Let’s move on from the bully Donald Trump

Donald Trump is the school yard bully who grew into an adult bully who looks for the ugliness in people like himself and then incites it using the lowest and most despicable behavior of which a human is capable.

Not only do I not want him as president of my country, I never want to hear his name or see him again after the election. The destruction he is responsible for from deaths to the environment, from democracy to lost humanity, from human decency to stark cruelty and on and on will be ongoing if he is re-elected.

We must move on from this insanity and scourge named Donald Trump. We must take back our country using the best in us.

Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow, Lake View

Witch’s brew of naked hate

In 2016, some 47 out of every 100 voters elected Donald Trump president. Hillary Clinton got some 3 million more popular votes, but our Electoral College system handed him the White House. That his base systematically ignores his transgressions is sobering, for it means some 47 of every 100 voters, strangers we pass every day, buy into his witch’s brew of naked hate; fear; fake “facts;” groundless demonization; consorting with our enemies; undermining the rule of law; undermining the press; profiting personally from the presidency; letting COVID-19 run rampant; alienating our friends overseas; and burdening us all with billions of extra dollars paid on imported goods, thanks to his backfiring trade war tariffs. He claims to be a job creator, including jobs for idled coal miners. Four years on, they’re still waiting.

He claims to champion law-and-order, yet he (a) just violated The Hatch Act and (b) pardons convicted criminals galore, even one convicted by a military court martial, to score political points while declaring himself above the law.

Tracking his torrent of lies, The Washington Post has tallied 30,000 told so far, and counting. Even if Biden wins in November, how is the nation supposed to come to terms with the reality that nearly half of us self-disqualified for U.S. citizenship, having in effect disavowed its bedrock principles? How likely is it they would pass the written test immigrants must pass to get U.S. citizenship? They think they are patriots. Are they?

And if Biden wins, how will the Republican Party cure its underlying racist malaise that made it the go-to home of Trumpism in an increasingly diverse America that in fewer than 30 years shall have become majority-minority? Anomalies aplenty to ponder.

Ted Z. Manuel, Hyde Park

Narcissistic arrogance

Donald Trump boasts, “I built the greatest economy in the history of the world and I’ll do it again.” What narcissistic arrogance! We’d all love to have 3.5% unemployment back but let’s remember it was 9.9% the year Barack Obama came into office and 4.7% his last year.

The statistics on actual growth mock Trump’s claim in 2017 that if Congress enacted big tax cuts for corporations “economic growth would soar to four, five, even six per cent.” In 2018 GDP growth “soared” to 3.2% and in 2019 came back to the Obama-era average of 2.2%.

Meanwhile, Trump has surrendered to the climate crisis, done worse than nothing on increasing health care coverage and rebuilding our infrastructure, and has no problem with the accelerating growth in the gap between the very rich and everyone else.

Kevin Coughlin, Evanston