Friday, October 2, 2020

An Open Letter to a Traitor

To the Current Occupant of the White House:

I have put up with this situation long enough and I just can’t do it anymore. I have tried to endure the last four years as best I can, but can hold my tongue no longer. And now I am compelled to tell you—for myself and on behalf of the people of the United States—that you’ve made me hate you. The phrase is not one I feel comfortable using, and yet nothing else even comes close to expressing my feelings about the job you have done over the last four years. I am a humanist, and I don’t like the word “hate.” I believe in the sanctity of human life, and that for life itself to be worth living human beings have an obligation to each other to do what we can to make everyone’s life as meaningful and happy as it can be. But you, sir, have betrayed the people of this country every single day that you have occupied the highest office in the land. You have disrespected me and my fellow citizens, talked down to we the people, and you have demonstrated by your very words and actions that you have nothing but contempt for all of the people you are supposed to be working for—including those people who voted for you. You betray our country every day by your mere presence in Washington. And because of that, you’ve made me hate you.

You are supposed to be the President of the United States, sworn to uphold the Constitution, and yet you have colluded with foreign enemies, asked them to illegally interfere in our election process, and turned a blind eye when they put bounties on our servicemen and women. And at the same time you run and hide in your secret bunker at the first sign of a threat. You don’t deserve the title of Commander in Chief. Instead you are a traitor to this country and all the people who live here. You are a joke to the international community. The leaders of other nations laugh at you behind your back. You are drawn to dictators in the rest of the world because, like them, you are unable to function in a democracy. You have no idea how to lead. You can only bully. You have committed treasonous acts that have put men and women’s lives at risk overseas, especially in our military, and you are putting our democracy at risk as well. But then you don’t care for democracy, and have made it clear to the American people that you would prefer to be a dictator. You have made a mockery of the office you hold and of the country you were sworn to protect and defend. You lied on your first day when you took the oath of office, and you have lied every day since. That is why you’ve made me hate you.

You lie, cheat and steal during your every waking moment, which was bad enough when you were a private citizen, but in the last four years you have carried on as if nothing has changed, as if you have absolutely no obligation to the people you are supposed to serve. Instead you have used your office as your own private base of criminal operations, hiring crooks like yourself to break our laws and deceive the people of the United States. You have purposely attempted to dismantle their liberties and remove the constitutional rights they have fought and died for over the last hundred years. You allow your criminal underlings to ignore the laws of this county, as you have done yourself countless times, and then pardon them so that they—and you—can get away with it. You care nothing for anyone but yourself. You have no humility, no compassion, no empathy. In point of fact, you are a sociopath. You are completely devoid of human emotion and concern for anyone else, including the members of your own family, and you blame the citizens for your own shortcomings, accusing them of wrongdoing when it is your own ineptitude that is responsible for all of the problems we now face in this once great nation. You belong in prison. I don’t want a criminal for a president, and that is why you’ve given me no other choice but to hate you.

You are lazy and refuse to do your job. Anyone else who had that kind of track record would be let go and find it difficult to get any kind of job in the future. You barely go to work at all, and when you do it is only to plan your next criminal action. The only effort you expend is to find ways to cheat the American people in order to line your pockets and those of the corporate interests that support you. You cheat on your taxes, you borrow money you can’t pay back—and then don’t pay it back. You pretend to collect money for charity and then spend it on yourself. You are an embezzler. You have failed at everything you have ever laid your hands on and now you continue to fail, except this is not a casino or a business deal that is falling through but the United States of America, the country I live in with the rest of my fellow citizens. As a young man you were given money that you didn’t have to earn, and then promptly proceeded to lose all of it. You are a failure as a businessman, you are a failure as a husband, you are a failure as a parent, you are a failure as a human being. It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, that you are the biggest failure as president that this country has ever seen. It’s bad enough that you’ve failed yourself, but now you’ve failed all of us and feel absolutely no remorse for it. That is why you’ve made me hate you.

You brag about how smart you are, but you have no plans, no ideas, not a single thought about how to make our country better. And because of that you have no idea how to talk to others, no conception of how to discuss differing points of view. Because you have no point of view. All you know how to do is attack people personally, like a child, with insulting nicknames like, say, #DumbDonald. You are, in reality, the stupidest person to ever hold the office of president. You are probably the stupidest person to ever hold any public office. To call you an anti-intellectual would be a misuse of the term, because that implies that you can formulate actual thoughts in your mind and then reject the intellect of others. But actually, a new definition of the word will have to be coined to apply to you, one that means a complete and utter lack of any kind of intellect at all. And even worse, you then take your stupidity and use it to foment hatred and dissention in this country, to disenfranchise voters and incite violence between Americans against each other, gutting Constitutional protections and their political representation. You have pitted the people of this country against each other and sown hatred wherever you go. You wear orange paint on your face when it would be much more appropriate for you to wear a pointy white hood. In a country that has had presidents who were actual slaveholders, it is unconscionable that you are the most racist president in the history of our nation. It seems you have purposely set out to destroy America, and that’s why you’ve made me hate you.

Finally, you have killed more Americans through inaction than have been killed in combat in all of the combined military conflicts since World War Two. You killed them, and that makes you the greatest mass murderer in the country’s history. U.S. citizens, whom you were sworn to protect and defend, you’ve let them die because you are incapable of leadership. You have no experience with the concept and don’t even know what it looks like, and so instead you let our citizens perish without lifting a finger. The only thing you care about is avoiding responsibility, and so you take none, leaving the people of the country to fend for themselves. You act as if you want them to die. And as if that weren’t enough, you also seem perfectly happy to let hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose the dignity of being a human that all of us should possess by right. But then you never cared for anyone’s rights. You only care about yourself. And now you want to deprive the people, in the middle of a pandemic, of the health insurance that will keep them alive. I don’t believe that people are evil, but your actions and inaction are a different story. Your abject failure to do anything to help your fellow citizens during this crisis is evil. There is, quite literally, no other way to describe it. And that is why you have forced me to hate you.

But as bad as all of that is, what’s even worse—as if such a thing were imaginable—is that you are nothing but a tool. You are the symptom of a disease, a figurehead for everything that has gone wrong in this country since the end of the Second World War. The real culprit behind your abject failure, the party truly responsible for everything that has happened in the last four years, from the subversion of American elections, to the murder of blacks in the streets by police, to killing nearly a quarter of a million people through your inaction to Covid 19, are Senate and Congressional Republicans who support you despite the fact that you have wantonly broken federal laws and misused the office to benefit yourself while completely ignoring the needs of the country you are purportedly here to serve. Senate Republicans in particular, had the opportunity to rid this country of the scourge that sits in our Oval Office. It was served up to them on a silver platter. All they had to do was the right thing, the moral thing, the only thing that would have allowed them to uphold their sworn oath to the Constitution. And yet they utterly failed, just like you, their so-called leader. Had Senate Republicans acted as duty demanded when you were impeached, had they responded appropriately to the will of the people when called upon by the country to remove both you and your complicit vice-president from office, someone else would be president now and the nation would not be in the miserable state it’s in, suffering not only from a global pandemic but from the economic chaos that followed in its wake.

But Republicans have stopped pretending to care about the people who elect them, block any beneficial legislation that will help ordinary people, and refuse to admit they are wrong when they are caught in their lies. They must keep up the façade of infallibility even at the expense of hundreds of thousands of American lives. At the same time you, their so-called leader are truly the emperor with no clothes. You are a nakedly racist, misogynist, homophobic narcissist who is incapable of opening your mouth without lying. You are a delusional adolescent bully who maintains his position through the criminal actions of his miscreant supporters in Congress who have allowed you to remain in office despite numerous treasonous actions against our country and the Constitution you were sworn to defend. I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want to feel hatred toward anyone. And yet you’ve made that impossible. You’ve forced my hand. But like so many other millions of Americans who also don’t want to feel animosity toward another fellow citizen, you’ve given us no other option. Despite all the odds, despite common sense, despite every method of prognostication, you have finally managed to bring the majority of this country together . . . against you. You have finally made us hate you.

Sincerely,
E.B. Neslowe