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President Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Capitol Rotunda on Monday.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “Trump Caps Return to Power, Vowing to Stop a U.S. ‘Decline’” (front page, Jan. 21) and “Trump Grants Sweeping Clemency to All Jan. 6 Rioters” (nytimes.com, Jan. 20):
What a disappointing Inauguration Day! I don’t know which was more disheartening: outgoing President Biden’s flurry of pre-emptive pardons, literally at the 11th hour, or incoming President Trump’s dour Inaugural Address, ironically promising a new “golden age of America.”
To close out an upsetting day, Mr. Trump announced his own sweeping pardons or commutations for the nearly 1,600 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, violent attacks on the Capitol, the very seat of our democracy — a decision that has elicited bipartisan condemnation.
It is apparent that the American presidency is being increasingly conducted in an imperial manner, and if it continues this way, we are headed to becoming a banana republic.
Jack Nargundkar
Cary, N.C.
To the Editor:
If President Trump’s idea of law and order is to grant clemency to insurrectionists who attacked and damaged the Capitol, assaulted policemen and threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence, this country is in big trouble!
Elaine Sloan
New York
To the Editor:
Whatever wisp of hope existed for a more rational and conciliatory President Trump was completely extinguished, and the threat of the onset of an autocratic era assured, by Mr. Trump’s Inaugural Address, which mirrored but far exceeded his worst campaign rants.
The speech must serve as a dire warning and a call to arms for every American who still believes in a democratic form of government, a binding Constitution and the rule of law.
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