Arthur E. Sowers is a resident of Harbeson.
Frank Daniels’ recent anti-Democrat, anti-Zohran Mamdani, anti-anti-Donald Trump, antigovernment and anti-freedom of religion Opinion was a trainwreck full of bigoted, prejudicial and kangaroo court judgments, accusations and opinions (“Is Mamdani a communist, a terrorist or both?”).
The letter’s title is a framed question. The question only allows three answers, which are already determined in the title. Suppose I asked you: “Do you bring lunch to work or do you beat your wife?” If you don’t bring your lunch to work, then the question requires you to fallaciously incriminate yourself. This is called “dishonest debate,” and if you look up that two-word phrase on the internet, you might learn a lot about misinformation, disinformation, fallacies, illogic, irrationality and propaganda.
Trump lovers just love to invent a nonexistent mental illness (called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which is also discussed as bogus in Wikipedia). In reality, it is Trump who shows signs of mental illness. Just read, for example, the article on the France 24 website titled, “Psychologist-backed documentary labels Trump ‘malignant narcissist.’”
But Donald Trump will go down in history as a guy who did more bad than good. Historians, experts and specialists already rank him deep down at the very bottom of greatness. Go see the bar chart yourself on the Presidential Greatness Project website.
Guys like Trump should have never been allowed to run for office. His 3,500-plus-lawsuit history means he can’t get along with people. His six large corporate bankruptcies mean he is really not a businessman. His attempt to overthrow the 2020 election means he wants to corrupt our Constitution. His tax situation looks to me like he wanted to cheat our government out of paying his fair share. Out of six court case indictments, he got off on five by technicalities, hidden-luck “judge shopping,” appeals and brute-force, arm-twisting legal tricks. Maybe our political system should license politicians, just like doctors, lawyers, dentists and other professionals. They should pass written tests, oral tests, history tests and ethics/morals tests, plus serve actual minimal-job apprenticeships. Maybe that will cut down on greedy, selfish, ambitious, aggressive, alpha male clowns from getting elected.
Trump presents himself as a “stable genius” but so did Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hitler ended up doing a lot of really, really, really bad things. Napoleon ended up doing only a few good things (according to historians) and a lot of really, really bad things, too. Polls are continuously coming out with gradually but consistently growing sentiments against Trump’s two biggest projects: improving the economy (in reality, it’s getting worse) and deporting those bad immigrants (and now, the polls are saying Trump is going too far).
There is an old saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But that old saying is in a document that has as its next sentence: “Great men are almost always bad men.” And any internet search will get you the whole story. Bad men? Alexander the Great? Attila the Hun? Genghis Khan? And the rest? How much pain, death and destruction did they cause? Was it worth it? Well, Donald Trump has absolute immunity, a Cabinet full of “obey Trump blindly” and largely incompetent kiss-ups. All so he can bluster, bossy and bully people around. He is making things worse, not better.
Daniels doesn’t like government, either. He said nothing about the rich and powerful corporate world executives who increase prices you pay and keep paycheck sizes so they are less than inflation. You could read Matthew Josephson’s book, “The Robber Barrons.” It tells about unethical business practices that forced the government to bring in various kinds of regulations. There were some historical “good guys” in government, too. Please dig out the whole histories on Solon, Pisistratus and Pericles from 2,500 years ago to learn about the tyranny of land monopolies and debt peon capitalism, compared to holding democracy and equality, in ancient Greece. Even in the times of King Hammurabi (3,700 years ago), his code had some elements of socialism and more rights against the rich getting too much power. A lot of this is in Wikipedia articles and in free PDF files downloadable off the internet. Internet access is free at the public libraries in Delaware.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
