The unthinkable one step closer to being reality

So it’s now official – incredibly, Donald Trump is the certified Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States.

This has to be the most bizarre decision in American electoral history since 2014, when voters in Seattle elected a dead man as their representative in the Washington State Legislature.

But at least there was method in Seattle voters’ apparent madness. Some Democrat supporters had chosen to re-elect the recently deceased Roger Freeman to ensure their party kept his seat in the House.

However, it’s hard to fathom why Republicans have opted for someone as patently unsuitable for the presidency as the megalomaniac Trump. Even the slightest scrutiny of his so-called policies is enough to make the Founding Fathers turn in their respective graves.

One of the first planks in Trump’s election platform was his pledge to build a wall along the United States’ border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants.

It was a policy that immediately signified the fact that here was a presidential candidate who had no intention of letting reality get in the way of a good rabble-rousing promise.

Such a wall would need to be more than 3000km long and would pass through four states, from California to Texas. It would cost billions of dollars.

The Berlin Wall that separated East Germany from West Berlin was just 150km long and it cost about $25 million way back in 1961 – about $200 million in today’s prices.

And how did Trump justify this extravagant project? He said he would get Mexico to pay for it.

‘‘I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words,’’ he trumpeted.

We may do well to mark the Donald’s words because he has a habit of changing his mind on topics and also misrepresenting facts. Some uncharitable commentators might even call it lying.

For instance, he now claims he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but the only evidence of his views on the topic reveals lukewarm support for the war and nothing at all to support his elaborate claim that President George WBush ‘‘used to hate me for being against it and sent people from the White House to try and convince me’’. No one from the Bush administration can recall such a meeting.

Another of the Republican candidate’s outlandish claims at the beginning of his campaign was that Muslims in New Jersey were seen celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Finding a witness to such celebrations seems about as difficult as finding someone who saw Trumps’ wife, Melania, writing her own convention speech.

That, of course, brings us to the incredible promise to ban all Muslims from entering the US ‘‘until we can figure out what’s going on’’.

The implementation of such an outlandish ban might be a bit tricky.

For a start, there would be an awful lot of empty seats at the UN Assembly in New York and even if Trump deigned to exclude diplomats from his blanket ban, US businesses might find conducting trade with Muslim states a bit tricky if their representatives weren’t allowed into the country.

Trump’s flip-flops include his conflicting views on universal healthcare, abortion and gun control. His views on any given topic are as slippery as an eel in a jelly-wrestling match.

The thought of such a man having his finger on the nuclear button (he’s in favour of more states having nuclear weapons, by the way) is chilling in the extreme.

So for the rest of the world it’s a nervous wait until November when the United States goes to the polls to elect its next president.

We all have to trust in the good sense of the American people to see through the brashness and the irresponsibility of the braggart multimillionaire and deny him a place in the Oval Office, although as they re-elected George WBush for a second term after the Iraq disaster, I’m not filled with confidence.

And unfortunately even if the Donald is rejected by the US electorate in the presidential election the litany of hate and bigotry that has spewed from his mouth over the last few months has caused damage that will resonate through American society for a long time to come.

If only someone had thought to build a wall around Trump Tower before the election process started, the world could have been saved a lot of angst.