The letter titled, “The first 100 catastrophic days of a new president,” by Frank Daniels (May 20) was an evaluation based on two things. The first was his massive disdain for Joe Biden, Democrats and liberals. The second was just mostly a list of issues that this country has faced going back many decades. Most of them have never been well-addressed by either party. And that is because, for any given issue, there are almost always multiple possible policies and almost always multiple endless arguments both for and against each policy outcome.
But let’s look at just one catastrophe from Donald Trump.
Trump’s expansion and improvement of the wall at the Mexican border has been loaded with controversy. Anyone can do an internet search and find reports and even photographs of people on the south side of the wall still climbing over to the north side, cutting through, tunneling under or otherwise defeating the wall. In other words, Trump’s wall project is mostly a flop. Connecting the illegal-immigrant problem — just one of the many bellyaches from Daniels — to Biden or one party or one mind-set is like fanatically insisting that the Earth is flat.
Daniels did not talk about the recent catastrophe of mental confusion caused by “conspiracy theory,” QAnon and “Trump think.” All three work to override rational thinking. Rational thinking is about reasoning, logic and understanding “cause and effect.” And it also says you need to have a basis for a statement. Making up a story out of thin air is a fantasy.
The one most remarkable and catastrophic thing that ever came from Trump is that he showed how a contestant can enter a contest (i.e., the 2020 election) and “win” (or claim to win) the contest, not by cheating but by changing (or attempting to change) the rules of the contest before, during and after it to benefit himself! Normally and traditionally, it is the sponsor of the contest that makes the rules, not the contestants. The rules are all made and decided beforehand and kept during and after the contest. Despite vote recounts, many failed lawsuits and Attorney General William Barr’s statement that vote irregularities would not change the outcome, Mr. Trump and Co. continued to interfere with and challenge the election process to win and overthrow democracy. Even now, despite polls showing a majority of the public accepting the election results, Trump still beats a dead horse. It was not surprising to me that he really lost the election because, all along his four years, he also lost all or almost all of the many polls measuring his approval and disapproval rates. He even polled lower than almost all prior presidents. And yet, we have a lot of people who still believe in the “steal” fairy tale. So in the real world, it was really Trump who was — and still is — trying to steal the election from the will of the people and not the other way around.
Arthur E. Sowers
Harbeson
