Senator Pat Toomey Has Responded!

Yesterday, I received my second letter from Senator Pat Toomey.

April 9 of this year, I posted his first response.  My best guess is that it was written as an answer to the questions I posed in my first letter to him - though it was kinda vague.

Unfortunately with yesterday's letter, I can't really tell exactly which of my eleven letters I've sent he's answering.

It's dated April 17, so that rules out my tenth and eleventh letters (dated April 18 and 25, respectively).  I can't imagine he's responding again to the first, so that leaves letters two through nine.

His first sentence reads:

Thank you for contacting me about President Donald Trump. I appreciate hearing from you.

The ninth, eighth, fifth, and fourth letters have no specific references to Trump, so they're out. The seventh has just a passing reference to Trump ("...I was struck by your defense of Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch.") but was more about the Republican obstructionism of the Obama presidency, so that's probably out as well. The sixth is about Trump's stubborn adherence to the false story President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower and whether that stubbornness has eroded Senator Toomey's confidence in him - so that's a possibility. The third letter is about another one of Trump's tweets. I asked whether the senator agreed with Donald J Trump that the press is the "enemy of the people." - so that's another possibility. The second letter is, again, about Donald Trump pushing things that are demonstrably untrue:

• The terror attack in Sweden
• Trump's electoral college win that was the largest since Reagan
• The murder rate is the highest in 47 years
• Between 3 and 5 million illegal votes were cast in 2016

And I ask Senator Toomey if he's concerned about any of that, and if not, why not.

And this is what he sent me:

I'm guessing that since his first response was to my first letter, this second response is to my second letter but it's wa-a-a-ay iffy. 

You'll note that the letter addresses none of my Trump-related concerns.  He begins acknowledging the "wide array of opinions regarding the President" (even though at this point Trump's disapproval rating is about 14 points below is approval). He then quotes Hillary Clinton's concession speech and her saying that "we owe him an open mind and the chance to lead" and that she hopes "he will be a successful president for all Americans."

We need only to look at those approval ratings to see that, so far, that last part's a complete failure.

Trump has had a chance to act "presidential" (a hundred days, in fact) and yet he's still clinging to the "Obama wiretapped me" story. And only yesterday:

The U.S. president had a historical question: Why did America's Civil War happen? "Why could that one not have been worked out?"

Remarks by Donald Trump, aired Monday, showed presidential uncertainty about the origin and necessity of the Civil War, a defining event in U.S. history with slavery at its core. Trump also declared that President Andrew Jackson was angry about "what was happening" with regard to the war, which started 16 years after his death, and could have stopped it if still in office.

And:

Trump's comments about the war came after he lauded Jackson, the populist president whom he and his staff have cited as a role model. He suggested that if Jackson had been president "a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War."

"He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, 'There's no reason for this,'" Trump continued.

And so to Donald J. Trump, the slave-owning Andrew Jackson would have done a better job than Republican Abraham Lincoln in dealing with slavery and secession and Civil war. If only Jackson had been alive at the time.

And should we be approaching this with an "open mind" Senator?