I received the letter from the US Treasury about a week ago, announcing my “Economic Impact Payment” with the letterhead of the White House signed with the Trumpian scrawl. After some thought, I mailed the letter back to the White House, along with my own letter:
Dear Mr. Trump:
I am returning your letter about the recent stimulus payment. I don’t want this letter with your signature in our home. It is as unwelcome as the COVID-19 virus.
We did receive the stimulus deposit. We sent much of it to a family member in New York, who is now unable to work, and living in a hot sport under siege from the pandemic. This is the pandemic that you neglected, and continue to neglect, by ignoring public health and national security exports, and by minimizing its threat.
We are using some of that stimulus payment in hopes of making 2021 a better year than 2020.
We are contributing some of it to Joe Biden, so that next year you’ll be an ex-president, and to Democratic Sentorial candidates, so that Mitch McConnel will be Senate minority leader, or better yet, an ex-senator. We’re also sending contributions to the ACLU to help them fight your authoritarian and anti-immigrant policies, and to environmental groups to mitigate some of the effects of climate change that you continue to deny, and defend environmental safeguards that you continue to weaken.
Here’s your letter. I don’t need a memento of the least qualified, least competent and most corrupt president in U.S. history.
I dropped it into the mailbox with a recent John F. Kennedy commemorative stamp on the envelope—just a reminder of what a real President looks like.
I’d like to think that some years from now, a scholar sifting through the papers of the infamous Trump Administration will use this letter as another small data point of citizen correspondence to the White House.
I’ll also recast this as a letter to the editor of our daily newspaper, will post it on my Facebook page, and now offer this up you reading this on Daily Kos.