Love Letters From Mar-a-Lago?

Anyone who ever encountered me in print knows what I think of Donald Trump. I quote from page 107 of “Bible Belt Blues,” a book with my name on the dust jacket: “God help us, we have what we have, its face spray-painted the ocher color of old Spanish walls, its angry mouth puckered like a blowfish poised to swallow minnows.” Thirty years ago I published a book citing the future president, then a fixture on Howard Stern’s sex-tease broadcasts, as one of the most loathsome creatures who had ever expressed interest in public office. Once I even enlisted my late father, claiming that he would have cut off his own right hand before shaking Donald Trump’s. I know he would have backed me, though mercifully he died some years before his Republican Party had sunk to the murky depths where things like Trump were lurking.

I’ve been consistent in my contempt and justifiably intemperate in my criticism.

And we all know how Trump treats his critics, his “enemies.” He sues them into submission or indigence, and when judges reject his lawsuits he pursues criminal charges, courtesy of his captive Department of Justice, against those citizens who offend him. We all know the risks, and most of us like to believe we’re too inconsequential to incur the wrath of the Emperor. So imagine my surprise when an email, allegedly signed by the president and sent by his own hand, appeared in my inbox announcing, among other endearments, “I love you.”

I’m serious. For two or three weeks now, these emails appear daily, bearing Trump’s signature and his depressing photographs. They claim to have been sent from Air Force One, from the Oval Office, from Mar-a-Lago, even from China? They express the president’s heartbreak that he hasn’t heard from me or seen a check signed by me, and his fear that I have abandoned him. How, he asks, could a faithful MAGA believer like me fail to respond to his invitation to join his “Inner Circle,” his “Midterm Patriot Roster,” his “Anti-Communist Club”? He even has a pet name for me, “Haroldawe,” some combination of my Christian name and God knows what? As in, “Haroldawe, I value your opinion so much. You’ve always stood by my side. Everything could change if I lose a supporter as devoted as you.”

Even more passionately, he writes, “A thousand miles in the air and all I could think of was You!” No one could make this stuff up, this intergalactic absurdity. I confess myself bewildered. I did the minimal research. These emails are issued by a PAC called Never Surrender, Inc., which evolved from Trump’s principal fundraising entity for the 2024 election into a permanent source of income for his agenda. In other words, in this online wonder-world of scams and deepfakes, my strange emails are definitely approved, if not rubber-stamped by Trump himself. The return address is . The question remains, why, of all people, me? On what list, in what file did my name, my email address appear? Nothing I’ve ever done, said or published suggests that I’d vote for Donald Trump or even speak to him, far less send him money.

I’m sure I’ve never made a request like this one before, but could someone who reads this help me? I need to hear from someone else who’s receiving these DJT love letters and maudlin pleas, to learn what we have in common, what infernal algorithm has exposed us to this. Only the testimony of other victims can confirm or refute my theory.

At this point, my theory is that I’m conspicuously old — a few months older than Trump, even — and that these emails have been sent to a target group of old white men who might, like the president, be suffering from dementia. Only individuals in obvious cognitive decline could be expected to believe they’re the president’s special favorites and chosen correspondents, and that he’s pausing amid the pressures of war and peace to keep in personal touch. (One of my emails claims that Trump has canceled his lunch break to send me this message, and it includes a photo of the president scowling over a huge cheeseburger.) Is anyone blessed with mental health and common sense gullible enough to respond to these messages as if they were sincere?

Where senility, vanity, and a painful amount of native stupidity come together, there is the citizen Trump’s boys at Never Surrender are trying to recruit. As most of us would look at it, this is a campaign rooted in brutal cynicism and condescension. Let’s identify a vulnerable population of doddering old fools and fleece them by convincing them that they’re President Trump’s beloved pals. Serves them right if they’re as dumb as that? I can picture a certain type of stage villain rubbing his hands in glee as he launches this ugly scheme, imagining the excitement at Assisted Living when these faded granddads open their billets-doux from Donald Trump.

Another possibility, supported by the beggar’s parade of frauds, cranks and damaged sycophants Trump has chosen to run his government (keep researching Pete Hegseth, you won’t believe it), is that Never Surrender is managed by Republicans so brainwashed and simple-minded they’d be thrilled to receive emails like the ones they send to me. MAGA is such a closed circuit of folly and belligerence, its most devoted soldiers may belong to a primitive subspecies, unknown to political science.

Anything dark and weird is possible, in this failing democracy novelist Zadie Smith described as a “hellscape” in her recent address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But the question I need to answer, for my own peace of mind, is still “Why me?” Even though the Orange One swears he loves me and me alone, I know some fellow sufferers are out there. If I could hear from a woman, a young person, a member of a MAGA-abused minority or an actual Republican, I might have to conclude that no one with an email address is safe from this creeping menace.

My latest message, which arrived five minutes ago, announced that President Trump had canceled yet another lunch break to express his anguish that I hadn’t claimed my Platinum MAGA Membership. The previous one, last night, also included the sentence “I love you,” and warned me that my nonexistent membership would expire by midnight. But the beauty, delivered after the deadline, announced that I had been chosen to receive the Trump Patriot Medal, “one of the greatest honors in the Trump World,” an honor he claims I share with JD Vance and Marco Rubio (and his adoring Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt). The patriot medal, pictured, is like an antique gold coin with a large color photo of an oddly squinting Trump in the center.

I guess it could get uglier, but how can this project get more bizarre?

I’m almost tempted to send for my medal—-a classic conversation piece — but who knows what forces that request might unleash? At the bottom of these emails there’s a line that says I can unsubscribe, but why should I believe that? And I admit I’d like to know how long Donald’s electronic hugs and kisses will continue.

For all the lunch breaks he’s canceled to write to me, I haven’t noticed that he’s losing weight. Big Don’s eerie courtship of Haroldawe is, I suspect, another symptom of the wild flight from reality we’ve experienced since Trump was re-elected. Reality, precedent, any clear sense of the way things used to be, the way things ought to be — going, gone? If you don’t think the president is insane — gold statues, memorial arches, Game-of-Thrones death tweets and all — you haven’t looked up “megalomaniac,” psychopath” or “malignant narcissist” in your medical dictionary. Zadie Smith’s “hellscape” vision of America is only one of many grim assessments I’ve been collecting. David Rothkopf in the Daily Beast, chronicling Trump’s personal canonization of Greed, writes, “We are no longer a shining city on the hill. We are instead a stinking cesspool of corruption, a republic of the rapacious.”

“Power is concentrated in the hands of a strongman who starts wars and builds monuments to himself,” Ben Rhodes wrote in The New York Times. “The rich are looting the nation and its unraveling empire while most people cannot afford a tank of gas or imagine a future that is better for their children.” Not to mention a strongman who tilts against windmill farms and calls global warming “a hoax” while our carbon-fueled planet comes to a steady boil. A strongman who deals pardons to fascist thugs, whose Department of Injustice makes the Mafia look like the Sisters of Mercy.

The strongman who loves me, and won’t let me forget it. How could anyone resist a chance to join his Inner Circle and wear the medals of the man who’s bringing Ultimate Fighting — real blood, sweat, flying teeth and screaming sadists — to the White House lawn? Maybe the final word on my email suitor should go to John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff during his first term, who remembers him as “a pathological liar, not just someone disconnected from reality but someone who did not even seem to understand that there was a reality other than what he decided it was.”   

Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s  H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” published in November 2025. Email delennis1@gmail.com.