Concerns about Donald Trump surpass those about Nixon, Reagan

Financial services executive Zachary Karabell offers the latest twist in the normalization of Donald Trump (“It’s not just Trump, People freaked out over Nixon and Reagan, too,” Nov. 17), concluding “we have danced this dance before” and “the sum of all our fears amounts to far less than many of us just now believe.”

But Nixon and Reagan did not appoint a white nationalist as their chief strategist. They did not lay plans to bar members of a religion from entering the country and forcibly register those living here as U.S. citizens. They did not prepare to deport millions as they prepared to take office. They did not include among the goals of their first 100 days the removal of all regulations protecting public lands from coal mining and oil and gas fracking. And they did not declare global warming “a hoax.” (Having never heard of it, of course, they couldn’t know better. The current president-elect has no such excuse.)

Complacency and looking to the past is no help: We have never been here before. That’s why, for the next four years, my organization and all of civil society will be fighting Trumpism with everything we’ve got.

This story was originally published December 5, 2016 at 9:18 PM with the headline "Concerns about Donald Trump surpass those about Nixon, Reagan."