DEAR DIPSHIT-IN-CHIEF

Dear Dipshit-in-Chief,

I’m coming back to Washington, D.C. for seven days. From June 28th through July 4th.

Not to see you. Not to meet with you. Not this time. You are, in fact, the one person in the entire city I have absolutely no interest in encountering, and I say that with the clarity of someone who has spent the last eighteen months watching you treat the executive branch like a storage unit for your personality disorders.

I’m coming because it’s America’s 250th birthday. And I’m inviting everyone I know.

Organizers. Veterans. Journalists. Artists. Voters who have never once held a sign. Musicians and comedians who have something to say and a stage to say it from. People who plan to drive all night from states you think you own. People who are going to walk into congressional offices and look your enablers in the eye and tell them exactly what their constituents actually want, out loud and on the record.

We are going to lobby Congress with the kind of relentless, coordinated, constituent-powered precision that does not show up on a donor list because it doesn’t need to.

We are going to run candidate forums where the people who want to replace your congressional allies will be asked the hard questions in public, where the answers cannot be walked back or deleted or buried in a DOJ filing.

We are going to train the next generation of organizers in the arts of showing up, pushing back, and refusing to leave — skills that will outlast this week, outlast this year, and outlast you.

And on the seventh day, July 4th, we are going to march.

Through the city. On the 250th anniversary of the country you have been running like a personal branding operation. Maybe we’ll visit the reflecting pool. Perhaps we will walk past the hole in the ground where the East Wing of the People’s House used to stand before you knocked it down to build yourself a ballroom.

To be crystal clear, we are not coming to D.C. for seven days because we hate this country. We are coming because we love it in the specific and inconvenient way that requires showing up for it.

You’re not invited.

E Pluribus Unum.

—Rook T. Winchester

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