Culture

Leslie Knope’s Post-Election Letter To America Is The Most Calming Thing You’ll Read Today

It quotes Winston Churchill and compared Donald Trump to "a T. rex named Dr. Farts".

by Meg Watson  11 November 2016

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It seems like every celebrity in the world has given their take on the results of the US election in the past 24 hours — solicited or otherwise. Jennifer Lawrence is writing advice for women in Broadly. Katy Perry is calling for some kind of uprising on Twitter. Aaron Sorkin has written a letter to his daughter that I refuse to read in any other voice than President Bartlett’s.

It’s probably quite telling about this election campaign that the only one I care about is this: a letter from a fictional woman in a discontinued comedy series about regional government.

Politics is bad and I am just so, so tired.

This morning Vox published a letter to America from the perspective of Parks and Recreation‘s Leslie Knope. As the piece comes from a member of the show’s writing staff, it’s perfectly done in her voice. It denounces Trump’s character, recalls a story from her childhood, and quotes Winston Churchill, so yep the whole thing pretty much feels like a speech for the Pawnee Goddesses.

“Amidst the confusion, and despair, and disbelief, it was suggested to me by a very close friend of mine (I won’t say her name to protect her identity) (Ann. It was Ann) that perhaps a few people would enjoy hearing my thoughts on this election,” the letter begins. “So I sat down at my computer, cleared my head, and opened a document. Then I started crying. So I had some hot chocolate, and my close friend (Ann) rubbed my back for a while…”

After a lot more hot chocolate she gets into it:

“When I was in fourth grade, my teacher Mrs. Kolphner taught us a social studies lesson. The 17 students in our class were introduced to two fictional candidates: a smart if slightly bookish-looking cartoon tortoise named Greenie, and a cool-looking jaguar named Speedy. Rick Dissellio read a speech from Speedy, in which he promised that, if elected, he would end school early, have extra recess, and provide endless lunches of chocolate pizzandy (a local Pawnee delicacy at the time: deep fried pizza where the crust was candy bars). Then I read a speech from Greenie, who promised to go slow and steady, think about the problems of our school, and try her best to solve them in a way that would benefit the most people. Then Mrs. Kolphner had us vote on who should be class president.

“I think you know where this is going.

“Except you don’t, because before we voted, Greg Laresque asked if he could nominate a third candidate, and Mrs. Kolphner said ‘Sure! The essence of democracy is that everyone—” and Greg cut her off and said, ‘I nominate a T. rex named Dr. Farts who wears sunglasses and plays the saxophone, and his plan is to fart as much as possible and eat all the teachers,’ and everyone laughed, and before Mrs. Kolphner could blink, Dr. Farts the T. rex had been elected president of Pawnee Elementary School in a 1984 Reagan-esque landslide.”

After speaking for awhile on the concept of democracy (that’s where the Churchill quotes come in), she then brings it back to Trump.

“The point is: people making their own decisions is, on balance, better than an autocrat making decisions for them. It’s just that sometimes those decisions are bad, or self-defeating, or maddening, and a day where you get dressed up in your best victory pantsuit and spend an ungodly amount of money decorating your house with American flags and custom-made cardboard cutouts of suffragettes in anticipation of a glass-ceiling-shattering historical milestone ends with you getting (metaphorically) eaten by a giant farting T. rex.”

“I acknowledge that Donald Trump is the president. I understand, intellectually, that he won the election. But I do not accept that our country has descended into the hatred-swirled slop pile that he lives in. I reject out of hand the notion that we have thrown up our hands and succumbed to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and crypto-fascism. I do not accept that. I reject that. I fight that. Today, and tomorrow, and every day until the next election, I reject and fight that story.”

Speaking directly to young girls, Knope urges them to stick together, work hard, and not listen to Trump or “75-year-old, doughy-faced, grey-haired nightmare men like him”.

“You will not be cowed or discouraged by his stream of retrogressive babble. You won’t have time to be cowed, because you will be too busy working and learning and communing with other girls and women like you. And when the time comes, you will effortlessly flick away his miserable, petty, misogynistic worldview like a fly on your picnic potato salad.

“He is the present, sadly, but he is not the future. You are the future. Your strength is a million times his. Your power is a billion times his. We will acknowledge this result, but we will not accept it. We will overcome it, and we will defeat it.”

This letter also comes just a day after Parks and Rec creator Michael Schur dropped a 28-point series of tweets about Trump’s victory interrogating his voters’ values and the response which has come from commentators so far.

You can read some of that here:

Alternatively, you can watch this supercut of Leslie Knope doing a variety of very bad accents and impressions. Either or. It’s okay to take a break from feeling shit today.