President Donald J. Trump’s Very Big Letter to Nancy Pelosi, Annotated

A Note to Our Readers: If you hate yourself, you can go read President Trump’s indelible letter here, but frankly we’d advise against it. Instead, Awesome’s Razor has attempted to break down the President’s missive in full. He regrets the decision.

THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON

December 17, 2019

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

Can you even imagine how much President Trump hates having to use formal titles with his political rivals? You know someone has to tell him every time that he can’t start his letter, “Dear Crazy Nancy…”

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued…

Strong alliteration game tho. 

…by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

Right, never before in American history has a president been impeached by a blatantly partisan House of Representatives for political non-crimes. 

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. 

Donald Trump probably thinks “jurisprudence” is a dessert and he won’t eat it because he doesn’t like raisins. 

They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

Truly, this man wouldn’t wish impeachment on his own worst enemies, except for all of his enemies. 

By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers…

This is one the best lines in the letter. This man gazes into the light of history like it’s a solar eclipse. He’s blind now, but his retinas have felt true power — now he shall wield it! 

…in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme, yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America’s founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build.

Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith… 

Say what, now?

…by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. 

Ooooh, he just double-negged Ol’ Broken-Rosary Nancy into oblivion with that rhetorical move right there. Classic playground debate move. She’s on the ropes! Finish her!

It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I.”

“Not I!” honks the President from the window of the Oval Office. His words are carried off to history on a chill winter breeze, when, by a bit of White House magic, the paint around Andrew Jackson’s ever-watchful visage dries a bit and his stoic sneer cracks like Jimmy Fallon. The ghosts of history whisper, “Y’all watching this shit?!”

Your first claim, “Abuse of Power,” is a completely disingenuous, meritless, and baseless invention of your imagination. You know that I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine. 

Buddy, if you have to state for the record that you had “a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine,” you missed your exit. 

I then had a second conversation that has been misquoted, mischaracterized, and fraudulently misrepresented. Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available)…

A redacted summary of the full transcript which is still hidden on a password-protected ser–oh, god, why am I even doing this.

…that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.

I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States. 

I had to go back and check the original letter to make sure I was reading this one correctly. In fact, yes, here he’s just name-checking the office of the Attorney General, essentially live-blogging the transcript of his call as he replays it in his head to write about it in a letter to the Speaker of the House. Totally normal, all of this. 

Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America’s interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky. 

You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense—it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.

I have just now reached the second page of Trump’s six-page letter. Fuck, what have I done…

You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: “I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars’… I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it “looked bad.” Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. 

“No Pressure,” I assume, is the name of a single released by Weird Al and the Ukrainian president, which, like the removal of our president, “does not exist” but, if we play our cards right, perhaps it will.

He further emphasized that it was a “good phone call,” that “I don’t feel pressure,” and explicitly stressed that “nobody pushed me.” The Ukrainian Foreign Minister stated very clearly: “I have never seen a direct link between investigations and security assistance.” He also said there was “No Pressure.”

Why are all these people denying the existence of this song? Really makes you think. 

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a supporter of Ukraine who met privately with President Zelensky, has said: “At no time during this meeting… was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid.” Many meetings have been held between representatives of Ukraine and our country. Never once did Ukraine complain about pressure being applied—not once!

Here we have a bully toasting a kid whose lunch money he tried to steal by gushing, “I was twisting his arm, but he never cried! Not once!”

Ambassador Sondland…

A man who bravely undermined arguments that the deep state represents a real and pernicious threat to our nation by exposing himself to be part of the real threat: an army of supremely unqualified political donors actively working in the federal government.

…testified that I told him: “No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on.”

The second claim, so-called “Obstruction of Congress,” is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation’s history. Under that standard, every American president would have been impeached many times over. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats: “I can’t emphasize this enough… if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It’s your abuse of power. You’re doing precisely what you’re criticizing the President for doing.”

Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. 

Fuck, man, I wish I knew what was happening. Your shit has been exhausting from Day 1 and even when I try to look away, I can’t; partly because I can’t not watch a trainwreck but also because you don’t ever shut the fuck up. And yet, inscrutable. All of it. 

Your chosen candidate lost the election…

She who shall not be named! 

…in an Electoral College landslide (306-227)…

Scoreboard! (Also, not a landslide.) But get ready, folks, here comes the piece de resistance of this entire letter: 

…and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement and sadly, you will never get over it!

[chef’s kiss] The moment Trump wrote these words he had the idea to name himself the U.S. poet laureate, but resisted; his work is not done. 

You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box… 

Hillary Clinton – 65,853,514
Donald Trump – 62,984,828

Uh, wrong scoreboard, dude. 

…during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!

Speaker Pelosi… 

Why is the President addressing her by name two pages into the letter? Does he think someone else is reading this?

…you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party’s impeachment effort has been going on for “two and a half years,” long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office the Washington Post published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.”

This might be the first true thing President Trump has ever said. I absolutely believe that he knows exactly how many minutes it took for the Washington Post to publish an article attacking him, and just like President Trump I’m not even going to bother to fact check it. 

Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, “I’m going to fight every day until he’s impeached. House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country’s best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports) who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib…

Rep. Talib should absolutely put that quote on her CV. 

…declared just hours after she was sworn into office, “We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the Representative Al Green said in May, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.” Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine.

It’s hard to believe, I know, but it is true: there was a period of time when President Trump did things that weren’t related to Ukraine that also merited impeachment.

As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine… 

NARRATOR: It does.

…or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president.

NARRATOR: It wasn’t. 

It only has to do with your attempt to undo the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!

Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me. 

President Trump is searching for his fainting couch at the mere idea his reputation has been wounded by an obvious joke. This is a man who “makes jokes” and calls people offensively ridiculous insults at least ten times a day and who I’m frankly astonished hasn’t figured out how to make the State Department formally change Rep. Pelosi passport to read “Crazy Nancy” as her legal name. 

His is shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.

I’m going to have to start ignoring some of these still very juicy bits if I’ve ever going to get to the end of this letter. Now I understand why Burneko inserts a YouTube video of a sad trombone in his NBA season preview instead of, say, “writing about the New York Knicks.” 

You and your party are desperate to distract from America’s extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market, soaring confidence, and flourishing…

WOAH, WOAH, WOAH. Hold up there. I see what you’re trying to do! You’re trying to bulk this letter up! Mulvany tell you it had to be six pages? Let me guess, you turned in two, double-spaced, two-and-a-half-inch margins and he said, “Mr. President, you really need one-inch margins, max, and it has to be single-spaced. This is an unhinged letter to the American People, not a term paper,” and so now you’re trying to copy-paste your stump speech right up into it, aren’t you? Didn’t think I would notice, it just flows so naturally? Well, ya’ busted! Let’s get back to your impeachment, bucko. 

There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. 

Oh, I sincerely doubt that. 

Unfortunately, I don’t know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.

I have a four-year-old who reacts the same way when I tell him he can have more cookies “later.”

After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found few people in high position could have endured or passed this test. 

You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family. 

He’s right. I don’t care. 

You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States, and you are doing it yet again.

Buddy, just because you won’t or can’t read the Constitution doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. 

There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens. But instead of putting our country first, you have decided to disgrace our country still further. You completely failed with the Mueller report because there was nothing to find, so you decided to take the next hoax that came along, the phone call with Ukraine—even though it was a perfect call. And by the way… 

So, I checked with the Library of Congress. This is the first ever appearance of “And by the way” in presidential correspondence. Hard to believe, I know. 

…when I speak to foreign countries… 

You yell loudly in English so they’ll understand you? 

…there are many people, with permission, listening to the call on both sides of the conversation.

You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. 

And now, for your entertainment, President Trump will perform a piece he likes to call, Capitol Letters: 

You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain. Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and regardless of the truth, you and your deputies claimed that my campaign colluded with the Russians—a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other. You forced our Nation through turmoil and torment over a wholly fabricated story, illegally purchased from a foreign spy by Hillary Clinton…

Oh, so you can say her name!

…and the DNC in order to assault our democracy. Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. 

The guy who doesn’t believe other people can pray for him wants to talk about forgiveness. 

You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection. Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person. All of this was motivated by personal political calculation. Your Speakership and your party are held hostage by your most deranged and radical representatives of the far left. Each one of your members lives in fear of a socialist primary challenger—this is what is driving impeachment. Look at Congressman Nadler’s challenger. Look at yourself and others. Do not take our country down with your party.

This isn’t fun anymore. This guy is fucking nuts. 

If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our Nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources… 

Literally your entire legal argument to this point has been that Congress doesn’t have “vast investigative resources” but okay. 

… into exposing the full truth concerning the horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election—including the use of spies against my campaign, the submission of false evidence to a FISA court, and the concealment of exculpatory evidence in order to frame the innocent. 

Five guys you campaigned with are in jail but one of them gets vindicated and now you want to talk about it. 

The FBI has great and honorable people, but the leadership was inept and corrupt. I would think that you would personally be appalled by these revelations, because in your press conference the day you announced impeachment, you tied the impeachment effort directly to the completely discredited Russia Hoax, declaring twice that “all roads lead to Putin” when you know that is an abject lie. I have been far tougher on Russia than President Obama ever even thought to be.

Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment—against every shred of truth fact, evidence, and legal principle—is showing how deeply they revile the voters and how truly they detest America’s Constitutional order. Our Founders feared the tribalization of partisan politics, and you are bringing their worst fears to life.

It’s true: Washington cautioned against the rise of factions, but let’s be clear about that context.

The rise of factions in American politics was due to a lot of everyday Americans who couldn’t understand why their government was abandoning allies who were fighting for their lives in a revolution against monarchy after having just fought for ours; why their government was choosing isolationist neutrality to placate a foreign government; why Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury, was wielding such enormous influence over a government that was plainly ignoring the growing concern of voters.

The rise of factions in America was, in fact, a reaction and attempt to foil the efforts of Federalists to assert unchecked power over Americans. And here we are, 250 years later, right back where we started. 

Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process…

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

…from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made. Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be presented), the so-called whistleblower, and the second whistleblower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud, and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew up but that didn’t stop you from continuing.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

Look, if you’d prefer we stage this they way they did the Salem Witch Trials, just ask Crazy Nancy. I bet she’d do it. 

You and others on your committees have long said impeachment must be bipartisan—it is not. You said it was very divisive—it certainly is, even far more than you ever thought possible—and it will only get worse!

This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup… 

NARRATOR: It was not a coup.

…that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you as you proceed with this impeachment Charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution.

Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There is no reticence. This is not a somber affair. You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans. The voters are wise… 

Oh, but I have 63,000,000 pieces of evidence that suggests otherwise. 

…and they are seeing straight through this empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.

Why did I ever think doing this was a good idea?

I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.

There is far too much that needs to be done to improve the lives of our citizens. It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.

Literally everything you do creates a permanent and indelible record. It’s called the Presidential Records Act. 

One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair… 

I’m honestly relieved he thinks humans will exist in 100 years. 

I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again.

Thank god this is over. There’s really only one thing to say to this guy: 

@realDonaldTrump Go fuck yourself.

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) January 17, 2013

Donald J. Trump
President of the United States of America

cc: United States Senate
United States House of Representatives