Dear Editor,
In his Aug. 28, 2024, Mountain Times letter “Response to Republican choice,” Mr. George de Luna states rather oddly that “Most of his [Trump’s] ‘lies’ are exaggerations but are in the same direction of the truth.” Actual journalists disagree.
In their Jan. 24, 2021, Washington Post article “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years,” journalists Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly do not use bizarre characterizations of Trump’s statements such as “same direction of the truth.” As the title says, these are “false and misleading.”
Three Trump lies that come to mind are that Obama was born in Kenya, climate change is a Chinese hoax, and that he won the 2020 presidential election. (How these can be characterized as “in the direction of the truth?” Only Mr. de Luna can explain.) And Trump continues to repeat the lie that he won. The journalist who wrote this article called the claim “ridiculously wrong.” Interestingly, Mr. de Luna does not mention the 2020 election or Trump’s lies about it.
Here is more on the 2020 election: A group of eight well-respected conservative Republicans headed by retired Missouri Senator John Danforth, wrote the report “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”
This report examines all of Trump’s charges of election fraud and demolishes any notion that Trump won. I challenge Mr. de Luna, or other Trump supporter, to read it and still claim that Biden did not win.
However, his loss didn’t stop him from supporting the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, trying to get the Georgia Attorney General to “find” him [11,780] votes, or trying to install bogus slates of electors. That is, he tried to overturn a free and fair election, the basis of our democracy.
There is a word for someone “who betrays another’s trust or is false to a duty or obligation, or someone who commits treason.” The word is “traitor” and by any definition, Trump is one.
Mr. de Luna states many things that must be charitably called his opinions, and which he backs up with … well, really, nothing. For example. “The left wing media is totally corrupt.” He doesn’t say who he means by this, but we can be fairly certain that it means anyone who disagrees with Mr. de Luna’s bizarre ideas about Trump. Mr. de Luna gives no references for his claims, but in fairness, it would be hard or impossible to find any evidence or credible opinion for statements like: “If Trump loses and the left gets control of government, you can expect a weak economy, never ending wars, rampant inflation and gas prices, restrictions on what you can eat, drive, say and do.”
Mr. de Luna stays away from Trump’s draft-dodging, his cheating his contractors and on his wives, and the $400 million he got from Daddy Fred, but it’s pretty hard to defend any of that.
Mr. de Luna ends by saying, despite his draft-dodging and attempted election sabotage, what a patriot Trump is. De Luna asks “What does he have to gain by being president? He’s already rich and can live his live out in luxury.” But we have it on good authority why Trump wanted to be president. In an interview with Maggie Haberman Trump himself said: “The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had it to do again, would you have done it?’ The answer is, ‘Yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are’.”
As the reporter then clarified: “OK. So, just to be crystal clear here — Trump is saying that if he had it to do all over, he would run for president again because it made him more famous. “
Some like to call Trump a “conservative,” but the only association between Trump and conservatism is in the first three letters: “CON.”
Kem Phillips, Cavendish
