Trying Trump in the media

Re “Did Trump cross the line?” editorial, May 25

President Trump asked the directors of two intelligence agencies to publicly deny that there was any evidence of a connection between his campaign staff and the Russians. A public admission that there is no evidence of collusion would serve as a reminder that people are presumed to be innocent until they are proven guilty.

In view of all the media hysteria, the president’s request was necessary and justified.

If Trump thought that the Internal Revenue Service was targeting a group for political reasons and he spoke out against it, would you accuse him of trying to interfere with an investigation? If Trump thinks there is no basis for this very public investigation of his campaign, do you think he should remain silent and allow his campaign to be “tried in the press” without putting up any defense? Bill Gravlin Rancho Palos Verdes

The assertion in your editorial that “Donald Trump may have entered the White House with some misconceptions about the limits of his authority as president” is a colossal understatement.

It would be truer to say Trump has always been guided by myth perceptions about himself, including his more recent selfinduced fallacy that he is personally in charge of and capable of altering the course of the world.

Trump has always viewed his own existence as a quest for illimitable self-gratification. In that vein, it’s almost nonsensical to speak of his even conceiving of the limits of his authority as president. Why, all of a sudden, would one of the world’s most famous billionaires abandon the very braggadocio that got him to the point he’s at today?

In actual fact, it may be the millions of American voters who marked their ballots for Trump who are now bedeviled by their own misconceptions about the president’s destructive capabilities while in the White House. Kevin Murphy Chelsea, Canada