Nor that President Trump will do anything to get re-elected, though he certainly will.

Nor is the problem that Mr. Trump will slime whomever he runs against, though he will, nor that the Electoral College gives him a big advantage, though it does, nor even that the Democrats’ impeachment of Mr. Trump was an amateur circus, though it was.

The problem is that 63 million Americans voted for him in the first place, and despite everything — his blatant lying, the extraordinary incompetence of his administration, the unprecedented damage he’s done to American power and prestige around the world, his use of the power of the presidency to enrich himself and his friends and family — they seem prepared to do so again.

This country has never lived up to the brilliance of its founding documents. We wrote that “all men are created equal” and then spent much of the next century creating our nation’s fortune on slavery and genocide. But until recently, no matter how badly we behaved, we continued to hold up those documents as the standard to which we aspired. And when those ideals were challenged, the institutions founded by those documents did their jobs and righted the ship.

Many voters are focused on “Who can beat Trump?,” which is to say, “Who can save this country?” We need someone who can stand up and remind us why this country is worth saving.

David Berman

New York

To the Editor:

Re “How Trump Wins Again” (column, Feb. 7):

David Brooks asserts that the election is being framed around this core question: “Is capitalism basically working or is it basically broken?” Rather, the central question that we must address is more fundamental, one that goes to the heart of the kind of country we aspire to be. It is whether we choose to continue traveling on the path of meanspiritedness, incivility, transactional amorality and tribalism that our current president is leading us down, or follow a different path that puts mutual respect, embrace of differences, compassion for our fellow citizens and the pursuit of common ground at the center of our national life.