Donald Trump is the butt of everyone’s jokes, right? Putting his unspeakable hair to one side because, you know, personal insults have nothing to do with politics, the man has become a regular punchline on The Daily Show (before it lost Jon Stewart) and, thanks to his speech that saw him say that Mexicans bring disease and drugs across the border, even Mr. Conservative himself Rick Perry moved to distance himself from the Trump, stating that Donald owed the people of Mexico an apology. Seriously, when Perry thinks that you’re coming across like a bigoted, out-dated idiot, you might want to take notice.D
That, I was convinced, was the final nail in Trump’s political coffin. Surely, nobody was going to take the man seriously now, right? At best, he’s an amusing distraction as the Republican primaries start to get into full swing. The big players are running from him like he himself has a disease. The base will surely follow. Not quite.
A recent poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News has Trump ahead of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio with 26 percent of the support. Bush is second with 12 percent, while Scott Walker sits third with 11 percent.
This is terrifying, even if we accept the popular opinion that is a temporary blip. This means that there are a whole lot of people in the United States who agree with Trump’s astonishing self-assessment that he is simply “telling it like it is.” There are a lot of people out there that like what he says when he’s playing the old fear-mongering game, hootin’ and hollerin’ about immigrants taking good old American jobs. Or as South Park put it, “They terk er jerbs.”
Truth be told, the Democrats will likely be praying that the Trump will be on the Republican card come the big election. Hilary and/or Bernie would wipe the floor with the man. But looking at it with balance and a clear head, it’s frankly terrifying that anybody is taking him seriously at all.
Because he’s not telling it like it is, not at all. He’s using ancient fear-mongering techniques to generate an obscene level of hatred among his apparently large number of followers, and that is unforgivable. It’s not “political correctness gone wild” to state that he’s guilty of a disgusting level of racism when he suggested that the American way of life is in danger due to the border between the USA and Mexico. He’s vile, because this country was built by immigrants. If he’s honest, he just doesn’t like the way these immigrants look and the language that they speak.