Ed Tant

Athens, Ga.

To the Editor:

In his short satirical tale “Zadig, or the Book of Fate,” Voltaire describes the fictitious great lord Irax: “The peacocks are not more vain, the doves not more voluptuous.” He is, we are told, “corrupted by vanity and voluptuousness” and “breathed nothing but false glory and false pleasures .”

Zadig, the prime minister of the kingdom, undertakes to rectify the bad behavior. He does this with the cooperation of a vast entourage of the court’s sycophants and via such an uninterrupted litany of praise for Irax for all the good qualities he lacked, that after five days Irax, exhausted and chastened, begged for it to stop .

President Trump does not appear to be exhausted or chastened.

Jerry Kavanagh

Pearl River, N.Y.

To the Editor:

In a time when the classics are nearly all forgotten by the average reader, I was heartened to read Bret Stephens’s imaginative column about how the classic writers might have portrayed Donald Trump and his minions. Missing, however, was the wonderful “Don Quixote,” by Cervantes.

Written at the turn of the 17th century , “Don Quixote” conjures a character who can only be seen as a premonition of the leadership we live with today. It is the story of a man who thinks he is something he is not and who cannot tell the difference between reality and illusion. When confronted with the evidence of his illusions, he simply dismisses the reality as enchantments.

While Don Quixote the character lacks the malevolence of Donald Trump the president, his misstatements and actions still cause embarrassment to himself (that he does not recognize) and sometimes tragedy for others. Cervantes wrote of Don Quixote, “He accommodated every thing he saw, with incredible facility, to the extravagant ravings of his disordered judgment .”

If that doesn’t sound like Donald Trump, I don’t know what does!

Jeffrey E. Green

Somerville, Mass.