To the Editor:
Thank you for your honesty, and for naming your weariness. Many people of faith feel it now, along with the sense that we are living through a moment of reckoning.
I take seriously your belief that we are being warned — about hubris, about disorder, about the danger of this hour. In the Christian tradition I was formed in, warnings are never given simply to be observed. They are given so that conscience may respond while there is still time.
If we are facing a reordering, then how power is exercised now — and what we are willing to excuse — matters profoundly. Hubris is not only a spiritual condition; it shows itself in contempt for limits, truth, alliances, and human dignity. These are not abstract signs. They are lived realities, with consequences borne by the vulnerable.
Faith may tell us that history is held by God. But discernment is asked of us while decisions remain human. Prophecy does not relieve us of responsibility; it sharpens it.
That is where I find both urgency and hope — not in predicting the end, but in choosing, here and now, what we will stand behind, and what we will refuse.
Pat Collins,
Fillmore, Ca
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To the Editor:
I thought Pat Collins’ arguments were worthy of more than quoting Lincoln on his defense of whiskey generals. You forget that Lincoln’s General was a master tactician who did not require Mrs. Grant to attend his strategy sessions. Secretary Hegseth had to swear off the sauce to get the job, and brings his missus to his workplace, to either ensure compliance or advise him on security matters. To compare Lincoln to Trump is comparing a Christmas tree to a carrot.
With regard to my request for your estimation of Trump’s domestic policies, you did what you so often do. You reframed the argument, ignored the actual question, and cloaked yourself with the moral high ground of Judaeo-Christian and anti-communist principles. “But what of the good things Trump has accomplished”, you asked. You identified one.
You then anointed Trump with “a mulligan” for his detention and immigration policies, derailing all other domestic policies from discussion. Except that “a mulligan” is not absolution. It does demonstrate, however, your refusal or failure to recognize the inhumane harm and suffering involved in distinctly anti-Judaeo-Christian methods of achieving Trump’s and your core objective.
It allows you to endorse by silence Trump’s description of immigrants as “animals,” and “garbage,” removable by any means necessary to places of unspeakable misery in all forms, without Constitutional or moral protections. It gives you permission to avoid the consequences of all of Trump’s domestic policies, secure in the thought that Christ approves? You couldn’t be reading the same Judaeo-Christian Scriptures with which I am familiar. Yours must be a “Trump Bible.”
You ignore that Trump is now holding the bag for the economy, lack of employment, for using food assistance as a cudgel against government subsidies for health insurance, for reductions in Medicaid, for withholding federal funds in states that don’t elect Trump-endorsed mayors or governors. Who thinks “affordability is a “Democrat[ic] hoax,” and that an Arc de Trump and massive ballroom are essential governmental expenditures.
My question remains, how do you separate the terrible things you admittedly see Trump doing in foreign affairs from the same inclinations in domestic affairs? A president who will treat honor as optional in one area will treat it as optional elsewhere. He promised to rid us of the “worst of the worst,” and instead makes no attempt to differentiate them from our families, neighbors, and friends. He is the same heartless, narcissistic con man he has always been.
Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca