Dear President Trump: Tell the Truth, Please . . . and Stop Tweeting

By RAHN ADAMS

I mailed my letter to President Donald J. Trump on our way out of town Friday morning. Timberley and I didn’t watch yesterday’s inauguration live, choosing instead to watch its highlights on the CBS Evening News. And today we participated in the Women’s March on Morganton.

Taking those topics in reverse order—since most things dealing with Trump seem backwards to me, anyway—I’m really proud of our hometown and the county’s Democratic Party for organizing the event in support of women’s rights and civil rights. Around 600 women, men and children from Burke and surrounding counties participated in the local march, which included a rally on the historic courthouse square.

The protest was peaceful. The worst behavior that I witnessed came from passing motorists—like the blond woman in the Lexus who gave us a thumbs-down as we waited to cross East Union Street so that she could continue through the intersection when the light turned green. At the same time, many other motorists waved. We saw many friends from here and elsewhere, some that we hadn’t seen for months and even years, and we made some new friends.

Morganton’s march coincided with other protests and vigils across the state and nation, the largest and most highly publicized, of course, being the Women’s March on Washington. I hope the march to preserve all our rights doesn’t end today.

Yesterday we spent the late morning and afternoon in Asheville. We had wanted to visit the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway again and then tour two new Asheville breweries: the New Belgium and Sierra Nevada facilities.

We spent a pleasant hour at the Folk Art Center, then headed into town. However, before we got to the first brewery, a police barricade rerouted us from the River Arts District back downtown. We later learned that the road was closed because a man was threatening to jump (but didn’t) from the I-240 bridge over the street we had been traveling.

So we settled for making some of our usual stops downtown—lunch at Mamacita’s Taqueria on Biltmore Avenue and then an hour of browsing at Malaprop’s Bookstore on Haywood Street. I chose David Foster Wallace’s dystopian novel Infinite Jest; Timberley picked Morganton native Patti Digh’s Life Is a Verb.

Unlike the dreary weather yesterday in Washington, D.C., the sun shone on Asheville during our visit. It was shirt-sleeve weather, like fall without the colorful leaves or spring without the flowers.

Finally, there’s the letter I mailed to President Trump yesterday. Since I’ve never watched his reality television shows and didn’t vote for him, it certainly wasn’t a fan letter. But its tone was much more respectful than his treatment of his “enemies” has been over the past year.

I kept my letter simple. I respectfully asked him to tell the truth, especially when his own words and actions come into question; to set a good moral example as president, since many evangelical Christians hold him in such high regard; to obey our Constitution and laws; to please, please stop using Twitter in such a divisive way; and, if he is, in fact, a Christian himself as many of his supporters claim, to remember Jesus’ second-greatest admonition to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

I have no delusions about him actually reading my letter; however, if the new White House correspondence office keeps track of constituents’ letters and their basic contents, I want my requests tallied along with those of other citizens who expect President Trump to act better than Candidate Trump, Reality TV Star Trump, and Real Estate Mogul Trump have behaved in public.

Only time will tell whether anything anyone says or does will make any difference. And that “anyone” includes President Trump himself.