Dear Donald Trump,

I have been writing to you fairly regularly for a few weeks now, but I have a confession to make—I’ve been communicating to you somewhat indirectly, and not without a little bit of cowardice. The feelings and thoughts I have expressed to you up to this point have been predominantly refracted through a satirical lens. On the few occasions when they were not, the sentiments I expressed were weak precisely because they were sentiments, and I was shying away from the fully developed expressions of whatever it is I am feeling towards you.

I do not, however, apologize for taking the stance that I have taken, as I intend to return to it in the coming weeks. You are weak because you believe yourself to be invulnerable, and I will exploit that weakness by taking everything you want people to love about you and ridiculing it loudly and without mercy. I will remove your portrait from its wrappings and show the world just how ugly you have become (I’m going to assume that you don’t understand that allusion and tell you that it’s from Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.”)

I need you to understand, Donald, exactly what it is I’m feeling, because then, I hope, you’ll have some inkling of an understanding of what it is you are up against.

What I feel towards you is not rage, because in order to feel rage, one must be treated so inhumanely for so long that they forget what it means to feel happiness. For the oppressor, it is the ultimate victory, because the rage dominates and directs the victim’s soul. They have successfully invaded their target’s being, and corrupted it so thoroughly that the victim is incapable of bringing anything to the world that is not in some way destructive and needlessly violent. Even if they are overthrown or subdued, so long as the victim feels and acts according to the dictates of rage, the oppressor is victorious, for not only will the victim never be free from their lack of humanity, but the victim will also become just as inhumane, the part of their souls that recognize the emotions of others having been bullied and beaten into a pathetic and contemptible whimper.

The whimper is not inherently pathetic and contemptible, not at all. But that’s how the victim hears it, and that’s where the oppressor’s victory is final. By pressuring their victim into feeling and giving into rage, which brings effusive satisfactions and needs more and more effusive satisfactions to sustain itself, they are also pressuring him or her into despising the part of them that cries for mercy, since that part of them failed them, and failed them dramatically, over and over and over again. Hating one’s vulnerability leads to one hating it in others, making the victim’s rage doubly inhumane, since it thoroughly dominates the victim’s life—rage needs to be stoked to stay powerful, and once it becomes powerful, it actively seeks out means by which it can stay powerful—and since it turns them against the vulnerability and humanity that would be able to liberate them from the oppressor’s seemingly ceaseless torment.

I have not been treated inhumanely by you, and I make it a point to remind myself of what it means to be happy every day. I am not compelled to seek out arguments to fuel my rage against you, and I am not compelled to destroy the humanity and vulnerability in others. I abhor my own minute impulses to do so, and I strive to work against them every day by respecting the vulnerability of the people around me as best I can.

I know that you have not dominated my soul because I know that hurting people brings me no pleasure, or illusion of pleasure, even if that person and I violently disagree. I know that you have not dominated my soul because it hurts me to think about striking at people’s weak spots, and because I torture myself every time I am not careful enough to prevent a hurtful remark from striking out from between my lips.

I cannot justly say that it is a righteous fury, either, because righteousness requires a certain egotism that I lack. I cannot help but be open to every idea that comes my way, and think about it deeply. The internal muddle that sometimes comes from thoughtfulness and rumination and the occasional bouts of perseveration makes righteousness’s solid shell next-to-impossible for me to maintain, and the blazing spears too hot for me too hold.

I am too drawn to tears, and laughter, and frustrations to be righteous.

After all these months, after all my facebook posts and satirical tirades, I think that what I can say about my feelings for you is that I love you, Donald. I genuinely love you.

I’m being completely honest when I say that. Beneath my disgust at your behavior, beneath my satire, beneath my fears of your Presidency, a current of love runs strong, and it is flowing towards you.

How can I love someone like you? You are not someone who ought to be able to be loved. Admired, perhaps. Despised, understandably. But the idea of loving you is ludicrous, too ludicrous to be something that passes as funny.

To borrow from Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” you are a monster, though you look like a man. You routinely objectify and belittle and use women. You threatened to deport the practitioners of a religion so that you would get elected. You mocked a disabled reporter in front of cameras. You stoked conspiracy theories about Hillary and you used her e-mail scandal to distract everyone from the corruption that drips from you as you walk. You insisted that Barack Obama was not born in America and then denied that you had ever done so. You have expressed that you would like to have sex with your own daughter while she was sitting next to you. You chose a man who hates the LGBTQ+ community and dated to call yourself a President for all Americans.

I’m not going to say anything more about how monstrous you are, because I don’t think you can ever be brought to see it, and the other readers of this letter don’t need to be reminded.

Part of the way I feel about you comes from how many similarities I see between you and myself. I once struggled with the need to be smarter than everyone else—perhaps I still am. I used to belittle and degrade people, even if they were my friends, so that I could be the smarter one in the relationship. I needed to be seen as smart in order to feel good about myself, and anyone who was also smart was a threat to my self-esteem. It was a narcissistic impulse, narcissistic because it was rooted in the need for admiration and the need to eliminate competition, and an impulse because it was involuntary for so long, and I am ashamed that I ever treated people the way I did because of it, and perhaps still am.

I used to brag about my academic accomplishments, and just about everything else.

At one point, my love of books mutated into a love of looking smart, and I threw myself into that role at the cost of my mental health and my social life.

I, for so long, could not really feel anything. I had feelings, yes, but I often did not know why, and I pathologically stayed away from finding out. In between those moments of feelings, I intellectualized about everything to prevent myself from feeling, or I melo-dramatized those feelings as part of a perverted attempt at Romanticism.

I lived in a world entirely of my own making, one that was completely detached from reality, where I was the only thing that mattered and other people existed to hear about my reality.

I was the moody, rejected high school artist who secretly liked being the moody, rejected high school artist, and the pretentious, deranged college student who did not realize how pretentious and deranged he was.

Looking back on that part of my life, I was in nearly constant psychological and emotional agony, and I refused to admit it. An awareness of it spilled over into my writing, but I never thought to remedy it, or ask why I felt it.

When I see you, and when I hear about the things you’ve done, I think about myself, and how I was once tempted to do everything I could to bully and belittle people to feel better about myself, and how I was once so wrapped up in my own version of reality that I could not see anything or anyone else (to be fair, I was never as cruel as you, and I was frequently a pleasant person to be around. But I recognize the impulse when I see it, because you have magnified it a thousand times and molded it with the center of your being, and by doing so, made it impossible to not see it, which is horribly ironic if you think about how desperately you need other people to admire you.), and I can see that you are suffering.

It is because you are suffering that I love you. Do not construe that as “I take pleasure in your pain.” I do not. The pain of narcissism is too unbearable for me to take pleasure in seeing another person suffer beneath it, and pain itself is painful to see.

Your suffering makes you human, and as a human being, I naturally love other beings I recognize as human.

This is what racist rhetoric and hate speech convince people to forget—that everyone has internal lives and rich personal histories, and that even though we have different labels and skin tones, we all share a fundamental something. Hateful speech and the like brainwash people into believing that the targets of the hate speech are not human, and that they cannot be loved.

But even if someone spews hateful bile, and even if someone harasses other people for fun, the same river of love that flows through me flows through them. Just like love steadily gurgles beneath my satirical jabs, it steadily gurgles beneath hateful and angry words.

I know this because if you look at tragedies like 9/11 and the Sandy Hook Massacre and the Orlando Nightclub Shooting and the November Paris Attacks, you will see people reaching out to strangers and crying with people they once said they hated and despised. In moments like that, we cannot help but feel that river flowing through ourselves and everyone around us, and feel united, and feel indestructible in our vulnerability.

But it’s so easy to lose touch with that current of love. People, like I said, can be brainwashed into damming up certain streams, and they can even be terrorized into abandoning the current altogether, and hearing it only as a pathetic and contemptible whimper, and they will do that because something has caused them to feel threatened, and because they love themselves they will build walls to protect themselves from whatever it is that is threatening them. (Eventually, the only person they can love is themselves, because they become so used to seeing other people as threats, and they eventually become incapable of self-love, because we need to give love in order to love ourselves.)

But the river’s still there, Donald, and this is why you will lose. Unless someone is as damaged as you, they can always return to the river, hear it for the mighty force that it is, dismantle the dams they have built, and effortlessly give love to everyone they see, and there aren’t enough damaged people in the world to prevent the majority of the human species from loving.

I say “current of love,” but this is a poetic device that perhaps obfuscates my meaning.

We naturally love each other because we can recognize our pain and fragility in other people, and seek to care for them. And not in a self-serving way, either. I know this is hard for you to understand, but this kind of recognition is different from the narcissistic recognition that turns everyone into mirrors and extensions of the self, because in recognizing the most fragile parts of ourselves in other people, we are not seeking to destroy the other person’s individuality. In place of that narcissistic need to destroy differences, we have a curiosity about the individual who is expressing that fragility, and that curiosity allows us to respect and value what we find. Even though we love because we can see our own pain—and not just pain, by the way. True happiness is also hugely vulnerable, because while we are happy we are oblivious to anything that might take away that happiness and therefore defenseless—we can also see that the person is different from us, and learn to love those differences.

I love you because I cannot help it, Donald.

But this love that I feel does not prevent me from wanting to tear you down, because while I am loving you, I am also loving everyone that is afraid of you, myself included, and everyone that has ever been abused by you, and, knowing how terribly you have treated them and how badly you have frightened people I care about, I cannot allow you to be comfortable in your Presidency, and this is why I am going to satirize you and mock you for as long as you are in office, and perhaps beyond.

You cannot be allowed to terrorize a country so that you can feel good about yourself. You cannot be allowed to sit on top of a mound of people’s dreams and laugh while they throw money at you. For though you look like a human, and sound like a human, you have lost touch with humanity, and you are able to do inhuman things. When we hurt another person, we hear that river of love gurgling in the background, or at least whimpering. When you hurt a person, you hear only the sound of your own smug snickering. You have forgotten—and yes, forgotten, because even you were vulnerable once—what it means to be a human being, and it is impractical to try to remind you, since at this point you are a genius at denying your own humanity, and it is foolish to sit back and weep for you while you are oblivious to your own agony, so you must be delegitimized so that you cannot suck the country into your need to feel something resembling love (it leaves a terrible, terrible pain when it is gone.)

But you must be delegitimized in such a way that respects vulnerability and humanity, precisely because those are the qualities that have been abandoned by you and they are the ones that you want to destroy in others, and this is why I resolve to never let you enrage me, since that will only make you more powerful, and why I will never act from a place of righteous fury, since that would make me hard-hearted and egotistical and closed off to other people.

Instead, I will go after you with composure and with grace and with a determination to protect the people I care about, and I will not stop until I know that you are powerless to hurt them.

I encourage you, dear reader, to do the same, because a man who loves to divide people needs to be met by a force that can never be destroyed, and the only indestructible force that I know of is a love that recognizes and cherishes how fragile and vulnerable we, the people, are, and in recognizing and cherishing that, indissolubly unifies everyone who feels it.

With love,

Nicholas