The current president undoes our place in the world, every day – Daily News

When everything exploding out of the White House as if from a busted sewer line is bad — and yes, letter-writers, I do mean everything — there can be a tendency to want to point to the smaller bad things, the ones that don’t make the front pages because of all the big, bad things.

For instance, out of all the lousy, I’ve been a bit fixated on the nutty firing of one of the most obscure major figures in the federal government, Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, on Feb. 7, a decision for which the current president gave no reasons.

He didn’t have to. While this is an apolitical post overseeing an apolitical agency, the current president when running for office didn’t like the fact that since the job of the the National Archives and Records Administration is to preserve and provide access to the essential records of the federal government, the agency was involved in the effort to reclaim classified records from his Florida home, in the same manner it was involved in reclaiming classified records from Joe Biden’s Delaware home.

“We believe the removal of AOTUS with no stated cause does harm to our nation and its people,” the gloriously nerdy Society of American Archivists said in a statement. The SAA went on to note the national archive’s job: “preserving and promoting our nation’s foundational documents, giving veterans access to their personnel records to secure benefits, connecting with your family’s history, teaching students about the history of the United States and studying and understanding the human experience.”

By keeping boxes of America’s stuff, in much better condition than you do your grandmother’s photos up in the dusty attic.

That’s all they do. It’s dull and very important. So after the boss was fired, just to kick sand in the archive’s face, the current president fired 27 employees across the presidential library system, which is part of the agency. To make it harder for Americans to understand their history? Just guessing, here.

So these big little things are vicious, and need to be called out.

But you know what’s really vicious, and if not turned around threatens the pre-eminence of our country in the world by reversing 80 years of standing up against first Soviet and now Russian tyranny and imperialism?

Cozying up to the latter-day czar who has installed himself permanently in the Kremlin.

And doing so with more of the lies the current president has such a genius for — his only apparent talent, making things up.

Vladimir Putin is a dictator who has installed himself for life, and who invaded a neighboring country whose breakaway from Russia was made possible by the steadfastness of Ronald Reagan and every postwar president who came before him.

So what does the current president say? He lies, saying that the president of Ukraine is a dictator, and that he started the war that Russia in fact began.

How, letter-writers,  do you stomach those lies, and continue to support the man who would undo the place we hold in the world thanks to Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Biden?

Those were presidents who, whatever their differences, supported democracy, and saw that the best way to spread the least-bad form of government ever created was to work with our closest allies in Western Europe and Canada to counter both the long despotism of Russia and the rising anti-democratic movements in China and India.

Whereas the current president says: “Look, let’s be honest, the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States.”

It was not. He’s lying. You know who’s going to get screwed by the current president’s newly announced — and literally insane — tariffs on imports from the EU? You and me.

And our current president sends his vice to Germany to support a neo-Nazi party that trivializes, for instance, Dachau.

We trivialize America every time we don’t call out the current president for the damage he does, every single day.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].