Dear Karoline,
Well, here we are, or more accurately, here you are.
I’d like to say I’m surprised, though that would be a lie.
We all saw this coming for you (well, those of us not indoctrinated into a treasonous predator’s mindless death cult). Like Pam and Tulsi and Kristi, and countless women before, you were destined to find yourself here.
This was always how this was going to end: with you finally understanding that you were never of any value to him, that you were always a tool; simply another expendable woman that he used for his pleasure and unceremoniously discarded.
This is the inevitable reality when one tethers themselves to a monster.
I imagine sitting on a decoy plane 36,000 feet above the planet with your life hanging in the balance was a terrifying way to have your wake-up call, but I guess some people have to learn their lessons the hard way.
Good people tried to warn you from the very first day you stood in front of a podium and confidently spoke words that were bereft of truth and harmful to millions, but once you sign away your soul, you have to ride the thing out to the end.
I wonder how you ended up here.
I wonder if you know.
I wonder, if in the quiet places, away from the lights and the bombast and the attention, you can now rewind through your story and see the thousands of small moral failures that led you to this place; the endless stream of seemingly insignificant concessions that began to overtake you.
I wonder if you can look back and see precisely where you lost the plot of the faith you so loudly profess; how you completely abandoned the compassionate, kind, loving Jesus of your religion and instead, willfully lied for a living on behalf of serial predator.
As you stood before the American people day after day, trafficking in untruth, justifying brutality, and celebrating prolific violence, all while wearing the cross of a dark-skinned foreigner who preached love for neighbor, did alarms of hypocrisy go off inside your head, or were the money and proximity to power too loud for you to hear?
But more than anything else, Karoline, I wonder if you feel like whatever you got for your soul was worth it.
Did eighteen months of rented importance, racists’ applause, and the public praise of a despot profit you enough to justify all that you sacrificed to get it?
When you realize that History has recorded every lie you uttered, documented each act of treason, and preserved each word of effusive praise for a war criminal, does that worry you at all?
When your young children grow up and learn that their mother was the strident mouthpiece for one of the most despicable human beings to ever walk the planet, will all of this have been worth it?
I can’t answer that for you—but from where I’m standing, it wasn’t.
It wasn’t worth the people beaten, abducted, and murdered by ICE.
It wasn’t worth the lives of children blown apart in Gaza and Ukraine and Iran and Lebanon.
It wasn’t worth the grief of families who’ve lost healthcare and their homes and their businesses, and their livelihoods.
It wasn’t worth the pain of trans teenagers, Latino mothers, and black men who’ve been terrorized by their neighbors and their Government.
It wasn’t worth a nation riddled with conspiracy, decimated by tribalism, and assailed by suffering.
Because, while you were not the author of this chaos and death, you were its spokesperson, Karoline. You were its voice. You woke up every single day, and you legitimized it, championed it, defended it, and sold all of it—and so it is on your hands, as well.
As a woman and a mother and a wife and a Christian and a human being, maybe auctioning off your soul was worth all of that to you.
And if so, I feel really sorry for you.
(Come to think of it, you probably are fine with all of it…)
