“President” Trump,

I just looked up how dictators prefer to be addressed and Wikipedia indicates that it’s a mix of variations on “leader” and “guide,” like “Supreme Leader,” “Great Leader,” “Dear Leader” or “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.” I took German in high school (and one miserable year of it in college), but never thought to look up what “Fuhrer” means and just learned this morning that it means “leader” or “guide.”

Obviously serious psyops were involved in these choices. I’m probably leaning too heavily on Wikipedia this morning, but here’s their definition of “psyops”:

“Psychological operations are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

Have you been writing out different options for your dictator title now that you’ve formally abandoned all pretense of governing in a lawful manner? I’m assuming that whatever you settle on, it will have to involve your last name because you’re so identified with it and so narcissistic you wouldn’t be able to tolerate a title that just represents the office (e.g., “Dear Leader”). It probably doesn’t really matter to you that none of the obvious options sound very good – “Dear Leader Trump” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it? I’m betting you don’t care whether it trips off the tongue easily as long as it gets its gaslighting job done with your peeps and cloaks you in the aura of trustworthy, cherished guide.

There’s a series of quotes in this morning’s WP by St. Louis’s Chief of Police, John Hayden, that are absolutely terrifying in their reveal of the success of the psyops mission you took over from Gingrich and Rove:

“We’re trying to figure out what is going on,” Hayden said. “Mr. Floyd was injured down and was killed somewhere else, and they’re tearing up cities all over the country.”

He said his officers showed “extraordinary restraint” as people threw rocks and explosives and shot at police lines.

“I don’t understand what that has to do with Mr. Floyd’s death,” the chief said. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

How the fuck does the police chief of a major city in 2020 America not understand that what people across the country are protesting is both the specific murder of George Floyd and what George Floyd’s murder represents? How could someone in his position be so willfully ignorant and refuse to see the glaring red dots of African American people’s blood that are dripping, gushing really, across time and space as they die from wounds inflicted upon them by agents of the state? How is it not obvious that people are protesting murders that are continuations of the examples that slave owners and slave traders made of both “trouble makers” and random black people to instill fear and thereby control everyone else? How is it not apparent to someone in his position that these murders are continuations of the lynchings that white vigilantes and mobs carried out on accused and random black people during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras to instill fear and thereby control everyone else?

The statement appears guileless but it is anything but – “Oh me, oh my, what is happening? Why in the world are people attacking my officers over the death of someone hundreds of miles away who had nothing to do with my community? Don’t they know, my officers would never, ever, in a hundred billion years do anything like that to any citizen of St. Louis, no matter their color or creed.” Did I get that about right?

Lots of us are good at spotting bullshit and we are so bathed in the crap that we can parrot it at will. But make no mistake – we see what you are doing – I see what you are doing – and you and the “Chief” Haydens among us are not dear anythings and you will not guide or lead us past 1/20/21.

May we all be safe from mind-fuck psyops.
May we be willing to do the hard work that critical thinking entails.
May we strengthen the health of our ailing, failing democracy before its too late.
May we never accept tyranny.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson