The Russians didn’t win in 2016
Re “Mueller indicted a gullible public,” Opinion, April 21
The American public isn’t nearly as gullible as Virginia Heffernan suggests.
It is true that Russia interfered with our democratic process by offering aid to the Trump campaign and seeding anti-Hillary Clinton postings throughout social media. But the primary messenger for Donald Trump was Donald Trump.
His bombastic views about immigrants and foreigners threatening America resonated with millions of voters. Heffernan’s advice to Americans to “refuse to be drafted into the next infowar” won’t make a dime’s worth of difference to people who genuinely believe Trump represents their “values” and is making America great again.
Trump’s election wasn’t a result of gullibility; it was a result of relatability. It wasn’t the Russians who threw our election process into disarray and sent us down the populist road we are now traveling. It was us.
That more than anything else is what was un- American about 2016.
KENNETH KONECNIK
Mundelein, Ill.
Did I miss something really important? Could Heffernan have discovered that Justice Department special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had “indicted a gullible public”?
More importantly, can she explain how whatever the Russian government said in 2016 was more important to the public than what the American media said? Large newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times vigorously opposed Trump.
Is the voting public’s sin that it did not do what the L. A. Times wanted?
ARTHUR ARMSTRONG
Manhattan Beach
The only gullible members of the public are the blind partisans buying into media liberals like Heffernan.
Clinton lost the 2016 election because she felt entitled to the presidency and, like most in the press, was arrogantly condescending to opponents.
As Heffernan and pundits who agree with her extend their juvenile insults and attacks beyond Trump to all his supporters, they go beyond a disreputable irrelevancy to become a total laughingstock.
PAT MURPHY
Pacific Palisades