In beginning Hitler also spoke of peace

To the Editor:
President Obama called Donald Trump’s victory “the usual zig and zag of politics,” as if nothing unusual is taking place. He is either whistling past the graveyard, in denial or capitulating, as Trump appoints the “alt-right” extremist Stephen Bannon to chief strategist.
This presidential election became a referendum on and a stunning rebuke and repudiation of neoliberalism, the disastrous Obama administration and its legacy, the feckless Democrat and Republican establishments and the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media, all of whom alternately and incessantly slammed and mocked the president-elect ad nauseam. And Clinton still could not win.
Does anyone believe Donald Trump will simply forget this or put it behind him?
The ascendancy of this crude demagogue signals a crisis of confidence in the ruling institutions. The only mandate Trump received was for change. The voters who elected a black president for two terms had reached a tipping point, it was more than racism, nativism, sexism or xenophobia that determined the outcome. People are fed up with the status quo, and with the duplicitous phonies and frauds in Washington – and Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”
Adolph Hitler rose to power because the traditional parties of the Weimar Republic came to be seen as ineffectual and illegitimate. Hitler would channel the frustration, humiliation and rage of the German people and unify them around a vulnerable “enemy.” In the beginning, Hitler also spoke of peace and accommodation.

John St. Lawrence
Johnston