Dear Donald,
Since your inauguration, you are in the bunker of the first hole.
Your three worldwide golf partners, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Angela Merkel are watching you. Vladimir is laughing as he did yesterday at his press conference: you gave him so many reasons to ridicule America. You thought he would be your friend: in fact, he gave a soft quick touch to your ball to make sure it would fall in the bunker. Xi is smiling, undecipherable, happy to see you weakened after your rodomontade on North Korea. As to Angela, you hate her and she sees you exactly as the player you are: a bully who hits ferociously the ball, does not wait for his turn, throws as much grass as the ball. You do not even have a sense of the basic etiquette: you did not shake her hand while you were holding Teresa May by the hand.
The rules of the game
Imagine a game of golf that would have no rules, no definitions, no referee, no clubhouse and etiquette, and would be played in an undefined terrain. You did learn the hard way the rules of golf. Did it ever occur to you that running a country is a job that might come with rules, definitions, referee, etiquette and a complex terrain: the United States of America and something called the rest of the world?
You refused from Day One to even learn what the rules were, let alone how they apply and, more importantly, you thought you had made a hole-in-one! You still pretend to be the best player: you just told your story to the Coast Guard Cadets. Like in golf, the only holes that count are the small ones, difficult to reach. They require style, subtlety and terrain knowledge – everything you don’t like in politics. Jut apply to your tweets what you do when you estimate the slope of the greens.
You infringed the etiquette
In other words, you acted like a bad boy, and lost the respect of the other players, and, as you will find out during your next trip, all the club members. I travel a lot, and hear how you have become the laughing stock of the world. In Brussels you will meet the NATO club: you want them to pay their membership but they remind you that you are providing the whole equipment “made in America” and benefit from it.
Did you know that, under the White House rules, you actually are expected to join the situation room when you attack another country, instead of talking about the chocolate cake with Xi? He almost got an indigestion when you told him you had bombed Syria.
You might be the most powerful member of the planet, but it does not give you the right to ignore how to treat the others with respect. Your colleagues are desperately trying to educate you, but you have decided that you could behave as you wanted.
Getting out of the bunker
Ever since you discovered that you could not ban immigration under the constitution, you hated it. In your bunker, the constitution is pretty high up even for you. Instead of trying to find a way out, you continued, executive order after executive order, to try to push the ball above the constitution and failed. Everybody told you it did not work… but you refused to listen. As you are frantically trying to prove them wrong, all you manage to do is to get deeper in the bunker to the point where you might not know how to locate the ball.
You are in the bunker because of your hits, not because of the others
After 120 days, you are still in the bunker of the first hole and know that, in golf, you are the only one to be blamed for the wrong hits. Your partners are wondering whether they should start playing among themselves and ignore you. You have become so unreliable that hey wonder whether you can play golf. By the way, the best way to get out of a bunker is not a wood 5 club, but a pitching wedge… Are you willing to pitch rather than bullying your ball?
Your reality TV-show has become pathetic. In this game “you get fired” can boomerang and hurt you as I am sure you found out in the last few days. You would want those who report about you to give then world a beautiful photo-op. You are the one who put yourself in the pigeon hole. They see the reality, not the show you believe you are playing.
You might actually be fired by your own club.