The Donald Trump Letter

Political art. I do not often admire it. Not because I am indifferent, but because it so often takes the easy road. Easy is rarely worth the journey. And yet, sometimes, the occasion demands it.

It is simple to mock the surface: the hair, the orange hue, the rumors of smallness in hands and elsewhere. Such gestures may relieve our tension, but they are hollow victories, fireworks in a storm. The truth is heavier. Donald Trump is contemptible without caricature. Misogyny, cruelty toward the disabled, a torrent of lies that flow as naturally as breath. And lately, the suggestion that the First Amendment itself should be rescinded when it dares to point in his direction.

“You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”

Lie and deny. That is the program. And for now, it works.

About the Artwork

The piece you hold—or may download, or may mail—is meant to live on paper. Letter-size paper, the most ordinary of stages. It is digital-analog, multi-voiced, participatory mail art. A small rebellion designed to pass through the postal system, to land in hands that must touch it, if only to discard it.

The work borrows its tone from the infamous birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump denies writing. Its silhouette is unmistakably his profile, stripped to outline. Not grotesque, not a cheap distortion, but simply the shape itself—enough to summon him, to make the text within vibrate against the form.

The words are not mine but his, preserved in Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump In The White House: They are all the more chilling because they require no embellishment.

This work does not list every crime, every cruelty. I resist the temptation to bury the viewer in particulars. Sometimes a single question is sharper than a hundred accusations. And so it ends simply: How will history remember you?

No reply is requested. The work demands only reflection.

Changing Hearts and Minds

Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, argues that we cling fiercely to our moral intuitions, and rarely shift them by evidence alone. It is other people who change us—when conversation softens the edges, when we are forced to sit with the uncomfortable for long enough. Art can do this too. A question lingers longer than a shouted slogan.

Donald Trump, above all, craves loyalty. He consumes it where he can find it. But every loyalty contains the possibility of fracture. Somewhere, a domino waits to be nudged.

I often think of that scene in Miracle on 34th Street, when bags of letters to Santa Claus are dragged into the courtroom. Paper has a presence that pixels cannot match. An email can be ignored with a click. A letter must be touched, sorted, discarded. It insists upon itself, if only for a moment.

Imagine, then, thousands of these works arriving uninvited in the mail—on the desks of senators, in the offices of party leaders, perhaps even on the breakfast table of the First Lady. A note attached: Dear Mrs. Trump, imagine the history you could make by becoming the first woman to divorce a sitting president. Would it heal America? Not directly. But it would signal that resistance is possible within even the most gilded cage.

The domino waits. Perhaps this work will help it fall.

And so I send it to you, to keep or to discard, to tack to a bulletin board or bury in a drawer. To be art, to be trash, to be both at once.

With defiance,

Frank Artinghard

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead