John Ripton lives in Kennebunkport.

Donald Trump’s thirst for vengeance, his hunger for power, his obsession with personal loyalty and his pretensions to monarchy produce a volatile psychological instability that borders on the criminally insane.

Just consider one of his more recent posts on social media. In it, Trump generated a meme that depicts him in fatigues and a crossed-rifle infantry hat with an explosion of flames behind him, five military helicopters flanking his right side and the skyline of Chicago under ominous skies in the background.

The meme reads Chipocalypse Now, a reference to the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” set in Vietnam and Cambodia, a film that depicts the Vietnam War as a descent into madness devoid of morality and reason.

Trump’s accompanying message amplified his deranged impulses: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” and “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” This is a twisted warning from a president of the United States descending into menacing and destructive madness.

Three images of helicopters punctuate the unambiguous message. When asked about the meme by a reporter at the White House, Trump called the question “fake news” and told the reporter to “be quiet.” The denial of reality and the consequences of his maniacal musings are disturbing and deadly, as demonstrated recently in the extrajudicial execution of presumed “drug runners,” summarily murdered in international waters without evidence and without a trial.

America’s cities are also in the sights of the Trump administration. No other American president has undertaken extraconstitutional occupation of the nation’s cities. And, of course, this attack on the nation’s cities is part of the Trump’s administration’s assault on immigrants.

Not since the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII has a president run immigration enforcement as a Gestapo-like operation. Today masked ICE agents disappear immigrants and move them from one detention facility to another, interfering with legal representation and causing suffering and loss in families.

The so-called border czar Tom Homan is thug-like. He warns undocumented immigrants that “We will hunt you down.” His violent rhetoric reflects the administration’s contempt for judicial processes and its disdain for human rights.

As it rounded up, shackled and flew alleged gang members to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, the administration clearly violated the fundamental constitutional right of individuals to prove their innocence in a court of law. In response to legal rejection of Trump’s summary deportations, Homan said, “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”

All of this vitriol and violence targeting immigrants is driven by a belief shared by Trump and a core of his appointees that people of a darker shade of skin will dilute the blood of white people of European descent. This belief is called the “Great Replacement,” a conspiratorial fabrication adhered to by racist individuals at the center of the Trump administration.

Even those who speak another language and share another culture are considered mortal enemies of Western civilization. Senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller is the most aggressive proponent of these baseless and degenerate ideas.

In the 2024 presidential campaign Miller declared, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” And, in May 2025, he described the Trump administration’s embrace of white South African immigrants as “a textbook definition for why the refugee program was created.”

Miller and Trump claim, despite lack of evidence, that white South Africans (Afrikaners) endure government-sponsored race-based persecution. In January, the administration suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program that, in 2024, admitted more than 100,000 refugees from mostly war-torn and impoverished countries. Then, in February, Trump signed an executive order that “opened the refugee pathway exclusively to Afrikaners,” as reported by the BBC in May.

Trump’s racist views and policies echo the white nationalism that rose in parts of Europe between WWI and WWII. His opponents must not stand by as he attacks immigrants, rips apart families and deports children.

It is time for a new political vision that embraces the best of America’s intentions, that welcomes immigrants fleeing violence, persecution and poverty, that offers universal health care and other broad social guarantees to all people living in this country, ridding our country of the plague of racism, turning back the advance of white nationalism and resisting the malignancy of Trump’s presidency.