Let’s Get Real
Watching clips from last night’s Republican debate, I came to a kind of startling conclusion. The way rank-and-file Republicans look at Donald Trump and recoil in horror is pretty close to the way rank-and-file Americans typically look at Republicans.1
Let’s get real…
Is Trump as dangerous to womens’ health as Rubio or Cruz would be?
Is he any more dangerous to Muslims than Peter King, who urges heightened surveilance of mosques, Ben Carson (who described Muslim refugees as ‘rabid dogs’), or Michael Bloomberg, who OK’d massive police spying operations targeting Muslims?
Is he any more damning of illegal immigrants than Ted Cruz, who has said he’d not only build a wall, but that he’d hire Trump to do it?2 Who said that ICE’s job is to go home-to-home, bundling up those that have overstayed their visas, even if that means dumping millions of children into the foster system?
He’s certainly no worse than any other mainline Republican on marriage equality. Ted Cruz has expressed the idea that states can ignore the Supreme Court’s decision so long as they weren’t a party to Obergefell. Rubio is determined to appoint enough Justices to get the case overturned.3 Ben Carson believes that we’re already on a slippery slope to legalized polygamy4 and bestiality5
When it comes to ‘fighting terrorists’, many mainline Republicans support ground troops- Lindsey Graham says 10,000 troops, Chris Christie wants to expand the NSA and make sure they’re not hampered by ‘privacy concerns’, and Cruz has advocated we ought to ‘bomb them back to the stone age’. Trump’s rhetoric about going after terrorists’ families might sound barbaric, but President Obama’s drone kill lists already take out families as collateral damage when striking suspected terrorists on his kill list, and the policy is not limited to declared war zones.6
Would Trump be any more dangerous to the process than the Tea Party types that have held the government hostage on a regular basis? Or even the rank-and-file Republicans that have pledged to abdicate their Constitutional responsibility if Obama was to nominate someone to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court?
Is the way Trump has played footsies with David Duke in any way different than the last 50 years of ‘Southern Strategy’? How is it materially different than Romney’s 47% gaffe?7 Even Ben Carson, in regard to the BLM movement, talks about ‘strife’ and blames the black community, rather than addressing the systemic abuse that has led to so many federal consent decreees like the one recently entered in to by the Cleveland Police Department.
Oh yea- Trump’s misogyny… John Kasich owes his election win to “women who left their kitchens”. Jeb Bush thinks women on welfare need to get their lives together and “find a husband”. Scott Walker repealed Wisonsin’s equal pay law. That’s to say nothing of ‘legitimate rape’.
Are his anger and his bully tactics really that different than Chris Christie’s? Does he seem any less ‘Presidential’ than Ben Carson or Sarah Palin? He’s certainly less likely to try to implement the Christian version of Sharia Law than a Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum would be.
The look on Ted Cruz’s face when he looks at Donald Trump makes me think of the look I imagine on the face of someone charged with weaponizing anthrax when he notices a tear in his biohazard suit.
He is a beast that has leapt off the pages of Revelations, a Republican Captain Planet- “Bigotry, Ignorance, Violence, Anger… By your powers combined, I am Donald Drumpf!”
He’s what you get when you combine the Southern Strategy with the Tea Party and the Koch brothers, with just a twist of the Kardashians. And many Republican voters are just eating him up, because they have a candidate who is just not interested in the window dressing. He’s the human expression of the frustration voters feel when they want to say ‘nigger’ but are forced to say ‘thug’.
The next 8 months will be entertaining, as least in the Russian dash-cam sense.