Dear Mr. President:

April 2022. Many of us were going about our daily lives minding our own business when you decided to veer way of course, swerve out of your lane — a lane clearly not under your purview — and stoke the flames of derision in our lovely community.

You started with inflammatory rhetoric forcing people to choose sides — even folks who were kinda already on the side of development, already half in your camp. But you attacked those folks. Good folks. Folks who, once upon a time, thought you’d done a thing or two that was good for the city.

(Pssst: Let me be clear, your constant chest-thumping and self-praise never fell into the category of things that were good for the city.)

And then you gathered folks together in a town maul meeting, invited the Mayor and City Council, and set out name placards. And when only one member of city council showed up, you pointed to the other empty chairs and told every person in the room that these people were to blame for their lot in life.

It worked. The theatrics. For five minutes.

But within hours, I said to my spouse, “It’s all a red herring, a ruse, subterfuge, nothing more than an election season distraction — the empty chair game, the oldest trick in the book.”

For those of you who have never been in a courtroom — which I know you have, Mr. President, about seven or more times as a litigant yourself (five as a plaintiff and two as a defendant that I can find so far) — you might not see the transparency of this guy’s tactic.

The empty chair game is a game of deception. It’s a blame-shifting game, a game meant to focus your attention on someone who is not there instead of looking very closely at the person who is standing right before you.

But I wasn’t deceived. And neither were others. We saw it. Instead of the opacity you were hoping for, your theatrics begged the question: What, Mr. President, are you hiding?

So I started digging to find an answer to that question. And I came up with a lot of answers, reams of papers filled with answers.

You say you want to run on your record. But all the diversionary tactics — day-and-night rants, blocking any member from FFBCC Facebook pages who might disagree with you or even question you, bullying dues-paying members who ask questions about finances — have, itself, become your transparency. It is crystal clear that for a guy who wants to run on his record, you’re running from your record.

And your vitriol has only grown louder in the past two weeks. The more FFBCC members question you, the more combative you become. You vilify folks as “crazy” and attempt to undermine their credibility, at the same time underscoring your rules of civility — rules you yourself refuse to abide by, which has undoubtedly become part of your record.

So let’s do it, shall we? Let’s discuss your record.

To the Fairfield Bay Community Club VOTERS…

My upcoming blog posts will be devoted to the president’s record. His lack of transparency. His ever-changing bylaws. His half-truths. His unilateral rule-making. And the out-of-control spending.

It is election season. And we need to know who we’re voting for. AND WHO WE’RE NOT VOTING FOR.