An Open Letter To Senator Feinstein

Dear Senator Feinstein:

I am outraged by your recent comments at a Commonwealth Club event in San Francisco urging patience for Donald Trump.  You note that it has only been eight months since he took office, and that we should wait and see “if he can forget himself and his feeling about himself enough to be able to really have the kind of empathy and the kind of direction that this country needs.”  You believe “the question is whether he can learn and change” and, if he can, “he can be a good president.”

For one of the leading Democrats in the United States Senate, a ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, to still give Trump the benefit of the doubt is beyond comprehension.  Only eight months you say?  In those eight months, Donald Trump has shown his utter mental and moral unfitness for office that is hardly due to a lack of learning or experience.  Where to begin?  

 

Let’s start with his refusal to disentangle himself from his myriad businesses or disclose the extent of his finances while he and his family are profiting off of the office of the presidency.  And then there’s his ill-conceived, discriminatory Muslim ban.  And the firing of the FBI director and other actions taken to thwart the investigation into his administration’s alleged collusion with Russia.  And his comments in the wake of Charlottesville that gave support to white nationalists and neo-Nazis, followed by the pardon of the unpardonable Joe Arpaio.  He has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords.  Has has called for a transgender military ban.  He is childishly taunting North Korea, bringing us too dangerously close to a nuclear confrontation.  He continues to attack U.S. institutions, from judges to intelligence agencies to the media, going as far as calling the press “the enemy of the people.”  And he has lied to the American people every day – the Wall Street Journal recently noted he has already lied more than 1000 times since being in office.

 

But you think this 70-year old ignorant narcissistic might magically transform himself and become a good president?   That we just need to give him more time?  That anything about this is normal?

 

As an esteemed leader of the opposition party, you should be leading the resistance, not the acquiescence.  You should be working to ensure that Democrats win back Congress in the mid-terms, not pandering to some mythical center.  Rather than urge patience, rather than normalize this president, you and your Democratic colleagues should be throwing sand in the gears of the Senate, using every procedural and technical move to prevent this frighteningly unfit demogogue and his enablers in the Republican Party from doing further damage to our country.  If you don’t have the stomach to fight, then perhaps it is time to move aside.