Dear Donald Trump,

When you first were elected, I remember coming home from my job at the news station and sitting in my room in silence as I tried to grapple with the fact that you’d won. I felt like everyone around me had not taken the election seriously, like there was no way that a reality television personality known for his solid gold toilet could win the absolute most important seat in the free world. But, then you did. A string of group texts and long phone calls started as I listened to my friends, mostly BIPOC folks who were also a part of the LGBTQ community spoke about their fears. I couldn’t do anything but try to imagine how the next four years would go.

To be honest, I was afraid too.

Up until this past year, I was coming to terms with your presidency as one of divisiveness. Just a fact. On the campaign trail, you mocked a disabled reporter. You made comments about a woman’s menstrual cycle. You said domestic terrorists were “very fine people.”

Instead of Making America Great Again, you Made America Comfortable with Bigotry Again.

And in that statement, I’m not even going to try to say that you made America bigoted. That would be giving you too much credit. No, the racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and all of it was there waiting in the shadows for a figurehead to tell everyone it was perfectly fine. You gave a microphone to those who believed not only in criticizing others but the people who believed that anyone who wasn’t a straight, white, wealthy man didn’t deserve respect. You ran this country like a country club, instead of making crass jokes about “grabbing women by the pussy” on the golf course (even though you spent a fair amount of time there too) you said it with the entire country watching. And then you got half the country to think “well hell, if our president is bold enough and can get away with these things then why can’t everyone else?”

As if listening to you continuously make comments about every single minority group wasn’t enough, we hadn’t even hit the tip of the iceberg. 2020 was around the corner.

Now we had to listen to you campaign, insult every single Democrat in the race calling them things like “Sleepy Joe,” “Crazy Bernie,” and “Pochahontas” but also handle some of the most important events, times when we needed a president with, once again, division.

When COVID-19 became a public health crisis, you lied to the American people saying it was just like the flu. Instead of trying to figure out a way to stop the virus, you questioned the usage of masks. You refused to sign a lockdown order that would’ve prevented people from having the opportunity to spread the virus. You lied to all of us about what you knew, information that would have saved thousands of lives. And of course, instead of taking responsibility for any of these things, you blamed the Chinese and Asian-American communities for spreading the virus.

I was used to getting comments on the street from random people about my appearance but it was when one of my co-workers in my office job made a “Chinese Virus” joke that I realized. Your voice was now the loudest one in the country, emboldening people everywhere to give up even the quietest sense of common decency.

I was no longer afraid. I was furious.

And of course, that wasn’t all. While Black Lives Matter protests were happening in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, you cleared the way for a photo op with tear gas and rubber bullets. You denounced Antifa as a criminal group - which if you look at the root of the word it’s literally Anti Fascism - which I will never understand how rejecting fascists became something controversial. Yet you cheered on the Proud Boys as they continued to terrorize, harm, and threaten.

You used whatever you could, broke the laws whenever you wanted, and said it was all in the name of a great America.

I used to think sitting here that there would never be retribution for any of your actions. The first time that you were impeached it was put to a stop by your friends in the Senate. I was motivated by my sheer rage about what this country had turned into to volunteer for Joe Biden, even though he wasn’t my first pick for the Democratic nominee. I met my own feelings with organizing, hoping that when you were voted out of office there would finally be a sense of what this country was and still could be.

Then, you were voted out of office.

But of course, you refuse to go quietly. Instead you turned the democratic process into a huge conspiracy theory for your QAnon fans to latch onto. And that conspiracy theory became deadly as soon as you orchestrated the insurrection.

There’s been plenty of news coverage on what happened on January 6th, 2021 so I won’t go into that here, I’m sure that you’ve been glued to your television for days now, hearing what everyone has to say about you. For a narcissist this is your biggest dream. But thankfully, it’s all about to come down around your head.

You certainly will not be forgotten but rather will be a stain in our history.

I know that through all of the atrocities of these last four years you will never truly think you’re in the wrong about any of it. But while I’ve had to put up with constant rhetoric, I’ve tried to tune some of it out and look at the person who I was before you were president versus who I am. You changed the fear I felt on November 3rd, 2016 into action. You made me realize the amount of hate and bigotry that had infected my everyday life.

It’s because of the aftermath of your actions that I have the courage to speak up.

Goodbye, Donald Trump.