Mike Connolly is a retired teacher. He lives in Portland.

In a recent social media post, President Donald Trump threatened to deport foreign nationals who were deemed to be “non-compatible with Western civilization.” Trump’s own paternal grandparents, Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump (likely originally Drumpf), were born in Germany, with Friedrich immigrating to the U.S. in 1885, five years after my own paternal grandparents arrived in Portland from Ireland.

The president has often been accused of practicing projection, which is defined in psychology as “a defense mechanism where a person unconsciously attributes their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings or traits to another person or group.”

I would like to submit that it is, in fact, Trump’s own behavior that is non-compatible with what many would regard as general principles of Western civilization.

Of hundreds of possible examples, I will list just a few:

• He accused six members of Congress of sedition (punishable by death) for simply restating the military’s own code of conduct, which holds that a soldier may choose not to follow an unlawful order.
• In the past couple of weeks, he referred to female reporters as “stupid” and as “piggy” and a sitting member of Congress as “garbage” along with the entire African country where she was born — previously calling these “shithole countries.” The only group of immigrants he has publicly supported are white Afrikaners from South Africa.
• He is attempting to eviscerate the 14th Amendment’s protection of “birthright citizenship” along with protections of minority citizens in the Voting Rights Law of 1965.
• He has promoted the widespread increased practice of gerrymandering for purely political purposes, which would clearly lead to fewer competitive districts and more partisanship.
• He has sent units of the National Guard, and threated the use of military forces, almost entirely into Democratic-controlled cities, often against the wishes of elected governors and mayors.
• He has canceled previously approved congressional appropriations, again often targeting cities with Democratic elected officials.
• He has threatened to leave NATO and, seemingly, has favored Russia’s President Putin in his unwarranted and aggressive invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s recently released 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) states, “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity … a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

This seems like a clear return to “gunboat diplomacy” of the 19th and early 20th century, and is evidenced by his unsanctioned threat of force against Venezuela.

Trump has imposed an ever-changing and incomprehensible regime of tariffs on most of the world’s countries, clearly at odds with Article I of the Constitution, which gives Congress the mandate to control this area of government.

He has threatened Canada, Panama and Greenland, our neighbors in this hemisphere, with unwanted interference in their own sovereignty.

His campaign of “retribution” has targeted political opponents, remarkably similar to the “enemies list” of a previously impeached Republican president. In this practice he has clearly weaponized the Justice Department, morphing it into his personal legal tool.

He has ordered the secretary of defense (or is it war?) to weaken the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, firing many top experts and weakening their power of military oversight. Also, top generals have been forced to retire if they have seemed not to be in tune with his policies.

Trump has pardoned a wide range of people convicted of financial crimes, including the former president of Honduras, convicted of facilitating the export of illicit drugs to America. This is on top of the pardon of the insurrectionists on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He continues to delay the full release of the Epstein files and he has nearly totally destroyed the historically significant East Wing of the While House, soliciting huge contributions from millionaires to replace it with a gold-plated ballroom.

In these and other actions, it seems to me that it is Trump who is “non-compatible with
Western civilization.”