SIR – I suspect your post bag is bulging with responses to Theresa Heaney’s letter published in The Southern Star in defence of Donald Trump. May I offer one more for your stack?
These words from Judge Stephanos Bibas of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals (who was himself appointed by Donald Trump) are perhaps the most apposite response to her misguided contention that Trump is entitled, apparently as of right, to make claims of voter fraud and that we should withhold condemnation of him for so doing until the last claim he makes is dismissed.
This is how the Judge dismissed Trump’s lawsuit in Pennsylvania; ‘Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here’.
Trump’s response to losing the election constituted the reverse of this process: he made the allegations of fraud and then sought proof. The slew of cases he has lost, of which this scathing judgment is but one, shows he had no justification whatsoever for making those claims. He is simply, as our friends on the other side of the Atlantic would put it, ‘a sore loser’.
Apologists of Trump do not serve the interests of democracy as Theresa Heaney claims to do. Quite the opposite: they provide oxygen to a stranger to the truth who does not deserve it.
Jeremy Cahill,
Knockroe,Kilcrohane.
*****
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