Working on Empathy and Other Concerns: An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Dear President Trump,

Let us all wish and work for a peaceful and just New Year.

The American people are spending a significant amount of time observing and thinking about your presidency and its robust tweeting operation as President. Three areas of interest and concern comprise this letter's purpose:

1. With news of the forthcoming medical examination by your physicians there will be renewed interest in your medical records and medical condition. This is true of all Presidents, but more so with you, because you have not been as forthcoming or anywhere near as complete in your disclosures about the state of your health during the campaign and since you became President last January.

The other concern relates to your diets and habits. You have what some nutritionists colloquially call a "cardiac diet" - full of foods containing fat, salt and sugar. A recent report said you drink about 12 cans of artificially sweetened diet coke a day! With artificial sweeteners. You have said you sleep less than normal people. You are overweight. Not a good combination, say physicians and health scientists, that is conductive to good health. And then there is the added stress of just being President and constantly being viscerally angry at critics here and abroad. People just doing things with their constitutional freedom, to which you strenuously object, seems to aggravate you.

Please release your full medical records with the necessary technical details and explanations to give the public confidence in your health

2. There is much writing and litigation about how you are enriching yourself from many private and public sources. The emoluments clause of the Constitution is much in the news as recurrent reports bring to public attention all the spenders going to your properties and those of your family hoping to ingratiate themselves with your favors, including diplomatic officials of foreign countries in Washington, DC and New York City, and other public officials patronizing your properties abroad.

Since you have not fully divested from your properties, there is all the more reason for you to release several years of your tax returns, including the most recent return. Even your supporters have wondered, "Why not, what has he got to hide?" Or more benignly, "Why not, he's got nothing to hide, everyone knows he is rich and has done lots of deals with lots of businesses and partnerships."

Will you recognize that you are a public official and owe the people the full tax information, most importantly, your assets, debts and other business dealings and partnerships?

3. There has been a vast conflict between your public statements assuring the people that "we want to protect our workers, their safety our health and we want to protect our air and our country's natural beauty." Moreover, last year you asserted that no one would go without healthcare.

By contrast, you have selected men and women to run your health and safety regulatory agencies and departments who were and are openly hostile to these agencies' official statutory missions. Like you, those you have appointed are boastful about their intention to dismantle limits on lethal or injurious impacts and actions that have been saving the lives, health and safety of the American people and protecting consumer dollars. You are aware of their sworn oath of office to uphold the laws under their jurisdiction - an oath preceded by similar assurances in their sworn congressional testimony at their Senate confirmation hearings.

The destruction of these federal agencies' missions, the degrading and marginalizing of their scientists, engineers, ecologists, economists and other professional public servants are without precedent. What is also unique is that your heads of EPA, the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, Education, Labor and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are contemptuous of the missions of their agencies. The neglect, reversals or replacements are letting more Americans, including children, die, get sick or be injured - on your Presidential watch! And the enablers of unprosecuted corporate crime and wrongdoing that are just getting underway -revoking or suspending rules and even brazenly pulling back on enforcement actions which are nearing settlements, sanctions or prohibitions. This abdication also creates a climate than can increase corporate abuses of workers and consumers.

Of course, there is prosecutorial or enforcement discretion, with priorities for action. That is not the situation here. This is a wholesale wrecking crew of non-enforcement of laws, taking the federal cops off the corporate crime, fraud and abuse beat. This is a demolition death dance cutting enforcement budgets, pushing conscientious enforcement officials out the door or leaving them with nothing to do, thereby wasting taxpayer money. Such zealotry keeps pushing the envelope until preventable disasters occur or serious scandals emerge. That's when it reaches your desk.

Pay attention to what those you have appointed are undoing, if only because they will be doing in your congressional supporters in November. You should start with the Rogue's gallery of Mick Mulvaney, grinding down the CFPB, Alex Acosta, the Secretary Against Labor, Scott Pruitt, Chief Toxifier at the EPA, Ryan Zinke, Oil-Driller-in-Chief on the federal lands and offshore, Sonny Perdue, the anti-nutritionist at USDA, Scott Gottlieb, the drug industry's man at the FDA, and Betsy DeVos, the corporatist, jeopardizing students at the Department of Education.

It would help if you are seen working on your empathy for the tens of millions of deprived and innocent people, including children, exposed to various forms of risk and exploitation in their daily lives here and abroad whom you are adversely affecting.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader