President* Trump,

A few days ago Michael Gerson (WP editorialist) posited that your re-election strategy centers not on actually winning but rather on invalidating the election results (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-strategy-is-not-to-win-its-to-invalidate-the-election-results/2020/09/24/2b201d48-fe82-11ea-9ceb-061d646d9c67_story.html). Between your assault on the Postal Service and mail-in ballots and your rush to add to the conservative flank of the Supreme Court ahead of Election Day, you and yours really do look like you’re pulling out all the stops to undermine confidence in the election results. You aren’t even being shy about it. Indeed, you’re actively telegraphing that if it looks as though Biden is winning or has won, all bets are off and you’ll be contesting the election. I suppose if you were to lie now and say that you’d accept the results, however they come out it just wouldn’t be in your interest to mollify the electorate. Nope, far better for you to sic clouds of murderous wasps on both your base to keep them stirred up, on edge, and spoiling for fight, and on the opposition to keep us fretting, off balance, and wondering what the hell we will and will not do should you really, truly attempt a coup.

Gerson points his readers to Barton Gellman’s excruciatingly detailed unpacking of the numerous weak seams in the Constitution that never anticipated a POTUS acting in bad faith who’s hell bent on subverting the people’s will if that will isn’t with him (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/). I started reading it yesterday while Laura was out for her walk and when she came home she asked me why I looked so stressed, why I was holding my stomach. I couldn’t explain it very well because it was (and is) so supremely overwhelming, but I definitely felt stressed and ill – still do. Basically, Gellman is warning us that while we don’t know exactly how voting will play out across the country and thus cannot know exactly what tactics you’ll use, we absolutely need to get on board with the fact that you’re already actively engaged in the mission to remain in power no matter what the actual election outcomes are. The idea is that there is no version of this where it’s within the realm of possibility that you’ll actually concede. He didn’t go quite this far, but he might as well have said that you all are committed to making Trump 2024 a reality.

This may be somewhat overly zealous and dramatic, but a sick thought occurred to me that will just bother me if I don’t share it with you. Could someone in your nefarious little camp have spotted COVID-19 as an opportunity to exploit with the endgame being the ability to seed doubts about mail-in ballots? I truly believe you all would like to weed out us low-lifes and that this is the primary motive behind the shockingly inept-appearing way you’ve addressed the pandemic, but could you have also seen failing to act as a way to subvert the election results? I realize that most people think COVID-19 is going to tank you, but because voting by mail is the only safe, sensible way to go, it provides a really handy way for you to do an end-run around the actual results.

I bet a sicko mastermind like Stephen Miller could have cooked this up, but who knows – you probably have even more dastardly schemers lurking in the shadows.

Anyway, the main point here is that very smart people are on to you all and while they’re leveling with us that there’s zero chance you’ll concede and every chance you’ll do anything it takes to invalidate the election, they’re simultaneously sounding the alarm. They’re saying loud and clear that complacency is not an option, that we’re going to have to take to the streets in numbers never seen before for as long as it takes to oust you and wrest our country back.

May we be safe from evildoers.
May we be willing to be real about what said evildoers are up to.
May we stay strong, healthy, alert, and poised to act.
May we accept that things are will get even more challenging before they get some better.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson