Issues aside, president needs to be removed

I’ve been putting off this letter for a while, but I need to get some things off my chest. I am a 72-year-old retired trucker living in Northwest Arkansas. It’s a good life here. Since 1980, I have voted Republican. I felt the party of Lincoln best reflected my views of my Christian faith and my view of personal responsibility.

But no longer. In November I will vote a straight Democratic ticket. It started for me when the impeachment hearings took place. I actually went out and bought a copy of the Mueller report and read it cover to cover. I had actually stopped watching Fox News about two years prior, so I guess you could say I was open to different points of view. The 2016 election was hard for me. Though I didn’t vote for Clinton, I didn’t vote for Trump either. You could just tell the guy was a fraud.

All my friends are Trump supporters, and so is my wife, so I don’t talk politics much. But here’s my point: This is not an issues-oriented election. Gun control and abortion and all the other issues I hold dear must be set aside. This is an election to uphold the tenets of our democracy. We have a president that must be thrown out of office. He is unfit to be the commander-in-chief. He is seeking to destroy the institutions we rely on, such as the

Justice, Commerce and Defense departments, etc., by politicizing them for his own personal interests. He has corrupted the legislative, judicial. and executive branches by installing unqualified sycophants, usually in an “acting capacity,” in order to get around the congressional oversight necessary to vet these people.

Comes now a worldwide pandemic, followed by an economic collapse not seen since the great Depression. As I write this 160,000 souls have been killed and 32 million people are out of work. This presidents response? “It is what it is.” Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have had a rescue package on Mitch McConnell s desk for two months. They dismissed it out of hand by saying it is too much. They say the bill pays people more to stay home than if they went back to work. But here is the truth: The U.S. GDP is 70 percent a service economy. If you inject money into the economy through the people, as we did in March, it will bolster the economy to the point where we will stave off a depression. And depression is a real possibility. Read your history on Herbert Hoover. If a half brain-dead retired trucker from Arkansas can connect the dots here and can see where this is leading, you’d think the Republicans could.

There’s an election in three months. Remember their names.

HAROLD WILLIAMS Bella Vista