Donald Trump is a shameless sideshow barker pretending to be a political candidate. That is a toxic mix because he has decided to stoke American xenophobia to garner votes. Not only does he want to build a wall along America’s southern border to keep out brown people who speak Spanish, but now he also wants to crackdown on American citizens who are followers of Islam. His ideas, if his words can be described with such a noble term, border of fascism, proving him to be unworthy of serving as local dogcatcher let alone President of the United States.
While speaking to Yahoo, Mr. Trump said “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
The news outlet also stated, “Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn’t rule it out. ‘We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,’ Trump said when presented with the idea. ‘We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully’.”
Perhaps, they could be required to wear yellow crescents on their clothes. The nation could quarantine them in their own ghettos. Perhaps, they could even be resettled.
Mr. Trump seems to be a fan of resettlement. “They’re going to be gone. They will go back. I’ve said it before, in fact, and everyone hears what I say, including them, believe it or not,” Trump said of the refugees. “But if they’re here, they have to go back, because we cannot take a chance. You look at the migration, it’s young, strong men. We cannot take a chance that the people coming over here are going to be ISIS-affiliated.”
Like the old-school fascists, Mr. Trump is not telling the truth here. Half of the refugees from Syria taken in by the United States (a pitifully small number of 2,000) are women and children. Another 25% of them are over the age of 60. His statement about “young, strong men” is either based on ignorance (in which case he ought to shut up) or he is lying (in which case, he also ought to shut up) .
Mr. Trump is currently running a radio ad in New Hampshire that claims the country has brought in “hundreds of thousands” of Syrian refugees. In truth, the total might touch 10,000 in the future. In a nation of 310 million, that is a rounding error.
However, Mr. Trump does not limit his fascist-like words to the refugee situation. He also gleefully engages in the kind of red-baiting that ought to have died out when Joe McCarthy made such an ass of himself. He said in the same interview of Senator Bernie Sanders, “I think he’s a communist. I think he’s actually a communist with a socialistic bent.”
A communist with a socialistic bent is, in Marxist terms, either redundant or nonsensical, and Mr. Trump simply doesn’t understand the words he’s using. Mr. Sanders may be many silly things that many on the left fall for, but he is certainly not a communist. In a decent society, he would be able to challenge Mr. Trump to a duel. As it is, he can at most sue for slander.
Finally, Mr. Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again.” Replace “America” with “Germany” or “Italy” or “Spain,”and it could have come from the mouth of the last century’s worst right-wing leaders.
This journal doesn’t believe Mr. Trump is a fascist any more than Mr. Sanders is a communist. The unfortunate thing is that he sounds so much like one.