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Revised. Please see the postscript.
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My father died of lung cancer in 1981. He was 60 years old and I was 21. Sometimes I write to him; this is my most recent letter.
January 19th, 2017
Hey Dad —
I know I haven’t written since mom died. That’s more than five years. The time before that was 9/11. I guess I only write after traumatic events, so maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t write you for a while. (And hey, it’s not like you’ve been writing back!)
First I’ll catch you up a little bit…
Sam is 16, a junior. Taller than me. Funny as hell, and quick. I guess that gene has been passed along pretty reliably. And no sign of hair loss, so maybe that gene skipped a generation! Smart, his grades and test scores are beyond anything I did in high school. Math guy, like you. So good natured, such a great heart, you would love hanging out with him.
Lily is 14, she’s in 8th grade. Still sparkly. Still makes every teacher fall in love with her. And now some 8th-grade boys are falling for her too. She hasn’t fallen back yet; plenty of time for that. Also gets great grades, but the biggest news: she landed a big part in her middle school musical. She just talks and sings and does her thing non-stop. She’s the noisemaker, Sam’s the quieter one.
I’m still working for myself, doing pretty well. We moved into a new house in the same town about 3 years ago, we really like it. Amy is doing great, things are really good at home. But there’s some other stuff going on.
Last year, 2016, was an election year. The Republicans won. And their guy is a real problem. Not a Reagan- or Nixon-type problem, more like a Stalin-level problem.
Let me back up…you remember Obama, the black guy we elected in 2008? He won a second term. Did a pretty good job. Screwed up some foreign policy stuff, but all in all, a class act.
Actually, let me back up even further…the Republicans started getting worse and worse after you died, starting with Reagan. (I’m not blaming you, but the timing was a bit suspicious…!!!) They started getting more conservative and extreme and hateful. These people got elected to Congress and basically made the government dysfunctional, because they hate government.
You remember Bob Grant, from WMCA? Well, the radio started filling up with guys like him, only worse: angrier, more right wing. Dozens of them, just spouting right-wing hate crap 24/7. Then they created a TV network that basically took the same approach: loose with the truth, basically a right-wing propaganda machine.
So pretty soon we have tens of millions of people who eat this stuff 3 meals a day and learn to hate government, and hate Democrats, and especially hate the black president.
Stay with me…you probably remember Donald Trump; he had just started making big real estate deals in the city when you got sick. Anyway, Trump became a successful developer, built lots of buildings and casinos, and was a big personality around New York, always in the tabloids, going bankrupt, coming back, openly cheating on his wife, all kinds of crazy shit.
Then he gets a starring role playing himself in a TV show. It’s a success and he gets famous nationally. (Mom loved that show, by the way. Go figure.)
A few years into Obama’s presidency, Trump starts saying that Obama has no birth certificate. Trump says he has investigators looking into whether Obama was actually born in the US. It becomes a news story, which is what really turns Trump on, because he’s a publicity whore. The whole thing is totally fake: Trump never shows a shred of evidence, but because half the country is addicted to the right-wing TV and radio stuff, people believe it.
The presidential campaign rolls around, and Trump announces that he’s running. His announcement is this laundry list of hate and blame and bragging and big promises. No content, no backup, no specifics; zero. Most people think it’s a joke.
Sixteen other republicans end up running, and the campaign is in full gear almost a year and a half before the election. It’s this huge circus (oh, by the way, Ringling Brothers just went out of business. Remember when I won circus tickets by answering Barry Grey’s question on WMCA? Wow, a lot of WMCA today!)
The campaign goes on, and Trump makes one outrageous statement after another: he insults POWs, he taunts his primary opponents like a schoolyard bully, threatens to ban Muslims from entering the country, calls the press liars, promises to sue them (because they call him on his BS). And keep in mind, Trump looks like a clown: paunchy, spray tan, and orange died hair in an elaborate, bizarre comb-over.
And this joke of a candidate starts winning primaries. The Republicans start freaking out, cause Trump isn’t a real republican, but they can’t stop him.
Turns out there’s this core of people who just love the guy because he’s different, and because they believe his bullshit, and because they think he’s going to make America great again — that’s his campaign slogan, and apparently some people take it literally. He’s also promising to bring back all these factory jobs that have gone to Mexico and China (which anyone who has been paying attention knows aren’t coming back.)
And he wins. This joker-clown wins the Republican nomination.
Democrats are celebrating, because there’s no way this guy is winning the general election. Oh, and he’s running against a woman, Hillary Clinton, who happens to be married to Bill Clinton, the guy who was president two presidents after Reagan. (He’s the one who’s intern blew him in the White House, remember that?) Anyway, Hillary is a whole other story. The short version is she’s super-smart, very accomplished, not that exciting, and a little smarmy. Politician-smarmy, not Trump-smarmy.
During the general election campaign, Trump’s crazy gets even worse: he insults the family of a dead soldier, threatens to jail Clinton if she wins, stuff like that. Then a month before the election, this video comes out: turns out someone left a microphone on when Trump was a guest on this TV show. Trump didn’t know he was being recorded during breaks, and this tape has him bragging to the show’s host about how women let him “grab them by the pussy” (his exact words) because he’s famous.
He goes down in the polls, but not that far down. Some other weird stuff happened which I won’t get into, but election day came, and Trump won. Actually, he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million but won the electoral college. Most people, including me, were totally shocked. This hateful imbecile got elected.
Meanwhile, there’s this weird thing going on with Trump and Russia. So Russia had started getting more democratic in the nineties after the Soviet Union broke up, but this old-school strongman came to power and crushed that. Now it’s a corrupt, repressive oligarchy with a failing economy. Their president, Putin, [it is suspected that he] kills his opponents, attacks neighboring countries, a really evil guy.
Except Trump seems to love him. He praises Putin at every opportunity and won’t say one negative word about him. Everyone thinks it’s weird, figures that Trump loves him because Putin is this strong, authoritarian guy. But then it comes out that the Russians were meddling in our election, working to get Trump elected.
After election day, Trump starts appointing people to his cabinet, some of who have ties to Russia, others who have absolutely no qualifications for the job. It’s like a big “fuck you” to the country.
Then more stuff starts leaking out about how the Russians may have compromising info on him. (I’ll spare you the details; you’d thank me if you knew what those details were!) And as crazy as the Russia stuff sounds, it all makes sense: Trump owes tons of money to Russian bankers, he won’t label Russia as an enemy, and many of his statements and actions are pro-Russia. So there’s literally a good chance that the new president is being controlled by Russia. Half the country is in total shock, the other half is in total denial.
As of tomorrow, our president will be a pure narcissist who would kill his mother if she made him look bad. Not smart, not informed, not willing to learn, hateful, spiteful, and potentially working for Russia.
It’s not clear that the Republicans — who control Congress — are willing to stand up to him. There’s this feeling in the air that things could get really ugly, really quickly.
People are scared. I’m scared.
It makes me think of my first trip home from college during Thanksgiving of freshman year. I’d just read a book that said the world was screwed because we’ll be out of fossil fuels by 2010, and I was pretty shaken by the book’s predictions. You told me you’d seen a bunch of dire predictions in the past — I think you mentioned something about India and overpopulation, I don’t remember the specifics. I just remember you saying that for every big problem, people manage to find solutions, and that we’d manage to find to whatever big problem came up next. Something would come along…a new technology, a new idea, something. I loved your optimism and your certainty. I felt better.
So I’m going to go with that same thought right now. We’ll find a solution. But it was a lot easier to believe back then, coming from you.
If mom’s with you, tell her that we love her and we miss her too. Tell her that the star of The Apprentice is the new president. And if you have any influence with God (or any God-like figures) up there, put in a good word!
Alright, dad. I guess I’ll let you know how things turn out.
Love,
Gary
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Editor’s note: This post is revised. Our Editorial Guidelines require that claims about a living person are substantiated by credible sources. As such, we originally hyperlinked the sources for the statements made in the author’s letter. We felt that presentation made the letter apprear and feel less personal. To correct that, we have revised the post to remove the hyperlinks from the letter and have listed them below.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/iran-trump-nuclear-deal/515979/
http://bluenationreview.com/trump-taunts-mainstream-media-you-cant-figure-me-out/
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-muslim-ban-comments-could-affect-his-standing-in-court-2017-2
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/us/politics/donald-trump-khizr-khan-wife-ghazala.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/22/a-brief-history-of-the-lock-her-up-chant-as-it-looks-like-trump-might-not–even-try/?utm_term=.dd62b1ff836c
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-putin-middle-east-russia-relations-234316
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-and-putins-relationship/500852/
http://www.focus-economics.com/countries/russia
http://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-people-putin-is-suspected-of-assassinating-2016-3
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-putin-relationship_us_589a894fe4b04061313a4660
http://fortune.com/2016/12/13/donald-trump-cabinet-picks-russia/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/trump-commerce-pick-wilbur-ross-financial-ties-russians
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-trump-cabinet-hacking-putin-2017-1
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/trump-russia-intelligence-need-to-know-214520
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/11/politics/trump-ties-with-russia/
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This post was originally published on the author’s Medium blog and is republished here with his permission.
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