Dear Editor:

Marines and National Guard units in our cities; a rubber-stamp Congress; a corrupt and compliant Supreme Court; monetary policy arrogated to the Executive; cultural and educational institutions subverted; civil service gutted; military command structure decapitated; healthcare compromised; free press and free speech gelded; electoral systems undermined and warped.

All in just half a year — Hitler would have and Putin must envy the speed and efficiency of this hostile takeover.

We know all too well how Trump’s erratic, unconstitutional orders have hamstrung our nation’s governmental agencies, courts, law firms, news media, schools and universities, healthcare providers, farmers, corporate and financial planners, migrant workers, national parks, cultural institutions, historical museums, scientists, human-rights and environmental organizations, diplomats and foreign policy experts.

The game plan is obvious. Create chaos; blame “leftist lunatics,” and then pose as the strongman who can set the nation aright. As he boasted at the 2016 Republican convention: “I alone can fix it.” He assured his MAGA base at the Waco rally in 2023, “I am your retribution” — the politics of victimization and revenge that got Hitler elected in 1933.

Having taken the reins of domestic power, he is looking beyond our borders for people and nations to dominate. We chuckle at his tweets about retaking the Canal Zone, annexing Canada, invading Mexico, buying Greenland, and developing the ruins of Gaza into a Trump theme park and resort. But we and our allies dismiss these plans at our peril. The Charlie Chaplinesque Führer of Germany managed to occupy the Rhineland, annex Austria, and seize western Czechoslovakia without a war.

Admiring William McKinley and embracing Putin, Trump bases his foreign policy on 19th-century Great Power spheres of influence: let Russia take Chechnya, Abkhazia, Georgia, Crimea, and Donbas; give China suzerainty over East Asia and the western Pacific. In return, to the United States go the spoils of the Western Hemisphere.

Our only hope is that citizen resistance and international pressure will constrain this homegrown autocrat and defend the rule of law that we have endeavored and sacrificed our lives to establish.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay