Dear Editor,

I am writing this on Monday and the State of the Union speech is (tonight) on Tuesday night. I will not be watching the SOTU speech for two reasons:

1) The man who sits in the oval office is illegitimate. We now know that at least 20 people who either are or were in his administration conspired with the Russians to swing the elections, especially in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Russian hackers such as “Cozy Bear” stole memos and emails from the DNC and cutout “Guccifer 2.0” passed this material onto Wikileaks. The dissemination of these materials to susceptible voters was guided by Cambridge Analytica and Jared Kushner’s data analysis organization. Hundreds of thousands of Russian “Bots” pushed and amplified actual and “doctored” DNC information through the social media platforms of Facebook and Twitter. Trump won these three states by a margin of 73k votes. That number of people could fit in a medium sized college football stadium. And may I remind you that he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes or approximately the population of Kansas!

2) The man who sits in the oval office does not tell the truth. At the meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Trump bragged that he “created more jobs in his first term than President Obama ever did. In fact President Obama created more jobs in each of the six years from 2011 to 2016 than Trump did in 2017. He also claimed that GDP growth in 2017 was greater than in Obama’s term. Another lie. Growth in 2017 (+2.6 percent) was almost precisely equal to growth in the economy in the years 2010-2016. In an impromptu “presser” when asked if he was going to fire Bob Mueller he replied “fake news” and that “he’d never thought of it.” We now know that was a lie. In June of 2016 he was so enraged by the Mueller investigation that he ordered him fired and was only dissuaded by White House Counsel Don McGahn, who threatened to quit if the president went through with it.

So the man is illegitimate and he lies incessantly. Some may think that these are not reasons enough for refusing to watch his SOTU speech, but they are good enough for me.

Jim Porter

Danville