would be subbed in).

We clearly need to do something to interrupt this nutso situation where a divisive player with enough money (and foreign bots and trolls pressing on the scales) can take the thing without a majority of the votes in a fractured field. Otherwise, we’re going to continue devolving into ever more virulently partisan camps while the planet burns up around us.

Which leads me to the thing that I’ve been avoiding coming out and saying for the last week – I really do want you and your administration to continue badly botching the response to covid-19. No, I don’t want millions (or thousands or hundreds) of Americans to die and I don’t want the stock market to tank so badly that people start losing their jobs and there’s another horrible economic meltdown. But I do want your greed and ineptitude exposed for what it is because if you’re allowed another term, the downstream effects of your proclivities and policies will almost certainly be far worse and far more impactful than the effects of this virus.

In short, you are a menace.
Your Cabinet members are menaces.
Your props in Congress are menaces.
Your shadow-backers are menaces.
Vladimir is a menace.

But as long as middle and upper-middle class (not to mention wealthy) whites see their 401k’s growing, way too many are willing to turn a blind eye to your human rights abuses, environmental destruction, divisiveness, plundering of our collective coffers, and disdain for the rule of law and they will keep supporting your sick house of cards because it benefits them personally. So for America and the world to have a long-term chance of recovery and a healthy reset, we need everyone but the most right-wing fanatics to see that you are butt naked. Unfortunately, my sense is that you all responding poorly to this health crisis may be our last chance for such a come to Jesus moment before the 2020 presidential election.

May we be safe from our POTUS and his crew.
May we be willing to hold the whole lot of you accountable.
May we stay healthy and strong in spite your blunders.
May we not make peace with craven lies.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson