DEAR EDITOR:

Have you ever seen two dogs standing nose to nose, hair bristling on their backs, tails wagging in those short, stiff wags? Then someone pokes the larger of the dogs with a stick, and the larger dog attacks, not the person who poked it, but the smaller dog. The recent meeting between Donald John Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy reminded me of this. Pick as you may the one holding the stick.

During what amounted to a show, both Trump and the smirking Vance, a former Marine who “was lucky to escape any real fighting (his own words),” reminded me of some well-known bully characters in movies, attempting to be real men by berating the one who has actually experienced all the horrors of war, standing up to a dictator and stopping him from marching into the rest of Europe.

Most disturbing was Vance who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and chose St. Augustine as his confirmation saint because “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way” and that Catholicism’s theology aligned with his political views. This saint explicitly said that God does not intend human beings to dominate, enslave and otherwise be master over one another. If Vance truly understands his faith and Augustine, he should be exhorting the person who actually started the war and cost the U.S. government billions.

KIM R. KOTHEIMER

Poland