Trump as president
With regard to “‘I will be president for all Americans’” (November 10), my belief is that we are living in times that are changing rapidly, and that Donald Trump epitomizes these changes.
Life is like a flowing river. We need to go with the flow. Life is about change – nothing ever stays the same. If we cling to the banks of that river, we get stuck in the debris and bogged down in the “sameness.”
I trust that Trump with bring a fresh change and that he realizes the old ways of “leaders and followers” have passed. The new way is cooperation and unity.
Good luck to Trump. May he make America great again.
PHYLLIS WALDBAUM Ra’anana
The historic election victory of Donald Trump represents a monumental triumph of the belatedly-enlightened American people over a chronically failed, corrupt political establishment embedded for too long in a quagmire of progressively dangerous, insane political correctness.
There are five tangible realities to take and digest from this campaign: 1. In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles (David Ben-Gurion). 2. The only two certainties in life – death and taxes – remain as such. 3. There are no coincidences in life, only miracles performed anonymously by God – in this case, guiding the electorate of the planet’s greatest democracy to recognize the reality about the political establishment. 4. The free world has been thrown a critical and pivotal lifeline in the so-far unsuccessful fight against a surging, worldwide radical Islamic terrorist caliphate. 5. The election outcome ought to be dedicated to the heroic victims of the 2012 Benghazi outrage and to those who diligently worked to expose the administration’s dereliction of duty and cover-up.
ALAN CROOCK Kfar Saba
You report that Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States. You also call him the “president-elect.” But Trump has not yet been elected president and he is not yet the president-elect.
Let’s get the American election process straight. On November 8, voters elected “electors” in each on the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. No one voted for president, only for the electors.
These electors will cast their ballots on December 19, and their votes will be counted at a joint session of Congress in the first week of January 2017. If, as expected, Trump receives a majority vote of the electors, he will then officially be elected president, and only at that point will he be the president-elect. Not before.
He will be inaugurated on January 20, 2017, together with the vice president-elect.
MARVIN HANKIN Jerusalem
The writer is an attorney.