'An Open Letter to Donald Trump'

Mr. President,

Time is something that we never seem to have enough of.

As the President of the United States of America, I’m sure you can understand. As the hours and minutes and seconds fall away from each day, we find ourselves getting older, falling behind from where we thought our lives were taking us. I understand that you have little time to sift through the letters sent from a 20-year-old nobody from the Midwest. With that being said, if you’ve made it this far, please, go on.

So, as they say, I hope that this letter finds you, and that it finds you well. More importantly, I hope it finds you in time.

There may come a day that I will look to those that I love and speak of the moment that I saw the face of the man that destroyed America. I will tell them that he was boisterous, that he was loud. I will tell them that I wondered if he could truly be real, or maybe the villain of our most vivid nightmares. I will tell them that when he stepped out on to the stage, separating the great, black curtain that stood behind the podium, I couldn’t see his face. I will tell them that a part of me, something deep in my soul, didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see the incarnation of evil that America had wrought. But I will tell them the truth. I saw him, Mr. President. And he was you.

That is a day that I hope will never come.

I hope that you can find your way, not because I want to see you succeed, not because I want to be “great again.” I hope that you will find yourself, because, Mr. President, I am an American. I do not want to see my nation collapse around me. I do not want my nation to fail in its duty to simply be the goodness that it can be.

It was more than a year ago now that I saw you for the first time. You stood in front of an Indiana crowd of your supporters, of which I was not a part of. You spoke with passion. Or maybe, it was manufactured positivity, another lie behind your complex reality of who you are. To them, your promises were of hope and prosperity. To me, I was left gutted and empty. I couldn’t see what was real. There was no truth to be told in that moment except for one. I was scared for our nation.

In the heat of an overcrowded pavilion, my shoulders bumping up against people that shouted and chanted your name, I wondered what it would be like to meet you. I wondered what you would say, how you would look, if your smile could really stretch across your face, like Jack Nicholson’s Joker. I wondered if you would laugh, if there would be a picture taken. I wondered what your handshake would be like. I wondered. But most importantly, Mr. President, I wondered what I would do.

I wondered if I would remain silent. I wondered if I would stagger in my balance, made physically ill by your presence. I wondered if I would retaliate with my own cheap, fake smile, plastered on my own face, mirrored in your image. But through it all, Mr. President, one thought remained on my mind long after I left the Indiana State Fair Grounds. It ate at me in the car as I rode with my friend back to our school. It is with me even now, as I write this letter to you. I wondered if I could ask one question, one final and absolute sentence that could define you, that could define the reality of you.

So let’s cast aside our preconceived notions of what it means to be a president. Let us send away the facts and opinions of what we’ve been told our entire lives about what it means to live in this great county. Most importantly, let us cast aside our ideas of Democrat and Republican, Liberal and Conservative.

What are you, Mr. President?

I don’t ask this in any mocking, facetious way. I truly want to know. What are you?

Before you answer the question with an utterance of “Republican,” or “the president,” please, for the sake of this nation and all that is good, remember that we already cast away our false ideas of what it means to truly be an American.

So I ask again. What are you, Mr. President?

I ask this question with the full understanding that you most likely will never hear it, much less respond to it. I understand that I am shouting my question into the nothingness of internet blackness, a woven web that, in my mind, resembles a cave. I will wait for your answer, but I know that I will only hear my own echoes, shouted from other voices that think the same.

What are you? Are you what they say you are? Do you truly want to appear as you have? Are you good, or are you bad? Are you something in between? Not a nightmare or a dream, rather, something that sticks to you only in the dead of night, lingering for a moment in the morning, weighing heavily with the feelings of hopelessness, anonymity, and abandonment.

Or are you simply a man, someone that thinks and feels, a person that can love and be loved? Are you misunderstood? Do you hurt? Do you feel pain?

What lies behind that smile of yours, the one you flash to hordes of people when they ask you questions like my own? Is it something horrible, something so dark that it has scarred the very core of you? Or are you simple who you are, bold and arrogant, lifeless and fake?

Please understand that I did not ask “who” you are, Mr. President. To be honest, I don’t care at this moment. Rather, I want to know just exactly what it is you are. I want to know what you stand for, what you feel. I want to know your inner most secrets, your greatest moment and your greatest fall. I want to know what you would fall for, what you would die for. Would you die for this nation? Would you die for me? I want the answer to these questions because, quite frankly, I wish to see you as a human being, Mr. President. I wish to see you as a person, someone that I can believe.

Until then, Mr. President, I’m afraid the truth of reality may escape both of us.

- Garrett Looker