Add another date history will remember: the day justice finally came for Donald Trump | Opinion

Monumental day

Aug. 3, 2023, marked a monumental and historic day in U.S. history. Donald Trump was criminally charged for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost. A grand jury accused Trump of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to deprive the American people of their right to vote and to have their votes counted. Finally!

Many of us remember where we were when significant historic events occurred. I will never forget the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but now I will remember Aug. 3 for the date that Trump was indicted for the third time, the most important trial in U.S. history began and the first former U.S. president was arraigned.

All his life, Trump has been a con artist, cheater, scammer, snake oil salesman and grifter. He ran for president to continue his corruption, line his pockets and use presidential immunity to cover his crimes.

His four years of extensive criminality, corruption and immorality should prevent him from ever holding office again. No one is above the law, so he must be held to account. His one term left a dark stain on our nation.

- Ann Geraughty, Overland Park

Hawley’s duty

Mere hours after a new superseding indictment in the Mar-a-Lago secret documents case was revealed, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley appeared on Fox News and said, “We cannot allow this to stand.”

This is completely out of line. It ignores the notion of separation of powers that is baked into the Constitution. It aligns him solidly with extremist MAGA House members whose idea of governance is to burn things down if they don’t get their way, and it demeans the dignity of his office.

However, we get it that the GOP feels it must do something about the albatross known as Donald Trump. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but in his case, publicly available evidence — including 40 years of sketchy business practices — hints that the scope and duration of his lawbreaking behavior is such that if he were a flood or a blizzard, he would likely be classified as a 500-year event.

Considering that temperatures around the country the past month have been the hottest ever recorded, it seems that Sen. Hawley could better use his time undoing the roadblocks his party created the past several decades to stymie efforts to counter the effects of climate change.

- Tracy Leonard, Kansas City

Workers hurt

Some are unhappy or shocked about the shutdown of Yellow Corp., formerly known as YRC. (Aug. 1, 1A, “Yellow trucking, with Johnson County operation, is closing”) Others of us are outraged.

The company received a $700 million loan from the federal government, despite having $1.5 billion in outstanding debt. It has left 30,000 employees and their families nationwide, including 990 locally, without employment and benefits. Many (including a widowed neighbor of mine) were left without health care benefits effective Aug. 5. Ask anyone how they would cover scheduled medical care or appointments suddenly without insurance.

Were these people and families considered by the top-level decision-makers? Were those decision-makers left without their health care benefits, retirement packages and golden parachutes?

I am so sad, disappointed and angry with this corporate behavior.

- Marianne L. Horned, Kansas City

There’s no need

Look at the Mission Gateway disaster: A perfectly good, relatively new building (which had been almost totally refurbished in 1989) was judged obsolete by East Coast developers who obviously didn’t know what on Earth they were doing. (July 19, 1A, “Johnson County city pulls funding for plagued Mission Gateway”) They made grandiose plans for luxury apartments and entertainment facilities, which would only be possible with huge government financial assistance and a lot of private money that the developers didn’t have.

The truth is, and the reason the Mission Gateway hasn’t been built, is that there is absolutely no need for what the proposed project would provide. Another truth is that the demolished Mission Mall should have been repurposed as a satellite campus for Johnson County Community College.

It required enormous amounts of labor and energy to manufacture the steel, concrete and other materials to build Mission Mall, and even more labor and energy to build the failed new development. And it was all thrown away for an ill-conceived idea fueled by nothing more than a desire for big profits.

P.S. Let’s not let John Sherman throw away Kaufman Stadium like Tom Valenti and Allen Gross did with the Mission Mall. Kansas City doesn’t need a new baseball stadium any more than Mission needed the Gateway project.

- Rick Witkowski, Kansas City

Pick and choose?

If the Catholic Church is really interested in punishing those who do not support its every last tenet, when was the last time you heard of an expulsion from a school or congregation because someone believed in capital punishment in opposition to the church’s teachings?

What about those who do not feed the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick and infirm, and shelter the homeless — in other words, following the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount?

- Mark Flynn, Seahurst, Washington

Deflect much?

I find it interesting that nowhere in Chris Talgo’s commentary “Unwarranted charges demonstrate two-tiered justice system” (Aug. 4, eEdition Xtra Opinion, Page 3) does he rebut any of the multiple charges against Donald Trump.

Instead, the editorial director for the Heartland Institute — a so-called “think tank” that denies the harms of smoking tobacco and climate change — regurgitates the same old lines that the charges are political and that the Justice Department, New York City district attorney and others should prosecute Hunter Biden.

Fair enough. If Hunter Biden is guilty, put him in jail. But don’t try to deflect by using that as a reason not to believe that Trump may also be guilty of numerous crimes.

Where are the arguments that the charges against Trump are not valid? I suspect it’s because there aren’t any.

- Barbara Scott, Lenexa

The right term

A nation unwilling or unable to effectively regulate the public use of weapons of war such as the semiautomatic AR-15 rifle is said to be espousing Free Dumb.

- Phil Anderson, Manhattan

Firearm realities

Gun regulation will not decrease the number of shootings in the U.S. With the accessibility of advanced manufacturing tools, it will be increasingly impossible to keep guns out of the wrong hands. With the creation of 3D printers, it has been proven that any average person can gain access to the design files for a working firearm. Also, because of the high price of commercial firearms and the declining cost of machines capable of making them at home, it may even be easier to acquire an illegal firearm than a legal one in the near future.

For these reasons, gun restriction should not be increased, because the last thing we should want in our society is all the criminals equipped with guns and very few of the well-meaning citizens owning the appropriate firearms to defend themselves.

- Joshua Lettow, Leawood

Ask questions

It is always helpful to meet school board candidates in person. If possible, attend a forum or meet and greet.

There are two important questions to ask a candidate: What is the source of your funding, and do you belong to Moms for Liberty? If the candidate is funded by an super-conservative out-of-state PAC, beware. Some of our very worst candidates and current members of the Lansing school board were funded by such PACs.

And if the candidate is a member of the group Moms for Liberty, beware again. Moms for Liberty presents itself as grassroots, but it is not. Its members believe in liberty for themselves, but no one else.

- Louise Bannister, Lansing