Sir, – I see Justine McCarthy has joined Fintan O’Toole and the rest of the leftist media by entering a ridiculously exaggerated spiral of doom. In her article “Thanks a bunch, America. Love, women everywhere” (Opinion & Analysis, November 8th), she compares a future America under Donald Trump to life under the Taliban. Might I take this opportunity to remind her that it was on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s watch that the US military abandoned the Afghan people and left behind billions of dollars of equipment and weaponry that ensured millions of Afghan women would be condemned to live in the most violent, oppressive misogynistic regime on earth. – Is mise,
SEAN MOONEY,
Raheny,
Dublin 5.
Sir, – The extraordinary mandate received by Donald Trump this week was the inevitable culmination of two clear trends in recent years.
First, having originally promised to govern as a non-partisan father-figure, from his first weeks in office Joe Biden decided to use Mr Trump as a strawman, regularly attacking him as a threat to democracy and presenting himself as the only person who could defeat Mr Trump in a future election.
Mr Biden did so in a shameless attempt to bolster his own tenuous grip on the Democrat nomination in 2024, and in the process breathed life back into a candidate who was a busted flush in the months after his departure from office.
Second, the last decade has seen a relentless drift by the Democratic Party towards policy positions which seem designed to appeal more to the far-left sociology faculties in Ivy League colleges than to ordinary American voters. Its upper echelons are now dominated by wealthy people based on the east and west coasts, who appear to be fascinated by the star power of the Obamas and multimillionaire celebrities.
By retreating into this ideological bunker, the Democrats paved the way for the extraordinary expansion of the appeal of the Republican Party, which now straddles all ideological, geographical, class, race and religious divides in a way which even Ronald Reagan never quite achieved.
The arrogant decision to anoint Kamala Harris – by any measure a wholly unsuitable candidate, untested by the electorate – as their nominee was just the icing on the cake.
So don’t blame the voters. Blame Mr Biden, his party, and those in the United States and abroad who unquestioningly cheered them on over the last four years. – Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH,
Dublin 3.