Mary Jane Newell’s breathtakingly illogical letter (Feb. 25) claims that Donald Trump would be a “great president,” like Ronald Reagan.
Where to begin?
• Trump is a crude, vulgar sexual predator who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. Reagan, as even his political opponents acknowledged, was a class act on the global stage.
• Trump gushes about Vladimir Putin’s leadership qualities. Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” and backed it up with compelling rhetoric (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”) and an arms buildup that brought the Soviet Union to its knees.
• Trump gained fame by stooping to American mass culture at its worst — reality TV. (It’s not real, folks. It’s scripted, “enhanced.”) Reagan was a two-term governor of California, one of the largest economies in the world.
• Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by eight million votes and Walter Mondale by almost 17 million. Early presidential approval polls show the same eye-catching discrepancies.
Quoting a right-wing polemicist, Newell blames Democrats for the KKK — a product of murderous post-Civil War racism a century and a half ago. But the party evolved dramatically, and 1960s civil rights legislation wouldn’t have happened without the leadership of a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson.
Powerful southern Democrats did resist LBJ, but a few years later, thanks to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” Republicans dominate the region. That’s the party trying to stifle Democratic turnout with onerous voter ID laws.
Those are facts, not partisan polemics.
David Griffiths, Mechanic Falls
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