Haven’t we had it with third-party candidates? All they’ve given us is George W. Bush and the most expensive, bloodiest foreign policy blunder in our history, two terms of Gov. Paul LePage and the harm he’s done to Maine’s image out of state, and now the profoundly ignorant president-elect.

The soon-to-be narcissist-in-chief, who’s about to gloat and lie his way into the mansion once graced by Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, promised on Election Night to bring us together after the most blatantly divisive campaign in memory. So far he’s appointed an EPA chief who disputes the 98 percent of all scientists who claim that climate change is man-made, a labor secretary who doesn’t want to raise the minimum wage, an energy secretary who once called for the abolition of that very department, an education secretary who wants to “advance the kingdom of God” in her public capacity, and a secretary of state who, as an oil baron, made nice with former KGB chief and current Trump snake charmer Vladimir Putin.

Add that to his ethical lapses, a cabinet dominated by rich white males, his predatory attitude to women, his effortless, paranoid lying (“I could have won the popular vote if I wanted to.”), his call for another arms race after 30 years of reducing nukes, and the fact that he lost to Hillary by nearly three million votes, and his presidency is illegitimate. That’s what we get for our pathetic obsession with “celebrity.”

Dave Griffiths, Mechanic Falls