President* Trump,

When Laura read me the Tweet last night announcing that New York Attorney General, Letitia James, was announcing that she would be making a major announcement of national importance this morning at 11:30am EST we both got a bit giddy. This giddy was goosed up even more when we learned that James’s announcement about her announcement came just an hour after the public learned that Deutsche Bank turned over the financial records of yours in their possession. So much possibility there!

We did puzzle over the AG’s decision to broadcast her intended announcement ahead of time and decided it was probably to maximize both the live coverage and the live viewing of it so that your spin machine wouldn’t be able to leverage it in the same way it would a minimally witnessed event. Not that you won’t try – I mean your inauguration was a pretty widely covered event and you all did your damnedest to convince people that it was spectacularly well attended when in fact, it was not. I also think it was smart of James to presage her announcement because there is every chance you’ll come up with some major attention-diverter any minute now and by setting her tent stake first, it’ll be clear just what you’re doing.

We are officially 59 minutes away from the beginning of the press conference…. I’ll have to circle back tonight to unpack whatever it is she has to tell us.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about a major victory in our neck of the woods. You might have seen that the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to significantly reduce funding for the police department here – they didn’t go as far as the 50% reduction many of us advocated for, but it’s pretty momentous. So that in and of itself is a victory, but the major one I am referring to is that our Council Member, Alex Pedersen, changed his mind and supported the measure in response to direct actions urging him to do so and thousands and thousands of emails and phone calls to his office urging same. He apparently reached out to a Black man who is a neighbor of his and asked him for his input and this man told him how he feels less safe the more police there are and exactly why. So this is a serious “whoot!” moment. Granted, Pedersen is a Democrat and didn’t have thaaaat far to go, but still, he’s mostly catered to the very wealthy, very White parts of our district and so it’s pretty dang huge that he came around and is listening to others of us. I’m going to email him right now and thank him. J

Later.

Alright, the NY AG’s announcement was patently not what I was hoping for – I so want you to be busted for at least some of the shitty stuff you’ve done. Dang it. I know there’s still hope, if for no other reason than that there are so very many different shitty prosecutable things to choose from, but I’m still sad that today wasn’t the day.

I mean, sure, moving to dissolve the NRA and going after all its head honchos for their nefarious self-dealing is absolutely a righteous thing. But we all know that it’s a whack-a-mole deal and if the NRA is no longer and the pilferers get some wrist slaps, their buddies will incorporate some other gun rights/running organization called some other something and they’ll do it in a freaking nano-second. There’s too much rabid, racist, righteous indignation to turn into profit for there not to be a “new improved” NRA-Zombie entity springing up before the NRA is even cold. So nah, I’m not going to bother getting excited about this one. Double, triple dang it.

May we be safe from profiteers who feed on fear.
May we be willing to push our elected officials to work for all the people.
May we be persistent when it comes to addressing all the overwhelming shit that keeps being piled on.
May we accept that today wasn’t your comeuppance day, but know it can’t be too far off.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson