To the editor:
The president of the United States stood before Congress and peddled his disgusting lie that immigrants are violent criminals and that cutting back on immigration is the only way to protect this country. ("In State of Union, Trump calls for unity in hopes of altering a threatening tide," Jan. 30)
President Trump drew a sharp distinction between "Americans" (by which he presumably means native-born citizens) and "Dreamers." He implicitly criticized as somehow being anti-veteran and anti-police those individuals (mostly citizens with a somewhat darker skin tone) who have had the courage to protest against police brutality and murder.
This was not, as your headline put it, a "call for unity." And Trump did not, as the lead paragraph of the article proclaimed, try to "shed [his] polarizing image." Instead, he doubled down on his dog-whistle bigotry in a campaign speech designed to rile up his base.
Steve Ellis, Los Angeles
Note from KBJ: How are you hearing the dog whistle, Steve? Are you a bigot?
