Dear Fomenter of Hate,

Yes, you, Trump. Instead of trying to unite the country, you’re demonstrating that you – not the protestors – are the real “thug.”

No respecter of First Amendment rights, you had your forces attack a peaceful crowd protesting outside of the White House. How can we criticize the Chinese for Tiananmen Square, e.g., and yet do the same thing here?

I can’t do better than quote to you from the op-eds in today’s Washington Post:

From Michael Gerson: “A man of Trump’s character, background and talents is the answer to precisely none of the great challenges of our time. … We needed a president who could imagine what the American experiment looks like from the perspective of those who find its promises fraudulent. We got someone [in Trump] incapable of empathy.”

From George F. Will: “This weak person’s [Trump’s] idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.”

Will adds that “In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him .., and to stock Congress with invertebrate [Republicans] whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism …”

If these two prominent Conservative and Republican columnists say it’s time to dump you out of the White House and dump out the current Republicans as well, “sir” – don’t you think you should just resign?

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Mr. Trump,

I speak with whatever authority may be granted a former federal prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section, United States Department of Justice – where for four years my primary focus was investigation and prosecution of allege police brutality:

Your rhetoric has encouraged violence against minorities.

Although you may not have had your own knee on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes, you’ve had your knee and every other part of your body on the necks of people of color for long before you became president.

It’s your family’s Ku Klux Klan history.

It’s your urging execution of innocent black teenagers and refusing to apologize for your despicable conduct: “President Donald Trump refused Tuesday to apologize for the full-page ad he ran in 1989 calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and suggested the men might still be guilty, even though they were exonerated years ago.” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 2020.

It’s your hatred of people of color. Here are your own words: “of course I hate these people, let’s all hate these people.” Id.

It’s your sharing of racist tweets from white supremacist groups and pushing lies about allege black violence against whites.

And why have the Republicans in Congress allowed you to get away with this conduct? The answer is simple: they either agree with your racist views or are willing to tolerate them. By their silence, they are equally complicit in the death of George Floyd and others like him.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Hypocrite-in-the-Oval Office,

To compound your repeated abuse of Twitter – fomenting discord and division in our country, repeated lies – you now want to punish Twitter because it had the nerve to call a lie a lie and added fact-checking material to your false claims about voter fraud.

Supposedly, you want to punish Twitter in the interests of the first amendment’s right to freedom of speech, i.e., you feel that your own lies should be free of contradiction, but punishing any entity for expressing its opinion – that you lied – is exactly what the first amendment forbids. Get it? FORBIDS.

If you’re so adamant about the right of anyone to say anything under the first amendment, then why do you threaten lawsuits against media that publish articles unfavorable to you or post cartoons unfavorable to you?

In your view, the first amendment apparently works only one way: you can lie with impunity and nothing can be done about it. But if something is said that’s unfavorable to you, it should be wiped off media and no one should be allowed to read or see it.

It’s not how it words, buddy.

Yet the craven Republican Party – your stool pigeons – will stand up for you until they’re voted out of office. It can’t happen too soon.

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Mr. Trump,

It’s so sad how you have degraded the institutions of our country meant to keep us honest and law-abiding. It’s sad, but not surprising. Those who scoff at the law naturally disdain lawkeepers.

So now you’ve fired the fourth Inspector General since the corona virus pandemic began. Let no one dare question or even investigate anything you’ve done, lest they be fired and their public service careers destroyed, lest they be reviled by your cult followers.

Sad, but not surprising, for those who like you cheat on their taxes obviously want to dismantle the IRS, for those who like you cheat on their wives obviously need to pay hush money to keep their porn star consorts quiet, for those who like you lie to the American public obviously want to silence their critics.

We’re now above 88,000 U.S. deaths from the corona virus, but you assured us – and so many sad people believed you – when there were 15 cases that the number would quickly drop to zero. That was your “stable genius” talking, the anus from which your words emerge.

You called the corona virus a hoax, and even after 88,000 deaths, the gullible in this country whom you depend upon as your base still call it a hoax. But it’s not a hoax to those who died and to the families of those who died.

But go ahead and have a Grand Old Party, GOP. If that’s what you really want to do, you’re welcome to spread the virus among yourselves.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Mr. Trump,

You’ve proven why the Republican Party can no longer be trusted.

A responsible Republican Party would never have allowed you to remain as president after your abuses of power.

A responsible Republican Party would never have mortgaged our country’s future by the trillion dollar tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. Now, when our economy is in shambles, the money that you and the no-longer-to-be-trusted Republican Party gave away is badly needed elsewhere.

A responsible Republican Party would have seen long ago that your incompetence and narcissism would lead this country to disaster.

A responsible Republican Party would have rebelled immediately against your racism, your cruelty to children, your abrogating international commitments, your divisiveness, your devotion to despots such as Putin and Kim, and would have stopped you in your tracks.

So when we throw you out of office, it’s our moral duty as caring Americans to throw out of office as well the Republican Party. It can no longer be trusted.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Murderer-in-the-White House,

What else would one call a person who disregards his own government’s safety advice and urges people to ignore social distancing? What else would you call a person who would rather have dead people pile up in the street than be honest about the deadliness of this disease?

You’ve essentially never cared about truth or science; your mission now is to continue to divide our country, making science and government the enemy and encouraging people to become vectors of a deadly disease.

It doesn’t bother you in the least that over 100,000 Americans will die when you assured everyone that 15 cases would be the max and that the virus would miraculously disappear. Or even 200,000. Those numbers are meaningless to you, unless it would happen that more Democrats than Republicans will die. Then you will crave the highest death rate possible.

When you pretend and say that even one death is horrible, we know you don’t mean it and have no understanding of what it means to lose a loved one. Your voice is pathetically devoid of empathy.

So murderer is, I feel, an appropriate name for you. Sadly, many and perhaps most of your victims will be those who still unbelievably trust you.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Mr. Trump,

I’m sure you’ve missed my letters for the past few weeks. Mea Culpa, but I know you don’t read my letters anyway, nor do you care about the feelings of average American, nor do you care a fig about their health. If you cared, you wouldn’t make it all you.

You encourage people to defy stay-at-home orders that your own government has recommended. When the new surge in Covid-19 cases kills tens of thousands more, you will be held responsible.

You encourage people to rally behind the firing of Dr. Fauci, a decent American who has the expertise that you lack and who cares about human life in way that you don’t. Heaven forbid he’s no longer working on our behalf.

You encourage people to use an untested drug – hydrochloroquine – which actually increases the rate of death. So, you’re trying to get people to kill themselves.

Your daily press briefings are one lie after another. Your lies are almost uncountable. Infinity isn’t big enough to hold every lie you’ve told since you’ve been in office.

Now, I believe you’re planning on subverting our November elections. Even though you vote by mail yourself, you claim voting by mail is a fraud. You will make every specious argument you can make to prevent people from voting you out of office. You will violate every law on our books to steal the election: foreign intervention on your behalf, closing polling places in Democratic areas, filing frivolous lawsuits, everything.

But we will be prepared and fight you every step of the way.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Mr. Trump,

The best letters to you are written by others, and at times therefore I feel I can only quote what others have said.

To wit, the essay in The New York Review entitled “Vector in Chief” by Fintan O’Toole says it all:

“Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31, when it had become horribly undeniable.”

I would add that you clearly still don’t understand and don’t care that your words and behavior will kill more people.

By talking about “a light at the end of the tunnel,” you are recklessly encouraging people to ignore the stay-at-home orders that are out best fight against death.

By playing up the efficacy of a still unproven anti-malarial drug, you are again inviting people to needlessly risk contaminating themselves and others. Why hide if there’s a drug that can cure you.

And the people you’re most likely to kill are your own supporters, but many of us in opposition will die too.

Yours in disgust,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Mr. Trump,

Against the advice of experts, you are continuing to downplay and lie about the coronavirus crisis. You would clearly rather have people continue to spread the disease and have the death toll mount if only you could encourage the stock market to go up. What’s more important, you ask: a few hundred thousand elderly people who will die someday anyway or the health of your IRA fund?

Apparently, you don’t know that businesses can be brought back to life from the dead, but that people cannot. All those people you’re encouraging to congregate together in churches are putting, not only their own lives at risk, but those of the rest of their community. Obviously, you don’t care.

And when you claim that you’ve already sent 4,000 respirators to New York, but we know you’ve sent only 400, it’s just another example of your unstoppable lying.

You are the most ill-equipped president in the history of this country to handle any crisis.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger

Dear Pathetic Liar-in-Chief:

You’re doing  a helluva job, Trump!

When asked why you shut down the White House National Security Council office that dealt with pandemic preparedness, you lied, claiming you didn’t shut it down.

How dumb do you think we are? Do you think there’s no record? Do you think you can fool your supporters by lying again and again?

Then you piled another lie on top of the first, claiming you knew nothing about the shutting down of that office.

Again, how dumb do you think we are? But if we are to believe that lie, it reflects your utter incompetence. A competent president needs to understand the offices under his control, not the least of which is the White House National Security Council office to address pandemics.

A competent president needs to speak truthfully, not as in your promise that “everyone who wants to be tested can be tested.”

And we need a president who listens to his health officials, not one who ignores them.

We need people in the White House who are competent for the tasks that you’re assigning to them.

Not people like science denier Pence, unbelievably put in charge of our defense against the virus.

Not people like Jared Kushner, who knows nothing about epidemics and who can only add to the chaos.

Not people like Kellyanne Conway, who tries to sandbag the American public by claiming that the virus “is contained.”

Many will die because of the way you’re handling this crisis, your lack of preparedness, your lack of caring. If our country is going to survive, we need a president who can manage a crisis. Not you.

Very truly yours,

Bruce J. Berger