Thursday, November
10, 2016
Dear Mr. Trump:
I am one of the
60,122,876 people who didn’t vote for you on Tuesday. I didn’t vote for you
because as far as I can tell you have neither the experience, knowledge nor
temperament to be President.Furthermore, you seem to have only a tenuous grasp on
reality and an inability to tell the truth. But most of all, I didn’t vote for
you because you have, with your belligerent, bullying, demeaning rhetoric, fanned the
flames of hate and anger in many of your supporters, legitimizing their racist, misogynist, hateful attitudes
toward women, blacks, Latinos,
other ethnic minorities,
Muslims, people in the LGBT community, people with disabilities
and many others. Just this week, two of my friends and neighbors have been accosted and traumatized by people whose hate and anger you have
legitimized.
Maybe you didn’t see this coming, but a lot of us did, and
it terrified us. It still terrifies us. You say you want to be the President of all the people, but
how can that be when you have in effect told your followers that it’s all right
to attack and accost those you have targeted in your speeches? How can that be
when you have bragged about how smart you are for not paying the taxes that
support our schools, our libraries, our hospitals, our police, our military, our veterans, taxes that guarantee
that we have safe food to eat, clean air to breathe and water to drink, that
our roads are built and kept in repair, that provide a safety net for those
who fall through the cracks, for
the elderly, for people with
disabilities, for the working poor who often work two jobs and still have
trouble keeping their children clothed
and fed? Which leads me to question how you can be pro-life, yet talk about cutting
back or taking away services and programs that help to sustain and improve life
for those already born? You say you want to make America great again, but how
can you do that when you have encouraged your followers to turn on their fellow
citizens much as the KKK turned on blacks and Jews and Catholics, when hangings
and cross burnings were common during some of the darker, not so great periods
of our recent history? And now you have the endorsement of the KKK and some of
its leaders, who now feel so emboldened that they are distributing flyers in
neighborhoods close to me.
You said that you will bring back jobs and industries that
once thrived but are now shuttered, the jobs shipped out of the country. Mr.
Trump, a lot of those jobs aren’t coming back, they’re finished. But we do need
to encourage innovation for new products, particularly in areas of green energy
so we can build up supply chains with skilled jobs that pay well. We need to support labor unions with their
training and apprentice programs to provide a well-paid, skilled workforce. We
need to replace the coal and retrain miners for these new jobs so that they
can become productive, able to support their families and be proud of the work they do. But of course, you believe climate change is
a Chinese hoax, don’t you, so no green energy jobs, I guess. We need to support companies that pledge
to keep jobs here and invest in their
workers rather than outsourcing or shipping their operations abroad, while avoiding paying their share of
taxes. We need to find a way to encourage small businesses, and to support American
farmers and manufacturers through effective, efficient and fair trade policies and tariffs that benefit us and our trading partners.
We need to strengthen our ties with our allies, not threaten
to abandon them by withdrawing from NATO, and we need to stand up to Russia’s
threat of aggression in the Baltic states, not check our balance sheets to
determine whether they“have fulfilled their obligations to us.” That’s kind of rich coming from someone who
doesn’t even pay his federal taxes. No, Mr. Trump, I don’t have much confidence
in your abilities, nor in your program and policy proposals, and even less in
the people you are reported to be looking to
appoint to Cabinet positions.
I would love to be proven wrong, that the great plans, the
best plans that you refer to, whatever they are, actually will work well for
the nation as a whole. But I would remind you that while you may have won a
stunning victory in garnering the most Electoral College votes, you did not win
a mandate from the people. Your opponent
actually won the popular vote by roughly 300,000 votes at last count. Those of us who voted for Sec. Clinton are
watching you, and we will let you know how we think you’re doing. Meanwhile I
suggest that you make some attempt to rein in your supporters, whose sparks of anger
and fear and hate have been fanned into
a raging fire that, if not checked, will burn this nation to such a
degree that we will not be able to recover for perhaps generations. I don’t think you, or any of us, want that.
Sincerely,
Grace K. B. Smith
1 comment:
You nailed it. Mail it.
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