“Criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on our own young people … will find no safe haven anywhere in our country…They don’t want to use guns because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they take a young, beautiful girl, 15, 16, and others and they slice ’em and dice ’em with a knife. Because they want them to go through excruciating pain …  and these are the animals that we’ve been protecting … Well, they’re not being protected any longer.”

This is how the president spoke to our children at the Boy Scout Jamboree, all the while talking about the “fake media,” obliquely insulting Jeff Sessions and encouraging the audience to boo former President Obama and Hillary Clinton — and revisiting his 2016 victory, of course. Quite a contrast to how any other president has spoken to our impressionable young kids. All other presidents’ speeches have been more along the line of Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And Roosevelt’s “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Which message would you rather your children heard? What example would you want them to emulate? Despots have always known if you want to control the populace, give them someone to hate (Muslims) and someone to fear (aliens). It keeps people from noticing what the despots, themselves, are doing.

There is gang violence, and some illegal aliens commit violent acts, but violent crime has been going down for years, although there is evidence Trump’s hate speech has resulted in an uptick in violence and hate crimes.

I did a little research. There are roughly 32,000 total gun deaths a year in this country — 16,000 murders. In 2014 there were 3,827 stabbing or beating deaths. Most of the other 12,000 would be murders by guns.

I also looked up serial killers, of which we have had and have way too many. Almost all are native born Americans. Most are white Americans raised in the “Christian” tradition. Ted Bundy, who killed around 40 girls that we know of, was a rising young star in the Republican Party. To be fair, John Wayne Gacy was a Democrat.

What we really have to fear is a president who alienates our friends, knows nothing at all about the policies he puts forward and only cares about how he can use the office to enrich himself and his family. He has a sad need to be adored. Mexico is now planning on buying the corn and other crops it formerly bought from the U.S. from Argentina. Germany and Britain no longer consider us to be a reliable ally because they don’t trust the president’s leadership.

An Australian journalist wrote that we had ceded our position as leader of the free world, and that cessation of our leadership had been accelerated by Donald Trump. He wrote that while some may celebrate our demise, he thought the world would miss us when we were gone.

Lonna Gooden Van Horn

Northwood