Don’t forget the real Trump
It is a strange political season in which the failure of a Ted Cruz presidential bid inspires not uncomplicated glee, but queasiness. Not out of fondness for Cruz (good riddance to the Tea Party zealot, detested even by fellow Republicans), but out of fear for what his departure means. Donald Trump, barring some unforeseen upheaval, will be the Republican nominee for president. Let that sink in. In the wake of Trump’s decisive victory in the Indiana Republican primary on Tuesday, both Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich suspended their campaigns. That leaves Trump alone in the race. And the world quivering at the prospects.
In recent weeks, as Trump’s victory started to seem inevitable, Republican leaders began warming to the candidate they fought so hard to defeat. And Trump, for his part, has sought to seem more presidential, hiring an adviser to help remould him into something more palatable both to voters and to his party-mates.
These developments must not be allowed to lend the candidate credibility. After all, this is the man the New York Times editorial board has called “the most volatile and least prepared presidential candidate nominated by a major party in modern times.” But he’s also worse than that.
We need not dig into his business record, littered though it is with failures both corporate and ethical, to find disqualifying details. The last few months alone provide the perfect case. Trump is nearly indiscriminate in his discrimination. Muslims? He absurdly promised to ban them from entering the United States, feeding both the fear and hate on which he thrives.
Mexicans? They are criminals and rapists, he said in his first speech as a presidential candidate, “though some, I assume, are good people.”
Women? Let’s take just a sample of his misogynistic musings. He has called women “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs” — and when challenged by a female journalist about this behaviour, he suggested she was being unfair because she was menstruating. He has said the only thing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has going for her is the “woman card,” though her undeniably impressive CV was literally designed for a presidential run.
His major policy proposal is a massive wall along the Mexican border to keep immigrants out. He has vastly overstated its likely efficacy, underestimated its costs and lied about who will pay for it. Still, on balance, that idea is better than his proposal to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants — a plan both impossible and immoral.
Trump is no more competent on foreign policy, as a speech last week confirmed. In it he revealed a world view so muddled and misguided that it provoked visions of a dystopian geopolitical near-future.
This litany, far from exhaustive, would be comical were it not the resume of the GOP’s presidential nominee. The uncanny reality is not funny, but frightening.
Not even a crack team of the world’s best apparatchiks could transform the man guilty of all this into someone worthy of the office for which he is now vying. Yet a deep-seated dissatisfaction with establishment politics among the American electorate has brought him frighteningly close to the White House.
Only Clinton, seemingly, now stands in his way. She leads in national polls by about eight percentage points, but as her own tough nomination contest is showing, populist insurgencies should not be underestimated in today’s America. Let’s hope she is learning that lesson. And, for everyone’s sake, that in November the voice of reason and the voice of the people align.
The uncanny reality of Trump as presidential nominee is not funny, it’s frightening