President* Trump,

How was your little outing this afternoon? Somehow I don’t think that Suburban is big enough to have allowed the other people in the vehicle to be 6’ away from you, masks or no masks. I wonder how they’re going to feel about their decision to accompany you on your little joy ride if they end up getting sick with COVID (assuming 1. they had a choice and 2. they didn’t sign on for the jaunt because they were already positive)? What if they pass it to their elderly parent who then dies of it, how’s that going sit with them? On the plus side, though, they got into the car with you knowing that you have the disease and thus, were presumably able to weigh the risks for themselves.

Most of the people you and your GOP props encountered in the last week weren’t allowed such self-determination, now were they? Nope. You all made those determinations for them by showing up and glad-handing and hugging them, by bathing them in invisible little spittle sprays from your all’s exhalations when you knew you were positive. As per usual, this behavior is neither surprising nor shocking, but it is horrifying and sobering. If you all are willing to knowingly put people who count themselves loyal to you at such risk, people who you presumably at some level need, then what must you be up for doing to the rest of us?

Oh right. We already know the answer to this rather lame rhetorical question, don’t we? You’re more than happy to lie about us, ban us, put us in cages, tell law enforcement not to be “too nice” to us, throw paper towels or tell us we don’t clean our forest floors properly when our homes and communities have been destroyed, have us plucked off the streets and shoved into unmarked vans by state agents with no visible identification, and tut-tut insincerely when we’re taken out by your White supremacist henchmen or dying in droves from COVID. Shall I go on?

But coming back to your all’s insistence to forge ahead with planned events that endangered your own followers when you knew you were positive – what was the reasoning there? Surely someone in the mix had to be weighing things out and decided it made more sense to pack a mostly mask-less crowd into the Rose Garden for ACB’s SCOTUS nomination than to behave in a public health-consistent pro-social manner. Same goes for the debacle on Tuesday; you should have had a plexiglass container around you like Jamie Harrison did during his debate with Graham this week. And did you really not tell your entourage that they needed to mask up if they were going to be around you at all (in the damn front row) that night? Or did they do their own self-determination deals and chose not to protect themselves or anyone else?

It really is sobering to consider that you all aren’t choosing to protect even those in your tight little inner circles. Is it really that important to telegraph to your base that this virus isn’t THAT dangerous, that you all aren’t afraid of getting sick, that it’s way more important to rev those economic engines back up than to play it safe? I guess I didn’t appreciate before just how powerful a motivator greed is. And pride too – right Mr. Invincible, Mr. Oxygen-What-Oxygen?

Well, I really don’t want more people to get sick (or die) whether they are or aren’t in your loyalty clubs, but the way you all are playing this, it sure looks inevitable that this will be the case. If there’s an appreciable uptick in case numbers and fatalities among Republican operatives and fans – and at least a handful of the survivors has the courage to call out the proximal cause – maybe, just maybe it will help some of your peeps wake the hell up and see that you all don’t care about them or anyone other than your selves.

May we be safe from selfish narcissists.
May we be willing to keep doing the pain in the butt stuff to keep one another safe.
May we all be clear that caring for one another is strong and healthy.
May we accept that right now we have lying sociopaths driving the bus.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson