Letter to the editor: Founders warned us about Donald Trump

Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and others founders warned us about a man like Donald Trump in power.

Hamilton wrote to Washington in 1792: “When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits — despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ … No popular government was ever without its Catilines and its Caesars. These are its true enemies.”

Washington in his 1796 farewell address co-authored by Hamilton reiterated against a Trump: “… cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Ben Franklin in Silence Dogood No. 9 would say of Trump and his radical, end-timer evangelicals: “A Man compounded of Law and Gospel, is able to cheat a whole Country with his Religion, and then destroy them under Colour of Law … .”

Bruce Braden

Carmel, Ind.

The writer is a Mt. Pleasant native.