America can do better than ‘King’ Trump
In his recent commentary, Lew Jan Olowski provides us a window into the mind of a nationalist true believer’s support of President Donald Trump (“This is why Trump should be re-elected,” Jan. 7). I’ll focus here on just a few things Mr. Olowski gets profoundly wrong.
I’ll start with an easy one. Mr. Olowski states President Trump has reduced “American military deployments in the Middle East.” Not true, of course.
Mr. Olowski must not be paying attention to what’s going on. Does he not remember when President Trump gave Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the green light to invade Syria and attack our Kurdish ally and its people? American troops were just shuttled elsewhere in the Middle East, not removed.
And as to Mr. Trump “demanding reciprocity from…military allies” which Mr. Olowski praises, I doubt the Kurds agree with Mr. Trump’s idea of “reciprocity.” I mean Mr. Trump essentially stabbed an American ally in the back.
And when Mr. Olowski praises Mr. Trump for “withdrawing from … the Iran nuclear deal,” I wonder (again) where he has been. The escalating tensions with Iran, manifested in recent attacks on America’s embassy and other fortifications in Iraq — and the U.S. killing Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani — stem directly from the U.S. withdrawing from the Iran nuclear accord and the diplomacy around it.
Mr. Olowski essentially believes we should all bow to, my words, King Trump. What we need is a “culture of subordination” to King Trump’s wishes, so implies Mr. Olowski. Those civil servants who testified in the impeachment hearing were, according to Mr. Olowski, basically insubordinate to the King. The U.S. Constitution be damned; a sense of civic duty to it inappropriate. Only King Trump’s dictatorial direction is relevant.
Finally, Mr. Olowski implies that the divisiveness and division in America today is normal. Presidents, he contends, “rarely achieve majority approval.”
Wrong again. Here are the highest approval ratings in Gallup polls for presidents since Richard Nixon: Nixon 67%, Gerald Ford 71%, Jimmy Carter 75%, Ronald Reagan 68%, George H.W. Bush 89%, Bill Clinton 73%, George W. Bush 90%, Barack Obama 67%, and Mr. Trump 46%.
Mr. Olowski wants voters to “Keep America Great” by re-electing Mr. Trump. I say vote to “Make America Whole Again.” We don’t need another term of Mr. Olowski’s King Trump.
Frederic H. Decker, Bowie