Letters to the Editor: Is there hope for Huizenga? And Trump's 'Trail of Tears'

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.

No hope for Huizenga

Sir,

Your master in the White House has all but ensured that your chances of re-election and keeping your House seat in Congress are doomed.

You must know his abject cruelty and astonishing incompetence have already had a destructive effect on several special election results. In many of those instances, his "endorsement" has only added to the severity of Republican candidates’ defeat and humiliation.

Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson titled his 2018 book “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” It has taken a while for that dynamic to take hold, but it’s spreading like a prairie fire now.

In your case, all it took was a phone call from your master, a scant two months after you announced, to kill any dream you may have harbored for Michigan’s open Senate seat. The term lapdog seems particularly apt.

Should you choose to slog along and return to D.C., this time in the minority party, it will be highly entertaining to watch you explain/support your party master’s new war, soaring gas prices, job losses, ICE lawlessness, corrupt cabinet and, lest we forget, prominent appearances in the Epstein files.

On the other hand, perhaps you should consider saving yourself that anguish (and what little of your personal integrity remains) and get out of the game. Toward that end, what follows are numerous trite messaging "offramps" that can help you on your way:

• Pursuing other opportunities
• Spending more time with family
• Focusing on long-delayed personal interests
• Accepting a position with some right-wing think tank

The best of all possible worlds would have you, like so many of your former GOP colleagues, vigorously denouncing any or all the deplorable actions that your master — and your party’s leadership and rank and file — have visited on our country.

Richard Wolfe
Park Township

Trump’s Trail of Tears

President Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal Act” of 1830 led to the displacement of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes. White men in power deliberately broke treaties and the law as they maltreated 60,000 individuals along “The Trail of Tears.”

Donald Trump, an avid Andrew Jackson admirer, has created his own “Trail of Tears” by empowering ICE to maltreat refugees and immigrants. ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was granted $85 billion in July 2025 to become the highest-funded U.S. federal “law enforcement” agency. More funding is anticipated as they continue to trap, kidnap, detain and imprison random minorities lawlessly.

Unbelievably, masked and belligerent agents make men, women and children disappear from public view without due process or even a phone call to relatives. These secret police have a goal, from the Trump Administration, to deport 1 million people a year.

On Feb. 7, TRAC Immigration listed 68,289 living human beings as “detained” in ICE camps. Imagine Trump’s pride in displacing more men, women and children than Andrew Jackson’s legislation ever did! (Yet 73.6% of current detainees have NO criminal record!)

Taxpayers, demand that your U.S. representative and senators visit and investigate
“concentration camps” in your state and then justify horrendous living conditions. How are crowded conditions, poor sanitation and sleeping arrangements, spoiled food, lax medical treatment, limited education for children and lengthy imprisonment for all NOT cruel and unusual punishment? How is threatening to deport an immigrant from Colorado to EGYPT not a crime?

Jo Bird
Holland

Where is the evidence?

Among the various reasons for attacking Iran, the two main ones seem to be that Iran had the capability of launching a nuclear weapon in the very near future. The second reason was the belief that Israel was going to attack Iran on its own very soon, and it was believed that Iran would then attack our many military bases in the Gulf, so we beat them to the punch, so to speak.

Where is the evidence to back up these reasons for war? We went to war with Iraq based on a lie, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Is this another war based on a lie?

The Trump Administration must show the American people solid evidence to back up its reasons for war, a war costing the American people billions of dollars, which could be better spent elsewhere. Moreover, this war will spike inflation and increase the national debt.  

The image of that school in Iran, filled with children and teachers, being destroyed, horrifies the world. Those kids would be alive today if Trump had not decided to go to war, along with the Americans killed thus far and thousands of Iranians.

Trump should have laid out to Congress the proof for the reasons for war. He did not do that, but he must now show us evidence for his claims about why we needed to attack Iran, or we simply will have one more war, costing thousands of lives, based on lies.

Henry Idema
Grand Haven

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