Dear President Trump,

It’s taken me a while to realize and admit this, but I’m grateful to you.

I’ve spent a decade openly lamenting your presence and the poison it has so effortlessly released into our nation’s blood system.

Today, I find myself horrified at a second term that is doing even greater damage than I ever imagined it could. My heart has been hourly broken as I’ve watched our country imploding, our public discourse become polluted, our daily existence grow ever more corrosive, and I’ve wrongly assumed you were to blame.

Yet, I’ve come to understand that you haven’t manufactured our current national ugliness; you’ve simply revealed it and leveraged it.

By generating a limitless torrent of hateful, mean-spirited ignorance, you’ve given other like-minded people license to do the same. You’ve opened up the floodgates for their collective moral sewage to flow fully. People no longer hide their malevolence behind feigned politeness and phony civility; they now revel in it, they broadcast it, and they celebrate it.

You’ve made bigotry, misogyny, and racism socially acceptable again, and that has been a kind of twisted gift because it’s allowed me to really see people, not as they pretend to be on the surface, but in the very depths of their closed and calloused hearts.

Over and over throughout the last decade, your supporters would always tell me that they liked you because you “speak your mind,” yet I realized a long time ago that it is because you speak their minds. You’ve given credence to their phobias, sanctioned their prejudices, and normalized their contempt for their neighbors.

Thanks to the terrible ground you’ve broken, politicians, pastors, friends, and strangers, both in person and on social media, now regularly out themselves as cruel, intolerant, and malicious. They remind me just how close they are to me, just how deep the sickness in us runs, and just how far a nation we have to go to become worthy of our songs and anthems.

You’ve emboldened people to be open about things they used to conceal for the sake of decorum, and though it turns my stomach, I know that this is the only way we can move forward; to have that cancerous stuff exposed fully so that it can be dealt with. Our progress as a nation is predicated on authentic dialogue, no matter how brutal and disheartening that dialogue is.

In other words, you’ve let us know what we’re really dealing with here and while it’s been rightly disturbing, it’s also been revelatory. That’s the thing about that kind of harsh light: you’re forced to see everything; beauty and monstrosity equally illuminated.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I think you are the most malignant President in our nation’s history, and I fear gravely for the world my children will inherit, should America survive your Presidency at all. I believe you’re a soulless, loveless, irredeemably hateful bottom-feeder; the very worst of what humanity has produced.

But regardless of what happens now, you’ve already allowed me the blessing of discovering the truth: about me, about my neighbors, about my friends and family members, and about our country.

And in the process, you’ve also shown me that I am not alone in resisting you and the sickening, grievous things you’ve revealed about us.

You’ve generated an equally loud, equally passionate response to it, and this is where I find my hope these days.

I find it in those for whom equality, freedom, and justice aren’t just cheap buzzwords or hollow sentiments; they are the most precious of hills to die on.

I find it in those people who refuse to be silent in the face of our moral regression.

I find it in those who are willing to be more bold in defending the inherent value of all people.

I find it in the growing army of those true patriots who will not tolerate hatred as a core American value.

I find it in human beings who fiercely reject white supremacy in every form.

I find it in those who reject violence as a default response to dissension.

I find it in the ever-rising voice of people who will not let your malice and bitterness represent them in the world.

I find it in the ordinary activists who will not allow us to repeat the worst of history here.

Today I find my hope in those who, like me, will not be complicit in allowing exclusion to become a source of national pride, who will not tolerate an America that is bereft of empathy and drained of diversity, because we’ve seen where that leads.

Yes, President Trump, you’ve unearthed our hidden afflictions, and you’ve paraded them unapologetically in the light of day.

You brought every awful thing about us out into the open so that we can face it without myth or misunderstanding.

You’ve shown me that America is greater than you and your sycophantic disciples’ repugnant plans for it, and that it is worth fighting for with everything I have.

And for all of this, I thank you.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe