To the Editor:

This letter is in response to George Pratt’s Oct. 10 letter in support of Donald Trump [“Politicians intended to globalize our government”]. Mr. Pratt admits that he is “not particularly fond” of Trump. I’m glad to hear it. That speaks well of him.

But he then says that Trump “explains himself as we do,” which I assume is meant to explain general support for the man. Assuming also he is referring to Trump’s use of coarse language, I would like to address that idea.

I have used coarse language also, many people do these days — but in private, not on a public stage. I daresay Mr. Pratt would be offended by hearing such language in a public forum in the town of Altamont.

Why then does it not set off alarms for this nation when Trump uses offensive language and sinks to mean, petty name-calling on national television, during public rallies, and even to international audiences? Donald Trump has degraded our public forum to a level that only a few short years ago would have immediately sunk an aspiring politician’s career. So much for American high-mindedness.

The second thing I would like to address with Mr. Pratt is what he incorrectly, to my mind, calls Trump’s positive contribution of exposing Washington politicians who aggrandize their financial futures. If this were only true!

Instead, Trump is only interested in calling out Democrats, often for doing what he and his cohorts do themselves. While Mr. Pratt doesn’t name anyone, he is presumably referring to Joe Biden and the “corruption” that enabled his son to make a fortune.

Now I happen to agree with Mr. Pratt that politicians should be serving the public without also trying to enhance their or their family members’ connections and job prospects. The problem is that what Hunter Biden did, which Trump and his consiglieri Rudy Giuliani are calling corruption, is legal.

It is not permitted under our Constitution for a president or other elected official to receive anything of value from a foreign country, but it is, unfortunately, quite legal for the family members of elected officials to go job-hunting and/or make lucrative business deals with foreign companies — in other words, to trade on their close associations with American power.

Which is why Hunter Biden’s dealings were within the law, as are all the deals that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Don Jr. are making as they add to their already bloated millionaire status. So, too, are the deals that have enabled Mitch McConnell, Republican majority leader of the Senate, and his wife, Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation, to increase their net worth in a few short years from several million dollars to a reported $31 million through Chao’s father’s shipping company and Chinese connections.

Corruption? Unfortunately, apparently not.

The wheeling and dealing is not limited to Democrats. What is needed are stricter laws that benefit the country, not the politicians, such as term limits and anti-nepotism laws.

Where there is actual corruption, our government, while slow, really does try to weed it out — such as in the case of Republican congressman from Buffalo Chris Collins, who recently was forced to resign after pleading guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI. While this example is of a corrupt Republican, sadly there are examples on both sides. The point here is that we need to be less concerned with which side someone is on and more concerned with good government.

I also agree with Mr. Pratt that common sense appears to be lacking today, but I fear I disagree with his analysis of where it is missing. Regarding why so many Democrats and so few Republicans are opposed to Trump, I think it should be obvious that most elected Republicans are afraid to speak out against him.

Those who have, feel the lash of his verbal abuse. Term limits would, I think, enable more politicians on both sides of the aisle to show some independence. If they were not so concerned with re-election and with raising money for their campaigns, we might find they had more backbone.

As for the reasons people, whatever their party, might be opposed to Trump, let’s start with his constant lies. The Washington Post keeps a list — to date, Trump’s documented lies are over 13,000.

Indeed, he can’t seem to keep himself from lying — even over unimportant things. Did anyone besides Trump give a hoot about the size of his inaugural crowd? When he mistakenly said Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian — a simple error anyone could make — the National Weather Service needed to issue a correction.

The president could have tweeted out, “Whoops! Sorry — my mistake!” Not only would it have disappeared quickly from the news, people would have respected him for his conscientious honesty.

Instead, whether because of inner insecurity or because he thinks he is too important to be wrong, Trump tried to convince the entire nation that he was right, and the weather service wrong, by drawing on a weather map with his Sharpie pen and holding it up to national news as proof of his rightness.

This ridiculous incident should have been permitted to die, but Trump couldn’t let it die because he could see that his doctored map didn’t fool anyone. Did it end there?

No, Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, illegally put political pressure on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to publicly rebuke the conscientious weather-service employees in Birmingham for attempting to report the weather accurately.

It’s notable that not a single person was willing to sign the letter of rebuke or stand by it and the National Weather Service condemned the insertion of politics into what should always be above such concerns.

To my mind, Trump’s lying and his bullying method of turning truth upside down are among the most egregious aspects of his presidency. His labeling of news organizations that do not agree with him as “fake news” is damaging to our ability to have a public discourse and to the people’s ability to differentiate truth from fiction.

It undermines our democracy. Politicians have always resented damaging stories about themselves and they have a history of defending themselves, sometimes very colorfully.

Who can forget Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism?” But Trump endlessly pounds home to his supporters the notion that anyone who disagrees with him is making the entire story up even when the facts are plain for everyone to see, and far worse, he labels the press as the enemy of the people. In doing so, he seriously undermines one of the foundations of our democracy — the free press.

But I believe that the worst thing about Trump is his insistence that, no matter what, he is above the law. Surely there is not a person in this country who doesn’t know that we Americans are part of a special union, a nation of equals, with elected, not ordained, officials where no person is above the law. We Americans do not have a king.

The current impeachment probe into Donald Trump may turn up nothing more damaging than that he casually dangled the idea of Ukraine helping him against Joe Biden, who may not even turn out to be opposing him in the 2020 election.

And while our Constitution forbids Trump from doing that, it may have been done in a half-hearted way or in such ambiguous language that the House will not vote to impeach, or that the Senate will not convict.

But, Mr. Pratt, it is not a farce. It is the right of the people to ask their elected officials to address anything they think may not be above board.

To suggest that they do not have that right, or should not exercise that right even if, for instance, the years-long investigation turns up nothing more than, say, the president having been guilty of being a creep who had an affair with an impressionable young woman and then lied about it, is to suggest that we become more like the dictatorships that Donald Trump appears to so admire.

And I am pretty sure that, as a World War II veteran, that is not something Mr. Pratt would want.

Laurie Searl

Berne