Trump controversy suddenly spotlights 2016 election

Rhetoric not seen in U.S. politics for decades

Donald Trump continues to go where no recent candidate for president has gone before, plunging the Republican Party — and the nation — into another round in the tumultuous debate about immigration, national identity, terrorism and the limits of tolerance.

Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States marked a sudden and sizable escalation — and in this case one that sent shockwaves around the world — in the inflammatory and sometimes demagogic rhetoric of the candidate who continues to lead virtually every national and state poll testing whom Republicans favor for their presidential nomination.

Nothing in modern politics equates with the rhetoric now coming from Candidate Trump. There are no perfect analogies. One must scroll back decades for echoes, however imperfect, of what he is saying, from the populist and racially based appeals of thenAlabama Gov. George Wallace in 1968 and 1972 to the anti-Semitic diatribes of the radio preacher Charles Coughlin during the 1930s.

Historian David Kennedy of Stanford University said there are few comparisons, adding that, in branding an entire religious class of people as not welcome, Trump “is further out there than almost anyone in the annals of (U.S.) history.”

From the day he announced his candidacy in June, Trump has continually tested the limits of what a candidate can say and do with apparent political impunity. In that sense, he has played by a different set of rules. In the wake of his latest provocation, the question arises again: Will this finally stop him? Everything to date suggests that those who think it will should be tentative in their predictions.

Those already drawn to Trump have shown remarkable willingness to accept the worst and continue to support him. In reality, it will be another 60 days or more for any definitive answers to emerge.

“This is a new campaign for a new century in which viral populism, most conspicuous on the GOP side, is the engine of our politics,” Ross K. Baker of Rutgers University noted in an email the day before Trump’s latest outburst. “Trump, above all others, has sensed this and is profiting from it.”

Even as Trump on Tuesday sought to soften slightly what he had said on Monday, the condemnations mounted. He drew rebukes across the globe, from the leaders of two of America’s most important allies, Britain and France, to Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Rarely has a presidential candidate generated such alarm abroad.

At home, the condemnations were just as swift and nearly universal.

But as the political establishment rushed to criticize Trump, there is little doubt that he has tapped into a strain of anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment that has ebbed and flowed through American history. There are a number of antecedents over the past century that put Trump’s candidacy and the responses to it into historical context.

After World War I, a wave of immigration from Europe to the United States, coupled with fears of the spread of worldwide communism after the Bolshevik revolution, led to strikes, riots, violence, anarchism and ultimately a powerful backlash against immigrants. Then-Attorney General Mitchell Palmer led a series of infamous raids, rounding up suspected radicals and trying to deport them.

A rising nationalist and nativist strain fueled by the war and its aftermath led Congress twice in three years in the early 1920s to enact strict new quotas on immigration, sharply limiting the influx of those fleeing a continent devastated by the war for opportunities in America.

Stanford’s Kennedy pointed to “inchoate, diffuse, free floating anxiety” brought on by economic strains, the nation’s inability to extract itself from Middle East wars and a generally unsettled world as other causes for Trump’s appeal. Kennedy also noted that in contrast to times past, what once held extreme expressions in check no longer does.

“We’ve known for a long time that we’re just less trustful as a people,” he said. “We have less confidence in our major institutions and our leaders. ... All the condemnation in the world falls on deaf ears.”

What once might have seemed inconceivable in political debate has become acceptable, at least to a part of the population. That makes this moment a potential inflection point in the life of the country.

For the Republican Party, it highlights what has emerged as a deep split between the party elites and at least a portion of the rank and file. Next week’s debate in Las Vegas, the final GOP debate of this calendar year, will bring the candidates together in what has become the most virulent moment of the campaign. Trump will be under fire, but he has been there before and survived, even prospered. Will this moment prove any different?