President* Trump,

Last night shortly after learning that the day’s number of new covid-19 cases had exceeded 50,000, Laura and I were talking about how very strange everything feels. Part of this involved doing something of a compare and contrast between the pandemic and 9/11 since these are clearly the biggest national crises either of us have experienced.

9/11 left us reeling, afraid, and as I’ve told you before, feeling deeply concerned about what the US did to Middle Eastern countries that would provoke such an attack against us. Both situations engender/ed feelings of helplessness and heightened senses of risk and uncertainty and in both situations these feelings are/were exacerbated by the nature of the federal response – Bush’s rush to judgment about Iraq that proved so catastrophic and your shit-ass minimizations, obfuscations, and fundamental betrayals of your oath of office in response to the coronavirus.

The duration of our compare and contrast exercise was actually quite brief. Where we spent more time was on how what’s going on looks for all the world like a “weeding out” exercise. Essentially, we concluded that it’s just not possible to be so abjectly incompetent at implementing the not-rocket-science measures needed to suppress a viral infection, that the blunders and the nonsense must be motivated. There were plenty of historical precedents to follow and there were numerous competent, contemporaneous examples from other countries that were readily available for borrowing and yet at every conceivable turn, you and your administration have done it flat out wrong. Why?

Pandering to your “liberty loving” base just doesn’t cut it as an explanation – especially when you deliberately put them in harms way with rallies and encouragement to party like it’s 1999 and not 2020. It also doesn’t make sense that you’d hew so strongly to your ding-dong anti-science/anti-intellectual stance in this situation if it didn’t serve your larger white supremacy agenda. You could have found some slithery way to not admit that science and reason are actually useful and still adopt a science-based plan for addressing the pandemic. Sure, you want the economy blasting as we head into the fall, but even there it had to be obvious to at least some of your inner circle that going full throttle on re-opening was going to re-ignite the virus, which in turn would compromise any economic recovery that could happen.

So what gives? Are these apparent blunders part of a eugenics agenda? It sure as shit looks like it.

If that weren’t awful enough, it’s absolutely galling how nonchalant you all are about it. You don’t even try to appear that you give a shit. You don’t even try not to say stupid stuff. You won’t go through any motions at (f*cking) all to act as if you are behaving in the interest of the common good.

When we were talking last night, Laura remembered Melania’s jacket – you know, the one she wore to visit migrant children in cages – that was emblazoned with “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?” Remember that one? Remember how after all the WH attempts to say there was no message, she came out with the lame-ass claim that it was the left-leaning media she was “talking” to? Well, that jacket with its pointed message sums things up insanely well – we have a POTUS and a POTUS-coterie that really doesn’t care – doesn’t care what anyone thinks of them, doesn’t care about the rule of law, doesn’t care about the Constitution, doesn’t care about the common good. Melania was just being upfront about it back then in October, 2018 and it’s high time the American people heed her message and recognize that you all truly don’t care about us and that you’d just as soon huge numbers of us die.

May we be safe from the evil that has taken over the Executive Branch.
May we be willing to own our roles in this take over.
May we have the strength to oust your ass and radically remake ourselves.
May we accept that none of us are expendable, that we are all precious (even if some of us need to be sidelined).

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson