Goodbye, Mr. President

Goodbye, Mr. President.

I say this with all the civic training and discipline of a person – the daughter and niece and friend of veterans who served this country faithfully – who respects the office you hold for one more day enough to call you Mr. President.

I say this with all the gratitude of a person who does not and will never have to know you well enough to understand why your niece Mary will not accord you any courtesy title at all.

Goodbye, Mr. President.

I say this with all the disgust of an African American woman who has lived 40 years in a nation that continually discounts the work of all the Black people -- from Crispus Attucks to the United States Colored Troops to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Eugene Goodman at the Capitol -- that have risked and often given their lives to make this nation anything like the beacon of freedom it claims to be. You have surely have taught us the cost of enabling those who wish to discount those working FORWARD toward freedom.

I say this with all the disgust of an African American woman who has watched you enable the spiritual spawn of those Confederate traitors willing to destroy this nation in order to keep my ancestors – and thus me and mine – in slavery forever.

I say this with all the fury of a loyal citizen – the daughter and niece and friend to loyal veterans – who read the transcript of you ordering your supporters among the Neo-Confederate spawn to the Capitol, carrying their gallows and traitors' flags.

I do not count you as stupid enough not to know that they would attempt to destroy the seat of government that they through you can no longer control, and I know you watched and made no attempt to stop all that came afterward.

I will never, ever forgive you for January 6th, 2021, Mr. President. Nor should any other loyal citizen.

Goodbye and good riddance, Mr. President.

I say this with all the stomach-turning sense of disappointment of a journalist who knows just how arrogant and thoughtless you have to be to have been a Republican president bragging on tape to Bob Woodward about anything. But since you are that arrogant, you went on and disclosed in February and March 2020 about how you knew a particular virus was five times deadlier than the flu and would kill all ages, but you were just going to play it down instead of even pretending to mount a robust federal response … as if you could lie Covid-19 away and evade all responsibility for it.

And speaking of stomach-turning disappointment: I listened to you on tape on January 3, 2021 – you, the whole entire president of the United States, the so-called leader of the free world, begging Georgia's secretary of state to let you hold 11,780 votes like some broke, washed-up ne'er-do-well begs and whines and tries to manipulate a better-off associate into loaning him money.

Then again, simple addition on the amount of debt you owe versus your assets explains your behavior.

After January 20th, 2021, you will be revealed as that broke, washed-up ne'er-do-well, with the wreck of the United States' economy and reputation in the world counting as your seventh bankruptcy. This seventh bankruptcy includes the sickening and the unemployment of millions, and the death of nearly 4oo,000 people, a number sure to keep rising long after you at last leave office.

We cannot say you have been a total failure, however. Your Neo-Confederate supporters seem to think the Civil War should be re-fought and resettled. You at least have managed to give them a casualty count a little over half as large as that of the Civil War through your willful bungling of Covid-19, and you allowed them to get that traitors' flag into the Capitol at last. And, you have succeeded in being the first and only president in American history to be impeached twice – you will not be the first president to be removed from office because you will leave too soon, but you can still be the first to be convicted.

I do not say the above without great sorrow. I am not without compassion for you, you for whom I have prayed nearly every day since you came into office. On the six occasions in which you were a better president than I expected you to be in a crisis, I know that my prayers were heard, and that God had mercy upon you and blessed you with special wisdom. So: I knew that you could be and prayed that you would be a better president than you have been.

I also watched you blow through every opportunity to take accountability for your failures and learn from them. I watched you blow through every opportunity to firmly tell your Neo-Confederate backers to stop their escalating attack on the diversifying fabric of our nation – in fact, you continually brought them into your administration, listened to them, let them enact policy, and made the executive branch an echo chamber of ideas defeated 150 years ago.

Now you are about to enter your 75th year of life, and face the consequences of ruination just as the Confederacy saw the destruction of their entire wicked, ravening society. Because you are the age of many of my elders, I cannot consider what must be your fear and dread without some compassion. You have made a hard bed for yourself to lie on at your age, at which even a five-year term in prison could be a life sentence.

Yet if any man in history has earned that hard bed, you have.

As the hours and the minutes and the seconds tick down to the end of your presidential immunity, I want you to know I remember why Derrick Chauvin knew he could sit his knee on the neck of George Floyd and have George Floyd experience nine minutes of terror as his entire life ticked away.

It was because you appointed Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III – a man named three times down for the highest and worst of Confederate traitors, and fully embracing his heritage – as attorney general. You sat back and let that man remove Justice Department oversight for police departments in cases of alleged police brutality and civil rights abuses.

That same Justice Department, under your administration, ignored all the things that your fellow Republican president Ulysses S. Grant created the Justice Department to do: to control and punish men who would not accept that the country at last recognized the rights and freedoms of citizenship for men they once held as slaves, and to assure justice for all.

(I do apologize to any members of President Grant's family who may read this for even mentioning President Grant in the same context as President Trump, except that it must be said that the latter president has helped to revive and give new strength to all that the former fought to defeat.)

The problem that you now must face, Mr. President, is that it is now your turn to count the moments in terror. You leave office with its protections stripped and your wealth gone. You leave office having made enemies of powerful Republicans you once dominated, and who remember as well as the Democrats remember that your directing the mob to the Capitol could have cost them their lives. You leave office with hundreds of lawsuits waiting on you, and an impeachment and new civil liabilities coming from the events at the Capitol.

You leave office with even some of your supporters abandoning you for giving up the fight – you do not understand that you will never be worshiped as an idol like Lee, or Beauregard, or Davis. They at least were competent enough to give their evil cause 150 years of life. You fail and depart in a mere four years, and you may live to see the Neo-Confederacy find a new champion and forget you.

No man has ever risen so high in the modern world as you, Mr. President, with yet to fall so far. You are being pushed to the brink of that near-bottomless pit with the relentless movement of every second hand on every clock in Washington D.C., ticking inexorably toward 12:00 noon EST, January 20, 2021. Into the pit you and your Neo-Confederate backers dug for everyone not such as yourselves – into that very pit of losing rights, privileges, and freedoms, you must now fall.

Goodbye, and may you depart expeditiously to that pit, Mr. President.

I would be remiss if I did not mention, Mr. President, that the United States and the world do owe you a debt of gratitude. No other man could have revealed before the world how deep the persistence of your type of man goes in fighting against the freedom and democracy enshrined in the ideals of the American republic, whenever and wherever that freedom may extend to others unlike you and your type of man.

Because of you, Mr. President, the world has seen how you and your type of man want to throw the whole American experiment away now that African Americans have shown we will use all five fifths -- not three-fifths -- of our will and vote and organizing power to put whom we will into office – or out of office in your case, in Georgia, in Michigan, and in Pennsylvania.

Because of you, Mr. President, those in the nation and the world who understand demographics now see that you and your type of man, faced with a future in which a true representative democracy will only accord you and your type of man 25 percent of national power, would prefer to establish inept white male authoritarianism instead. We know that it would be inept, Mr. President, because of how you handled Covid-19 and the great security breach that exposed our secrets to the world in 2020, and we know it would be authoritarian because of the wreck your supporters tried and failed to make at the Capitol of the republic, and of its republican and democratic processes.

Because of you, Mr. President, four living generations of citizens have been alerted and galvanized to know we must resist and stand against your type of man if we are to see this nation continue toward its ideals, and not regress to the hell-hole of slavery, genocide, and oppression that your type of man thrives in – the type of man who, as Milton said about your master, would find it “better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”

Yet the only person whose paradise is going to be lost is you, Mr. President, at 12:00 noon EST on January 20, 2021. The four generations of citizens who galvanized and voted against you and your type of man have won, and have swept you and your type of man out of control of federal power, at least for a little while. Our fight will surely continue, but not with you.

I have no illusions about the man who will be president after you leave. I know his history as I know yours, and I know the history of his party. I may choose to send him an equally thorough welcoming letter. He needs it. I know that.

Yet know this, Mr. President: the author of your defeat is not Joe Biden, although he is the heir of it. He is not so much better than you, but he only needed to be ENOUGH better than you to replace you. You made that all too easy.

As you desire all things to be, so it is: it is indeed all about YOU, Mr. President. The author of your defeat is YOU, Mr. President. The person who has made a lying, sniveling, whining TRAITOR TO THE NATION out of you is YOU, Mr. President. You will leave office in disgrace because of YOU, and YOU ALONE.

Goodbye, Mr. President. The only thing I have in common with Mitch McConnell is that I do not intend to speak with you ever again.