Letters to the Editor - The Millerton News August 6, 2020

Letter writer might have missed a few things…

At this writing, the Trump administration has been in charge of the U.S. for a bit more than three and a half years. For the first two, his party controlled both the House and Senate, and soon secured a 5-4 Supreme Court majority. With this much power, what has it accomplished?

“More smart things than the last three administrations,” said a recent Millerton News letter writer, retired Boston attorney Peter Antell. I’ll leave it to fact-checkers to weigh the deeds of three two-term presidents against those of a chief executive who won’t read, hates briefings, has turned over more staff than any president in memory and spends most of his waking hours watching Fox TV and tweeting. (Yes, about 40 miles of replacement border wall have been built, at a cost per mile of about a zillion dollars, but at least that money can’t buy battlefield nuclear weapons.)

Antell mentions China. That is going really well. Hong Kong will soon be indistinguishable from mainland China; a fruitful research effort with first-rate Chinese scientists into cross-species infections was churlishly canceled; and a tit-for-tat closing of consul offices has begun. Antell praises Trump’s tariffs. That tactic may work in a board game, but has only backfired in actual international trade for as long as there have been borders. Antell fails to mention Iran, which is further from peace with us than ever.  Or nuclear disarmament, now in such tatters we’re about to start rearming. I can’t think of any Republicans who believe that’s smart, but there must be a few in Washington and Aroostook County.

Here at home, Antell omitted the deployment of nameless, faceless federal agents from Trump’s favorite department, border control, to harass peaceful protesters, all but a handful law-abiding, in defiance of local and state leaders and the U.S. Constitution, which Trump swore on a Bible to defend. Even Putin’s Russia allows protests without tear-gassing and cudgeling the assembled.

There isn’t space to detail Trump’s giveaways to polluters and developers, which Antell apparently forgives. He’s so gutted the legacy of every president back to Ike that it’s almost as if the country never had an environmental movement. He truly must hate the great outdoors —  unless it’s his golf course.

The best that can be said about Trump’s behavior is that it’s the way he ran his business, with favors for loyalists and harsh retribution, banishment and ostracism for those who crossed him. But that’s no way to run a democracy, except into the ground.

I don’t usually wish people ill will. So just this once. After Trump’s been landslided in November, maybe his greens and fairways can be visited with his legacy: smog, oil spills, fracking accidents and wildfire ash, along with local global-warming-amplified events such as, for example, derechos, seiches, high seas, wind shear, a storm surge, weather bombs, flash floods, microbursts, and — hey, why not — walking catfish.

Tom Parrett, Millerton