A Letter to the President-Elect

Dear President-elect Trump,

First of all, congratulations on your election victory. This time you won both the electoral and the popular vote, and you won big. A special benefit of this definitive win is that there were no protests or violent incidents afterward, and we, your fellow Americans, are grateful.

I’m writing you today about your legacy. Since this will be your second and final term, I am sure you are thinking about how history will remember you. Recently I saw an estimation by presidential historians that ranked all the U.S. President to date (The 2024 presidential greatness rankings are in | WSAV-TV). Abraham Lincoln was in first place, while you were rated last. My hope for you is that you will surprise Democratic voters like me by becoming the President for all Americans and not just for your loyal base. As your slogan “Make America Great Again” correctly implies, no country, not even ours, is perfectly great. Maybe the reunited America that President Lincoln helped to create could be a model for what you could achieve: changing our divided nation into a unified one. By the way, our Constitution agrees with your slogan, at least in part, since it talks about leadership aiding us in becoming “a more perfect union.” So maybe your new slogan could become “Make America Even Greater!”

In doing so I hope you will take these points into account:

• Americans, not least the modest earners in your base, need affordable healthcare. So if you and your advisors decide to cancel the Affordable Care Act, please make sure to have something even better available before you do so. The same is true for Medicaid and Social Security.
• Raising tariff walls on imports may be worth experimenting with. However, if doing so ends up causing prices for needed household goods to become more expensive for the average American, that may make the inflation of recent years seem like nothing by comparison. In that case, I hope you will show yourself to be a strong, pragmatic leader who cancels failed experiments. After all, nothing succeeds like success
• In foreign policy I look forward to your quickly ending the wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land, as you have promised. Many leaders abroad seem eager to work with you, and you are well known for your ability to make deals. So God’s speed with that.
• You have received a lot of personal attacks and even several unsuccessful assassination attempts. I can feel how natural it would be for you to want to take revenge on your enemies both foreign and domestic. Since you have gotten solid support from various Christian groups, however, I would be pleasantly surprised if you followed Jesus’s advice to forgive others not seven times but 70 times seven times (Matthew 18:21-35).
• Finally, I know you are committed to closing our borders to undocumented individuals wanting to enter our country illegally and also to ridding the U.S. of the undocumented individuals who are already here. For the former, I recommend your supporting the bill both parties agreed on earlier in the year. For the latter, I hope you will consult with business owners large and small who depend on the labor of the undocumented before sending them out of the country wholesale. Many of these individuals may be hard to replace.

Thank you for your consideration of these ideas. I hope four years from now all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, will be proud of your accomplishments, and you can retire as one of our country’s greatest Presidents.

Sincerely,

​Reynold Ruslan Feldman, Ph.D.
​ Boulder, Colorado

And the winner is….