Any sensible person with a smidgen of knowledge about Adolf Hitler’s and Joseph Stalin’s careers as genocidal autocrats knows better than to view President-elect Donald Trump as their counterpart in that respect.

So, I disagree with letter writer Mark Wood’s objection (Dec. 19) to Dave Granlund’s cartoon, in which Trump is depicted as Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.”

Wood’s contention that the cartoonist “equates” Trump with them is overstatement. After all, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev is also depicted there, and he was no perpetrator of genocide. On the contrary, he denounced Stalin for his myriad crimes and for the cult of personality he gave rise to.

(Cult of personality? Remind one of a certain Mr. Fix-It who regards himself as God’s chosen and who’s lauded as such by millions?)

Also portrayed there was Russian President Vladimir Putin, of whom, as everyone knows, Trump is a jealous admirer and whom he’s nitwittedly praised as a “genius” for invading Ukraine.

President Richard Nixon, the last man portrayed in Granlund’s cartoon, was guilty of the Watergate scandal, a major political crime which nonetheless pales in gravity to the twice-impeached Trump’s scads of felonies and his despicable incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection — a crime without precedent in American history.

Excepting Nixon, all those men are dictators, which is just exactly what Trump himself is bound and determined to become — and not for just “one day,” as he mendaciously maintains, but for as long as he possibly can.

William LaRochelle, Lewiston