Open letter to the US President
Words © Paul Ransom
UPDATE: This letter was originally sent in late July 2024, shortly after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Now that the intended recipient has been re-elected, my feeling is that the themes it addresses may be even more pertinent…and not just for the returning POTUS.
I am not a US citizen. As such, I will neither be voting for or against you this November. What’s more, I’m a foreigner you can safely afford to ignore. Indeed, I fully expect you never to read this missive, although I anticipate some of your fans may berate me on your behalf. But I’m cheering on my inner American and daring to dream of the highly improbable; that somehow you will receive this.
However, I am not begging you to let me through your border wall or take me on as an apprentice. Rather, I am reaching out to the man behind the tower. The one who knows exactly what he’s doing.
Let’s set aside the slurs and sloganeering for a while, and talk like adults. I see what you’re doing, Donald. I may be a suburban nobody from the shores of a ‘little man’ foreign backwater, (as opposed to a Nobel winning economist or retired wrestler), but from the distance of my irrelevance it is clear you are playing with fire. I am sure you know this. A lot of people have you down as stupid, maybe even nuts, but what I see is a calculating, realpolitik risk taker.
You are not the first, nor will you be the last clever, well-connected person to brilliantly (ruthlessly) exploit asymmetries of knowledge, or to work a crowd by pulling on a raft of unconscious triggers. You are a puppet master par excellence. Part of me applauds your audacity and theatricality. But what price victory?
You will know better than I the risks associated with vaulting ambition – namely, the fall is further, harder. You will also understand first-hand how fleeting and fragile business success can be, how fickle and uncertain markets and economies are. Moreover, you know full well how complex these things tend to be. How interconnected. Your vast and diverse experience will tell you that shaking your fist and calling people names rarely leads to lasting good.
It is, as you are doubtless aware, easier to fan a fire than to stop one.
Perhaps this is the real problem with the pursuit of cold, hyper-rational strategies like yours – that, (as with AI), optimising ‘success’ may come at a cost none of us are willing to pay. I believe you are smart and self-regarding enough to give yourself an off-ramp. Let’s hope there’s room in the escape pod for the rest of us.
Apologies for plagiarising your playbook here, Donald. I do not mean to exaggerate a sense of crisis, and am not suggesting that a Trump win in November will mark the end of civilisation or the terminal decline of America.
- That said, you are right when you suggest that the rest of the world sometimes laughs at the US these days. True, it is still a beacon of hope to countless thousands trying to make it across your borders, even as you daily deride them. However, for many, America is less Lady Liberty and more spoilt rich kid with nuclear arsenal. Like a 12yo bully we need to placate. A corrupt, doughnut-gobbling cartoon cop with an itchy trigger finger. As for great…maybe not anymore. But then, you already know this.
What concerns me is the weaponisation of common disquiet. Most of us ordinary folk – i.e. people whose fathers didn’t have a spare million, or who lack the spark, drive or good fortune to propel us to the kind of success you have enjoyed – have a nagging sense that things are not quite right, not truly fair. The rich get richer, etcetera. Justice is not meted out equitably. Hard work so often fails to pay off in the advertised way. In fact, the vast bulk of us move through our lives without the purported and visible rewards of merit and acclaim, nor with any realistic hope of such. Generally, we are okay with this. We all have our issues with ‘the way things are’ but we are rarely stirred to red-faced fury. We do not storm Capitols. We do not blow up aircraft. We will not try to kill you.
While some lecture us for being complacent, sleeping sheep, and others call us lazy, disengaged, and even stupid, perhaps we just prefer to live in a world where our differences are neither set in stone nor caked in blood. As long as my complexion, genitals, sexuality, bank balance, zip code or political leanings are not used against me in any serious way, I am happy to let you disagree with me. Unfriend me. Call me names if you like. Just don’t mobilise the base to hate me, to label me ‘other’, or to blame me for all they regard as wrong in their world.
- Granted, some people I know paint you as an enemy, as an American Hitler. Indeed, some of my more classically conservative companions find you intolerable, if not a traitor to their side of politics. I am trying to see past all that here, because this letter is not a call to arms.
I realise the practise of divide & conquer did not start with you. Neither are you the only politician to paint things in simple, emotive, either/or terms. Your appeal to patriotism, your opportunistic megaphoning of declinist sentiment, and your holy war rhetoric are textbook. As you will recall from years of marketing multiple developments, and from your time in the entertainment media, we are all skewed by a number of unconscious biases, many of which can be exploited for gain. You know as well as I do that you are bending truths, cherry picking facts, exaggerating crises and selling sound bite solutions to those who have neither the capacity nor the inclination to resist the lure of easy answers, nor indeed the curiously comforting confection of the big strong daddy figure. Father, Fuhrer, drainer of swamps. Some of us want so much to be saved that we will fall for even the most fictitious of gods.
Again, you know this well. You are a genius at it. Congratulations.
Yet idols, like empires, have a habit of falling. And the righteous rage of the recently radicalised, like fire, can burn indiscriminately. Curating people’s anger, selling them a sense of both entitlement and victimhood, is therefore a calculated risk. What if the short term convenience of us/them, good/bad becomes the long term trend? What if the country turns against itself? What happens when the newly infuriated ‘decent folk’ find a better saviour? Or a bright orange target? (Surely, you know this, Donald. Surely your confidence has not already become hubris.)
When we seduce people with the idea that some ‘other’ has ripped them off, or that their way of life and system of values are under immediate threat, (and we compound this with a diet of nostalgia and future-fear), we hitch our wagon to volatile horses. Rage and righteousness are the breakfast of martyrs. They maybe heroes at lunch, but they will be terrorists by teatime. You know how it goes. Liberating army becomes occupying force. Palace guard kills Caesar. Again.
Put people on a war footing and soon enough they will fight. Put them on the lookout for enemies and, voila, they will find them everywhere. Including your house.
When we start telling ourselves that we live in a world where few can be trusted, where everyone else is an idiot, and that our society is in freefall, we lose our appetite for risk. Stop dreaming big. Stop investing. We retreat. Leave the pool to the sharks. So now we don’t even go swimming. You get the picture, don’t you Mr President?
This is not the energy of prosperity. Nor is it the heartbeat of a healthy democracy. This is not the land of the free, it is a nation of paranoia, one in which we imprison ourselves.
Did I mention the divide & conquer thing?
I realise that much more could be said here. People write books about this stuff – but I’m certain you won’t have time for that now. I know you are smart enough to join the dots, but from a distance I sometimes wonder if you are letting the thrill of the game obscure the true price of playing. You are toying with a volcano, sir. I know you think you can handle it. Perhaps you even believe it remains under your control. We all think that before Pompeii.
Now that you have seen off Momentary Joe you may be tempted to take your Tyrannosaurus Trump routine to the next level. I understand the appeal of victory. But now we must think of leading, which is more than merely winning. Now we have a fire on our hands, and our job is to stop it going wild.
When we borrow peoples’ hopes in order to short their reality, we may well be left to carry the limitless debt of their disillusion.
You are going to have a big say in this, Donald. Please use your voice wisely. The price of proffering miracles – of promising a righteous reclamation – will be the measure of the miracle’s failure to meet the KPIs.
I trust that your seller’s charm will then work wonders when you astound us all again by changing your pitch, and urging your army not to fight.
Of course, I doubt this will happen; just as I suspect you won’t ever read this. You seem to relish the game too much, like a high stakes junkie, pulling off the most audacious heist. It’s been great theatre, Mr President, but we know from experience how such dramas conclude.
Ultimately, all I can really say is, be careful, Donald. After that, I just hope.
As If You Were Listening 