Get on your knees, Mitt!

You can’t deny — this Trump stuff is gold.  I just woke and wondered if I dreamed that in one news cycle Trump insinuated that Mitt Romney would have blown him for an endorsement – AND – bragged about his penis size on national TV at a debate.  You can’t make this stuff up!

Trump is actually causing the Republican party leadership as much angst as Democratic voters.  You have people like Peggy Noonan talking about the breakup of the Republican Party.  That’s extreme, but even to broach something like that is remarkable.

If Trump were to win the presidency the worst damage he could do would be via Supreme Court Justice appointments.  Don’t get me wrong, this is, in and of itself, pretty bad, but it’s no worse than if Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio were making the appointments.  The Congress would not allow him to build a wall on the Mexican border, or deport Muslims.  They would be just as divisive under him as they are under Obama.

Now if only the Democrats would realize that Bernie Sanders has a much better chance of defeating Trump than Hillary Clinton.  Imagine a Sanders-Trump contest.  All the center-right Republicans would threaten to move out of the country.  Soar-ry, Canada!

Troubling Times

The Trump stuff is starting to get a little scary. He’s like a cartoon character — a buffoon – and it’s hard to take his platform seriously.  After all, other than promising to build a wall, or make Mexico build a wall, he really hasn’t said anything. If you go by his history he’s even a little more liberal than his hapless opponents.

No, what’s worrying me are his followers.  Trump’s jingoistic, xenophobic banter has brought to the surface a virulent racism in this country, so much so that I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve progressed at all since the 1950s.

Coded racism has long been a staple of Republican (and even Democratic) candidates.  One need look no further than patron saint, Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County fair, a few miles away from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town associated with the 1964 murder of civil rights workers.  There, he used the term, states rights, a kind of code for tacitly approved racism.

But with the ascendance of Trump there is no longer a need for code words.  He can vilify Muslims and Mexicans, thus empowering rednecks across the land to speak their minds.  And I’m not just referring to the South.  There were plenty of racists in the New York metropolitan area six years ago when I lived there.  Drive ten miles in any direction from Manhattan and you’ll see what i mean.  Long Island and New Jersey are cesspools.

Even here in the Bay Area, one of the most liberal places on the planet, you can find racism.  A singer with whom I worked with just last night friended me on Facebook.  No sooner did I accept her request than I saw that her page was littered with racist posts.  One showed a pair of four or five year old African American boys teasing and hitting a white girl, with the implication that violence starts at a young age.  She also compared these children to Palestinians.

By itself the post is merely ignorance.  In light of the violence and bile we have seen at Trump rallies, however, it’s unsettling.  What level of racism would be unleashed should this man somehow gain the White House?