To the editor:
It is not only fruitless but dangerous to debate Mr. Trump on current political issues such as taxation, employment, inflation, immigration, foreign policy, trade, health care, education, or the abortion question. To do so is to normalize and legitimize him as a candidate; it is to treat him as if it were a case of the first President Bush debating Clinton or President Obama debating Senator McCain.
In this election, Mr. Trump is himself the issue. All other issues are informed by, predicated upon, and subordinated to him and to his ominous envisioned agenda of an absolutist, authoritarian regime completely antithetical to democracy. Until the precise dimensions of his invidious aspirations are known, all other issues are not only secondary but irrelevant.
But the compounding problem is they cannot be known. For example, some of his cohorts who espouse the 2025 program have said that representative government, surely the indispensable component of any democracy, is obsolete, has had its day, and must give way to a new form of rule. Since Mr. Trump has actually orchestrated and directed an attack on our elected representatives of both parties, with knowledge aforethought that some of them might well be killed, is it so inconceivable that, in the frightening eventuality of his election, he would attempt to use the military in a coup against Congress?
And if Mr. Trump vigorously and angrily denounced such a suggestion as preposterous, you would still have only the assertion of a proven, inveterate, and arguably pathological liar! Indeed, it profits little to ask him anything at all!
We do not have the luxury of sitting around coffee shops or other forums discussing, in some self-induced torpor, the relative merits of Mr. Trump. He has none. Those who persist in the invincible ignorance of being still undecided are best left to some form of reality therapy!
Joseph R. Noone
Lynn
