Who does Trump think he’s kidding with the Orwellian term ‘alternative facts?’

So top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway has given the media a new politically correct term for lies and falsehoods “alternative facts”! One wonders when the SNP will more openly exploit this verbal alternative, although they have been spouting alternative facts at us for long enough.

JOHN ADDISON Addison Conservation and

Design, Bush House Edinburgh Technopole

Milton Bridge

Those who naively declare that it’s none of our business who the Americans choose as their president are wrong. It’s self-evident that we have no right to vote in their elections, but we have every right to express our views on their choice, especially when it has an impact on us. Every US policy decision, whether on foreign aid, taxation, trade or the environment, ultimately affects us all.

Wordsarepowerfultools,and the more powerful the leader, the more carefully we should listen, and respond with words of our own. Almost three million people, led by women, but including many men, took to the streets of American cities on Saturday, and hundreds of thousands turned out in other countries around the world, to express their opinions about Trump’s election.

People are worried with good reason.

The US media is now being punished for truthfully reporting that Trump’s inauguration audience was smaller than that of Obama. Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer angrily accused journalists of “deliberately false reporting”. By imposing censorship on factual reporting, Trump has already broken his vow to “protect free speech for all Americans”.

In a breathtaking example of Orwellian “Newspeak”, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House aide, later insisted that Spicer had simply offered “alternative facts”. Trump’s attitude has not gone unnoticed.

His inauguration has given far-right parties in Europe a confidence boost. National Front leader Marine Le Pen is set to headline a gathering of eurosceptic and far-right leaders in Germany on Saturday to promote their “vision for a Europe of freedom”. Geert Wilders of the Dutch anti-islam Freedom Party announced the conference on his Twitter feed using the hashtag “We Willmakeourcountriesgreat Again”. Sound familiar? CAROLYN TAYLOR Gagiebank, Wellbank Broughty Ferry, Dundee Is there anything we can learn from the divisions and conflicts which we are facing? In the US we have a gulf between the Trumpsters and the rest, in the UK between the Remainers and the Brexiteers and in Scotland between the yay sayers and the nay sayers.

A common theme seems to be nationalism.

All that nationalism seems to bring about is division and conflict.

HENRY KINLOCH Campbell Park Crescent,

Edinburgh