I AM deeply uncomfortable when anyone says anything favourable about Donald Trump. I was therefore rather taken aback by Alexander McKay’s letter (November 15), in which he suggests that Mr Trump may be right to suggest that, if the Americans had not intervened in the Second World War, French people today might be speaking German.

There is not "a smidgen of truth" in this: they might be speaking Russian. In the absence of Allied troops in France, the Soviet steamroller, having rolled over Germany, would not have stopped until it had reached the Channel.

Donald R Buchanan,

75 Antonine Road, Bearsden.

IN reply to Alexander McKay, all I can say is that the present incumbent of the Oval Office in Washington is quite simply a complete and utter insult to the office of the President of the United States. No more, no less.

Bill Rutherford,

30 Halliburton Place, Galashiels.

PRESIDENT Trump's Tweet about the "Parisians learning German before the US turned up to save them” displayed the President's ignorance of historical facts, as usual.

Firstly, Marshall Lafayette, a French aristocrat, used his own personal fortune to help the colonists fund the American War of Independence against the British. Without that foreign help Americans would not have won their independence, and would still have been British.

Secondly, the Americans traded with Germany right up to joining in with the Allies in the trenches. They did the same all the way through the Second World War, they traded with German companies.

In fact, an American company, IBM, with their punch card files, enabled the Nazis to trace every Jewish person to their exact flat, at their precise address so that they could be arrested.

America has only ever done what suited America. President Macron and Angela Merkel have at last recognised that the only way to keep the US in check is to do what should have been done 75 years ago: tell the US that "enough is enough, stop threatening the security of the entire planet, stay within your own borders and give the rest of us peace". If Britain could only stop behaving as America's lapdog, we could join in with France and Germany.

Margaret Forbes,

Corlic Way, Kilmacolm.