Dear Editor: I beg of you, please stop!
As a regular reader of the Tablet, I find your attempts to normalize President Donald Trump to be disturbing.
Case in point: your Feb. 25 editorial, filled with pietistic language, attempting to make some kind of moral equivalence between Trump and his press critics.
All presidents had issues with the press. Some journalists have always been unscrupulous. That is routine.
Trump as president is not. As Sen. John McCain pointed out, describing the press as enemies of the people is what authoritarians do. As Pope Francis described it on the front page of the same issue of The Tablet, populists around the world are promoting nationalism at the expense of moral obligations to refugees. As he did last year in Mexico, when Francis described how real Christians don’t build walls to separate peoples, he didn’t mention Trump by name but everyone knew who he was talking about. Trump had the honesty to be offended; his apologists in the Catholic media pretended Francis was referring to an oblique abstraction.
Trump just doesn’t stop. His first campaign speech referred to Mexicans as rapists and murderers. Subsequently he told us Muslims should be banned and black Americans exist in the midst of violence that only he, the Great Leader, can rescue them from.
There are children in Brooklyn and Queens tonight who sleep uneasily for fear that they may not see their parents in the morning, thanks to Trump’s deportation policies that expand those eligible to be deported to include those who ever used false documents to obtain work to feed their children. Many of them are Catholics in our pews.
The Tablet has a proud history. You frequently run articles praising The Tablet’s involvement in the great issues that have faced this nation. Some day, if we survive this, we will look back on this era, and historians will judge an immoral and incompetent President who reveled in rupturing so many of our Catholic families. They may stumble upon a Catholic diocesan publication with a proud history and wonder why it so routinely minimizes abhorrent policies and behavior. For what purpose?
Thank God we still have an aggressive press, a pope, and political leaders like Senator McCain who can point out what is happening.
PETER FEUERHERD
Rego Park