I Write Letters

[Content Note: Nativism.]

Dear United States former Presidents, former First Ladies, former Secretaries of State and other cabinet members, former intelligence agency chiefs, and former (and current) ambassadors:

Where are you?

With a few notable exceptions, you are not showing up publicly, visibly, to name Donald Trump while objecting to his vile policies, and none of you, that I have been able to discern, have called for his swift removal from office.

Trump is observably and relentlessly leading this nation down a path of authoritarianism. He has repeatedly expressed and demonstrated contempt for the rule of law. He is undermining trust in public institutions; he attacks the free press; he subverts democracy.

The motivating center of his vile agenda is malice, the latest sickening example of which is separating children from their parents at the southern border and detaining those children in makeshift jails and concentration camps euphemistically known as "tent cities" hastily constructed in the blazing summer heat of southern Texas.

Where are you?

I am terrified thinking what it will take to motivate you to speak out unreservedly against this president if subjecting children to such traumatic and potentially deadly horrors will not move you.

There is no reason — none — to hope that things will not get worse while you remain silent. To the absolute contrary, there is every reason to believe that Trump will continue to escalate, increasingly empowered to commit acts of atrocity against children in the vacuum of accountability abetted by that silence.

Where are you?

You have whatever platform you've got because you went into public service ostensibly because you are patriots who care about this nation. So why are you choosing to not use that platform now, when everything you presumably love and value is slipping away to the sound of children screaming for their parents?

It is now abundantly, painfully evident that some of you who should have said something before the election didn't, to our lasting regret. The nation's statespeople cannot double down on that mistake.

You must name Donald Trump — and Mike Pence, and Jeff Sessions, and Kirstjen Nielsen, and every other member of this horrifying administration — and detail the harm of his wicked agenda, and shame Congressional Republicans for being derelict in their duty to prioritize country over party.

You must call for Trump's swift removal from office, to preserve the republic, before it is too late. If it already isn't.

Where are you?

Your nation needs you.

With urgency,
Melissa McEwan