An Open Letter to Donald Trump
I am not you. You are not me.
I believe in human rights—and in the radical notion that every human being has value. Whether they’re privileged, wealthy white men like yourself, or the rest of us—regular people trying to make it in the world with whatever mix of gifts, grit, or luck we were handed.
We, your constituency, matter. Every single one of us. Documented or undocumented, gay or straight, rich or poor, PhD or high school dropout, Democrat or Republican—we matter. And we will not be discarded.
For starters: we see you.
We see the ruthless slashing of the federal workforce. The gutting of public service infrastructure like it's a bloated carcass in your way. We see you starving universities and civil society organizations—those pesky pillars of democracy—of funding, or holding their futures hostage like a third-rate mob boss.
We see the “drill, baby, drill” smirk as you drain the lifeblood from the environment. The way you bully public servants, LGBTQ+ citizens, judges, Black and brown people, journalists—mocking them for sport, or worse, ruining their lives. We see you naming entire bodies of water, like a toddler with a Sharpie and no sense of scale.
We see all of it—for what it is. A grotesque attempt to consolidate power and control the narrative in ways this country has never seen—and never signed up for.
And we think: how narcissistic. How vile. How contrary to every decency we were ever taught—about dignity, integrity, and treating people like they matter.
Do you know—really know—that tens of thousands of federal public servants show up every day with the same sense of duty and courage as any soldier? That researchers at the NIH, park rangers, humanitarian workers—they all serve this country with quiet valor?
Thanks to you, many now face a crisis they didn’t create. Laid off in an economy teetering on recession, they’re left scrambling to pay rent, cover healthcare, and put food on the table.
This is the carnage. Not the one you promised to end—the one you gleefully unleashed.
A USAID staffer you sent packing—someone who spent a career saving lives on the front lines of global crises—told me they felt like trash. Like a Vietnam vet coming home. Spat on. Shamed. Forgotten.
You might be wondering—who am I to write this? Just a nameless, middle-class civilian. One of the millions living under your gilded thumb. Who am I to address you—the self-anointed most powerful man on Earth?
I’m the great-granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant who fled Lithuania before World War II. One of the lucky ones. The rest of our family? Murdered in the Holocaust.
I’m the granddaughter of a man who grew up on food stamps in Depression-era Brooklyn, scraping by in a city that only valued the wealthy and well-fed. And on my mother’s side? My great-great-great-grandparents packed their belongings into wooden wagons and crossed the prairie to Nebraska, armed with grit, stubborn hope, and maybe a cow or two.
I’m a former journalist—sickened as you wage war on the press, eroding public trust with every lie, every sneer, every “fake news” jab, until truth itself is bleeding out on the floor.
And I’m an adjunct professor who struggles to look her students in the eye and promise them there’s still a future worth fighting for.
You look at people like me and see weakness. You slap labels on us—radical left lunatics, traitors, threats. You dream of jailing us, silencing us, bending us to your will.
But here’s the thing: we’re not going anywhere.
Because people like me—and everyone like me—we come from fighters. From survivors. From generations who stood up to tyranny, to hunger, to hopelessness, and kept going. My mothers, because I've been lucky enough to have two, taught me how to use my voice to help others.
You may think you’ve broken something in us. But all you’ve done is awaken what was always there: the will to resist, to speak, to rise. And rise we will.
I write to you today to affirm my place in the resistance. In the streets. In the courts. And in the hearts and minds of the people.
This is a call to action. A cry for solidarity from someone who wants to be part of the movement for democracy—not the vanity project you’re dressing up as one.
And I get it—it’s hard to show up. It’s easier to be lulled into a stupor by Netflix, or football, or Pilates. To believe the myth that democracy runs on autopilot. Many of us grew up in the richest, freest country on Earth—and for too long, we mistook that freedom for permanence. We took that freedom for granted. I'll own that I've been too tired. Too busy. Too afraid to speak out.
Because now we see what’s at stake.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
And we are alive with the spirit of our ancestors, whispering across generations: Never forget.
Source: An Open Letter to Donald Trump
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