By Spencer Glassman ’19, Staff Writer

Dear President Trump,

First I would like to congratulate you, which I have not formally done yet, for winning the election. I wrote an article predicting your defeat last spring, and you truly did overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. I may not have supported you during the primaries and I may have been undecided throughout the whole election cycle, but the moment you took the victory, I fully embraced your presidency. I knew that your success was my success, was our success, and was ultimately the success of the world. My current support and hope that your policies succeed do not necessarily imply that I agree with your policies and actions thus far, as there are many that I endorse, but still many that I find disconcerting. I do not wish to list everything that I support or am against, but rather to remain in accordance with my previous point on our shared success: I want to help you out. I want to lay out what you could do that would be politically beneficial.

Firstly, I will go through the primary success of your nomination of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court: he is a highly-qualified, consistent originalist who really fits under the Scalia ideal of a conservative justice. There is no reason for him to not get confirmed and if the Democrats manage to stop his confirmation it would hurt them politically.

Secondly, your “Fulfill what you promised” strategy has so far been mostly successful with a few key exceptions. The executive orders on the Keystone Pipeline, the border wall, and those that internally review government programs such as Dodd Frank, or the restrictions of government administrative officials lobby have been some of your most constructive executive orders. Those orders frame you as a focused, conservative, and competent outsider, features that had the most popular appeal throughout your campaign and will continue to gain support going forwards. They also show you are honest, as in issuing those orders you keep your campaign promises.

Despite these successes, you have also faltered many times so far in your presidency. First and foremost, you need to stop tweeting; tweeting only hurts your public image. In your tweets you sound childish and impulsive by lashing out against anyone who criticizes you with belligerent and often plainly false claims. Among other things you’ve said that are simply wrong, you must stop the narrative that there were three million illegal voters: we know this is not the case and you are currently president so it does not affect you how you won or if you should have won the popular vote. What matters now is that you are president so you should govern as such. Considering the fact you are such an outsider in many senses, especially as the first, politically-inexperienced civilian president, you should have picked your cabinet in order to be the most possibly qualified in order to help you better understand the political system. While you might want to reform the system, you cannot function without understanding it. Appointees such as Reince Priebus, James Mattis or Nikki Haley were very smart, but appointments such as Steve Bannon and Betsy DeVos were ill-founded and could only serve to hurt your presidency and lead to attacks against you.

Even this early in your presidency you have dealt with many political issues, some in ways I support and others in ways I am critical towards. Ultimately you should do what is smart. Despite this, you can probably ignore my advice, as I have pretty much thought that almost everything you have done thus far has been a bad move, but time and time again I have been proven wrong, and hope that this pattern continues.