CLEVELAND, Ohio — Kathy Hayes isn’t good at public speaking. She’s in no way held workplace. She’s not a lawyer or a political technology principal. In reality, she’s pretty normal. But she will write. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, Kathy has written to him each day — stamped letters, no longer emails — except for two days in April 2017, a quick hiatus took after she placed her dog, Sammie, to sleep. That’s nearly 1,000 letters if you depend on the handful she despatched earlier than he took office.
“I’ve probably requested him to renounce 800 instances,” she says. Sometimes, she even says, “Please.” An empty nester at fifty-two, Kathy and her husband Chris proportion a rambling, e-book-stuffed ranch in Richfield with lately followed gray kittens that tumble from room to room. Bespectacled and nice, she seems a more friendly librarian than a rabble-rouser. And nobody 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 became efficient as haiku.
Kathy has lived in Richfield, midway between Cleveland and Akron, her entire existence. When her network voted to send Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, Kathy, who’d, in the main, been recognized as an Independent, found herself in a deeply dismaying minority. Kathy put her arms to the keyboard rather than commiserating with like-minded pals over cocktails, posting rants on Facebook, or planting her head deep inside the Lake Erie sand.
She addressed her letters to “President Trump” till his comments about “a few very excellent people on both facets” on the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. She despatched her letters to “Oval Office occupant” after that. When a number of the letters started again, “I began addressing them to President forty-five,” she says. Kathy usually composes her letters in the evenings on a tabletop computer in her library, her father’s Purple Heart medal in a pitcher body on a shelf above her. He changed into significantly wounded when a mortar shell exploded close to where he and his pals had been dug at the Battle of the Bulge.
“The things my Dad did for us were so difficult,” Kathy says. “You recognize 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 may mean analyzing the Mueller document or heading to a nearby town to pay attention to former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe to explain why sellers opened an investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign conspired with Russia.
Once signed and sealed, she drops her Executive correspondence in a mailbox on her way to paintings. Every Monday morning, she mails letters—on Saturdays and Sundays. Civic engagement is a 24-hour job; she does not have weekends off.
Kathy is a copy editor and creator for a national business-to-enterprise magazine, so her observations aren’t just incisive and nicely crafted—they’re also grammatically accurate.
Occasionally, she offers the President unfastened “language suggestions” in a PS “so that you can improve your tweets.” Or she gives him “a word of the day,” a sport her family performed when she was a child as they accumulated across the dinner table. “Compassion was one. The decorum was every other. A third turned into “restraint.”
