OPINION

Roosevelt revisited?

Re: "Trump: new 'golden age' ", (BP, Jan 22).

One is glad to see the words "golden age" in the headline with quotation marks. America deserves President Donald Trump since its voters have spoken.

But the world does not deserve his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the WHO, or the declaration that henceforth all official documents in the US will rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Those famous words of President Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow Republican, that "no one is above the law" were uprooted by President Trump as he granted mass pardons for the Jan 6 defendants and others on day one of assuming office.

Historians rank Teddy Roosevelt as the greatest American president.

Will the current president be eventually be ranked likewise? Time will tell!

Clocking hypocrisy

Re: "TikTok ban reveals a broken system", (Opinion, Jan 22).

It's amazing that no one points out China's hypocrisy in its self-righteous raging against America's banning of its TikTok.

Not only have other countries already banned TikTok, but guess which is the largest and most powerful country to have done so?

Alas, no joke, just the ironic truth: China! Yes, that's right. China itself has banned TikTok!

There, the world-famous social media platform -- owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance -- is operated differently under the name Douyin, separately from the international version. It also has different content libraries and databases due to China's internet censorship policies.

A successful dictatorship can't allow free speech and unbound criticism within its borders, that is, TikTok.

But exporting TikTok as a tool for profiting from and spying on democracies -- that's not just OK, that's great!

Cult of Trump

Re: "A case of TDS", (PostBag, Jan 21).

Jan Meyer urges people to "accept the will of the vast majority" in the last election and "get on with life".

I do accept that Donald Trump won the recent US election, but I don't accept the premise that his win reflects the will of "the vast majority". Mr Trump won only 49.8% of the popular vote, fewer than half the total votes cast.

This means more people voted for other candidates (either Kamala Harris or one of the alternative party candidates) than voted for Mr Trump. Mr Trump bested Ms Harris by slightly more than 2 million votes, out of 152 million cast -- hardly a rousing margin.

Moreover, 36% of eligible voters (or about 90 million people) didn't bother to cast votes at all -- many of them undoubtedly not enthusiastic about the proposed Trump agenda.

Taken together, it is highly misleading to claim that the vast majority of Americans voted in support of Donald Trump's so-called qualifications and policies.

Those unsupportive of his right-wing agenda have every right to oppose and undercut it rather than simply accepting it and "getting on with life".