We are past the point at which Donald Trump's qualifications were the issue. It now seems abundantly clear that it is his sanity that voters should be questioning. He thinks that without voter fraud of some sort, he is sure to win the presidential election in Pennsylvania. He thinks that Barrack Obama founded ISIL, and that Hillary Clinton was his henchman. He thinks that he can make Mexico build a multibillion dollar wall all along their border with the United States. He has never categorically disavowed his "birther" claims about The President. All that could just be political hyperbole meant to appeal to a "true believer" class of voters as ignorant as he is. But every time he says something outlandish--and usually he insists on repeating it for several days before someone advises him against it behind closed doors, or in one recent instance on the radio--he denies that he meant what he said and he expects to be believed not just on that point, but with regard to the next outlandish thing he says. This time, with the ISIL founder thing, even an ally tried to get him to temper the remark with a colorably sane, albeit factually erroneous rationale on his conservative talk-radio show. But Trump spurned the effort to throw him a life-line and insisted that he meant the claim literally...and everyone heard it on the evening news that night. The next day, he started claiming that the news media were persecuting him because he was being sarcastic...even though when that was offered as an explanation he categorically rejected it, insisting that it wasn't just that current policy toward ISIL that he was talking about. He said, "I disagree," when the host tried to rationalize Trump's outlandish demagoguery away by offering that explanation to him. Trump insisted that he meant what he said literally, and that it should be taken that way. That is insane. We all heard him say that he meant what he said, and we heard him say that he wasn't speaking metaphorically. Are we now to believe that he didn't say what he said...or that we misinterpreted his remarks? Are we all part of the media conspiracy against him? That kind of absurd paranoia qualifies as insanity in my mind, and because Trump also hints that some 2nd Amendment nut might just want to do something about Hillary Clinton, implying something that the Secret Service then warned him about implying, I think he is a candidate for involuntary commitment because he is dangerous. How dangerous? Let me give you a couple of examples of the kinds of things his supporters do and say in response to his dangerous rants.
I saw film--that is, there was film on the evening news--of one of his rallies, which in this case was attended by what looked to be a ten or eleven year old boy. The boy stood with his arms in the air waving a placard that said, "GUT THE BITCH." Some Trump supporter not only said such a thing within earshot of his young son, he allowed that young son to create a sign proclaiming that sentiment, and then allowed him to come to a rally of reactionary whackos like himself at a Trump whistle stop and show the world that he thought Hillary Clinton should be gutted. And then, just last weekend at one of Trump's rallies, an older man stuck his face in a television camera after Trump had accused the media of conspiring against him, and with a possessed looking rave accused the cameraman of being "a traitor." I doubt that it was the same guy, but he looked like an older man who had shoved a forearm into the jaw of a protestor being ejected from a Trump rally several months ago. Trump never reproaches the perpetrators of these questionable-at-best rants, and certainly never repudiates them. In fact, Trump seems to be energized by them. He feeds off them. Lest you think my suggestion that he be committed is disproportionate to the threat he represents, or that I'm just being sarcastic, consider Hitler.
After World War I, the allied countries that had defeated Kaiser Wilhelm in his attempt to take over the world imposed on Germany a surrender treaty that effectively crippled Germany economically in the course of insuring that the German's couldn't mount a renewed offensive against the rest of Europe and the world. Inflation, economic stagnation, unemployment and desperation followed, from which Hitler emerged with a nationalist policy that the German people couldn't resist. His rants against the Jews were a little like Trump's rants against Mexicans, Syrians and Muslims. The policies Trump advocates are redolent of Hitler's agenda, namely nationalism, racism, religious exclusivity and scorn for the physically and mentally disabled, all of which ended up inflicting on the subject populations everything from sterilization to extermination, all toward the end of extirpation of their kind in Nazi Germany...toward the end of making Germany great again. Try to think of one of those things that Trump hasn't paralleled, albeit subtly, with one or more of his publicly uttered remarks. And given the zeal of his followers, who can give the nation the assurance that none of those things could happen here.
Donald Trump is no longer the clown. He is no longer the blatherskite. He is no longer the blustering buffoon. Donald Trump is messianic and paranoid. And because of his belief in those terrible concepts that, in their abhorantly refined form manifested themselves as the Nazi ethos that cost tens of millions of lives across the world prior to and during World War II, Trump is a threat to the American way of life...a danger to everyone.
Your friend,
Mike
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