It is very disappointing to see the animus from some readers of the Tribune toward our president well after the election. It is frustrating to see the continued negative attitudes and comments about the decisions and actions taken by our president to force-feed changes that our country appears to desperately need, which is why the majority of Americans who voted in November elected him.
In recent letters, writers have chosen to allege “bullying,” focus on the threat of Trump acting as a king or demagogue and label as a sycophant a fellow citizen who has been selected by the president to review and advise him on the efficiency or inefficiency of our federal government. Is this effort in chastising our president after he has been in office for only three weeks reasonable or rational? I think not.
It is unnecessarily destructive and appears to be vengeful, coming from people who ended up on the losing side of the presidential election. Instead of accepting defeat with grace and dignity and showing support and hope that the president is successful, we are burdened with relentless negative attacks. It is shameful and as un-American as can be.
I wish that these Americans would stop their negativity toward our president. We desperately want and need him to be successful. We may not like many aspects of Donald Trump’s personality, character and approach, but we still need him to be successful.
We should accept that there will be many decisions that we may disagree with. There will be times where his style is ignorant or distasteful. Unfortunately that is who he is, but when all is said and done, Trump, for good and for ill, is our president, and we need him to succeed.
— Dave Roberts, Frankfort
Gaza plan is lunacy
After President Donald Trump announced his plan for Gaza last week, I expected a strong denunciation of this lunacy by the Tribune Editorial Board.
What could possibly go wrong with somehow “persuading” more than 2 million people to give up their land and move to some country that doesn’t want them? And Trump has the notion that this somehow will not require U.S. military action (but he’s not ruling out needing the U.S. military to take over Greenland and its 56,000 inhabitants!)
As expected, I’ve seen zero pushback on this idea from the Republicans in Congress. My fear is that with the Democrats in the minority, Trump’s plan will gather momentum and drag the U.S. into a disastrous conflict. It’s very easy to see that the consequences of this action would result in the loss of huge numbers of lives on all sides — think Vietnam all over.
I would much prefer that the Tribune Editorial Board take a position on this now in its editorials instead of some of the recent subjects of much less importance, such as how much money to pay out for a police shooting, issues for suburban commuters, etc.
Let’s get our priorities straight here!
— Erik Andersen, Downers Grove
Crumbling of checks
I accept that Donald Trump won, although I did not vote for him. I accept that the American people wanted a change. I accept that there is too much waste in our government.
I do not accept the dismantling of our government. I do not accept the crumbling of the separation of powers and the checks and balances our Founding Fathers intended. I do not accept that the American people really want individuals who have little or no experience making decisions about what departments or programs need to be extinguished. I do not accept that the American people want Elon Musk and his young entourage having access to our personal information such as our Social Security numbers.
I beg all to wake up before we no longer recognize our country and we have to accept it.
— Susan Bauer, Hawthorn Woods
Board’s contradictions
In its piece on the current woes consumers are facing at the grocery store and elsewhere, the Tribune Editorial Board points out that “despite Trump’s promises to roll back price increases that already have occurred, a president’s powers are relatively limited when it comes to market forces, as many Trump predecessors have found to their chagrin (including Joe Biden)” (“The price of eggs? Just one sore spot in a food economy that has Americans on edge,” Feb. 10).
It would have been nice if the editorial board had acknowledged that basic fact during the presidential campaign, when candidate Donald Trump was thundering falsehoods about how “Bidenomics” was driving up inflation and making the price of eggs unaffordable. Rather than deal in reality, however, the editorial board sang a decidedly different tune about government and the economy last spring.
In an editorial (“Americans are not all economically ignorant. They just mostly care about different measurements than elites.,” May 26) about why Trump was ahead in the polls despite economic data favoring the incumbent, the board argued no, voters aren’t stupid to blame politicians for all these high prices. It proclaimed, bizarrely enough: “The mistake Democrats keep making, time and again, is to bang away on (Trump’s) liabilities (criminal and otherwise) that swing voters already have discounted, instead of fixing the two things that mater the most in this election: immigration and the cost of living.”
So apparently, according to the editorial board, Democrats are supposed to “fix” grocery prices because voters expect that. That’s smart politics. But we can’t expect a Republican president to do the same. That’s unrealistic.
Yet another topic the editorial board has two positions on, depending on who’s in the White House. Disappointing, but not surprising.
I have plenty of other examples of their doublethink, if anyone’s interested.
— Gregg Long, Longmont, Colorado
We need reason, not fear
Again and again, we see politicians stoke fear to justify harmful policies. They tell us immigrants are a threat, that LGBTQ+ rights endanger children, that granting women full autonomy over their bodies will lead to chaos.
They’ve even suggested we should be afraid of books, of all things. Books!
The thing is, fear-based messaging taps into our most primal instincts — fight or flight or fawn or freeze — shutting down logic and reason. When people are scared, they react, often without thinking about long-term consequences.
And that’s exactly what some politicians count on. They want people scared. Because when people are scared, these politicians can soothe them. They can provide answers to the problems they made up.
This is power. And it is manipulation. And it’s how we end up with bans instead of solutions.
Instead of improving education, they ban books. Instead of addressing health care needs, they criminalize choices. Instead of creating humane immigration policies, they build higher walls.
Fear makes for bad decision-making, and when it drives policy, we all lose.
Fear is an easy sell — it simplifies complex issues into a black-and-white, us-versus-them narrative. But real leadership means digging into the hard questions, finding solutions that work and making decisions based on facts, not hysteria.
We don’t have to fall for it. We can demand better. We can support leaders who lead with reason instead of fear. And most of all, we can refuse to let fear dictate how we see our neighbors, our communities and our future.
— Ariele Sieling, Newton, New Hampshire
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