Dear President Trump:

Two years ago today you became our President. I don’t think you expected it and I know I didn’t, but it happened. At the time your told us you were going to be the greatest President in our history. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now; two years ago I set us some benchmarks and told you that you would be graded against them. So here’s what I have:

• The Dow Jones average was 19,732.40. Today it is 24,706. That looks good but you caught a break coming into office after President Obama rescued the economy from the brink of disaster. Last year at this time it was 26,071.72. You’re going backwards.
• Likewise the NASDAQ was 5540.08 on January 20, 2017. A year later it was 7336.38 and today it’s 7157.23. Again, you’re going backward.
• Finally, the Standard and Poor’s 500 (the S&P 500) started at 2663.69 and last year it was 2810.30. Today it’s 2670.71. More backwards.
• You’ve done well with the unemployment rate. In 2017 was 4.7% and in 2018 it was 4.l%. Currently it’s 3.9%. I give you props for that.
• Currently 153,340,000 are employed in the United States and that’s good. It’s up from 123,570,00 two years ago. Of course, it doesn’t count the government employees that aren’t being paid. More later.
• Gallup tells us that your approval rating stands at about 37% and that’s been consistent for your time in office. Your minimal base appears to continue to support you
• You ran on a platform to make us great again. When you entered the White House the federal deficit was $590 billion (that is, we spend more than we earn). Today it’s $985 billion.
• The deficit is different from the national debt. The deficit means we need to borrow money to keep things working. The debt tells us how much money we’ve borrowed (and need to repay). Two years ago the national debt was just under $20 trillion. Now it’s approaching $22 trillion.
• You ran promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. Your best efforts to replace the ACA didn’t work, though you have had some success in disabling it. Two years ago 11% of Americans didn’t have health insurance. Today it appears to be 12.2%

But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. As I write this we are nearly a month into a partial government shutdown. Thousands of government employees and contractors are not being paid (even though some are forced to work) because you insist on building a border wall that most Americans recognize as a bad idea. You’re not doing this because you think it’s a good idea or good for the country. You’re doing this because you recognize that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter will not support you and you’re afraid of them.

Mr. Trump, you could resign, go back to your tower in New York, and never have to worry about paying your bills. If you do that thousands of government employees and contractors will also have to stop worrying about their bills.

Dear President Trump:

I’m writing to you today to encourage you to give up on the idea of a border wall and reopen government. Two weeks ago government funding stopped for several departments out of dispute over funding your promise to build a wall along our southern border.

All presidential candidates make promises that, once they are elected, recognize they can’t keep. Famously President Obama promised to close the detention center at Guantanamo.

And let’s face it: you have your own broken promises. Eleven times on the campaign trail you promised to jail Hilary Clinton. You also criticized President Obama for playing golf while on the job and promised not to do the same.

I could go on, but that’s not the point. Now that you’re President you need to recognize that building the wall will not stop illegal immigration. It will cost a great deal of money and won’t do what it’s supposed to do.

Simply put, Mr. Trump, we all recognize that this is one campaign promise your base cares about. But your base has never been the majority of Americans and most of us oppose the wall.

You need to stop worrying about losing your base and start leading our nation. And you need to stop making federal employees hostages of your fear. Employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and the United States Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (among others) are currently working without pay. They are praying that they won’t lose their homes, that their credit ratings won’t suffer, and that their children won’t lose necessary services.

Mr. Trump I understand that your corporations have declared bankruptcy at least four times. But all of these bankruptcies were corporate and did not cost you anything personally. No matter what happened to your employees your home in Trump Tower remained safe.

This won’t be true for federal employees who suffer from your fear of losing your base. I pray none of them will need to declare bankruptcy but if they do, you will not pay any price for their pain or their future.

I have no confidence that you will suddenly develop a moral compass but I will never stop praying for the people you are hurting.

The United States Constitution instructs that a census of all persons in the United States be conducted every 10 years. The first census was 1790, the latest in 2010. We conduct a census every 10 years to ensure that every member of the House of Representatives represents the same number of people. Every 10 years states take this information and draw congressional districts.

But the census has become much more. The Census Bureau has also asked questions about age, place of birth, marital status, education, etc. And we update these questions with each census. Historically this gives us a “snapshot” of our nation. For those of us who choose to climb our family tree, this information gives us an incredibly amount of information.

The Census Bureau comes under the Department of Commerce and two years ago President Trump nominated Wilber Ross. Not long after Mr. Ross assumed his office he began to advocate that the 2020 census ask each person in America about their citizenship status.

At face value that sounds benign but it’s not. From the first day of his campaign President Trump has proclaimed that they (noncitizens) are out to destroy our (citizens) way of life. It is their hope that families with undocumented residents will lie and exclude those household members from the census. Those uncounted people will not factor into the congressional district. Or perhaps they will answer truthfully and undocumented residents will in danger of being discovered and deported.

Those who favor this question respond by saying (rightly) that individual census information doesn’t become public information until 73 years after the census. Anyone can access information on the census from 1790 to 1940; in 2023 the 1950 census will be released.

Except. Except that in the 1940s, during World War II, the United States decided to inter Japanese Americans. They used several tools to determine who were Japanese, and one of them was data from the 1940 census. They broke the law. Don’t believe me? OK, at least read this article.

So in 2020 people with family members who are undocumented have to face a terrible dilemma: should they lie and give up some representation or should they tell the truth and fear a knock at midnight?

And, by the way, if you think the census should only count people with legal status, you need to amend the Constitution. The census counts all persons, not just persons the President likes.

Things are not looking good for President Trump these days, and virtually all of his wounds are self inflicted.

Last week his Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned and wrote a scathing resignation letter. Secretary Mattis, in a break from most resignations, stated clearly that he holds a different world view than the President. He offered to stay until the end of February, but when Mr. Trump saw the reaction his letter was getting, he ordered him to leave by next week. When Mr. Trump was inaugurated nearly two years ago he appointed a group of retired service members he called “my generals.” They included Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor; H.R. McMaster as Mr. Flynn’s successor; and John Kelly, first as Secretary of Homeland Security, then as Chief of Staff. Now they are all gone, and Mr. Trump can’t avoid the view that he does not want advice, he wants yes men.

Mr. Trump moved into the White House during a bull market (ie, the stock market is going up) and has claimed credit for its ongoing rise. As I write this the Dow Jones Industrial average is 23,138. At the beginning of the year it was 24,824. The last week or so has been particularly volatile but we’re probably due to experience a recession in 2019. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 didn’t become another Great Depression in large part because President Obama slammed the brakes on it by working with the Federal Reserve and pouring money into the economy. President Trump lacks even a basic understanding of how the Fed works and if we do slip into another recession I fear he won’t know what to do.

Finally, we are on day 6 of a partial government shutdown over his promise to build a wall along the entire US/Mexico border. He’s broken several promises before (e.g. promising to jail Hillary Clinton) and his supporters haven’t seemed to mind. It’s often said that they take him seriously but not literally. The border wall appears to be different. Last week he appeared to be willing to defer funding for the wall to avoid a government shutdown. But he turned on Fox and Friends and saw that he was being criticized for backing down. He’s not a man who does well with criticism, but it goes deeper. I think he recognizes that if he doesn’t build the wall he will lose support from his base. The partial shutdown can’t go on forever, but he’s really trapped. Next week the Democrats take control of the House and there is no way he will get wall funding once that happens.

Unfortunately he is no longer hosting a reality TV show. His missteps have real consequences, for him and for us.

Many of you reading this may not have heard of the term “Kristallnacht” but it’s important that we learn from it.

By 1938 it became clear that Adolph Hitler, who led Germany, wanted to eliminate all Jews from German soil, and many were already being deported to Poland. In Paris, a 17 year old Jew named Hershel Grynszpan learned that his family was among those deported. He decided to take matters into his own hands and went to the German Embassy in Paris and demanded to see the ambassador. This obviously didn’t happen, but a low level diplomat named Ernst Vom Rath did meet with him. Mr. Grynszpan then shot him to death.

And even though this was a simple murder in Paris, the Nazi’s reacted with rage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ordered Nazi Storm Troopers to respond with “spontaneous demonstrations” against Jewish buildings and businesses. On the night of November 9th, they did just that. Kristallnacht translates to “The Night of the Broken Glass” and on that night over 7500 businesses and synagogues were damaged or destroyed. Additionally about 100 Jews were killed.

This night chills us not only because of the damage (and German police and fire were instructed not to interfere) but also the aftermath. Germany demanded that Jews pay them the equivalent of $400 million for the murder of Mr. Vom Rath; they also confiscated their businesses and collected the insurance money. Simply put, this was the exact definition blaming the victim. Because Mr. Vom Rath was murdered by a Jew, all Jews were at fault and any revenge was justified.

Why does this matter 80 years later? I’m not claiming that we are in danger of experiencing this again, but I do think our current President leverages a deep seeded fear of immigrants to his own advantage and uses some of the same tools. Famously, when he announced his candidacy in 2015 he told us that Mexico is sending us drug dealers, criminals and rapists.

I’ll be the first to recognize that not everybody to comes to our nation (legally or otherwise) respects our laws. But just as Hershel Grynszan didn’t act on behalf of all Jews, a single Mexican criminal doesn’t mean all Mexicans are criminals.

I’ve written about this previously, but in the days leading up to recent elections, our President sent 5200 active duty military and 2100 reservists to the Mexican border to combat a caravan of men, women, and children who are walking here to escape violence in their own countries.

The President portrays them as invaders. But this caravan is thousands of miles away and already outnumbered by the troops at the border (who are not allowed to interact with them.

Yes, he’s blaming the victims. Let’s look 80 years back and tell him that we won’t fall for it again.

I’ve written several times before that President Trump lacks even a basic understanding of how our nation works. This week he has proven me right beyond anything I could have imagined.

In the last few weeks we’ve learned that men, women, and children from Central America have begun a migrant caravan through Mexico in the hopes of reaching the United States. They are fleeing poverty and gang violence and chose a dangerous and exhausting journey out of desperation.

But our President refuses to see this. He repeatedly refers to this pilgrimage as an invasion.

His two responses shows us again how little he knows about his job:

• He has misused his power as Commander in Chief to move troops to the border. When he learned about the caravan he ordered state National Guard troops and active duty soldiers to the border to “protect us.” So here’s the problem: they can’t do any law enforcement. They can’t detain or arrest anyone who crosses the border illegally. In 1878 Congress passed a law called Posse Comitatus. It stated that our military protects us from those who endanger us from outside our nation and they cannot perform law enforcement duties. So if these troops are called to the Mexican border, what can they do? Good question. They can support law enforcement. In other words they can make repairs and transport law enforcement. Yes, they will can be uber for border patrol. As for me, I think that’s a terrific reason to pull our military from their jobs and families.
• His lack of understanding of our Constitution continues to stun me. In the last few days President Trump has challenged our belief that anyone born here is, by right, a citizen. Actually, it’s not a belief: it’s embedded in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment was passed after the Civil War to ensure that newly freed slaves were guaranteed citizenship. Mr. Trump believes that he can end or change a Constitutional Amendment by executive order. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan recognizes this isn’t true. So does the Supreme Court. In 1898 the Supreme Court in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark ruled that anyone born in the US is automatically a citizen. Mr. Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents. In 1895 he visited China, but on his return to the United States he was refused entry because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that denied entry of nearly anyone who was Chinese. Mr. Ark claimed that he was a citizen by virtue of being born in the US. In 1898 the Court ruled that if someone is born in the United States, that person is a citizen and nothing else matters. You can read more about this in a previous post.

Only true history nerds will recognize that on this day in 1973 President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) set in place the events we now call the Saturday Night Massacre.

In 1972, during President Nixon’s reelection campaign, five men were arrested for breaking into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington DC. They were attempting to bug the phones and gain intelligence on the campaign of the President’s opponent, Senator George McGovern (1922-2010).

And while President Nixon was reelected in 1972, the investigation of the break in grew in the minds of many Americans. By May of 1973 Congress began holding hearings and President Nixon (under pressure) appointed Archibald Cox (1912-2004) to investigate what we all began to call “Watergate.”

But Mr. Cox soon began to investigate whether or not President Nixon drove a coverup by bribing the original defendants to quietly plead guilty in return for cash and not implicating anyone else. President Nixon spent the summer of 1973 growing angrier and angrier over the investigation. On Saturday, October 20, 1973 he directed his Attorney General Elliot Richardson (1920-1999) to fire Mr. Cox. General Richardson refused to do so and resigned. President Nixon then ordered General Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus (b.1932) to fire Mr. Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus also resigned. Finally Solicitor General Robert Bork (1927-2012) fired Mr. Cox.

Instead of ending the scandal it intensified it. Pressure grew on President Nixon, and on August 8, 1974 he resigned.

I write this not out of nostalgia for events 45 years ago, but because we’re seeing frightening parallels today. President Nixon ordered a coverup of events intended to ensure his reelection. Many of us believe that in 2016 then candidate Donald Trump conspired with Russia to provide false information to convince American voters to vote for him.

President Nixon spent the rest of his life convinced that he did nothing wrong and his enemies were out to get him.

As I said, the parallels are frightening.