November 16, 2020
Dear President Trump,
Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you ready to finally sad-trombone walk yourself out of the White House? Because we are. We are done with you. You make us weary. You do not console us. You do not comfort us. With each crude phrase you declare, with each enraged message that you Tweet, it is evident that you lack even the tiniest drop of pity or the mildest feeling of concern for us. And that is why - after all of the thousands of questions you've been asked, after all of your displays of feigned victimhood, after all of your bullying and braying, your dodging and over-explaining, after the always-expanding ocean of your lies – there just remains one final thing to ask you: Have you left?
Silence. Does that word mean anything to you? It should. Because silence must be your next act. Precious little time remains for you to claim at least one brief moment of redemption, one moment free from the angling for advantage, from one-upping the other guy, from forging a false reality to dominate actual, lived reality. Precious little time remains for you to experience at least one human moment, however fleeting, of being vulnerable and open. For you to have just one experience not defined by a struggle for power, but by a struggle to listen, you must become silent and you must leave. Leave us to march on without you. You bring us down. There are many of us who’ve become much worse people because of you. It is time to end the charade.
It’s funny - your life has actually been one long and dramatic string of endings. Marriages ended. Affairs. Businesses built up in a flurry of midnight energy and then collapsed under the weight of their own fraudulent nothingness. Trump University. Trump Steaks. Trump Hotels and Casinos. The “Taj Mahal.” Mirages. Places where magic and success were on offer and where a crass swindle was delivered. A sleight of hand. Like games of Three-card Monte without the grace and subway elegance.
It may be that between the ball kicking and the number subtracting, between the sand trap and water fables, between the brash declarations of, “I cheat on my wives, I cheat on my taxes, you don’t think I’m going to cheat at golf?” when confronted on your fairway trickery, that you had a moment or the slightest intimation of a moment that approached silence and a pause in the hustle… When the sun hit your back and the light through the trees in that New Jersey wood was honeyed, tinged with something that could not be explained, by memory, perhaps… This is to where are you must return now. To that moment that you sought to banish from your mind as soon as it occurred. For that to happen, you have to leave the presidency. Fortunately for you, you have lost the 2020 election. That fact cannot and will not change. It is a stubborn fact, immune to your gold plated BS. You’ve not made America great, you have made many, many graves. Now go.
Sincerely,
Dan Hanrahan
Chicago, Illinois
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