Time to Write a Letter

It is surely time for citizens of the United States to write letters – millions of them – to Republicans in Congress. On ‘No King’s Day’ millions wrote letters with their feet, in demonstrations around the country; now is the time to flood Capitol Hill with paper, to flood in-boxes of representatives’ and senators’ email accounts with emails, to jam their telephone lines with calls and left messages. And to keep doing it. A roused populace inundating Congress with angry and anxious messages might do something very necessary in the crisis precipitated by Trump in both US and world affairs: namely, to move the conscience of a handful of Republicans on Capitol Hill to action.

A Brit urges this for two reasons: that because the US has the Money and the Bombs, its horribly unfit and dangerous President is a threat to us all everywhere; we beyond the US’s borders are as affected as those within them. Unlike the situation in my own country, where such an action would have no effect, Republican control of the Capitol is wafer-thin, meaning that a small shift would have big consequences. Trump is well beyond the point at which he should be impeached and thrown out; this could be done, if just a very few good-and-true men and women on Capitol Hill would act. Getting that few to act has to be the aim of a concerted campaign that jams the House and Senate with the nation’s outpourings, and keeps them jammed – and keeps them jammed – until action is taken.

Waiting for the mid-terms in November 2026 is no good; they are too far off. Trump does damage daily. There are 550 days to go to the mid-terms at time of writing – that’s a lot of daily damage still to come.

Contrast matters with the UK. One of the few resources citizens (more accurately, subjects) in the UK have to exert influence on politicians is to write a letter to their Member of Parliament, their ‘MP’. Under the pretence that MPs have obligations only to residents of their own constituencies – despite voting (at the behest of their Party leadership, whether or not this aligns with the personal judgment they are putatitively meant to exercise on behalf of their constituents and the country) – on legislation that affects everyone in the nation, they reply with one of their two stock answers. One in effect says, ‘You’re not my constituent so f-off’, the other – to a constituent – standardly and formulaically dodges the issue with cut-and-paste material from the party line. A visit to an MP’s ‘surgery’, if it concerns matters of national consequence, gets the same response, while local matters of practical concern fall into the sump of a fact that few fully understand: the powerlessness of MPs to do much about them. In short and in sum, the majority of the hundreds of MPs (there are 650 of them) who turn up at some – some – of the debates in Parliament, quite often without having read the legislation they are to vote upon (because they don’t need to) unless they are members of Select Committees, are functionally ciphers, voting lobby fodder, ‘whipped’ under terms of Party discipline to vote as their leaders tell them to.

If this indictment appears too harsh, consider that MPs, supposed knights in armour for their constituents, and likewise for the interests of their country, tasked with finding out more, seeing further, and acting more wisely than those who send them to the counsels of the land – for they are not delegates merely conveying their constituents’ wishes but, constitutionally, representatives of their constituents’ and country’s best interests, however patriarchal this sounds – are not chosen by their constituents, only voted for by some of them. (I advisedly say ‘some of them’ because most MPs are elected by a minority of their constituents only, for in the antique and undemocratic plurality electoral system used exclusively for the House of Commons – proportional systems are used for almost everything else and even within the House of Commons – this is inevitable because more than two Parties field candidates). MPs, in short, are not chosen by their constituents, they are imposed on them by their Party.

So: you are a British voter, the Parties place their choice of individuals before you, you vote, and the largest minority of votes sends one of them to Westminster to do their Party’s bidding. From top to bottom it is a farce. Only in the rarest circumstances of a close-run election does an individual’s vote make a difference. And because individuals are therefore effectively impotent in affecting the legislation under which they live, they become alienated from the process, and pay it insufficient attention. And as Plato says, those who do not pay attention to politics end up being ruled by bad people.

Electorally, things are no better in the US. The same plurality system of voting has there reached its inevitable conclusion of forcing a binary between just two Parties with any chance of a seat in the House of Representatives. This, with gerrymandering and big money, results in over 90% of congressional districts being the permanent possession of one of the two Parties. The Senate is not even remotely a product of democracy; it is a States’ house, elected irrespective of population, the two senators from small-population conservative states locking in a persistent Rightward bloc that, at best, teeters either side of a majority depending on the political wind. Moreover, as House of Representatives elections are held every two years, Congressmen spend great swathes of their time on electioneering and fund-raising for the next election throughout their two-year term – rather than caring for the whole nation, and ensuring that it is fitly, soberly, responsibly, rationally governed.

Now as to the letters, emails and calls with which to ‘bombard the headquarters’ as one egregious national leader in the Far East used to say. These letters, emails and calls should litanise the facts about a man provenly unfit in mind and character (and, it increasingly seems, in body) to hold any responsible office, let alone that of President. A bloviating, boorish, bullying, erratic, unintelligent, ignorant, narcissistic, unstable, petty, vengeful, convicted felon should absolutely not be in the White House. Alexander Hamilton devised the (now farcical) Electoral College to ensure that no such unfit person would ever become ‘chief magistrate of the land’. The setting-up of the Electoral College is itself therefore a constitutional proscription against a person (a word that does him too much kindness) such as Trump being President. In fact this is a crucial point: it would appear from the founding arrangements of the US that it is a constitutional requirement that no-one of the character of a Trump should ever be President. This by itself is grounds for impeachment; there are a thousand more.

One thing such a ‘bombardment of the headquarters’ would do is to maintain the message to the outside world that not all, indeed not even most, of the US is MAGA, and that therefore the world need not give up hope. A hugely powerful – an over-powerful – economy and military (though Trump is doing his best to degrade both) is a matter of global concern because it has global impact. Americans might feel ashamed to their boots by Trump, and appalled at the damage he is doing, but I can tell our American friends that we are no less ashamed to see our own leaders in Europe having to suck-up to Trump and tiptoe round his pro-Putin, anti-Zelensky, pro-Netanyahu, prejudiced, unreliable, dangerously lunatic obsessions, his wild on-again-off-again tariff schemes, his evisceration of US democratic institutions, his disembowelling of what was anyway a precarious international order about which he seems to have as much grasp as a potato would have, solely and merely because the US has the Bombs and the Money, and even if all in the Trumpishly-disintergrating Western bloc were to do as Canada has done and turn their backs on the US, the mere fact that he has the nuclear codes alongside his MAGA memorabilia in the Oval Office is enough for them to maintain the façade of civility as if they were all still allies. (Trump is no ally to them; he does not want to be, and persistenly behaves as if he isn’t). They have to pander to him, coax, wheedle and pretend, the way one does to a petulant and episodically hysterical infant.

Go on, our fellow human beings in the US: get out your pens, your laptops, your cell phones, flood Capitol Hill with your messages, and keep on flooding it. Remember: you have only to get less than ten people there to step up to what they know is true, and to do the right thing for us all. For us all.