"A vast carelessness"

Susan Posel

In today's NY Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Bigotry Didn’t Elect Trump” (Op-Ed, Dec. 27):

David Paul Kuhn claims that bigotry didn’t elect Donald Trump, despite Mr. Trump’s vow to register Muslims, despite his use of anti-Semitic tropes, and despite the white supremacists among Mr. Trump’s advisers and supporters. Mr. Trump may not himself be a racist, and Trump voters may not believe they themselves are bigoted, but Mr. Trump used lies, racism, misogyny, xenophobia and Islamophobia to sway voters.

Every Trump voter claims to have voted for the right reasons. To those people I say, if you voted for the man who claimed that Mexican immigrants were rapists and murderers, then you are complicit when a Latino child is threatened with deportation by schoolmates.

If you voted for a man who appealed to white supremacists, who used language right out of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” then you are complicit when a racial epithet is scrawled on a schoolroom door or when a swastika is painted on a synagogue wall.

If you voted for the man who demonized Muslims, then you are complicit when a mosque is burned down.

You are responsible for and complicit in everything this narcissistic, self-serving, authoritarian, willfully ignorant demagogue does.

Yes, your motives in voting for Mr. Trump may have been beyond reproach, but, nevertheless, you are complicit. Now, you have to live with your complicity.

JOYCE DENN

Woodbury, Minn.

Rob's comment:

And the rest of us also have to live with what a writer called "a vast carelessness" that elected this contemptible man President of the United States.