I AM surprised that Donald Trump is said to be the most divisive US president ever.

After all Abraham Lincoln presided over the Civil War to stop the South seceding.

In my time Franklin D Roosevelt was initially demonised when he became president in the early 1930s.

He came from a wealthy old patrician family; his cousin Teddy had been a popular man’s man Republican president earlier in the century.

FDR stood as a Democrat which was anathema in itself but his New Deal to pull the US out of the Great Depression was far too socialist for traditionalists.

It introduced huge public infrastructure projects, extended workers’ rights and worst of all increased the power of the Federal Government.

His program is hated to this day by right-wing Republicans.

The New Deal actually worked and became one of the pillars of Keynsian post-war economics but his detractors fought him bitterly in every field right up to Pearl Harbor.

A V Martin,

Westfield Close,

Wigginton, York