Dear Donald,
It’s been a while. I [Mark Green] last saw you & Melania when you walked into my final fund-raiser for Mayor on November 4, 2001. You joined the Clintons, Cuomos, Jon Stewart and 1100 other guests in our effort to defeat Republican nominee Bloomberg. Thanks again for your $4500 contribution.
In this very different political situation, we want you to have a copy of our new book — Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption and General Bullsh*t — on the day of its publication. Our conclusion: while you of course were legally selected, you nonetheless are a “fake president” who is unfit to fulfill the duties of the office due to your lack of stability, integrity, honesty and knowledge. Your disabling ego so degrades your judgment that you, in effect, are a PINO, a president-in-name-only.
We’ve observed how you routinely avoid accountability by engaging in angry monologues in your tweets, rallies, FOX interviews and White House lawn walk-bys. In such venues, as noted in Fake President, you invariably stick to a couple of repeated talking-points of-the-day, buttressed by falsehoods and objections (“excuse me! excuse me!”) should any journalist ask something that annoys you. This is not JFK interacting with the press at his many press conferences.
Another device we observed is your “upside-downism” of attacking rivals for criticism of you in order to preempt such criticism and confuse Americans unaccustomed to serial disinformation — e. g., Elijah Cummings was a “bully”, Nancy Pelosi “treasonous”, and House Democrats “unpatriotic” for considering your own impeachable (unpatriotic) offenses. The First Amendment of course allows you say all that but there’s little more to support such sentiments, excepts perhaps a guilty conscience.
Instead, we believe that you should be held accountable for your daily lava of lies that can destroy public trust and subvert democracy. In our view, “presidents are not kings”, to quote federal district court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in her decision last week involving Don McGahn’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. Since we are not White House correspondents waiting outside your doorstep and hoping to be called on — and given the timing of Impeachment proceedings beginning tomorrow in the House Judiciary Committee — we’d like to send you 10 brief citizen questions involving material in Fake President. The American People need to see if you’ll answer for any of your apparent 14,000+ lies/falsehoods (Washington Post) and the 2600 conflicts of interest uncovered by CREW. Until you admit your compulsive dissembling, you will continue to be a fake — someone hiding the truth — and be rightly called The Lyin’ King.
Out of hundreds of examples in Fake President, we’d like to give you the opportunity to respond to our “Top Ten List of Falsehoods.”
When asked last year if you were aware of or paid hush money to Stormy Daniels, why did you deny it since witnesses under oath later said that you wrote at least six checks totaling over $200,000 while in the Oval Office to cover some of Michael Cohen’s payments?
When you said in 2016 that you would release your tax returns and in 2017 that you’d absolutely testify in person before Mueller, were you simply lying at the time or did you do a 180o later to save yourself from embarrassment?
You believe that assertions are the same as accomplishments. Take health insurance — where is the “terrific” health plan that drives down premiums that you’ve been forecasting for three years and why do you claim to favor coverage for pre-existing conditions when your Department of Justice has sided with plaintiffs who are seeking to end such protections? Which is it since it can’t be both?
You once made fun of congressional Republicans for caving in to NRA money. But how is that any different than the way you refuse to challenge major oil & gas firms as they and you ignore the science of climate violence? For example, can you rationally explain your view that coal is “beautiful [and] clean” but windmills are not?
When you lie, bully citizens, self-enrich, and use veiled racial taunts (“go back to…” the country of your origin), are you at all worried what kind of example you are setting for young people everywhere?
Since it’s virtually impossible that four dozen separate women are lying about you engaging in non-consensual sexual abuse with each of them, can you assure the public that you will not continue such misconduct and make amends to your accusers?
Recall when Richard Nixon said that he was “not a crook” and then it was shown that he was by approving hush money payments to the Watergate burglars. When documentary evidence and all witnesses under oath show that you froze military aid to Ukraine until they announced a probe of the Bidens, how can you expect most voters to continue to believe anything you say?
Does it hurt American interests around the world when the people in some 190 nations have far less regard for you in polls than President Obama registered, while only two — Russia and Israel — now conclude that you are more popular?
Given your massive pulpit, it is disgraceful when you engage in specific character destruction — for example, when asked who might be financing the Caravan that you were denouncing in the Fall of 2018, you typically answered, “maybe it was Soros. I’ve heard that.” Do you understand the difference between evidence and deliberate innuendo?
AG Barr told Congress under oath that he thought the FBI “spied” on you while investigating Carter Page’s FISA warrant. If the independent DoJ Inspector General’s report on December 12 concludes that was false, as press reports indicate, will you rebuke Barr or at least apologize for your role in spreading a falsehood about the leading federal law enforcement agency within Barr’s agency?
Thank you for your attention. We hope that you read Fake President (enroute to your office in a digital file and in hardback) and use it as an opportunity for self-reflection. That would surprise your critics — and help a divided country if you can sincerely promise to stop telling an average of 22 falsehoods/lies daily, stop routinely violating laws, stop incitements to riot, start treating women respectfully and start being racially inclusive in a multi-ethnic country looking for leaders who bring us together.
Best regards,
Mark Green
Ralph Nader
Re-posted from https://nader.org/2019/12/03/open-letter-to-donald-trump-from-mark-green...
