To the Editor:

Re “A Great Nation and Its Unstable Leader” (column, Aug. 27):

Nicholas Kristof’s column is encouraging. Rome survived Caligula and Nero, and the harm now being done to American institutions and even to civic decency and democratic norms may ultimately be rectifiable. But not all potential damage will necessarily pass. Sadly, the wreckage of which President Trump is capable has far greater geographic reach and long-lasting effects than anything within the ambit of the most pernicious Roman despot.

Thanks (no thanks!) to global climate change and — even more potentially catastrophic — the possible unleashing of nuclear war, we don’t have the luxury of consoling ourselves with reassurance that we, and our planet, have the resilience demonstrated by ancient Rome.

DAVID P. BARASH, REDMOND, WASH.

To the Editor:

Nicholas Kristof uses the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero to illustrate how an incompetent and nutty emperor was not enough to derail the empire because it had built-in stabilizers.

Although he focuses mainly on Caligula, his one paragraph on Nero includes many unproven or untrue assertions about Nero, although he does qualify them with “apparently.”