May 15, 2017

Open letter to the Honorable Mitch McConnell
317 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Fax: (202) 224-2499

          Re: Termination of the Presidency of Donald John Trump

Dear Majority Leader McConnell,

We are writing to you today to discuss the pivotal and immediate role that you personally play in the very future of the American experiment in democracy, as well as the singular power you have to facilitate the possibility that the Republican Party will retain its hold on the Oval Office and Congress for more than one single term.

You may or many not know us… by way of a brief background, The Domino Principle provides strategies for seeing “deep repercussions” in world events and realizing how chain reactions produce future outcomes. The concept behind The Domino Principle evolved from the now famous speech given by Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 7, 1954, in which he stated: “Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” Ten individual Domino Principles provide a framework for understanding how events happening today impact our lives tomorrow.

In pursuit of The Domino Principle’s mission to understand how events happening today impact our lives tomorrow, we have long followed your career, as we have many aspects of contemporary American politics. During the eight years of the Obama presidency, you spoke out loudly and often regarding the ways in which you saw his administration as being harmful to America. In some cases we viewed such statements as partisan criticism, appropriate for a minority leader to voice on behalf of his party. In other cases, you spoke vocally regarding deeper issues, including abuse of power by the administration. Americans, regardless of political persuasion, could stand behind your calls for our government to act with honesty and integrity.

Today we see a presidential administration in place that in less than 120 days has already, in the opinion of many, far exceeded the transgressions of the Obama administration. Many Americans truly believed the promises of the Republican Party to bring a deeper level of integrity to America, and instead we have an administration that seems intent and at times even gleefully prideful on taking every single abuse of power by the previous administration and finding a way to vastly exceed it. And many members of Congress seem complicit in allowing it to continue.

Senator McConnell, your actions over your career have demonstrated that you are quite an intelligent man.

We are virtually certain that we are not telling you anything you don’t already know when we note that, while we may not know to whom Donald Trump has debts and for how much, and we may not know whether his love of so many things Russia and Putin stems from blackmail, financial ties, ideology, or his genuine spirit of admiration for malevolent dictators — we do already know that he shows an affinity to the Russians in ways that he should not.

We are not telling you anything you don’t already know when we point out that Donald Trump has surrounded himself in the White House with people who have no business being part of our government.

We are not telling you anything you don’t already know when we point out that Donald Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family in a way unlike anyone has done previously.

We are not telling you anything you don’t already know when we point out that Donald Trump acts in a manner consistent with an individual suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and other serious mental health issues, that he seems unable to differentiate fact from fiction, and that he often seems completely unknowledgeable even about the basic facts of the legislation he signs and endorses.

We are not telling you anything you don’t already know when we point out that Donald Trump’s modus operandi centers on corruption and abuse of power. And that each time he engages in the abuse of power and it goes unchecked, he is emboldened to pursue even greater abuses of power. And that the reactions of the American people to his ever increasing misconduct inevitably will encompass greater and greater acts of civil protest coupled with severe negative repercussions impacting the ability of Republican members of Congress to be re-elected. We are in the midst of an out-of-control spiral of cascading dominoes that will, if not stopped, inevitably tear America apart and destroy the Republican Party.

One week ago we projected that the odds were 35% that Donald Trump would fail to complete his term of office. The events of the past week, primarily those surrounding the firing of FBI Director Comey followed by the celebration of Russians in the White House the following morning, have caused us to revise that likelihood as now being greater than 50%.

In the near term, it isn’t a question of whether the Republican Party will hold the Oval Office. If Donald Trump leaves office, Mike Pence will assume the presidency. Most Americans, even those who deeply disagree with Vice President Pence from a partisan perspective, don’t see him as someone who is mentally unstable, they don’t see him as beholden to Putin, and they don’t see him as likely to use the presidency to enrich himself personally. And we have little doubt that at this point, the majority in Congress would rather work with a Mike Pence presidency than Donald Trump’s never ending world of chaos and corruption.

The real open question is which of these three possibilities is going to come to pass:

1) Will Trump’s presidency come to an end in a manner that tears America apart and destroys the Republican Party? or

2) Will Trump’s presidency come to an end in a manner that allows the Republican Party to find a moral high ground and give itself at least a chance of retaining power in the future? or

3) Will Trump retain power and in the process transform America away from democracy and towards illiberalism and fascism?

And that is where you come into the equation, Senator McConnell. You are the key “domino” in the entire system who can easily choose which of these three scenarios becomes reality. You have an opportunity to make your name in history in a positive fashion, well beyond anything you have already done in your distinguished career. If you stand up in front of the American people, call for an independent commission to investigate Trump/Russia, and call for your colleagues in Congress to begin the process of impeachment and then conviction, you can make the second option play itself out in a matter of months. Then, you can start working to further your conservative agenda over the remainder of the term without all this insanity. And you can bring pride to the Republican Party as being the American political party that had the backbone to take strong steps against one of its own who has deeply abused the office of the presidency.

As I know you are aware, the Constitution allows impeachment for the commission of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” “High crimes” refer to violation of “public trust,” by abusing power, breaching ethics, or undermining the Constitution. In 1970, then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford defined the criterion as he saw it: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Should they choose to stand up and do so, the House will have no difficulty making a case that such acts of abuse have occurred, and you should have no difficulty in persuading a majority of the Senate that it is time to bring Mike Pence into the office of the presidency.

Which side of history are you going to be on, Senator McConnell? Will you be the Senate Majority Leader who allowed Donald Trump to destroy the American experiment in democracy?; will you be the Senate Majority Leader who stood by and did nothing while America tore itself apart?; or will you be the Senate Majority Leader who had the backbone to step up and save the country?

This is the defining moment in your career, Senator McConnell.

The American people are counting on you to make the right decision.

Sincerely,

Clifford R. Kurtzman, Ph.D.
Executive Director
The Domino Principle

If you found this letter of value, please help this go viral by sharing it on FaceBook and Twitter, and feel free to use relevant portions of what we have written to draft your own letters to Senator Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and your own Senators and Congressional Representative (use this link to the National Priorities Project to see how to easily contact them). Also please consider supporting the March for Truth taking place in cities around the world on June 3, 2017. Finally, also check out the Indivisible Guide for more ideas on how to #Resist. 

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Cliff Kurtzman

Founder at The Domino Principle

Described as "pragmatically reckless with a high tolerance for ambiguity," Dr. Cliff Kurtzman is the founder of The Domino Principle. He is also an award winning entrepreneur, speaker, trend forecaster, and M.I.T.-trained rocket-scientist. Over the past 25 years, Cliff has launched several highly successful ventures by seeing technology trends in the world before they became widely realized, figuring out how they would impact our lives and then creating businesses that leveraged those trends ahead of many others. His bio is at http://www.kurtzman.biz.

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