Trump: the new face of the legendary Ugly American

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.