DJT

Dear Donald,

Can I call you DJT? I feel I know you after all these years. I'm old enough to remember your go-go days in real estate, always wild even when they turned into go-go-broke days. You were loud, and brash, and not very good at what you did, but you were a memorable part of the eighties.

I admit I didn't watch your television show. Don't feel bad-- I didn't watch any reality television. Did people really think that was reality? Did they think there were no writers involved? Frankly, Donald, I would not have watched your show. Not my kind of thing. Maybe I was frightened by Archie Bunker as a small child. Maybe I was one of those people watching PBS. Maybe you were on past my bedtime.

Now I have a confession to make. For the last four years I have been taking notes on your latest venture as the most powerful person on Earth. I didn't mean to, but a weird thing happened. Actually, a lot of weird things happened. But one weird thing happened in particular. On Inauguration Day, January 20th, 2017, at noon, as you were being sworn in, Jonathan Jarvis, the head of the National Park Service, was suddenly out of a job. You'd fired him. Your right, I assume, but he was in charge of security on the Mall. This confused me. Why would you want to change security chiefs for your own Inauguration in the middle of the event?

I knew my mother wasn't interested in political things and wouldn't have heard about it, so I wrote it down to mention it to her later. Just a little note on the Notes program on my Mac. Then came your rather sparse Inauguration Day parade and news that the White House website now had a link to the new First Lady's modeling career and jewelry collection on QVC. The White House took down its climate change web page, and the healthcare, civil rights and LGBTQ sections, I assume to make room for the jewelry. Then the page for support of military families disappeared.

I wrote it all down.

The White House shuttered the Office of National AIDS Policy as you were coming in the door. You started signing Executive orders right away. Three on the first day: #1 freezing all non-emergency regulations, #2 calling for the end of the ACA as your Administration's top priority, and #3 raising interest rates on FHA mortgages. Am I the only person in the world who remembers that third one?

I wrote it down, for my mother to read some day.

I was so certain, 100% sure, that you would be getting rid of the ACA on day one. GOP leadership had had years to write a replacement, or at least to hamstring the current legislation more than they had. I admit I had a vested interest here. I pay for my insurance myself, and I don't need a subsidy, but I have a pre-existing condition and was certain my health insurance was about to go away. Hadn't House Speaker Paul Ryan made the ACA his special target? But there was no magic ACA-killing legislation waiting for you on the Resolute Desk, DJT. You must have been frustrated.

It wasn't a party atmosphere in the White House, either. Which is too bad. You'd won, it was your big day, but it didn't feel like a celebration. Was it whatever you said to your wife during the ceremony that made her so unhappy? What was that, by the way? Was it the crowd at the Inauguration? The Department of the Interior was banned from posting Inauguration attendance figures, and that became a mess in your first week. What does it matter, by the way? You won the election. Why keep asking newspapers to print your Electoral College map?

You were surrounded by allies, and your opponents certainly knew their world had changed. Newt Gingrich urged your Administration to fire federal employees who had voted for your opponent. The White House declared it the National Day of Patriotic Devotion.

I can't remember how many Inaugural Balls you had. One question-- why was your Inaugural cake a styrofoam copy of Barrack Obama's 2009 cake? Why borrow that from the Smithsonian? I know you got sued by famed cake creator Duff Goldman for copyright violation. How did that work out?

See, I wrote it all down. And it turns out I kept going after that first day. Just as you kept going. Remember on your second day, before your visit to the CIA, when you tweeted that you were "honered" to serve? Yep, I wrote it down. I used "DJT" for you as a time and space saver. It didn't seem like much at first. By the end of January, in normal formatting, I was only on page six.

My mother finally started reading my record. So did an aunt and a neighbor. I'm tweeting the start of your Administration from four years ago as the new Administration begins. It's the first week of March as I write this. You had already gone golfing eight times.

The longest single day in my record is January 6th, 2021. It is 4,776 words long. Twenty pages. I just finished formatting February of 2021. It ends on page 2,809.

So I hope you don't mind me calling you DJT.

What did you say to Melania?