Dear Mr. President

July 8, 2017

Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

We’ve never met. Still, I despise you more passionately than I ever thought possible. You are arrogant, dishonest, greedy, ill-informed, pompous, selfish, short-sighted, stupid, and untrustworthy. Truly, you are a despicable man.

Alas, you are also the man who, by virtue of a quirky electoral system, sits at the head of our government. (Save that load of horse-hooey about millions of people voting illegally for your opponent for the alt-facts crowd.) You’ve been our servant, now, for 169 terrible days, and you had 72 to prepare yourself for the job we gave you. (You had a lifetime, before Election Day 2016, but I don’t get a sense from you that you place much stock in being prepared.)

Today, what set me off was your utterly idiotic decision about a “fill-in” when you left the G-20 meeting for Lord knows what reason. Ivanka Trump. Your daughter. (The one you’d date if she wasn’t your daughter.) Pray, what qualifies your daughter to sub for you at a meeting of world leaders? Did I forget National Take Your Daughter to Work Day? Did I miss an election, where we chose her to be … somebody?

Maybe you thought your daughter might gain some knowledge from what she was hearing. Knowledge, I guess, you didn’t think she could get from reading a transcript of the proceedings later. Or, maybe, you simply didn’t care one whit about how others might interpret your actions. About the disrespect you shower on your peers. The contempt for protocol. And the message to your 300+ million bosses, back home, about just how disinterested you are in governance.

You sold many millions of Americans on your Make America Great Again message, Mr. President. How’s that working out? Do you think the world respects America when you have Ms. Trump sitting at the grown-ups table? When you offload responsibilities on your unqualified, shady son-in-law? (What possible competencies does he have to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?) Or when you isolate America, handing over leadership on pressing issues like climate change to others?

Mr. President, you told us you didn’t want other leaders and countries laughing at us anymore.  Respectfully, sir, you missed the memo: the laughing began between November 8, 2016 and soon after January 20, 2017.

Mr. President, with leadership comes responsibility. The Leader of the Free World—that’s you, sir—can’t throw temper tantrums. He gets to take a few hits, too, because they come with the territory. And the United States of America, as a nation, leads by example. That means, sometimes, sucking it up, for it, too, comes with the role. Maybe, for example, getting to YES with more than 190 countries on climate change matters more—a whole lot more—than your pretentious play for votes in coal country.

Mr. President, I mean no disrespect for the office you hold with my words. I wonder, though, whether you think you’re respecting the office of President of the United States. Did you respect your office when you put your daughter at a table, representing our country, along with 19 world leaders? Do you respect your office when you have about 80% of the government’s senior leadership positions sitting empty, solely on account of your decision not to put nominees before the Senate? Do you respect your office when you’ve turned the presidency into a job you do when golf doesn’t otherwise occupy your days? (You told us, when you were running that you wouldn’t have time to play golf. Maybe you should pass on golf and read resumes, sir.)

Mr. President, most Americans respect the office you hold. Someday, sir, most of us will, once again, have good reasons to respect the occupant. For now, though, I think you give us every reason to wish we could say, simply, “You’re fired.”

Sincerely,

/Mark/

Mark Rubin

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