Dear Senator Booker, Senator Kim, and Representative Smith,
I write to you as your constituent to express my outrage at the foreign policy being pursued by the Trump administration. To call recent statements by the President “beneath the dignity of his office” would be a ludicrous understatement. The pronouncements of the President regarding American foreign policy and the actions of his officials on the global stage have been obscene. It is frankly difficult to find language strong enough in which the malfeasance of this administration can be condemned. Many dimensions of this catastrophe could be enumerated, but for brevity’s sake I will focus on two: the President’s plans regarding Gaza and his pronouncements pertaining to the conflict in the Ukraine.
President Trump’s professed desire to remove the Palestinian residents of Gaza amounts to nothing less than a blueprint for a war crime. Punishing 1.8 million Gazans, half of whom are below the age of 18, for the depraved actions undertaken by a group of about 40,000 Hamas fighters, is an exercise in collective guilt to rival that of any authoritarian regime in history. It is the logical and moral equivalent of forcibly moving all of the residents of Los Angeles to Montana to punish the handful of criminals that engaged in arson.
This ethical derangement would be bad enough on its own, but it lands in the middle of a torturously complex political conflict that requires sober and strategic leadership to resolve. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be almost impossible to achieve even if US leaders act with penetrating insight, deep knowledge, and complete fairness. With the US President spouting absurdly bigoted fantasies, the distant prospects of peace will recede even further, exacerbating the destructive violence of the conflict and extending and deepening the terrible suffering already being experienced by Palestinians and Israelis. The words and actions of the President on this issue are beyond foolish, they are gratuitously cruel.
If the President’s involvement in Gaza must be described as gratuitously cruel, his engagement with the Ukraine conflict can only be characterized as lunatic malice. In 2022 Vladimir Putin, without any provocation or just cause, invaded the peaceful, sovereign, and democratic nation of the Ukraine. Since then his soldiers have murdered, raped, kidnapped children, and wantonly destroyed the homes and infrastructure belonging to the Ukrainian people. In response, President Trump blames the Ukrainian people for the crimes that have been committed against them. The President’s lies are simply too disgusting to be borne. They are a disgrace not merely to his office, but to the American people as a whole. We owe the world an apology for foisting upon the community of nations this ugly, vicious troll.
You gentleman are the voice of your constituents here in New Jersey. You must condemn these actions and words of the President in the strongest possible terms, and continue to condemn his malpractice unless and until he recants his obscene offenses and makes amends for his breaches of common decency. Representative Smith, as a member of the President’s own party you especially have a responsibility to hold him accountable to basic standards of right. All of your good work advocating for civil rights in China will be rendered meaningless if you do not speak up now to preserve the credibility of the United States and the integrity of the values its leaders have championed for more than a century on the global stage.
Though Representative Smith falls under a special onus of remonstrance, you three gentleman all must cooperate in bringing this message to the President and to the American people as a whole. You must band together with your colleagues in the House and Senate of both parties to decry the President’s atrocious words and behavior. If nothing can be done to restrain the President’s misconduct, the pain he causes will deepen and spread, and even the “two beautiful oceans” he is so fond of invoking will not protect citizens here in the US from the disastrous effects of his transgressions.
Sincerely,
Andrew Meyer
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