He’s vulgar, vain and obnoxious. But refusing to take Trump seriously would be infantile folly
Mightthebouf fan th aired Right-wing oddball Donald trump be the next President of the United States? Could his finger be hovering above the nuclear button one day quite soon?
For months, high-minded people on both sides of the Atlantic have scoffed at the very idea. Americans may be strange, but they surely can’t be so out of their minds as to choose a man who makes Nigel Farage look a weak-kneed liberal. they’ll come to their senses.
Well, they haven’t. Not yet, anyway. Donald J. trump, as he likes to refer to himself, easily leads the opinion polls among Republicans. his closest rival, Senator ted Cruz — also a couple of degrees to the Right of genghis Khan — trails him by many points, though they are neck-and-neck in the polls in iowa, where a caucus at the beginning of next month kicks off the Republican nomination process.
Faced as he is with the possibility of being chosen as his party’s presidential candidate, you might expect trump to be a little statesmanlike. Not a bit of it. Whom did he choose to endorse him? Why, Sarah Palin, a former Republican vice-presidential candidate, with a voice like a chainsaw that has spun out of control, and a brain not famed for the scope of its knowledge of the wider world.
the reason Donald wants Sarah is that she appeals to conservative Republicans not unreasonably wondering whether a billionaire businessman who has had three wives and sports a Playboy magazine cover on his office wall can be wholly trusted on moral issues. Although he now makes the right noises about abortion and religion, they harbour suspicions that deep-down he may be a louche New Yorker. Mrs Palin is supposed soon to have put paid to the doubts.
All the same, it’s a rum state of affairs when the blessing of such a daft (though possibly perfectly nice) woman can actually enhance your political credibility. But then it’s equally bemusing that a man with the views of Donald trump could be heading to the White house.
Again and again he has seemed to put his foot in it by saying the unsayable. he’s gone too far, say the pundits. he’s really blown it. But every time he strays further into the realms of poor taste and crassness he seems to enjoy another boost.
AMoNg his transgressions, he has questioned whether fellow former presidential Republican candidate John McCain, who was taken prisoner in the Vietnam War, really was a war hero (‘i like people who weren’t captured’). he seemed to suggest that the female moderator of the first Republican debate asked him difficult questions because she was menstruating.
trump has also led the lunatic posse that alleges President obama was not born on U.S. soil, and he has claimed Mexico is sending its drug-dealers and rapists into America, proposing a ‘great, great wall’ to keep them out. Recently, he called for ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’.
granted that America is a more Right-wing country than Britain, the mystery remains as to why a man of such incendiary views should be the favourite to clinch the Republican nomination. Somehow his coarse populism is connecting with many people.
they seemingly like his inveighing against the political class and liberal media (which even sometimes includes, in trump’s wide definition, the Right-wing Fox News) and they applaud the way in which he wades into subjects such as immigration, which have been partly off-limits.
interestingly, there is another tub-thumping populist candidate whose appeal is also that he is outside the mainstream political class. his name is Bernie Sanders, a Left-winger challenging the Establishment candidate hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. he’d get on well with our own Jeremy Corbyn.
Bernie Sanders’ idea of a good time was to take his wife on their honeymoon to the Soviet Union, a country in which he had a not unsympathetic interest, as he also had in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
he is anti-big business, against foreign interventions, protaxing large companies more, and in favour of an NhS-style healthcare system in America. he frets about increasing inequalities, and strikes a chord with many middle- class Americans when he rightly says average real wages are lower than they were 40 years ago.
Although Sanders is behind Mrs Clinton in national polls, he is closing the gap in iowa, and is far ahead of her in New hampshire, which holds its primary eight days later. it seems unlikely that so Left-wing a candidate will get the Democratic nomination, but it’s not impossible. Mrs Clinton has several skeletons in her closet, not least her husband Bill, around whom allegations of former sexual misconduct still swirl.
imagine a contest in which the two outsiders trump and Sanders, strikingly divergent but also oddly similar, were pitted against each other in a final showdown this November. According to one recent poll, Sanders would win comfortably in such an eventuality. President Bernie Sanders! our Jeremy would be on the first plane to congratulate him (economy class, of course).
My guess is that this outcome will not happen, and that on the Democratic side hillary Clinton will prevail. But no one can be sure. Something unprecedented is going on when two antiEstablishment candidates are riding so high in the polls.
ThE tide of disenchantment which is flowing away from the mainstream parties in Spain, italy, France and elsewhere in Europe, and throwing up populist politicians who take on the status quo, is now sweeping all before it in the United States.
And however misguided both Sanders and trump may be, it is not hard to see their appeal. they are not grey, machine politicians who pour over focus group findings before they dare open their mouths, and then weigh every word. they speak their minds.
if it could be President Sanders, it could just as easily — more easily, perhaps — be President trump. that being the case, it seems particularly idiotic for some on the Left to try to ban him from setting foot in Britain owing to his allegedly racist remarks about Muslims.
on Monday, some 50 MPs with nothing better to do debated whether he should be banned from Britain, though no vote was taken. SNP members, who specialise in infantile gesture politics, made the running.
it seems to me pretty pathetic to try to ban someone from entering your country just because you disagree with his views. When that person could conceivably be the next President of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, such posturing borders on the suicidal.
however, i don’t suppose a single over- excited SNP or Labour MP raised an eyebrow at the news that, as they laid into trump, an ex President of the Maldives serving 13 years for terror offences was on his way to Britain. Mohamed Nasheed had been temporarily released from jail to receive medical treatment here.
Donald J. trump may be obnoxious and vulgar and absurd, but no one has ever accused him of terrorism. Let’s engage with him. Maybe he’s better than he seems. though we may hope he isn’t the next President of the United States, it’s time we faced up to the possibility that he could be.