Political satire has its place … and its limits. So Dave Granlund’s recent cartoon about the history of Time magazine’s “Person of Year” recipients radically exceeded those limits, in that it surrounded President-elect Donald Trump, this year’s recipient, with some of history’s most notorious mass murderers and dictators.

There were plenty of other recipients Granlund could have selected without crossing the line of decency and propriety by including Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

President-elect Trump is no choirboy — and Time doesn’t necessarily make its annual selection based upon a sterling character — but to equate him with Stalin, who ordered the deaths of thousands of his political opponents, starved millions of Ukrainians, and jailed thousands more dissidents in the former Soviet Union’s infamous gulags, was reprehensible.

Then to also suggest that Trump belongs in the same company as Hitler, the man who orchestrated a world war as he blessed the genocide of the Jewish people and many others, was a grievous insult to the majority of American voters who elected Trump, again.

So, what was this paper thinking when it ran this cartoon, knowing it would insult tens of thousands of the president-elect’s supporters here in Maine, while still believing it met the standards of good journalism?

If Maine Trust is trying to create a community readership, it should be more careful not to disenfranchise many of its readers. We all know that free speech is not free, but when it costs this much perhaps we are showing our bankruptcy, not our solvency.

Mark Wood, Poland