Dear Donald,

Well, here we are, another week, and you’re still, thankfully, the President-Elect. Nevermind those rumblings about a recount and a revolt in the Electoral College. You have unlimited power over all of us, and it’s time we take a moment to try to understand you and your life. We all need to come together, like you said, and a critical part of that is trying to understand where everyone comes from, including you, the President. With a little bit of knowledge of your background, your critics might be inclined to shut the hell up and start loving you. Who knows?

I’ve gotta say, though, you are a complicated man, Donald, one of the most complicated I’ve ever studied. Trying to understand you has not been easy, so I truly thank you for the challenge.

While I don’t think I’ll ever truly have an accurate understanding of someone like you, I do have something tentative to offer. It’s an imagining of a morning in the life of Donald Trump, and I do think that will give readers a greater understanding of you as a President, but more importantly, as a husband and father. I hope that this attempt to convey your personal experience to the public is to your liking.

The sun breaks on a new day in the Trump Penthouse. You don’t need an alarm clock because the light reflecting off all the gold surfaces is enough to wake you up. You see the glow from the living room leaking in from under your bedroom door. You stretch, you yawn, you see that your wife is still sleeping, which means that no one’s made breakfast for you, so you shake your wife and say “Hey, honey, get moving!” and your wife scrambles out of bed, hair disheveled, pajama top barely hanging on to the upper half of her torso, and stumbles into the kitchen. She drops a pan on the floor. Seeing a great way to give yourself a burst of energy, you shout “Why do you have to be so clumsy?” and then snicker when she drops another pan.

While she’s getting breakfast together, you lie in bed and stare at the painting above your bed. You see the abs on the angels above, and you think to yourself too bumpy. No stomach should be that bumpy. I’ve got a better stomach than him.” Having sufficiently humiliated a painting, you reach over to your nightstand and grab the first newspaper your hand lands on. You scan it for any mention of your name, and see an article about how wonderful it is that you have purchased the historic Mar-a-Lago house. You beam with pride and say “Of course.”

You smell coffee wafting in from the kitchen, and then you decide to roll out of bed. Naked, you walk over to the gold-colored bathrobe hanging from a hook on your gold bathroom door, and you slip it on. You adjust the collar, because even a morning Trump, in the privacy of his own home, has to look pristine.

You open the door to the main part of the Penthouse, and golden light washes over you. It does not bother you—you are crying, yes, but because you are thrilled to own something so beautiful, not because the light hurts you (this is something you do every morning).

You see yourself reflected in the floor, in the columns, in the golden ceiling tiles, and you are reminded of how awesome you are. In the corner of your eye, you see your wife reflected, too, and, beside her fragile, unkempt, sloppy appearance, you look even better.

“That’s why I married you, honey,” you say. “You make me look good.”

Your wife smiles and cracks an egg. She used to blush whenever you said that, but now, lately, she just goes pale and does whatever she does with a noticeable lack of grace and dignity. You remember how her eyes used to look at you, how they used to adore you, how her whole being collapsed into a state of adoration and worship, while now, now she is struggling to make eggs and she looks like she has not nearly enough energy to worship anyone or anything, and you hate her for it, so you say “Come on, it’s just eggs. How hard can it be to make them?” and she starts to work faster, faster, and you’re strolling over to the coffeepot to get your morning Joe, whistling contentedly.

(truth be told, you like seeing your wife so frantic, because it means that she wants to please you.)

Then your daughter—a nice, nice sixteen—wakes up and wanders into the kitchen, and you think about all the things you wish you could do to her but can’t because that would probably cost you a hotel or two and a couple hundred million dollars, and you say to her “Morning, sweetie” and take a sip of coffee, staring at her with those magnificently reflective eyes of yours.

“Hi, Dad,” she says, yawning and stretching her body in such a way that it makes you pray—yes, pray—that you weren’t her father. (you rarely pray, because as far as you’re concerned you are God, but every now and then something comes up that reminds you of how powerless you are, like being unable to have sex with your daughter due to the constraints placed upon you by that annoying entity called society. Wouldn’t it be nice to rule it, you wonder to yourself while you take another sip, to be able to say to society “NO” and turn it into something where you never feel challenged or threatened by anything, and where everyone everywhere adores you as much as your wife used to, and as much as your morning reflections do?)

“Your voice is too high,” you say to her. “You want guys, you want to sound a little bit like one.”

“Don—” your wife starts.

“Guys don’t like anything that’s too different from them. Trust me, I know guys. I know the best guys, and these guys talk a good game, say they want a real woman, a real girly woman, but they don’t mean it. They don’t mean it. What they want is someone who sounds just like them. Most guys can’t handle too much. I’m not one of them, but let me tell you, guys get savage when people are too different from them. Savage, absolutely savage.”

“Don—“

“I’m trying to help her out, dear,” you say to your wife. “You could use some pointers, too. You’ve been slacking lately.”

She goes to say something and you lean in and say “Slacking.”

“What have I said about talking about that in front of the kids?”

“It’s good to be an open family, dear,” you say.

Your daughter nods in agreement. Your morning is off to a great start.

Then your son stumbles in, and oh-my-God his hair is not combed.

“Go back to your room and comb your hair,” you snap at him. The circles around his eyes and his sluggish demeanor mean nothing to you, because, frankly, he looks ugly when his hair’s not combed, and your children cannot look ugly.

“Go back to your toom and comb your hair,” you say again when he does not immediately respond, this time slower, with a greater emphasis on each syllable.

He runs back to his room, pouting and screaming the whole time that he just wants to start a morning peacefully. You snicker and call after him “Then comb your hair!”

You look at your wife.

“I love you,” you say.

She glares at you.

“I love you,” you say again. This is a game you love to play. If she doesn’t respond, then, oh, it gets really fun for you.

“I mm...hmm...” she mumbles.

“What? I didn’t hear you!” You cup a hand around your ear.

“I love you,” she says, louder.

She has stopped making the eggs.

“Get back to cooking!”

So she does.

“And I still didn’t hear you,” you say.

“I love you,” she says, loudly, with solid annunciation.

“Now look me in the eyes.”

She hesitates. She holds the pan too long over the stove and the eggs begin to burn.

“You’re burning my breakfast!” you say. You slam your mug on the counter for emphasis (it cracks, but that’s okay because now your wife has dropped the pan.)

“Some woman you are,” you say. “You can’t say I love you, and you can’t cook! You can’t cook. Pick it up and make a new one. I don’t eat dirt.”

You take a look at your daughter.

“Remember,” you say, your eyes boring into hers. “You have to be able to cook.”

She nods forcefully, confidently, and because of how confidently she nodded, you can see her bra-less tits jiggle beneath her nightgown.

Yes, this is a good morning for you, Donald, full of love and admiration and concern for your daughter’s ability to survive as a woman and what your son’s physical appearance will say about you. So good, so good.

Of course, there are also those mornings that aren’t so good, like when the New York Times runs a story about your supposedly corrupt business practices and your wife’s actually genuinely happy. Stories like that shouldn’t be told, for starters—no one deserves to be bullied like that, unless the bullying is being done by someone as high-minded and virtuous as you—and your wife has no business being happy when you have been insulted by the press and you are not directly responsible for whatever made her happy, because God forbid she realizes that she can find happiness elsewhere—what use will she have of you? And what will you look like next to a woman who wants to find happiness without you? What will that say about you? You can’t have that, so naturally you seize her by the shoulders, throw her into a wall, and tell her to blow you, which she does because she knows how solid your fists are.

Then, later, while she’s making your breakfast, you tell her that she’s still got it, and she smiles, and everything’s better.

(your kids did hear that whole exchange, but part of the reason you do those kinds of things is because your kids need to learn how to deal with life’s unpleasant parts. What kind of father and husband would you be if you always treated your wife with respect and humanity? That’s just setting your children up for failure because the real world can’t stand decency. It only allows winning and competitiveness and fierceness, all three of which you have in abundance, so, really, by abusing your wife, you’re helping your kids just get used to it all.)

I understand you, Donald, I really do, and I think that you’re a good man, a good father, and a good husband. A great man, even. You clearly have the strength of character to be classified as one of history’s greatest men.

Although...I’m thinking, for some reason, of a quote from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone that goes “After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things. Terrible, but great,” and I’m a little disturbed that this quote is rattling around my brain in relation to you, because, while you’re not overly concerned with how terrible or not-terrible you are—success is everything, I know, but bare with me here—other people are, and if there’s even an inkling of a possibility that you might be doing terrible things, I don’t think History’s going to look too favorably on you, and that, instead, people will be saying horrible things about you one hundred years from now.

Try not to be just great, but good, because then people will actually love you.

But that would mean being vulnerable, and that would mean admitting that you’re human, and that would mean admitting that you’re not a God, which is impossible for you to do at this point.

I hate to break it to you, Don, but you’re destined to be reviled for eternity. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Once you’re dead, you can’t control how people see you—no amount of belligerent early-morning blowjobs will change that, so don’t bother—and, right now, the people who control the moral compass of the world—the oppressed—aren’t seeing you in an especially favorable light, and as long as you insist upon thinking of yourself as a God, or a genius, or a manly-man, or the richest dude ever, they’re going to keep on hating you, keep on protesting you, keep on trying to delegitimize you, because—and your breakfast tantrums and your twitter tantrums prove that you know this—as long as people are threatened, they will do everything in their power to remove the threat and make their worlds safe.

You are in every part of their worlds right now, thanks to your dominance of the media and social media, so, as long as you change nothing, you’d better brace yourself for four years of fury from the underdogs, the marginalized, and the perpetually abused.

Take care,

Nicholas

P.S. William Shakespeare has a line in Macbeth that goes “It is a tale, told y an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It’s usually used to refer to people who say a lot without saying anything—all talk, no walk—but in this case, you should know that the sound and the fury currently breaking out across the country signifies everything, because we will mock you, defy you, resist you, and fight you—until the end of time, if necessary—to protect ourselves, our homes, our friends, and our families.