To the Editor:
Throughout Donald Trump’s first year in office, Fox News has railed against what it calls the prejudice and unfairness of the “mainstream media’s” negativity in their abusive reporting on Trump.
It is certainly true that no other American president — with perhaps the exception of F.D.R., whose long tenure in office gave his enemies 12 years in which to vilify him — has been the target of such an unrelenting flood of hostile and denigrating attacks.
Trump has been called a “jerk” (Jeb Bush), a “pathological liar” (Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders) a “short-fingered vulgarian,” a con man, a snake oil salesman, a racist, a white supremacist, a sexist, a neo-Fascist, a sexual predator, an “egomaniac,” a narcissist, a xenophobe. “Saturday Night Live” and such late-night TV hosts as Stephen Colbert have revelled in Trump jokes and caricatures. Some eminent psychiatrists have defied their own profession’s code of conduct to offer diagnoses of Trump as mentally and emotionally ill.
My personal choice among the many epithets hurled at Trump was provided by Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. Fried labeled Trump a “malignant buffoon.”
But years from now, after he has left office, will those writing and commenting on Trump treat him with more consideration and generosity than he now receives?
I don’t think so.
Trump devotees such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Boston’s own Howie Carr may sneer at university professors as nerdy, eggheaded elitists who have the gall to consider themselves intellectually superior to “real Americans” living out there in fly-over country. Nevertheless, these professors write textbooks that play a large role in influencing how a future public will judge today’s political leaders.
These historians will be merciless in their portrayal of Donald Trump.
Trump’s children should prepare their own children for what they will hear and read about their grandfather when they take a prep school or college class in history or political science and the subject for discussion turns to the Trump Administration. If they are sensitive adolescents, it will be a painful experience.
R.E.L. Knight
West Tisbury
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