President* Trump,

You didn’t want us to panic. How thoughtful of you. What a mensch, always looking out for the country – that’s you! No doubt about it.

It didn’t take any sort of genius to know that you’d use the notion that you didn’t want to frighten or panic us as the out when this taped statement of yours was shared with the whole wide world:

 “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

And sadly, you have millions of Kool-aid drinkers who desperately want (and need) to believe you, Hannity, and the brave GOP props who aren’t waiting to “read the book” and have come out swinging on your behalf. You know they’ve already swallowed about 20,000 other lies and are gamely hanging in with you because you scratch their White, heteronormative, 2^nd Amendment grievance itches just right and keep promising them the moon – and delivering judges. It doesn’t matter to your loyal base that you’ve actually set them back economically and functionally; it’s worth sticking by you to keep that satisfying (non) righteous anger stoked and poised to boil over. So, in all likelihood, this latest revelation that you (with a hell of an assist from Woodward) sold us all down the river to keep the stock market from panicking won’t even be a blip for them as far as their fealty to you.

But I bet there will be a couple of million wavering people for whom this will be the last straw and who will conveniently forget to vote this year (yes, some will have gotten so fed up with you that they’ll vote for Biden, but I think many more will just sit this one out). So what’s the plan? Do you have armed “patriots” signing up on shadowy social media feeds to “protect” certain polling places on Election day? Are you counting on DeJoy coming through for you? Have you planted another group of loyalists in post offices in the larger metropolitan areas of swing states, people who can conveniently “misplace” a few thousand ballots in each station that’ll miraculously turn up around November 10^th?

I can’t remember now how much I told you back in 2017 about the voting integrity group that shared their findings from the swing states with us – findings that strongly suggested clever, but decisive voting interference wherein the numbers in the most populated regions of those states showed odd dips in Clinton votes and odd increases in Trump votes. The proportions of votes for her and votes for you tracked along as predicted in the smaller precincts and overall the expected ratios held in the bigger precincts, but the graphs showed noticeable irregularities in those bigger precincts, noticeable, that is if you look carefully and aren’t taken in by the spreads. The way it seemed to work is that Clinton would still come out ahead by a lot in those big precincts, as anticipated, but a chunk of votes for her either disappeared or were counted in your column – just enough that when everything was tallied up within each state, you would be the “winner.” This group also identified irregularities in the voter registration roles of the swing states, but I don’t remember those details well enough to try and explain them.

As far as I know, none of this every hit the mainstream media. It probably depended too much on somewhat esoteric statistical modeling that could never be completely proven or considered bullet proof, but if there was something too it and Putin was putting his fist on the scale for you, odds are that he’s set to do it again this year. And odds are that he’ll need to pull out all the stops since the rate you’re going, it won’t be just a few swing states that he’ll need to save for you.

May we be safe from malign dictators and wannabe dictators.
May we stay steady and keep breathing through the turbulence.
May we be strong and keep steadfastly to the high road.
May we accept that the GOP is utterly irredeemable.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson