Dear Editor:

Though we grew up in similar circumstances — in the Northeast during the 1950s; in traditional, financially secure households; in safe neighborhoods that sheltered white boys from the harsh realities of life; and benefiting from the ‘affirmative action’ of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males who attended good schools and entered adulthood with unspoken but very real advantages over women and people of color (when America Was Great?) — Donald Trump and I now disagree about everything … except discontinuing the minting of pennies. How did our world views become so different?

Wealth and power disparities, of course; but there’s another variable in this unbalanced equation. From his ‘Birther’ attacks against President Obama to his whitewashing of historical information in our museums and National Parks, Trump is either ahistorical, anti-historical, or counter-factual when dealing with our national past. As a former history teacher and avid reader of scholarly works in this field, I bridle at his misuse of history to buttress his authoritarian rule.

Childish and patently absurd use of superlatives when boasting about himself (he calls it ‘truthful hyperbole’) betrays his complete ignorance of — or worse, his utter contempt for — history. He uses executive power to delete information about dark periods of American history: genocide against Native Americans, the horrors of slavery, discrimination against and disempowerment of women, internment of Japanese Americans, Red Scare witch hunts against suspected communists. And he is leading the right-wing campaign to redact American history in public school classrooms: the children are learning, for example, that slavery “wasn’t that bad” for its victims; after all, they received vocational training on George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s plantations.

I would have assumed that both of us came of age with the conviction that “it can’t happen here.” But, thanks to him, it is happening here. And with shameful Trump - Vance endorsements, it is happening in Germany, too. Holocaust denial is rising as the right-wing AfD party gains popular support.

Is this why it seems that senior citizens alone are protesting Trump’s authoritarian coup? Do younger Americans even know what we are about to lose?

Bill Hammond

Boothbay