NOT MY PRESIDENT: Open Letter to @RealDonaldTrump
By Dawn M. Sanders
13/7/2018
Hadley Freeman, an American expat who authored an opinion piece in the Guardian neatly captured what many of us could be feeling right now:
“It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by one’s feelings about Trump, but my feelings about his visit can be summed up in a single word: embarrassment.”
I echo that sentiment completely, so am taking it along with the thousands of protesters on the streets of London and elsewhere, in an open letter directly to Trump himself…
To Mr. Trump,
Note: I am not lavishing you with ‘dear Mr. President’ Your Excellency or any other endearments you simply don’t deserve.
I have lived as a resident in the UK for 26 years and, at the ripe age of 51, can easily remember the America I grew up with.
Of course my home country has always run deep with racism, particularly in the south and more conservative quarters. There has never been a utopia, with gang wars for decades stretching from Los Angeles to Chicago and beyond.
We perpetrated the Cold War with successive invasions and backings of dictators in Latin America to the tune of our own interests, but on the ground at the grassroots of everyday people – human decency and helping one another mostly prevailed.
My mother was a single parent of 5 kids, uneducated and on welfare benefits and I remember one year someone left a parcel of food and toys on our doorstep for Christmas.
Even if one didn’t have much, in the America I grew up with it was somehow enough and it was okay to be poor and happy.
Despite the throwback to the years of segregation, my best friends at school were usually black or Mexican Americans because, I like most of them was poor, disadvantaged and different.
Nowadays under your dark and hateful influence of ‘zero acceptance’ means working people who happen to be of colour or another culture, can’t speak in their native language, because of your brand of brainwashing to demonise immigrants or penalise the poor.
You have blatantly downgraded women as sex objects and mocked a person with special needs.
You crisscross the world with a cavalier air of telling others how to implement policy; perpetuate cultural and trade wars, wars of words and seemingly thrive on spreading chaos and undoing piece wherever you go.
Your ripping away environmental policies which took years to carefully craft and put in place like delicate wall paper – favouring corporate dominance, will only put America in the pathway of catastrophic natural disaster.
I could go on and on and, I’m not saying anything new here, but just because the British government and state has decided to treat you like royalty, doesn’t mean for a second we the public or especially Americans you supposedly represent, invite your shallow, uninformed reckless antics and unpredictable ping-ponging to the tune of your inflated ego and whether or not you get your way in the world.
The American/British “special relationship” is special, because of historical ties, yet more so these days it is “special” due to a leader/follower kind of sick partnership in crime.
In the days when George W. Bush Jr. was president and the inside job of 9/11 was staged and the Twin Towers came down – American expats like me were too ashamed to admit to being American, because of the years of war that followed – based on lies – resulting in cultural polarisation between the West and Middle East.
With all that in mind Mr. Trump, the days of American hegemony are long over.
You have taken the sinister beginnings to the new millennium Bush Jr. signalled to a new and dangerous height.
Your increasingly Orwellian influence among the rich and powerful will only strengthen the resolve of the poor and disenfranchised and ordinary hard working people, regardless of race, cultural background, gender or visible/invisible difference.
All of this will of course fall on deaf ears and a delusional mind – detached from the reality most of us live in, from political/cultural polarisation, climate change to the effects of austerity.
So, as you set about playing golf on Scottish turf, blissfully wrapped in the finest cotton wool British security can muster, in the words of an American protestor who flew over just to cement solidarity on your unwelcome visit, He’s an ‘embarrassment’ to the United States: Echoing both Freeman and myself among expats.