Editor,

It was Maya Angelou who once told us, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

We find ourselves today living in a country that was founded on the finest of principles — freedom, equality and acceptance — but now led by a man and an ideology that further desecrates everything it’s ever stood for with each passing day.

With just a few taps of his finger last Wednesday, Donald Trump in the saddest, most vile way possible, showed us who he is.

When he shared three videos that supposedly portrayed Muslims as violent, Christian-hating thugs on Twitter, he showed us that he does not understand that there is no place in America for that kind of racism, bigotry and hate. Ours is not a country that vilifies entire religions, and he need only walk among the crosses, stars of David and stars and crescents at Arlington National Cemetery to learn that.

He must not know that we’ve fought and won long, bloody wars against people and ideologies who believed that some humans were less human than others, that entire religions of people were dangerous to society, and that it’s okay to hate somebody just because of what they believe.

What he did on Wednesday is a far greater threat than his inaction on climate change or his takeover of federal judgeships with amateur ghost hunters who’ve never tried a case. What he did on Wednesday strikes at the core of America itself, and it shows that our president has no concept of what it means to be an American at all.

For 241 years, we’ve tried to do better than this. What Donald Trump did on Wednesday is giving up. It’s giving in to our worst demons, our worst instincts and the darkest parts of ourselves that led us to do things 72 years ago that we vowed never to do again.

So now, we have to ask ourselves if we’re really ready to give up on the idea — inscribed in America’s founding documents — that we’re all equal, no matter what god we pray to. Donald Trump is, but he’s only one man.

And maybe we’re so afraid of the madmen who supposedly want us dead that we can’t even think straight ,but the right thing — the American thing — to do is to show him he’s wrong. And it’ll be easy, because we’re just so much better than that.

William Harper

Clinton