Trump’s contemptible behaviour

■ I applaud Dennis Fitzgerald’s letter (‘Trump shows pettiness in death’, August 28) ridiculing Donald Trump’s bestial reaction to the death of John McCain.

Trump vetoed a White House statement praising Senator McCain and only allowed the US flag to be flown at half-mast at the weekend.

Following a furore, Trump’s White House staff somehow persuaded the presidential sociopath to allow the flag to be lowered to half-mast again. This was followed by a eulogy from Trump – actually his speech writers, who will probably be fired next week – saying what a jolly good fellow McCain was, a man Trump once called a coward for being captured and held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese.

Trump himself did not see military service by having five deferments – four for educational reasons, hard to believe he had any education – and one for bad feet.

These excuses stink of rich boys being protected by their own; by the scions of money thinking themselves above poor white, and particularly poor black, youths being sent to mortal and psychological oblivion because they did not have the money to pay their doctors to lie for them.

One might be charitable and feel pity for those Americans who felt their plight had always been ignored by past administrations, who voted for the miscreant incumbent – but what of the well-to-do Trump voters?

Who can understand the mind of a people George Clemenceau described as “the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without the normal intervening period of civilisation”?

I hasten to add that this does not include the people of New York, who are of a separate calibre.

George Dalzell

Stillorgan, Co Dublin