Open letter to J. D. Vance, vice president of America

This has been on my mind, but now I’ve got it on paper (on screen, actually) I can get on with other things. I needed to unload my thoughts. This is an open letter to J.D Vance, vice president of the USA. It probably won’t reach him. That’s okay; now I feel lighter:

Dear Vice-President Vance,

It’s clear you’re an intelligent person, but intelligence doesn’t necessarily make a person wise, or honest. Your well-documented resistance to the war in Iran is commendable, but your desperate attempt to shield Trump from total responsibility for the Republican shambles that was the mid-term elections seems to me to be both mendacious and duplicitous.

You say the ‘reason’ for the Republicans’ losses in the mid-term elections was voters’ resistance to the Iran war. But I suspect most American voters see the war as merely a symptom of a far greater problem.

Look at it this way: if you have a boil on your body somewhere, that’s not the reason you feel ill; the reason is the underlying pus that can kill you if it’s not removed. And in this analogy the reason (the real reason) for the Republican rout is not the war, it’s the pus — and the pus is Trump.

Trump is not a statesman; he’s a real-estate salesman with a questionable reputation who became a media identity, which probably massaged his narcissistic ego (Jabba the Hutt springs to my mind) and led him to try politics, where he could get the whole country to love him. And it seemed a great many of them did — for a while. Now they know his entire presidency has been a lie fueled by cruelty, greed, corruption, treason, and betrayal of the voters who were foolish enough to believe anything he said. I haven’t mentioned narcissism because he probably can’t help that; but nevertheless, self-aggrandisement has been his only purpose. I suppose voters are always vulnerable to gullibility, and third-rate politicians rely on that, but what’s your excuse, vice president? Or are you just another third-rate politician? What is the excuse of any Republican member of Congress for following Trump’s dive into a swamp that didn’t exist until he dug it? You all took an oath to uphold the constitution, and yet at every turn you’ve all supported Trump in ignoring it, and even in attempting to destroy it.

I feel most sorry for those people who voted for him on both occasions, and especially for his MAGA voters, who couldn’t have been aware they would be complicit in Trump’s near-total destruction of the USA’s reputation worldwide. So much for Making America Great Again. I doubt there is any leader worldwide who admires him, and only a few who pretend to do so to further their own fortunes — as do a considerable number of USA House and Senate Republicans.

I’m merely a UK/Australian onlooker who has watched the collapse of Trump’s world with great relief. Please don’t suggest that either the Republican Party or Trump have an abundance of support in these countries. They don’t, not even from our governments. The British admire underdogs and the Australians admire battlers. But Americans admire winners, and initially they thought they’d elected one. Now they know they’ve been deceived by a government controlled by losers, and led by the biggest loser of them all; that’s Trump, and (or so it seems) you — and, finally, the pus is being eliminated.

Yours sincerely,

colin