Opinion // Letters

Friday letters: A polarized nation

Love it or leave it

Regarding “Bigot-in-chief” (Editorial, July 16): President Trump is not a racist. President Trump’s tweets were not racist. Your accusations do not make it so.

Did you read them? I did. He never made a single racial reference. The only mistake he made was suggesting U.S. citizens go back to where they came from. With the exception of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., they all were born in the United States.

President Trump makes a great point: If the United States is such a terrible place, then go someplace else. Nobody is holding you back. If your ideas are so great, then go someplace where they will be implemented.

Galynn Ferris, Montgomery

Squad’s inexperience

Regarding “The Squad shakes up D.C.’s establishment” (Outlook, July 18): I watched in disbelief as four newly elected Democratic congresswomen ganged up on the president because he offended their delicate sensibilities. This reflects the congresswomen’s political inexperience, alternative agenda and impulsive reaction, calling out the president as a racist as an impeachable charge.

President Theodore Roosevelt graciously invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, just as Kanye West embraced President Trump in the Oval Office.

Those dishonoring the office of the president and attempting to impeach the president,are not advancing the best interests of the country and its citizens.

Bill Pond, Humble

History speaks volumes

The claim that President Trump isn’t a racist flies in the face of the man’s well-documented history of being exactly that.

Consider: (1) In the 1970s, the Trumps (father and son) were found guilty in a housing discrimination suit that involved potential African American tenants. (2) in 1989, then-private citizen Donald Trump spent thousands on newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for five minority teens who were accused of raping a woman in Central Park. After they were found innocent by dint of conclusive DNA evidence, Trump persisted in his assertion of their guilt. (3) In the run-up to the 2008 election Trump championed the thoroughly debunked birther conspiracy theory aimed at candidate Barack Obama; and (4) As president, Trump said that Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel couldn’t render an impartial decision because of his “Mexican” heritage.

That’s four decades of racism.

Marty Adams, Houston

‘Leaving’ is illogical

Regarding “Trump ups attacks on Dems as furor rises” (Front page, July 15): Using his own logic, why didn’t Donald Trump leave the country he once disliked so much? Before and after becoming president, he harshly disparaged this nation, claiming that it had an illegitimate Kenyan president; that its inept foreign policy included agreements with other nations that needed nullification; that its naive negotiators had long been taken advantage of in bad trade deals; that its awful health care system needed to be replaced by something better; that it was being invaded by rapists, murderers and drug dealers, who could be stopped only by a huge wall paid for by Mexico; that it had a broken education system; that it was a “swamp” that needed draining; and that it struggled with an immense national debt.

Presumably Trump hated so much the nation he was inheriting from past administrations that he stayed to improve the things he found imperfect by trying to remake it. Can’t he realize that the four congresswomen he viciously attacks are patriots wanting to do the same?

They may sometimes fail, as he has by draining the swamp straight into his own administration; trying to charge American taxpayers for his wall, increasing the national debt; and installing tariffs he claims bring billions of dollars to America when it is in fact American buyers who pay the tariffs, not the foreign sellers.

George Bass, College Station