Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, President Donald Trump’s former secretary of defense, called the president a “polemicist,” one who engages in debates of controversial views with antagonistic fervor, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published last week.

Trump espouses controversial viewpoints, many based on misinformation, bigotry or proven lies. The written record and videotapes demonstrate his lies in more than 12.000 statements to the American people.

Although representing the world’s leading democracy, he is a forgiving “good buddy” to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who attacked our election process and forcibly annexed a democratic neighbor, and Kim Jong-un, who starves his people and has created a nuclear threat.

Behaving like an insecure third-grade bully, Trump chastises those who differ with him with insulting and disrespectful nicknames. Unlike late Republican Sen. John McCain, who refuted audiences who spewed untruths about his Democratic rival for president, Trump is silent to bigoted chants or he makes statements saying prisoners of war are losers and that he only likes winners.

He has abandoned his moral authority by not silencing audiences that chanted bigoted, white power chants or responded to his criticism of four minority women legislators with openly racist chants.

The president ridiculed and insulted his attorney general for following the ethics of that office and appropriately recusing himself from reviewing Trump campaign issues. He insulted allies who sent their soldiers to fight and sometimes die with our forces.

Why such behavior? Could ego-gratification, vested self-interest or personal absence of morality and ethics be the answer?

Why are Republican legislators and the decent, America-loving people of the president’s base cheerleaders for this behavior or silent about it?

Are they kids who are frightened the schoolyard bully might pick on them if they oppose him?

Or do they not believe all people are created with equal rights and that democracy’s values are worth the struggle to maintain them?

— Richard Sorenson

Salisbury