Donald Trump says a lot of crap, or nonsense. People in the news media say that he lies, or that he makes false statements, and I agree with those assessments. But usually what it comes down to is, simply, crap!

I don’t watch much TV, and I get most of my news from reading newspapers and listening to public radio. Back in 2015, when Trump began his first run for president, I’d heard of him, but honestly didn’t know much about him, and didn’t care, either. I’d never lived in New York City and had never seen “The Apprentice” on TV.

So when I first heard him speak about running for president, and that he was going to do this, that and the other thing, I asked my friends if he was a real human being. I’d never heard anybody say the kinds of ridiculous things that he was saying, and that he meant to be taken seriously. It’s not that I don’t believe that politicians sometime lie, or don’t tell the whole truth. It’s that what Trump was saying was outright nonsense. I’m not a genius, but it still wasn’t difficult for me to recognize that Trump, quite literally, didn’t know what he was talking about.

But if that wasn’t enough, he did say two things in particular that really disturbed me. The first was that “if Ivanka wasn’t (my) daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” And the other was that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” and he “wouldn’t lose any voters.” Who says things like that?

It wasn’t until I saw George Stephanopoulos interview Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, who also happens to be a clinical psychologist, and read her book about the entire Trump family, that I began to understand why Donald Trump says so much nonsense and acts like a child in a senior citizen’s body. And while I agree that the news media should report what he says and does, I’d like them to also say that it’s more of the same thing — a lot of crap!

Russell Pirkot

Greenfield