To the editor:

I appreciated the opportunity to read Mr. Grapentine’s thoughtful letter in last week’s paper.

There are points in Mr. Grapevine's letter I can agree with.

I deplore the vitriol he experienced while canvassing for his preferred candidate and am sincerely sorry he had to go through that. At least from his account, he didn’t experience the death threats and intimidation that poll workers and election officials faced for performing their civic duties after the last election.

As Mr. Grapentine states, social media is a big problem. Social media is programmed to feed you what you click on. It feeds you only what it perceives you want to hear, sending those who depend on it down their own personal rabbit hole. Both Democrats and Republicans who get their news exclusively through social media would do the country a favor if they refrained from voting.

Finally, I am sure Mr. Grapentine would agree with President Biden about an attack on a major presidential candidate when he said, “Our politics must never be a literal battlefield. We resolve our differences at the ballot box - not with bullets.”

That said, there are points which we see quite differently.

The rule of law is foundational to democracy. In a democracy, laws are voted on by the representatives of the people and interpreted by disinterested jurists. This is the antithesis of one man and a cabal of cronies deciding the law is whatever they want it to be.

When one perceives a law is broken they go to court to seek justice. This is the rule of law in action.

The Trump campaign alleging fraud and corruption in the 2020 presidential election brought 62 suits to courts in battleground states and in 61 of those — they lost (often also on appeal), in both state and federal courts.

Despite this overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump lost, he continues to insist that he was cheated out of winning the election. In doing so he undermines a large segment of the public’s trust in the rule of law as well as the electoral process, another bedrock of democracy. Therefore it is not too much, sadly to say, Donald Trump is “…a flamboyant offense to democracy…”. Donald Trump’s failure to respect the rule of law, therefore, makes him unfit to hold any public office, let alone the most powerful one in the world.

To blame Democrats for raising the political temperature is surely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Again Donald Trump, dismissing the rule of law, on Jan. 6, 2021 incited an already toxic mob to storm the Capitol building in the greatest affront to our democratic system in the history of the Republic, and resulting in the death of 5 capital police and injuries to 174 more.

When Mr. Grapentine claims that “Republicans, as a group, have been marginalized for decades”, he is surely referring only to Rhode Island. In the last 40 years, there have been 5 Republican and 5 Democrat administrations. Both the house and senate have gone back and forth and we can safely say that the Supreme Court is acting as an extension of the Republican party.

Again I am grateful to Mr. Grapentine for his heartfelt comments. I would hope that at some point in the near future I would have the opportunity to have a conversation with Mr. Grapentine so we could discuss our differences and further explore our common ground, which I am sure is quite expansive.

Geoff Berg
Warren