President* Trump,

It must be nice to have such a ready come back for everything you don’t like in your “fake news” claim. Maybe you could trademark or copyright it so that you can get some royalties (or sue people if they use it) to pay off your IRS bill when it comes due.

Blowing right past the bogus “fake news” claim, there is no sunshiny spin you can put on the (almost certainly not fake) news that you paid $750 dollars in federal income tax the in 2016 and in 2017 and nothing, nada, in 10 of the last 15 years. Either you were robbing the country blind or you’re flat broke or both – nothing to be going around town boasting about any which way you slice it.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but songs I never, ever think about keep popping in my head and just now it was Jean Knight’s Who Do You Think You Are, Mister Big Stuff? It narrates a woman’s dismissal of a flashy guy with fancy clothes and a big car who’s out for conquest and doesn’t care at all about the women he uses. She affirms that he’s never going to get her love and basically tells him to take a hike.

My bet is that this little revelation about your taxes is going have even more White women telling you to take a hike as they cast their votes for Biden (BIPOC women were done with you before you started). The last few days there’ve been bunches of news stories about how women are not down with you and sadly, how men are down with you. One of them reports on the WP-ABC poll, which said that among suburbanites, women favor Biden over you 66% to 34% while men favor you 60% to 38%. I know not all suburban people are partnered and they aren’t all heterosexual, but I decided to do a bit of math to see what the upper limit of discord/accord rate would be among partnered straight people and it works out to 63% discord and 36% accord. Of course there’s assortative mating so it can’t be the case that nearly two-thirds of suburban heterosexual marriages are comprised of a Trump-loving man and a sensible Biden-voting woman. But still – these numbers signal that there are millions and millions of women out there who are having to put up with their male partners being absolute political dickheads (I’m done with benefit of the doubt crap when it comes to anyone who plans to vote for you).

The same article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-trump-biden-post-abc/2020/09/26/940ef678-ff7f-11ea-9ceb-061d646d9c67_story.html) provided a more global overview of the gender split among likely voters: 55% of men say they will vote for you and 42% say they’ll vote for Biden while 65% of women say they’ll vote for Biden and 34% will vote for you. That figure indicating that 55% of men are planning to vote for you is so horrifying that I had to figure out what things looked like around this time in the 2016 election cycle. It took some digging, but I found an NBC poll that took place between 9/26/16 and 10/2/16 and they found that 47% of men said they planned to vote for you (38% Clinton; 11% Johnson; 3% Stein)  (https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/data-points/poll-hillary-clinton-holds-national-lead-over-donald-trump-n658721). So the current 55% is actually more horrifying than I originally thought since it represents a sizeable increase in men’s support for you even after they’ve gotten to see you in action for nearly four excruciating years.

It’s pretty mind (and heart) boggling that more than half of likely male voters think you are doing a-okay and want four more years of you (or maybe longer, who the hell knows?). Their poor little egos must be more fragile than the most delicate of blown eggshells to want to throw in with the likes of you. But you know, poor little ego-men are dangerous men so I sure as shit hope that all those suburban women who find themselves in Biden/Trump discordant partnerships have back-up plans for when you lose because I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that things could get very ugly, very fast.

May we all be safe from angry, insecure men.
May we be willing to stand up to them and vote our consciences.
May we be grateful that most women have a sense of what is and isn’t healthy.
May we all accept that our POTUS is a criminal.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson