To the Editor:

The most charitable thing that can be said of St. Lawrence County legislator Joel LaPierre, a man who likes to post Facebook rants urging Barack Obama to move to Kenya, is that LaPierre has lots of company amongst Trump supporters.

Meet Maine governor Paul LePage! He’s concerned about outsiders visiting his state. As he said in a press conference, “There are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty…they come from New York and Connecticut, they sell their heroin, they go home…half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.”

Let’s move on to Cliven Bundy, moocher extraordinaire and leader of Yokel Haram (or better yet Y’All Qaeda), who likes to philosophize in his spare time. “I want to tell you one more thing about the Negro. They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned to pick cotton…are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”

Here’s Kathy Miller, an Ohio county Trump campaign chairperson, who says that there was no racism before Obama. “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you.” Why is there low African American voter turnout? Is it because of Jim Crow-esque voter ID laws, the modern day poll tax? No, says Miller, it’s due to “the way they’re raised.”

And let’s not forget Buffalo businessman Carl Paladino, who ran for governor of New York in 2010 and probably received support from many of the same people that voted for Trump in 2016, who said he hopes to see Barack Obama die of mad cow disease. As for the First Lady, Paladino said, “I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

So what is it about Barack Obama that causes his opponents to say that he is some combination of a secret Muslim illegal immigrant who hates America? These are all various ways of saying that Obama is different from us, an “other,” and not like the previous 43 presidents. What is it about Obama that makes him different or “other” in the eyes of his opponents? ‘Tis a mystery!

Sean Pidgeon

Morristown