Originally posted on July 13, 2020

A friend received a letter from the Trump campaign asking for (what else?) a donation. It runs 4 pages and here’s a pdf of it in its entirety. Almost needless to say, it is full of insults, alarms and lies. Below I’ll pick out a few of the passages from just the first page (doing all 4 pages would be torture) that reveal just what sort of person Trump is.

• “My Fellow Patriot”. Most politicians start their solicitations with something like “Dear Friend”, but not Trump. Right away he implies that people who don’t support him are by definition not patriots.
• “stop the Liberal Democrats from using the Chinese virus pandemic to turn our nation into a failed Big Government Socialist country like Venezuela”. First, he pushes the racial button with the Chinese virus meme. Then he accuses the Democrats of wanting to force Socialism on the U.S. I’m not aware of any leading Democrats who want to force Socialism on us. Not even Bernie wanted that, unless you re-define “Socialism” to include lots of stuff that most Americans want – like a better health care system. Venezuela is certainly a basket case, but it seems that corruption and authoritarianism are the main culprits, not socialism.
• “Sleepy Joe Biden”. Trump can’t resist insulting, can he?
• Pelosi is “ultra partisan”? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! This portrayal is undercut by Trump’s subsequent mention of the bi-partisan CARES act.
• James Clyburn’s “restructure” quote. It appears to be accurate, but out of context. He was talking about it now being the House’s turn to weigh in on the CARES act that the Senate had just passed. And the House did so, increasing the size of the package from $1T to $2T.
• “Radical Liberals”? I guess that includes anyone to the left of his fairly extreme right, which includes a majority of us.
• Then Trump lists 4 Democratic proposals that he regards as evil, as follows:

• Hiking the tax rate. Yep, especially on higher income people. I’m guessing this is pretty popular with those of us who want to fund a functioning government without going into massive debt like Trump has done. No wonder he went bankrupt, what, six times?
• New Green Deal. I think most of us know we have to do something about global warming, that it is not a hoax. I do have a lot of problems with exactly what we should be doing. For my thoughts on wind power look at windfarmrealities.org.
• Medicare for all. Some Democrats are for this, others not so much. Regardless, most all of us want a better, more efficient health system.
• Border wall. He claims the Democrats “forced my hand to declare a national emergency” to build his wall. This is nonsense. Almost nobody thought his wall was a good idea – but Trump had promised it.

The next 3 pages are filled with similar themes. I imagine it might be attractive to someone who lives in the Fox bubble. For the rest of us, it shows what sort of person we’re dealing with, and what sort of government he has been leading, and would continue to lead.