Richard Hudson

Dear Mr. Chairman,

Your letter about the 2026 mid-term elections arrived at my Virginia home last week.

You wrote to say my name was forwarded to you as “a top Republican and leading Trump supporter.” You thanked me for everything I had done for the Republican Party and for “our beloved nation.”

A $47 check came with your letter. I was elated at my good fortune until I went to deposit it electronically. Then, I discovered the fine print, which read: “This check is a facsimile. Not redeemable nor negotiable and has no cash value.”

Kind of a bait and switch, don’t you think, Mr. Chairman? Turns out you wanted me to send you at least $47 because “a group of generous patriots” would match every donation of $47 or more “over the next 30 days!”

Your reasoning went as follows:

You pay attention, so you know that if just a handful of seats flip from red to blue, the Democrats will retake power in the House. And if we lose our House majority, the far-left, ICE-hating radicals will enact the most woke agenda this country has ever seen. And there will be no end to their corrupt, desperate witch hunts against President Trump.

The choice of bold-face type and hyperbolic language to instill fear and urgency is predictable in almost every political party’s fundraising letters. It is also a tactic as trite and tired as it is expected. But I get it, Mr. Chairman. Things are growing desperate for America’s Grand Old Party based on the sociopathic, unconstitutional, cruel and likely criminal behavior of the GOP’s grand old leader, Donald J. Trump.

A solid majority of Americans don’t like the way Trump is running this country in most ways, foreign and domestic. So, I don’t understand why you would want to elect more “America First Republicans” to Congress. You say it is so they “can send more pro-borders, pro-freedom, pro jobs legislation to President Trump’s desk for his signature.”

Job growth has been stagnant under Trump, so it would be great if the new jobs “America First Republicans” create go to hardworking regular Americans and not to wealthy defense contractors to finance an unnecessary war with Iran that the president started. Trump’s attacks on Iran, a country he threatened to bomb out of existence, even as intelligence officials said it posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Trump’s needless war has used up much of our critical missile supply. The war just led the president to propose a $1.5 trillion federal defense budget to Congress for 2027, an increase of 44% over 2026.

Trump plans to pay for the increases in military spending with a 10% cut in domestic programs many of which provide essentials such as health care and utility assistance to Americans struggling to make ends meet.

By the way, Mr. Chairman, almost every gas station I visited before Trump’s Feb. 28 attack on Iran charged less than $3 a gallon. Now, little more than a month later, I can find very few with gas for less than $4 a gallon.

The war has helped drive a 3.3 % increase in inflation since the beginning of the year. But even before we went to war for no reason, Trump’s tariffs had caused my costs for food and other necessities to rise. Those costs will likely rise more if Trump gets a giant increase in defense spending, which invites more inflation and increases the national deficit.

In any event, Trump and his Republican enablers will add enormously to the human suffering already occasioned by the president’s existing Big Beautiful Budget bill. Before the war, the BBB put millions of Americans at risk of losing access to affordable health insurance premiums and coverage by Medicaid, health insurance for those with low incomes and disabilities.

I missed that in your fundraising letter.

I am not sure what you mean by “pro-borders and pro-freedom” laws. To me, they mean immigration rules that give people fleeing terrorism, authoritarianism and destitution a path to legal status, then citizenship so they can help the United States maintain its global economic and scientific leadership.

As a country, we have a long history of finding a way to turn immigrants into productive members of society. Wave upon wave of foreigners who come seeking a better life arrived here with the work ethic to find it. America profited from their desire. It was a win-win.

These days, Republicans in the White House and in Congress want to turn immigrants, especially non-white people, into scapegoats. Republicans dehumanize immigrants as criminals even as crime rates show immigrants commit less crime than U.S. citizens.

The truth, Mr. Chairman, is that pro-borders and pro-freedom could co-exist and continue to make this country an example for the world. But that requires abiding by the constitutional guarantees of equality, free speech and due process of law. Honoring those promises reinforces what were supposed to be our country’s underlying principles: tolerance and opportunity.

Those principles will never exist in the white nationalist theocracy that Trump hopes to create as Congressional Republicans choose to stand by, afraid to challenge him.

Cowardice is a form of complicity, Mr. Chairman.

In your letter, you said you wanted to use my donation to “hire more ICE agents and deport record numbers of illegal aliens.” That was not what Trump said he was going to do. He said he was going to deport undocumented violent criminals and drug dealers, something most Americans agreed with. He never mentioned using masked government agents with automatic weapons to detain people with honest jobs.

He never mentioned throwing people with legal status into detention. He did not speak of separating children from parents. He never mentioned deporting people without constitutionally guaranteed due process hearings. Or bashing through doors. Or hanging outside of courtrooms to grab people as they tried to follow the process toward citizenship. Or abducting foreign-born college students off the street.

Not all ICE agents are like that. But what Trump’s xenophobic policies have given us is a subset of goons who violently manhandle people and squirt pepper spray point blank into people’s faces. These are the government agents and leaders from whom many Americans now recoil. They are the ones who hide behind masks as they injure and intimidate. The ones who beat people or break their bones and lie about what they did with their leaders’ blessings. They are the ones who kill U.S. citizens exercising their constitutional right to question or resist ICE’s Gestapo tactics.

You asked me for a donation to support congressional Republicans who have let a mad man run amok at the expense of every class of American except the superrich.

Well, Mr. Chairman, I don’t know who forwarded my name to you as someone who would send money to support that. But I guess you better take me off your mailing list.

Jim Spencer of Williamsburg is a former Minnesota Star Tribune Washington correspondent, Denver Post and Daily Press columnist, Chicago Tribune feature writer and Virginian-Pilot journalist. He started his career at The Virginia Gazette in 1975.