Woman copes by writing daily letters to Trump
Kathy Hayes CLEVELAND — is not good at public speaking. She’s never held office. She’s not a lawyer or a political science major. In fact, she’s pretty ordinary. But she can write.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration January 20, 2017, Kathy has written to him every day — stamped letters, not emails — with the exception of two days in April 2017, a brief hiatus taken after she put her dog, Sammie, to sleep. That’s nearly 1,000 letters if you count the handful she sent before he took office.
“I’ve probably asked him to resign 800 times,” she says. Sometimes she even says “please.”
An empty nester at 52, Kathy and husband Chris share a rambling, book-filled ranch in Richfield with two recently adopted gray kittens that tumble from room to room.
Bespectacled and pleasant, she seems more friendly librarian than rabble-rouser. And no one who knows her would say she shares the Tweeter-in-Chief’s desire to hog the spotlight.
Her letters, however, are sharp as arrows, tipped with dry humor, disappointment and righteous anger.
Her first dispatch was efficient as haiku. President Trump, Here’s your chance. Try hard not to be a fascist dictator, ok? Sincerely,
Kathy S. Hayes Kathy has lived in Richfield, halfway between Cleveland and Akron her whole life. When her community voted to send Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, Kathy, who’d mostly identified as an Independent, found herself in a deeply dismayed minority. Rather than commiserating with like-minded friends over cocktails, posting rants on Facebook, or planting her head deep in the Lake Erie sand, Kathy put fingers to keyboard.
She addressed her letters to “President Trump” until his comments about “some very fine people on both sides” at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. She sent her letters to “Oval Office occupant” after that. When some of the letters started being returned, “I started addressing them to President 45,” she says.
Kathy usually composes her letters in the evenings on a desk top computer in her library, her father’s Purple Heart medal in a glass frame on a shelf above her. He was severely wounded when a mortar shell exploded near where he and his buddies were dug at the Battle of the Bulge.
“The things my dad did for his country were so hard,” Kathy says. “You know what? Darn it, I can write a letter.”
Some take a few minutes, others an hour or more, depending on how much research she has to do. That might mean reading the Mueller report or heading to a nearby town to hear former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe speak about why agents opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia.
Once signed and sealed, she drops her correspondence in a mailbox on the way to work. Every Monday morning, she mails two letters — Saturday’s and Sunday’s. Civic engagement is a 24-7 job; no weekends off.
Kathy is a copy editor and writer for a national business to business magazine, so her observations aren’t just incisive and well-crafted — they are also grammatically correct. Occasionally, she offers the president free “language pointers” in a PS, “so that you can improve your tweets.” Or, she presents him with “a word of the day,” a game her family played when she was a kid as they gathered around the dinner table. “Compassion” was one. “Decorum” another. A third was “restraint.”
“One need look at only a small sampling of your tweets to know that restraint is a quality you have yet to develop,” Kathy wrote.
“Restraint is a characteristic widely admired in grownups. President Obama has it. Supreme Court justices have it. Bus drivers, janitors, grocery clerks and soldiers have it. Men and women everywhere, including me, have a great deal of restraint. It keeps us from... riddling our correspondence to our elected officials with vile curse words.”
She has also sent a letter accompanied by a pocket-size copy of the Constitution. And one with an annotated children’s picture book about manners.
Kathy knows that owning up to her daily ritual will rub some the wrong way. “Am I nuts?” she asked a co-worker. “No,” he told her, just “dedicated.”
This is how one woman is getting through the Trump presidency.
She’s found that letter writing isn’t just therapeutic, but a way to document the latest outrage, so many, she says, it’s easy to lose track. Kathy runs through a short list of grievances: The bullying. The lying. The nepotism. Attacks on the media. And immigrants. And the FBI. And female legislators. (“You really have a problem with powerful women, don’t you?” she wrote on Dec. 12, 2017. “Pack your bags and go back to your penthouse.”)
She’s gotten 23 boiler plate responses bearing President 45’s instantly recognizable Richter scale signature. “I appreciate you taking the time to write. Your support means a great deal to Melania and me,” read one from The White House dated April 9, 2019.
Kathy is sure he’ll never read any of her letters. Sometimes, she’s felt like giving up. But she can’t quit now.
“I think a lot of it is standing up and saying, ‘For the record, this is not OK.’”
Fate intervened on a cold, rainy day last spring, when the presidential motorcade blew by her house. She painted RESIST on a bedsheet, hung it from her porch, called a few friends and staged a “mini protest” in her front yard. Kathy’s 89-year-old mother joined her, holding a sign some 4-feet long that said “RESIGN.”
In a letter dated March 29, 2018, Kathy wrote: “President 45,
You drove right by my house today; I was no more than 10 feet from your limousine. I hope you saw me... As one of your most faithful correspondents, it was very exciting for me to be able to convey my message to you in person.
Thanks for coming to our little town, screwing up traffic for hours and sucking up local tax dollars that could have been better spent on the actual needs of our community. Sincerely,
Kathy S. Hayes