Donald Trump, a living, breathing, half-sentient sweet potato is an abomination – you know this, surely. It doesn’t take a genius to see through his façade of fear mongering and xenophobia, or maybe it does, because despite his second place finish in Iowa, he’s still crushing the general election polls.
In the last year or so, his rise to popularity has been meteoric, to a deeply disturbing and unsettling degree. It began as a joke. He does this every election cycle. “Haha! Look, it’s Donald Trump again!” We as a nation took part in another collective giggle fest. Then the unthinkable happened: He gained support; he didn’t go away. We continued to laugh sheepishly as if it was a hilarious joke that had gone on too long, as if he were a lingering guest who just didn’t realize they were overstaying their welcome, and who was also probably telling weird, racist jokes. Now, here he is, finishing second in the Iowa Caucus, a primary that, whether you agree or not, does have considerable meaning.
His “policies” if you want to call them that – which are less of policies, and more of him just saying things – have no coherent basis in reality. He tells frustrated, scared citizens exactly what they want to hear, and nothing more. He is a pandering, blowhard villain out of a James Bond movie. He is a cult leader from the underworld sent to profit off the fears of everyday people. There is absolutely nothing commendable about him, and people eat it up.
Most American citizens tend to be low-information, single-issue voters. So when he rants and raves about illegal immigrants or radical Islamic terrorism, without fail, those who don’t bother to understand the nuances of such issues take his propaganda at face value. It’s fear mongering, it’s inciting hate and resentment toward marginalized groups of peoples, and it’s tacit terrorism.
Every death is a tragedy, but only 45 people have been killed by radical Islamic terrorism since 9/11, while nearly 500 innocent civilians have been killed in mass shootings in 2015 alone, all but three of which were perpetrated by non-Muslims. Immigrants, whether they are illegal or not, boost the economy, and getting rid of them would cause a Real GDP loss of $1.6 trillion. Facts contradicting Mr. Trump’s hate speech could be rattled off ad infintum, but this is irrelevant, because there is no evidence to back up the claims of Donald Trump. There never will be, because the universe he lives in is a dimension we have yet to discover.
On December 7, he proposed a banning of all Muslims from entering the United States. This proposal was met with raucous applause. The week that followed, there were 19 hate crimes committed against Muslim-Americans. One of which included a 16-year-old teen being beaten and thrown from a sixth story window.
In Boston, Massachusetts, a homeless man was beaten within an inch of his life because of his perceived Hispanic heritage. “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.” Donald Trump responded directly to the incident by calling his followers “passionate.” This is a moral outrage. How can we as a society look in the mirror at ourselves and say, “I want this. I want a president that condones this behavior.”
We used to laugh about him. We shouldn’t anymore. There’s nothing funny about it. The venom that comes spewing from his giant mouth every time it opens isn’t missing its intended target. His rhetoric, no matter how stupid or insincere it appears to be, is affecting the people who are listening.
His rise to mass appeal is not only an indictment of our changing political landscape, but it’s also an indictment of the direction of our nation as a whole and the values we as Americans hold so dear. The notion expressed by his supporters is that he “disregards the PC society” and “says how he feels.” But it’s more a condemnation of us than Mr. Trump that we’ve placed a premium not on experience or intelligence for a job, but rather the ability to shout insults at a higher volume than anyone else. Donald Trump is well aware of this, and has seized the opportunity with both fists. Now, he’s still a long way from the presidency, sure, and it will be interesting in the coming months to see how the rest of state primaries unravel. After all, it’s really up to us, the voters, whether we let him into the Executive Office or not.
