AMERICA FIRST

7 July, 2017

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher,

101 Main Street #380

Huntington Beach, CA 92648

Dear Congressman,

Re: America First

What seems clear, after last week’s G20 conference, is that America has now abandoned its leadership role in world politics. “America First”—as simplistic an idea as “Make America Great Again”—is a bill of goods that Trump managed to sell to the American people even as he undermined our importance in maintaining the stability of the world. As I suggested in another recent letter, he has managed in the space of a few short months to make America smaller and more insignificant than in the past two centuries.

Congratulations, Republicans! When will you finally come to recognize that Trump is a small man, a “tiny, tiny, tiny man,” who demonstrates every day that his pusillanimity is equaled only by his lack of curiosity and intellectual courage? If Republican leaders were prepared to step in and take up the slack, the damage to our nation would be less extensive, hopefully even less permanent than it threatens to be. Trump’s only interest in the presidency was the advancement of his own brand. He now sits in the Oval Office and leaves the country leaderless and rudderless, and all the Republican leadership is ready to do about it is to use the vacuum to force through legislation that is not in the interest of the American people, and which they expressly do not want.

What is to be your role in this debacle, Congressman? Are you ready to take seriously the responsibility that your constituents and your country ask of you? Or will you capitulate to the hegemony of a president and a party that no longer even deserve the name “conservative”? A good socialist myself, I can respect a rational conservative argument. But there is no rational argument taking place in our political arena right now. It’s all, and only, about winning—the only philosophy that Trump can understand: “America First”—but in whose race? Not, I fear, the human race.

Respectfully,

Peter Clothier, Ph.D.