To the editor: Virginia Heffernan’s column on the doctors, lawyers and other professionals over many years who have made major ethical compromises in service to Donald Trump was sobering. I am a lawyer, so I am familiar with professional ethical tenets.

President Trump’s enablers are shameless. Their willingness to abandon their integrity so they can curry favor with Trump is inexcusable. Our current national nightmare may end sooner than the remaining two years of this administration thanks to the professional integrity of Justice Department Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The Trump tragedy also includes some Republican legislators. These people are indeed professionals — after all, serving as a lawmaker requires knowledge of the law. All of these enablers must face their own reckoning.

Steven A. Ludsin, East Hampton, N.Y.


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To the editor: I do not understand how Heffernan can conclude that Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was guilty of “moral cowardice” for having fled mandatory military service in the German Imperial Army when he was 16 years old in 1885.

I hold no brief for either Trump, but Heffernan could have just as easily concluded that it took moral courage for Friedrich to escape (not “slunk off”) to North America instead of serving.

My grandfather was conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army at the turn of the 20th century. I think it took great moral courage on his part to come to America, bring his young wife and family over as soon as possible and begin a new life here. He died in Pittsburgh of the Spanish flu in 1919 working for his family’s future, not on a forsaken battlefield where he was destined to become cannon fodder. His thriving family lives on.


Heffernan does not say why she believes Friedrich’s act was moral cowardice. Can we then conclude that she believed it was the moral duty of good Germans to serve the kaiser’s imperial ambitions? Can we extrapolate from this her opinions on the Vietnam War protesters?

Michael P. King, Beverly Hills

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To the editor: Heffernan concludes, “When our current national nightmare is over, if it ever is, everyone — from doctors and lawyers to PR firms and lobbyists — who enabled the bad guys must face their own reckoning.”


Why wait? Hold the enablers of Trump accountable now. The path to Trump’s reckoning is through theirs.

Brian Masson, Harbor City

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