Re “A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad president builds an empire” (Opinion, June 13): Niall Ferguson’s attack on those “highly educated people” he knows who believe that President Trump is not only a bad president but a dangerous one is based upon his appraisal of Trump as an ascending emperor who is winning a battle with the dual competing empires of China and Europe. Ferguson’s argument, like the mind of Trump that is displayed daily in his tweets and in the media, is filled with conspiracy theories that identify China as the major villain in a struggle to the death between the United States and its rivals. Is there any way to view this other than as paranoid fantasy? Ferguson, who should know better, chooses to find a way to rationalize his support for a president who is out of his mind and out of control.

The danger of Trump’s presidency, to the United States and to the world, can be seen by all who are capable of recognizing that the emperor’s new clothes are nonexistent, whether those observers have no academic degree, one degree, or, like me, two degrees. Fortunately, it doesn’t require advanced degrees to be made uncomfortable by the president’s disturbed thinking, his lying, and his destruction of our government and our values. Ferguson, as a political scientist, should be able to resist the draw of Trump’s paranoid grandiosity.

Dr. Henry J. Friedman
Cambridge