Statues should have been left alone

Re: “No excuses possible for Trump now” (Andrew Coyne, Aug. 17)

It is very fashionable to denigrate Donald Trump. Whatever he says is subject to heavy criticism.

Trump is neither eloquent nor charming, and I am not his apologist. However, in my view, he is smarter than his predecessor and many of his critics.

Andrew Coyne is right when he writes: “you either have the judgment to see (President Donald Trump) for what he is or you do not.”

A man whose daughter became Jewish and whose Jewish son-in-law is held in high esteem is hardly a racist. Trump attributed blame to both sides and condemned neo-Nazis, KKK, white supremacists and racists, but many in the media were not satisfied.

In my opinion, those who decided to remove statues were not very smart, because they generated a crisis. They created a problem that didn’t exist and showed intolerance. They provoked those who were defeated during the Civil War by rubbing their wounds and erasing their history. They fed the extremists who needed any excuse to express their hatred, but they also hurt a lot of other people who didn’t want to be humiliated some more.

How would Coyne feel if English-speaking Canadians started destroying statues of French-Canadian heroes or if French Canadians started dismantling statues of English-speaking-Canadian heroes? That wouldn’t be too smart, would it?

In the United States, the extreme left has been behaving as irresponsibly as the extreme right. For example, on university campuses they have intimidated others who didn’t share their opinions. They claim to be more justified than the extreme right, but in reality they both are to blame, and that is what Trump did. Joseph Bitton, Hampstead