An open letter to President Trump from a former supporter

Dear President Trump,

I voted for and supported you, as did 74 million Americans throughout the land, and now we are all absolutely and completely betrayed. The Democrats have the presidency and Congress because of you. I am a Christian and wholeheartedly believe in forgiveness – but my forgiveness of you will be difficult. Here’s why.

For about three years your accomplishments were incredible – more than any president in my lifetime. You brought Kim Jong-un to the table and accomplished more in one year with North Korea than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton did in 16. Clinton’s sunshine policies and Obama’s Wilsonian overtures did nothing to advance anything with that Asian nation. But you had Kim talking, at least for a while.

You managed to author new trade deals with Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union. You brought NATO to heal by demanding other member nations pay their fair shares. The border with Mexico was strengthened and we were on a concrete plan to better regulate and control illegal immigration.

The economy was perhaps your greatest accomplishment. Usually, the president has little power to deeply affect economic cycles but you lowered taxes and eliminated draconian regulations, essentially removing the tourniquet off of the economy’s blood flow. It absolutely erupted. In fact, I would argue that the economy – running like a greased locomotive going downhill by early 2019 – was better able to shoulder the initial economic shut down due to COVID.  Had Hillary been in the White House, I have no doubt that her weak economy would have tanked with a COVID shuttering. 

But once COVID hit, you implemented that shutdown and you seemed – at least initially – on top of the crisis. Always remember that politics is perception. And, fair or not, the media helps shape perception. Once the summer of 2020 came, you stopped acting like an active leader. You never directly addressed the people, as Reagan or the Bushes would have done. You never inspired confidence in our ability to defeat the virus. Instead, you endlessly moaned about the media and tried to shape perception via Twitter, which was largely unsuccessful.

I have no doubt that the media single-handedly destroyed your presidency with all the misinformation it monolithically propagated. From Charlottesville, VA, to COVID, you never could use the media for your own purposes. Instead, you antagonized it by fighting with Jim Accosta, Chris Cuomo, and other talking heads with whom you had no business arguing, like a child on a recess playground. 

George W. Bush understood that you will never gain the full support of the media and so when it was critical, he ignored it. He placed the media beneath himself and his office, which is absolutely proper.

Your ego would not allow you to be gentlemanly, empathetic or kind. I think this is one reason why the media hated you so much. And instead of leading the people through the COVID crisis, you were viewed by most Americans as petty. If you would have just been nice, pleasant and active for the media, you’d be president today.

Also significant, you never could give others credit when things went well or take the blame when they did not. Reagan was always the first to admit when he was wrong and when he was right, he credited others instead of himself. George H. W. Bush and his son did the same. Obama and Clinton were mixed with this – I saw them give and take credit. But you? You always took credit for everything, without exception. And what’s worse, when things went haywire, you blamed everyone else. What you did to Jeff Sessions was completely wrong. And you ended up doing the same thing to James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, William Barr and many others. During your four years you had four chiefs of staff, five Deputy Chiefs of Staff, four national security advisers and three secretaries of defense. The rate of turnover in your administration was higher than any other president.

Lastly, you manufactured what now seem to have been completely untrue stories about election fraud. You did this in complete dismissal of the truth and most damning, you willfully lied about it for over eight weeks while you should have been focused like a laser on Georgia.

When Republicans tried to legally and constitutionally stand against the electoral votes in certain swing states on January 6 (a largely symbolic gesture), you encouraged your supporters to march on the capitol, which they did. And when they overran the capitol police, ultimately causing the deaths of six Americans and the vandalism of our capitol building, you sat and watched, like Nero playing his fiddle, for hours and hours.

You never made it clear that this was illegal, violent, murderous and destructive. You, it seems to me, tacitly approved while the capitol was ransacked. This is pathetic. You sir do not deserve to be our president. I do not support impeachment or removal because it is essentially a fait accompli. 

However, your dithering on 6 January absolutely and concretely confirms that your time in Washington is over, forever. I will never vote for you again because you placed yourself above your office and the Constitution. 

Your actions have probably destroyed the Republican Party in its present form. And the damage that Biden-Harris will inflict on the nation will further illustrate the depths of your failure. Perhaps worst of all, the media’s false claims about gun-toting, redneck, racist conservatives that have been made for years have now been given a real example, the damaging results of which will not be known for a long time.

Goodbye, Mr. Trump. Go into that good night silently, please. Someday I will forgive you, but I don’t know when.