Dear Editor:

Last week, a letter writer who considers opponents of Trump to be equivocators and “deranged” adduced examples of dead dictators and contrasted their authoritarian regimes to that of Donald Trump.

It is interesting that he doesn’t reference contemporary dictators, like Kim Jong-Un, accused of crimes against humanity by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Trump enjoyed a convivial summit meeting with this totalitarian mass-murderer in Pyongyang and received “love letters” from him (found among Trump’s stolen government documents at Mar-a-Lago). Nor does he mention Vladimir Putin, another dictator guilty of war crimes and invader of two
neighboring, independent nations. Trump has had numerous business and political connections with this Russian autocrat; he even had the shameful temerity to take Putin’s denial over the assessment of the CIA, NSA, FBI and DNI, who claimed with “high confidence” that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Trump’s antipathy toward NATO and his siding with Russia in their invasion of Ukraine betrays his Stalinesque cynicism.

Let’s not forget Trump’s awkward “sword dance” and his admiration of the “magic orb” when he schmoozed with the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, early in his tenure; apparently he forgot (or didn’t know) that the Saudis provided fifteen of the nineteen terrorists on 9/11.

The first head of state to congratulate Trump after his election was Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, dictator of Egypt, the home of one of the 9/11 attackers. At a G-7 summit in 2019, Trump said that he looked forward to his meeting with “my favorite dictator,” al-Sisi.

The list goes on, but we must be painfully aware that Trump used Adolf Hitler’s infamous phrase when talking about undocumented immigrants to the United States: They are “poisoning the blood” of our country — verbatim from Mein Kampf.

So let there be no “equivocation” when it comes to Trump’s tyrannical mindset. He has told us that, if re-elected, he would be a dictator “on day one.”

Bill Hammond

Boothbay