To the editor:
As a British visitor in Southern California for a few weeks with family, I am avidly following the election campaign. Max Boot’s fine piece on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s incendiary tweets should have examined further aspects of his record to establish his ideological closeness to Nazism. (“The Nazi echoes in Trump's tweets,” Opinion, Oct. 17)
Trump has boasted that he will “take out” the families of terrorists and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He has declared that Mexico will be forced to pay for a wall to seal the border between the U.S. and Mexico.
Trump sees the law not as a judicial process but as an instrument of the state. He threatens to send his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, to jail, and he criticizes a judge’s ruling in the Trump University case because the judge has Mexican heritage. Most worrying of all, he insinuates that Clinton was wrong to do her duty as a lawyer in defending a rapist.
In a democracy, the exercise of the rule of law is not to be bent to the will of the leader of the state. Nor is the law there to punish those who do not love unreservedly the Trump-defined U.S., which appears to be Trump’s position. The Republican nominee is clearly not as evilly talented as Hitler, but we should not make the mistake, as many did with Hitler, of underestimating his threat to civilized life in the U.S. and the world.
Andrew McCulloch, Collingham, Great Britain
Note from KBJ: If Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, then Hillary Clinton is Joseph Stalin. Hitler murdered 12 million people; Stalin murdered 15 million people. See here.
