It’s fairly easy to underestimate the gratingly flamboyant US
presidential candidate Donald Trump. “The Donald”, as his apologists have
dubbed him, is, after all, a perennial poser with a bad comb-over, a kind of cardboard
cut-out of the ogre boss man, a comic-book ugly American who holds diversity in
utmost contempt and answers the truth with lies, personal insults, unsubstantiated
hearsay and vulgar innuendo. As a presidential hopeful, he is a candidate who
substitutes megalomaniacal fantasies for concrete projects and blatant
prejudice and jingoism for a policy platform.
Seldom has a presidential candidate been more often referred to as “a
clown”. Among reasonable people it is common to hear the opinion that Trump is “a
buffoon”, a “flash in the pan”, “a joke”, and that he will never seriously be
the 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States. Nor, they
say, will he ever have the wherewithal to win as an independent. “Nobody will
even remember he was running,” some people say, “a month after he drops out of
the race.”
But such disqualifiers appear to be akin to whistling in the dark, and
they may just be a dangerous miscalculation of Trump’s appeal. As much as
clear-thinking mainstream Americans would like to convince themselves that a
stereotypical bully and monstrous bigot like The Donald could never be taken
seriously in “the world’s greatest democracy”, the incredible success that
Trump’s vile fundamentalist patter has had in getting people to rally behind
him is leaving political analysts scratching their heads, while humiliating
still further an already severely questioned Republican Party leadership that
has appeared incapable, to date, of coming up with an official GOP candidate
capable of sending Trump whimpering back to his penthouse with his tail tucked
between his legs.
After his comment last week about how he would impose “...a total and
complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our
representatives can figure out what the hell is going on...” Trump has managed
to scare even some of his former supporters and to change the minds of a few of
those who saw him as a “harmless and entertaining clown”. Many have been quick
to not only condemn such a clearly discriminatory suggestion, but also to compare
his stance to that of other fundamentalist racists, including, prominently,
Adolf Hitler.
And the fact is that while many people have laughed off such comparisons
as unwarranted hyperbole, they are really not all that far-fetched if put
together with other jaw-droppingly caricaturesque statements that The Donald
has come up with in seeking to convince a growing critical mass of reactionary
citizens that he’s the man who can make their hate-ridden isolationist dreams
come true.
For instance: his idea of entirely separating the United States from
Mexico with an invulnerable wall—not a new idea; the Soviets did it when they
raised their Iron Curtain between East and West, but back then Americans, to a
man (and woman), considered such a wall to be a morally and humanly repugnant
monument to a cruel totalitarian regime. Or his suggestion that the majority of
Mexicans crossing the border were drug-traffickers, rapists and other criminals
who brought only crime to the United States. Or his patently racist comment
during riots over the death while in police custody of African American Freddie
Gray to the effect that “our great African American President hasn't exactly
had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”
Or like when he doubled down on his racist jabs and quipped that, “laziness is a trait in the blacks...Black
guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my
money are little short guys that wear yamakas every day.”
Trump spares practically no one—except
like-minded bigots and radical right-wingers—in his campaign to become the
voice of the Ugly American. But while many people in the media who should know
better have laughed off The Donald’s blatant political incorrectness as nothing
more than sensationalism on his part, a gimmick to lure more and more would-be
bigots and reactionaries out of the closet and toward declaring their love for
his brand of spit-in-your-eye nationalist politics—in the hope that if he can get
a big enough critical mass of disenfranchised “rednecks” to support him, the
GOP will have to nominate him to run—it stops being funny or entertaining when
that possibility starts actually looming large.
A recent poll showed that a sound majority of
Americans rejected Trump’s anti-Muslim statements. The NBC News-Wall Street
Journal poll revealed that 57 percent of Americans condemned Trump for such
statements while only 25 percent applauded him. Among Democrats, that ratio jumped
to 75 percent rejection. But these figures fail to render any less shocking the
fact that 42 percent of Republicans responding to that same poll agreed with
Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims in general from entering the United States,
with only 36 percent of Republican respondents saying that they rejected the
proposal. Even considering a four or five percent margin of error in such polls,
that is a huge proportion of Republican voters that would go for such an
obviously irrational, discriminatory and undoable idea.
For those who scoff at Trumps televised
antics the question to people like myself who find the emergence of someone
like Donald Trump a dangerous throwback to an era that we felt had ended, never
to return, following World War II, the question is always, “What makes you
think Trump matters?” And the answer is, because his influence goes way beyond
poll numbers, shocking though they may be.
A good example was this week’s Republican
Presidential Debate, in which, with the notable exceptions of Rand Paul and Jeb
Bush—Paul suggested that “if we ban certain religions, if we censor the
Internet, I think that at that point the terrorists will have won,” and Bush
underscored the importance of allying with Muslims, saying, “if we're going to
ban all Muslims, how are we going to get them to be part of a coalition to
destroy ISIS? ...This is not a serious proposal. In fact, it will push the
Muslim world, the Arab world away from us at a time when we need to reengage
with them to be able to create a strategy to destroy ISIS”—candidates spoke
with a level of bellicosity, disregard for rules of engagement and general lack
of humanitarian values that was appalling, even to the point of suggesting
World War III (New Jersey Governor Chris Christie) as a viable means of dealing
with both ISIS and a perceived threat from Russia. There was talk of
“carpet-bombing” ISIL-held territories where the “collateral damage” among
civilian men, women and children would be devastating, and of “doing whatever
is necessary to keep Americans safe,” even when some of the “solutions” suggested
were morally reprehensible and violations of international law.
The high level of blithe abandon and egregious
hostility with which candidates in general spoke about foreign policy and
security as if preparing for the Showdown at the OK Corral—with the theme of
“making America great again” after what they billed as “Obama’s weakness”
underlying almost every response—was a new departure, for the most part, within
the context of the debates that have taken place to date and reflected the
eagerness of the presidential hopefuls to capture attention and push back.
Against whom? Against the front-runner, Donald Trump, and to do so by fighting
fire with fire.
Seen in this way, Trump has become the
dubious benchmark for just who Republican candidates figure they need to be in
order to capture voters. The Donald, they seemed to reason, has eroded their own
popularity by appealing to the fears, anger, prejudices and radical nationalism
of the least-informed and most fundamentalist segments of society. If it worked
for him, maybe they too can cash in and recover some lost ground by taking
irrational, irresponsible and blatantly hawkish stands. Such was the result
that a CNN military consultant would later tell the network’s Anderson Cooper
that the level of the debate had been shocking and embarrassing to him as an
American military officer, leading him to ponder just how badly it would play
abroad, especially among allies and potential allies in the Middle East.
Another place where Trump’s malignant influence
has been felt is in the US Muslim community. There, news reports indicate,
Muslims have suffered a sudden rise in personal attacks, threats and insults
ever since Trump’s suggestion that all Muslims be banned from entering the US.
Instead of downplaying his former statement, however, Trump reinforced it
during this week’s debate, saying, under questioning from moderator and CNN
anchor Wolf Blitzer, “Our country is out of control...Tens of thousands of (migrants)
having cell phones with ISIS flags on them? I don't think so, Wolf. They're not
coming to this country. And if I'm president and if Obama has brought some to
this country, they are leaving. They're going. They're gone!”
In recent days, as a defense for his call for
banning Muslim immigration, Trump also cited executive orders imposed by the
administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, which effectively
stripped German, Italian and Japanese descendants living in the United States
of their basic civil rights and property, and, in the case of
Japanese-Americans, included isolating them in concentration camps. That Trump
should even consider this heavy-handed and inhuman blunder of FDR’s—which has
been poignantly documented in books and films portraying the unspeakable
suffering and injustice suffered by these segments of the US population due to
government-sponsored racism, discrimination and gross authoritarianism—to
provide validation for his own autocratic attitude only goes to show how far out
of touch with reality he is and of how dangerous he would be in a unique
position of power like the presidency of the United States.
It’s easy to shrug all of this off as simply
politicians being politicians and, as such, reckless opportunists who will sell
their mothers for a vote. But that’s
hardly what the vast majority of sensible Americans and the world at large are
willing to settle for from US leaders, and if Trump can be leading the
Republican pack at this time, then the GOP has surely lost its leadership
capabilities and any claim it might entertain to greatness.
When people try to laugh off Trump’s blatant
racism and bigotry and comparisons of his rhetoric to that of the monstrous twentieth-century
extremist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini who led the planet into the most
devastating war in the history of the world, they should be reminded that when
Hitler first stepped onto is path toward Aryan supremacist policies, his “final
solution” for the ethnicities that he disdained, and his quest for world
domination, all of the supporters who turned out to listen to his vitriolic and
impassioned speeches could fit inside of a single beer hall. Furthermore, the
fact that millions would later follow him into World War II didn’t make his
objectives or political philosophy any less morally repugnant or any less
illegitimate under international law.
Fortunately, a similarly xenophobic and Islamophobic
trend in France led by Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party was defeated in
this month’s parliamentary elections in that country, despite media predictions
of a major win for Le Pen and her anti-immigration and anti-Islamic proposals—which
tends to show that right-of-center voters are often smarter and less
fundamentalist than either the candidates or the press give them credit for. It
can only be hoped that this will be the case as well with Trump in the US primaries,
in which American voters will have an opportunity to deny access to a shot at the
presidency for anyone representing bigoted divisive policy stances that can
only lead to vastly increased chaos, violence and insecurity for the United
States and the world at large.
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