The ex-president Trump has announced his resignation from the Screen Actors Guild, something which made SAG-AFTRA happy according to to their release of the statement, “Thank you”. But I am not so much interested in the resignation as I am in the letter of resignation.

Par for the course, the letter begins with an insult, indicating that Trump is not familiar with Ms. Carteris’ work. But he brags about his. (For the record, I was not familiar with her work, either, but I looked it up and it is certainly more impressive than Trump’s.) Trump cites several movies he was in, but which I would never associate with the man. He mentions Home Alone 2, and I didn’t even realize he was in that one until I read that Macauly Culkin and others were calling for Trump’s cameo to be removed. He did mention The Apprentice, which I do associate with him, but still, it’s The Apprentice.

The first paragraph of the letter mentions the “Disciplinary Committee hearing at revoking my union membership”. So, intelligent readers understand Trump is concerned about the hearing and want to resign before they can kick him out. Te Trump cultist will disagree with this, but I maintain, if that is not getting under his skin, why was it mentioned first. He ends the paragraph with “Who cares!” (sic). Mm, I think he does.

He mentions that the union has not done anything for anyone but he really stresses they have not anything for him. This man has been president for the last four years and clearly not acting (well, okay, maybe he was acting), but he certainly did not need SAG membership to do what he did. If the union was so bad, then there are two questions that must be asked: 1) Why did he continue to pay his dues? 2) Why did he not use his position as president to pressure the union to make some changes? The answers are, I think, obvious. First, he enjoyed being able to say he was an actor and his union card helped with that. Second, he has never really cared about anyone other than himself, so as long as he got what he wanted out of them, he was happy.

It seems clear that Trump resigned before they tossed him out of the union. It reminds me of another situation in which someone renounced jurisdiction of an organization before they were brought up on disciplinary charges, but were adamant it had nothing to do with certain charges.

Trump claims SAG-AFTRA has done nothing for him. I wish we can say the same of Trump, unfortunately he has done so much “for us” that it will a generation or more to recover from that damage. And his ego comes through, even in the end, he has to list himself as “President Donald Trump”. I’ve seen letters from other former presidents and have not seen one of them call themselves “president” once out of the office.