Dear Mr. President,
I write to bid you farewell, and to castigate you for the contemptible way in which you are leaving office. Your use of the Bully Pulpit to broadcast unfounded conspiracy theories, in combination with your complete abdication of leadership in the face of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, is one of the most disgraceful chapters in the annals of our nation's history. Shame on you, sir.
The chief duty of a President is communication. As a communicator you have been virtually nothing but toxic and divisive since the moment you were sworn into office, but the corrosive malignancy of your pronouncements has reached new heights in recent days and weeks. Take, for example, this tweet from December 1:
There are at least two ways that the text of this tweet could be read. The first would be:
Do something Governor Brian Kemp. You allowed your state to be scammed. We have concrete evidence of thousands of illegal votes cast in your jurisdiction. If you check signatures and count signed envelopes against ballots, the truth of these allegations can be verified. Once that is done, there will be no need for a run off election, as we have reason to believe that Senators Perdue and Loeffler garnered more than 50% of the legal votes cast.
The second, more plausible reading of your tweet would be:
Do something Governor Brian Kemp. You allowed Republicans to lose the election. There is a convenient mechanism to reverse that outcome. Just go back over the ballots, and on the pretext of a "mismatch" between signatures on mail-in envelopes and those on past voter registration forms, you can throw out thousands of mail-in ballots. Since we know that Democrats disproportionately voted by mail, once you have thrown away ten or twenty thousand mail-in ballots, we can be assured that all of the Republican candidates on the ballot will win handily.
The fact that you allowed this ambiguity to exist demonstrates pernicious malice on your part, and is a violation of your oath of office. You swore to defend the Constitution of the United States, and nothing poses a greater threat to our constitutional order than a collapse of faith in the integrity of our elections. For you to use your office in the manner embodied by the above tweet is equivalent to throwing acid on the foundations of the Republic.
Fake news! you might protest. I am insisting that the "worse" reading of your tweet must be true. I am purposefully misconstruing your intent!
Such protests would be an insult to everyone's intelligence. A President of the United States may not make flippant or unsubstantiated accusations of voter fraud, EVER. If you had made the accusation expressed in your tweet in a sober press conference, filled with eye witness testimony, expert analysis, and documentary evidence, then the more charitable reading of your tweet might be trenchant. For you to toss such a pronouncement onto the web without any corroborating evidence is malpractice that rises to the level of treason. It compels any thinking person to read your tweet in the harshest light, and it is only one of dozens of such pronouncements that you have made since November 3.
I personally cannot understand why anyone is disposed to attribute benign motives to you or to give you the benefit of the doubt. Your penchant for venality, corruption, and cruelty has been on such constant display, from your verbal coddling of dictators and white supremacists to your unconscionable torture of children kidnapped into and remaining in federal custody, to your criminal negligence as tens of thousands of Americans die of Covid-19, that you resemble no leader in modern memory so much as the late President of Uganda, Idi Amin. But what is "really in your heart" is of little matter in judging your actions now. Your persistent pursuit of a coup to overturn the free and fair results of our most recent election is both illegal and immoral. Cease and desist!
I will not close with any pleas for you to change course or reflect on your actions, as I am certain that you are deaf to such entreaties. I wish you personally no injury or ill fortune. For the sake of our nation and its social cohesion, I hope that you and your family remain healthy and safe. But I cannot help but look forward eagerly to the day when you are no longer profaning the office you now hold, and can no longer use its powers and prestige to do such terrible damage to our system and way of life. Good bye, sir, and good riddance.
Sincerely,
Andrew Meyer
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