Closer to the truth
In extolling “J.D. Vance’s incredible road” (July 21), Douglas Altabef ignores the many negative statements Vance made about Trump in 2016 and 2017. He called Trump a “moral disaster,” a “total fraud,” “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin,” and wondered whether Trump was “America’s Hitler.” In a 2016 CNN interview, he said, “I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains.”
Trump said that if he is reelected, he would like to “be a dictator on day one.” He sparked a rebellion at the US Capitol aiming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and encouraged his vice president to reject certification of the results.
Trump told over 30,000 false or misleading claims in four years during his administration, according to The Washington Post, and is still telling the big lie that he won the 2020 presidential election despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He is in denial about climate threats despite the many wakeup calls we have been getting.
Trump hosted two known antisemites for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and made antisemitic statements such as that US Jews care more about Israel than the US and that Jews who do not support him are disloyal to Israel and Judaism. Vance’s comments about Trump in 2016 are far closer to the truth than his current praise of him. the Palestinian view of the “two-state solution” – a Palestinian state from which all Jews have been banished and a Muslim-majority Israel in which no Jew would be safe because Palestinians have grown up seeing their fellows honored and rewarded for killing Jews (“Aggressive deradicalization: US must help toward a better future in Gaza,” July 22).
Destroying this nefarious plan requires a complete Israeli victory over Hamas, the demilitarization of Gaza, and the deradicalization of the Palestinians. Israel cannot implement this plan by itself. Western democracies must realize that destruction of Israel is only the first step in Islamist efforts to implement a worldwide caliphate under Sharia law.
I hope that we will soon be seeing a return to Trump policies: bankrupting Iran so it will have to stop funding its proxies; widening the Abraham Accords so Israel will have partners working to resolve the “Palestine refugee” farce; and monitoring by the US, EU member states, and Arab states in the Abraham Accords of Gaza reconstruction projects to guarantee that donated monies are used for their intended purposes.