10 Things This Suburban Woman Doesn't Need From Donald Trump

Dear President Trump,

I am a suburban woman. I am part of the demographic to whom you have been explicitly appealing – begging me (us) to like you, to vote for you. I can’t. I won’t.

Let me give you 10 reasons why:

1. I do not need you to save or protect my neighborhood. I’m far more afraid of the once latent, now live-out-loud racists that you have emboldened within my neighborhood than I am of the (codeword alert!) “urban” threat from outside of it.

2. I do not need you to protect my country’s heritage. I’m far more afraid of living in a country that can’t acknowledge and reckon with the sins of its past than I am of condemning a legacy that ought not to have been memorialized in the first place.

3. I do not need you to “get my husband back to work.” This ain’t the 50s and I’m not Donna Reed. I need you to try to control the virus in order to accelerate a recovery which will bring back lost jobs for men AND especially for women, who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID job displacement/departure. (Shout out to all the “honeys making money and mommas who profit dollars.”)

4. I do not need you to open schools by fiat. I need you to create a national plan for COVID mitigation and testing that will enable schools to open (and remain open), safely.

5. I do not need you to appoint a woman to the highest court of the land as though a nominee’s gender is the only thing about which I should care. I need you to appoint a justice who will protect my reproductive freedoms and whose judicial philosophy embraces those “majestic generalities” of constitutional text that enable meaningful progress, modernity, and equality.

6. I do not need you to safeguard coverage of pre-existing conditions with some mythological it’ll-be-here-in-two-weeks healthcare plan. I need you to stop tearing down the policy in place that does that very thing right now.

7. I do not need you to speak as eloquently as some of your predecessors. I need you to stop your misogynistic attacks on women who challenge you as though it’s okay for you to speak in a manner I wouldn’t tolerate from my son, and teach my daughter not to tolerate for herself.

8. I do not need you to be a scientist or a medical expert. I simply need you to be a leader that heeds their advice.

9. I do not need you to lie to me and spare me “panic” (as though hysteria is the only response we women could have in the face of crisis). I need you to tell me the truth.

10. And finally, I do not need you to tell me who is to blame for all your woes: Obama! Hillary! The deep state! China! As women, we’ve learned that whining is both unbecoming and unproductive. So put your grievances aside, (wo)man up, and start the hard work of governing…

But you can’t, or won’t, do any of that. So no, Mr. President, no matter how much you beg or plead, you can’t have my vote. And that means there’s at least one thing of mine you can’t grab.

Signed,

A Suburban Woman Saying No