President-elect Trump was accused of being a bigot and xenophobic.

The people who supported him have been ridiculed as “deplorables” and “uneducated”.

Do anti-Trump “liberals” realise their behaviour displays intolerance to those holding different opinions? And demonstrates their own dislike and prejudice towards Donald Trump and his wife Melania, from Slovenia?

Eve Parnell

Dublin

We are abusing technological advances

In 1938 Orson Welles managed to persuade quite a few people in America that the Martians had actually arrived, some even took to the hills, as they are doing still. It was all done through the power of radio and an adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds.

In the 1930s and 1940s a little man called Adolf Hitler took the power of the media a step further, and very successfully. Hitler persuaded millions of Germans to believe in his satanic philosophy of a brave new world of pure Aryans.

We still have the radio, but now we also have the TV, the internet and all those other toys that us children like to play with. Some call it progress, and technically it certainly is, but it is progress uncontrolled. And, so far as its use is so manifestly accelerating the destruction of the social fabric of our world, it is a hugely retrogressive step for humanity.

We do have the capability to control the development and use of technology, but it will not happen because we are enjoying our toys too much. And there is worse to come!

I think I began to grow up in my seventies, I can’t work out when mankind will reach its seventies, but, judging by how slow is the rate of growth, it is going to be too late.

Tony Moy

Honiton

Climate change should be our main Trump concern

Like many others I share the worries regarding the effects of Donald Trump’s election on measures to limit climate change. Given that he is a businessman, perhaps he is more likely to be persuaded to adopt and promote the necessary measures by convincing him of the business case for them and the economic benefits to US citizens.

Kathy Hal

Derby

What about a UK-Trump trade deal?

President-elect Trump clearly dislikes Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement. If he renegotiates it Mexico might find itself effectively ejected, leaving just the US and Canada.

We seem to be spending so much time lately desperately imagining post-Brexit trade deals. So why not create Afta, the Atlantic Free Trade Association, consisting of the US, Canada and the UK? These countries do actually make a nice fit in many ways.

Stranger things have happened, such as the election of Trump!

John Gemmell

Birmingham

Political cliches are coming back in force

I've been thinking about clichés which have entered political discourse lately:

Boots on the ground (the daddy of them all)

Impact [upon] (what happened to “affect”?)

Step up to the plate

A game changer

We are in uncharted waters (eg, after Brexit)

It’s his/her shtick

Get our ducks in a row

Precariat

Weaponise (what does this mean?)

Uptick (ditto)

Any more?

David Gist

Address supplied

Are badgers vermin?

This morning I read Janet Street-Porter’s article on the John Lewis Christmas ad.

I was unaware that badgers are classed as vermin.