You Owe Your Readers an Apology
To the Editor,
As a faithful “Gazette” reader, I was stunned into disbelief by your editorial, “Trump and Biden: Worst candidates ever?”
Putting Trump and Biden into equal boxes because both are old, insults your readers who treasure democracy and abhor Trump’s vilification of our Black, Latino and Asian-American community members.
The right to choose our leaders in free elections, and to get together without fear of violence or threats and try again if our preferred candidate doesn’t win, is fundamental to democracy, as are a free press and freedoms of speech and assembly. It’s this feature of the USA that, despite our country’s profound flaws, beckons to the world. The Chinese activists who in 1989 erected a “Goddess of Democracy” statue in Tiananmen Square, were massacred for demanding these rights. Russian protesters who in 2011-2013, 2021 and 2022 demanded these rights from Putin’s regime, were imprisoned for years and decades.
Donald Trump tried to violently take these rights away from us. He incited a deadly mob to overthrow our system of peaceful transition of power in January 2021. He is currently indicted for 17 felonies around his attempts to invalidate the 2020 election results. If Donald Trump is elected in 2024, his first agenda item is to abolish our democracy: our freedom of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble to express our demands, and peaceful transition of power. The clear awareness of his autocratic intentions is why millions of voters in red states voted against him in 2020 and against his favored candidates in the 2022 midterms.
On policies, the two presumed 2024 candidates differ profoundly. Biden supports legal abortion, while Trump ensured an end to it with his Supreme Court appointments. Biden passed major climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, while Trump denies the climate crisis that suffocates our cities with wildfire smoke and devastates our farmers with crazy weather. Biden is cutting monopolistic powers (1) of corporations that treat us like ciphers to be maximally milked of our money, including tech, airlines and phone corporations; Trump passed gigantic tax cuts for those same corporations, that blew up our deficit (2, 3). Nearly 1,000 children taken from their parents at the border by the Trump administration have not yet found their parents despite the efforts of the Biden administration (4).
Corrupt enrichment of multiple Trump family members during and after his presidency was contrasted with Hunter Biden’s trading on his father’s name, by Time magazine (5). In fact, Hunter Biden’s reprehensible apparent use of his father’s position to support his lavish lifestyle, is appropriately being addressed by a court of law.
Trump’s political career is based in racism (6). He announced his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants rapists. Biden won with a multiracial coalition with 92% of the Black vote.
I happen to strongly disagree with many of President Biden’s policies. But equating him with wannabe dictator Trump is foolish and dangerous. You owe your readers an apology.
(1) https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/09/biden-to-sign-executive-order-aimed-at-cracking-down-on-big-tech-business-practices.html
(2) https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tcja-2-years-later-corporations-not-workers-big-winners/
(3) https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianweller/2020/01/29/trumps-wasteful-tax-cuts-lead-to-continued-trillion-dollar-deficits-in-expanding-economy/?sh=475a94e766c4
(4) https://www.reuters.com/world/us/close-1000-migrant-children-separated-by-trump-yet-be-reunited-with-parents-2023-02-02/
(5) https://time.com/6279053/hunter-biden-trump-children-scandals/
(6) https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-racism-history
Julia Koehler