Letter to Trump: 1/25

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Published date: 
Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - 11:45pm

Resident Trump:

Today is your third working day in office, and you are taking incredible and unprecedented steps to consolidate power, stifle dissent and free discourse, and exclude those you consider “the other”. You have taken steps to stop immigration – putting a freeze on immigration from a whole list of Muslim-majority countries, signing an executive order to build a wall along the border with Mexico, placing a gag order on the EPA. Are you kidding me? You know that this is not the purpose of executive orders, right? I mean, you must know that there is no constitutional provision that permits executive orders. They are supposed to be used ONLY for a very specific purpose – for the President to provide instructions to the federal agencies on how to carry out the laws created by Congress. Article II, Section 3, Clause 5 of the Constitution instructs the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" or face impeachment.

But you seem to have no clue about not only what the constitution requires of you, but also the content of the very executive orders you are signing – do you even know what the Dakota Access Pipeline is?? Do you have any idea how many enemies you are now creating, how many treaties with Native nations you are violating, how much anger you are stirring up in the Dakotas and beyond when you say you will re-open the plan to build this pipeline? I doubt it, since you obviously get your news from Bill O’Reilly and Fox, and given the blank look on your face both when you signed the executive order, and when a journalist asked you “What do you say to the Standing Rock protesters opposing this pipeline?”, and you just stood there with a blank look on your face and an aide had to step in and call an end to the press conference.

Who the hell do you think you are, and what gives you the right to run this country into the ground for your own profits and ego??

You seriously think it’s ok to put gag orders on federal agencies like the EPA and the Parks Service, cut off their social media and start blacking out their websites? You think this is how a democracy is run? No, Mr. Trump, it is not. This is how authoritarian dictatorships are run.