Trump Slurs in Context--

 

Terre Haute Tribune Star, May 28, 2026

READER'S FORUM

Context necessary to read the past

Our 250th anniversary is almost here. Besides celebrations galore, there’s the retelling of the events and actors of the American Revolutionary era: Breeds or Bunker Hill, “Common Sense,” Button Gwinnett, and so on.

Solitary facts from those times are all interesting in a Jeopardy quiz show kind of way. For instance, did you know Thomas Jefferson was very particular about having his hair regularly cut? It was not a late night TV comic who made a joke out of this stray fact. It was Abigail Adams. She expressed the view that Jefferson might be spending a full year of his allotted time on earth in a barber’s chair. John’s wife was a woman always ready with a sharp comment.

But a deeper appreciation of the revolutionary era requires more from us than smiles at a light remark on a Founding Father’s hair clippings. Historical facts are given meaning through the historian’s creation of context — time, place, circumstance, consistency and inconsistency of a leader’s behavior.

Context allows us to read the past as part of an understanding of the present. Too often hollow political slogans stand in for the needed deeper understanding of the complexities of any historical period or event. Try making useful sense out of the MAGA label without historical context. If you’re going to “Make America Great Again,” on the most basic level you must ask: When did that “Again” exist and what made it so “Great”?

“Say what you mean and mean what you say.” Pithy advice. Choose your source. This phrase has been attributed to General Patton and, wait for it, Horton the elephant in Dr. Seuss’s “Horton Hatches the Egg.” Generals or elephants, we want our leaders to work and express themselves consistently. Their doing so provides a context for following and judging them.

If you read only one of Donald Trump’s 3 a.m. posts on the Truth Social platform, it is easily dismissed as a failed try at humor, or an upset stomach speaking, the sour product of too many burgers and fries. But examining his 8,800 posts on Truth Social since Trump took office in 2025, the Wall Street Journal found one in 10 calling a person or group a name such as “crooked,” “sleazebag,” “loser” and having “low IQ.”

That’s context verified by the numbers over time. It’s the president of the United States saying what he means to say, how he thinks and feels. Can we agree these slurs and insults aimed at others tell us much more about Trump than his hair clippings? But equally important, what do they say about those who read his stuff, nod in agreement and vote accordingly?

Finally, I do admit to wishing Abigail Adams was around to say something about Trump’s thinly-crafted bouffant.

— Gary Daily Terre Haute

Listen to a Billionaire, at Least This One

 [4-5-2026] submitted to TH Trib Star online, published 5-6-2026]

Readers’ Forum

The value of reading and thinking

To the Editor:

“This process [streamlining higher education toward in-demand careers] is almost a no-brainer.” – Larry Garatoni, member of the  Indiana Commission for Higher Education, – Terre Haute Tribune Star, April, 2, 2026

It’s a fair guess not many of us had the experience of taking two college history courses taught by an Cambridge University PhD scholar who in mid-life was ranked 512 among The World's Richest People in 2006.  The Cambridge degree still impresses me. Billionaire status? Eh! 

But this was my personal luck as an undergraduate history major at Northern Illinois University. Decades before the billionaire thing, this prof, my favorite teacher of all time, heard I was choosing to teach at the high school level rather than going on to grad school. He took me aside and told me this, “For God’s sake, Daily, make them [my future students] read and think.”

Teaching at a far southwest side Chicago suburban high school in the early 1960s taught me that this advice, offered so sternly and sincerely, was not easily achieved. And why would it be?  What is challenging, important and deeply meaningful is never easily grasped and ingrained, is it?

While I was working hard at the “reading and thinking” teaching task, a sign prominently displayed in the hall near my high school’s administrative offices did not strike me as helpful.  It advised the students passing each day of worthy goals: “Stay In School!  Go to College!” 

This counsel was direct and admirable. But it went on, emphasizing in specific numbers, a bargain. Stay in school and in a working lifetime you would earn this much more moola than a high school drop out. Or go to college and pick up a college degree  and with that sheepskin “union card” in hand  you too will become a well-heeled organization man.

What this billboard shouted out was the benefits of education are all wrapped up in dollars. 

I have no doubt there was and is one form of truth in the education equals dollars adverts surrounding us today.  But where are the value truths residing in the reading and thinking advice/admonition my mentor put forward?  We must ask:  Are reading and thinking served by the cutting of college programs that are splashed onto a spread sheet and shown not to pay off in dollars?

Who speaks for the reading and thinking dimensions, personally and socially, of education in our lives? Far from being “no-brainers,” these centuries old elements of thought and critical thinking cannot be weighed on an indifferent scale of dollars and cents. It shows a failure of insight, creativity, imagination and plain courage when state education boards, school trustees, university administrators, and faculty cannot overcome the wave of materialism washing over true “higher” education in Indiana.

It was John G. Sperling who handed me the  “reading and thinking” advice all those decades past. He made his billions with the founding of the for profit Phoenix University corporation. His motivation, at least originally as far as I can make out, was to provide an education for adults who had missed the traditional path to higher education.

When Sperling was interviewed by the business press, reporters invariably noted the shelves of books in his offices. Asked about them, Sperling was always ready with this comment:

 “I have learned more about how to conduct my business affairs from such novels as Tom Jones, Emma, Notes from the Underground, The Red and the Black, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Great Gatsby than I ever have from reading a business book.”

You have to read and think to find an important “no brainer” lesson in billionaire Sperling’s  response.