You can hardly be a political maven and not want to delve deeply into the political phenomenon of Donald Trump. He challenges the experience and intellect while he corrupts the political scene. We have written so much about him over the past months that some readers have been referring to our Trump commentaries as rants. We apologize for that but from every angle from which we look, the Republican candidate for President in the United States is without redemption.
But in understanding the Trump phenomenon you have to talk to his supporters. And that is a challenge in itself. Ask a sweet motherly lady why she wants to vote for a man who disrespects women and she tells you “It is all about leadership.” It is the sincerity with which she says it that leaves you dumbfounded. Hell, Trump and his supporters can leave anyone dumfounded.
If you were very generous in your assessment of Trump, you might say he is a populist. You could say this about his ability to deal with people on their level. He appeals to their emotions, be they anger, bigotry, distrust, envy, hopelessness, jingoism or anything else that a liberal abhors.
Yet Trump is not a conservative. He is certainly not your typical American Republican. He is by no stretch of the imagination a Tea Party holly roller. The only God he acknowledges is what he sees in his narcissistic mirror.
The man thinks he is smart because he pays no taxes on the millions, he parlays, purloins and pulls out of deals he makes with the gullible. The poor who want to vote for him would stay poor as he would only share the profits of office with others of his ilk.
The only political profile that he fits is fascism. He lacks the malevolence of an Adolph Hitler but there are strong similarities to the buffoonery of Benito Mussolini. Trump would ‘Make America Great Again’ in the same sense as Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time. It would hardly be fun.
But he certainly subscribes to the big lie of fascism. He tries to run over his opponents like a run-away truck. Be they the poor aspirants to the Republican nomination or his Democrat opponent, Trump will lie about them. He does not just denigrate his opponents; he seeks to destroy them and he could care less how.
If it is any consolation, at this point in time, Donald Trump has almost no chance of winning the presidency on November 8. You should also bear in mind that in the last free election in Germany in 1933, Adolph Hitler and his Brown Shirts only won a third of the votes of the German people.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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