Re: "Breaking With U.S. Intelligence, Appears to Accept Saudi Explanation of Journalist’s Death" — Letters that should have been in the new york times

10.20.18

To the editor:

In what seems an eternity ago, then candidate Trump opined that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote. This boast will now be put to the test, figuratively if not literally, in the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

President Trump (Breaking With U.S. Intelligence, Appears to Accept Saudi Explanation of Journalist’s Death, 11.20.18), unbelievably though unsurprisingly, finds credible (or pretends to find credible) the Saudi fabrication that Khashoggi died during a fight in the consulate putting Trump on the side of a government that killed a U.S. resident, journalist and father while visiting the embassy to get papers in order for his marriage.

President Trump’s absence of a moral compass and grasp of his responsibility to our country is revealed in his bizarre comment: “This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately … It’s not a positive.” He sees the problem not as the murder itself but the world’s response to it. The video of Khasshoggi entering the embassy is haunting because we know – we do not need to imagine - what ensued. We experience moral outrage and the need for justice. For President Trump, always the self-serving businessman, the problem is the imagination of others rather than the misdeed.

I hope that Republicans in Congress and his base of supporters do not let him get away with this degradation of life and denigration of moral outrage as ‘imagination.’

Respectfully submitted,

Larry S. Sandberg