Write! The pen is mightier.

Moved by the Substack post by Ben Meiselas on Meidastouch Network about the devastatingly chilling effect on Latino communities and neighbourhoods of masked ICE operatives rampaging around them and detaining people, I repost here a shortened version of my plea to our US friends and cousins to write letters and emails – millions of them – to Republicans in Congress. What Trump is doing to the US he is doing to our world; we are all affected. We need you, citizens of a country that has until Trump been a beacon, to oppose Trump and MAGA and to bring them down. What you do for yourselves in rescuing your country from this benighted predation will help us all everywhere on the planet. This is an inflection point of history: the good people of the US have all our futures in their hands.

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 Republican 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. The GOP majorities in Congress are wafer-thin: it would take a very few to be brought to their consciences to change the trajectory of this disaster.

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 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, prejudiced, unreliable, dangerously lunatic obsessions, his wild on-again-off-on-again tariff schemes, his disembowelling of what was anyway a precarious international order about which he seems to have as much grasp as a potato, solely and merely because the US has the Bombs and the Money, and even if all in the Trumpishly-disintergrating Western bloc were to 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 their ally, still less their friend). 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. Go for it.