1. United States
2. Ga.
3. Letter

I saw a recent quote attributed to the Washington Post that asserted the greatest threat facing the United States is its own President. I do not wholly agree with that, and this is why, and how you and other government leaders connect with what the true greatest threat might be: The forces that enabled Trump’s rise are also truly fearsome, because they are still at work, stand to receive great tax breaks from him, and have been running too much of government for a very, very long time... so long that nobody in leadership (including you, my Senators) sees them as the actionable domestic threat they are ... and thus do not see anything they or the convicted felon are planning, doing, and bragging about as TREASON. That is the worst kind of threat: one that grows under our own noses and that those in power won't even acknowledge as a threat. It's easy to target the buffoon at the top, and much harder to fix the system that helped put him there (twice). My understanding of the Federal oath I and other government servants took is obviously much different in its implications to me, compared to those who have succeeded more and have moved to high places in the government ranks. My oath would have made it a moral imperative to speak out against a domestic threat and actual treason when I saw it, which would have been a true conflict for me had I not retired from my 33-year Executive Branch Department civilian job in 2012. I already saw no promotion during my last twenty years there, arguably partially due to my speaking out against the wrongs I saw, and my refusal to give up constructive technical work and improving my skills in it in favor of what I saw as a loyalism-advancing management track. The planners of Trump’s ascent to power, including that convicted felon’s reelection and the lack of actual penalties in his sentencing, include those entities who have been working for decades, and who benefit from the legal fictions asserted by a Republican-controlled SCOTUS and its disastrous Citizens United ruling. The time to do more against this treason, this domestic threat subtly risen in the midst of a government leadership that is afraid to challenge it, or even to call it what it is, was long before now. But all we have is now. Treason is treason is treason. A domestic threat is a domestic threat. And inadequate action is both painfully visible, and woefully inexcusable. We pay taxes for government Defense and Justice. They should not genuinely be jobs left for ordinary citizens with much less money and only individual votes to try to fight the corrupt and powerful to stop … at the ballot box. But we’ll keep making good trouble as we must, and I need to add, it might not seem very “good” to those who have succeeded within the current corrupt system. Be a good government leader. Be a helper of society, not swayed by the “good” of Big Business or Unlimited Donations from Corporate “Persons”.