Donald Trump and the people around him are making our country a “banana republic,” where the rulers use their position and their country’s resources to enrich themselves and their friends. In a normal administration, Congress would hold hearings to stem such corruption, but this Congress does nothing to rein in Trump’s administration — both because I think its Republican members are gutless and because the corruption is so all-encompassing there is a new scandal nearly every day. One hundred and thirty people who work at the White House (including Jared and Ivanka Kushner) cannot get security clearances — Jared “corrected” his security form 39 times — he had omitted all meetings with foreigners (including Russians.) If your news source is Fox News you know little of this.

Minnesota’s Richard Painter was George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer. A lifelong Republican, he has nothing but disdain for Donald Trump since he believes Trump is ignorant, a pathological liar and that neither Trump nor the people around him have any ethics. He contends any gift they accept over $20 is illegal. The latest recipient of his disdain is Scott Pruitt, who I think is more corrupt than the average Trump appointee, which is saying a lot since they all seem to be using their positions and our tax dollars as if they are auditioning for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Painter also despises what Pruit is doing as head of the EPA, which, under Pruit, Painter calls the “Environmental Destruction Agency.” To keep Trump’s oil and gas industry donors happy, Pruit is cheerfully dismantling the regulations put in place to help keep our air and water clean and safe. Painter also believes those stockholders affected by Trump’s lies about Amazon, for instance, should file a class action lawsuit against him.

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, former analyst for Fox News, and often harsh Obama critic, said he quit the network because he had become “ashamed” of their news coverage. He said it had gone from being a “valuable conservative voice” to “assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers.”

Peters’ comments directly targeted the network’s opinions hosts — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — for their consistent attacks on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election. He said, “When prime-time hosts — who have never served our country in any capacity — dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller — all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of ‘deep-state’ machinations — I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove,” Peters wrote. “To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.”

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith said in a Time magazine interview that some of the network’s opinion programming “is there strictly to be entertaining.” In other words, “Don’t believe it!”

Lonna Gooden Van Horn

Northwood