Copy: “As a veteran and as a mayor I’ve seen what we can achieve when we have each other’s back.”

HE Rewrite: “As a veteran, a mayor and someone who’s been doing lots of watching and listening all over this country, we have to do everything we can to support and nurture the ideals of dignity, approximations of honesty, civility and neighborliness…we have to stand up for decency and fairness and, perhaps most of all, facts…for we are far better than what the atmosphere in this country has become over the last two and two-thirds years. We have to. For ourselves, for our planet, for our descendants and for our future.”

Copy: “But in today’s divided America, we’re at each other’s throats.”

HE Rewrite: “And yet, sadly, roughly a third of U.S. voters appears to actually approve of what President Trump has said and done and tried to obscure since January 20, 2017. They seem to actually believe that he’s done some good things for this country, and that the path we’re taking is more or less the right one. Mother nature would like a word about that, to say the least.”

Copy: “To meet these challenges, we need real solutions…not more polarization.”

HE Rewrite: “Which is why, if elected President, I will fully commit to building and staffing a vast nationwide network of compassionate green re-education camps, with a special focus on rural red-state voters. We can build our nation’s economy into a tide that will lift all boats, but we can’t hope to really and truly change things for the better with so much ignorance and racism and so many lies standing in the way. A semi-educated populace, at the very least, is essential for any democracy to succeed. And the hiding of tens of millions of heads in the sand is obviously not the way to go.”