Since our last post 8 days ago, Donald Trump has swept to a wide range of victories on Super Tuesday, and all of his rivals for the Republican nomination have quit except John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. Trump looks hard to stop. Yet he is only averaging the vote of one primary Republican voter in three.
Also since then much of the general leadership of the Republican Party has spoken out in alarm against Trump. Mitt Romney, presidential nominee four years ago, said this, with a little paraphrasing: Think of Donald Trump's personal qualities, bullying, showing off, misogyny, greed [we might add 'lying'], and absurd third grade antics. Imagine your children acting the way he does. People in prominent positions need to show honorable conduct. Donald Trump is a phony [because he isn't the answer to who can lead our country]. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.
One problem with Romney's critique is that he may have waited until it is too late to do much good. Yet I have to echo his statement of two self-evident facts: Trump has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.
Walter Shapiro, an op-ed columnist who once ran as a Democrat, put it more strongly (again with a little paraphrasing): Trump poses a mortal danger to the American experiment itself. Imagine in 1968 if George Wallace had led the primaries. Never in modern history has a serious presidential candidate displayed such contempt for responsibilities that come with the Oval Office. Trump makes Napoleon look self-effacing. If he prevails as Republican nominee only a wounded Hillary Clinton and a divided Democratic Party stand between him and the White House. Trump is the gravest threat to our democracy in decades.
Shapiro says that Trump didn't know what the phrase "nuclear triad" meant. I thought I knew but checked--that the US has nuclear bombs to be delivered by three methods: planes, submarines, and missles. This is a Sarah Palin kind of ignorance of presidential basics that reveals the person should not be running for that office. That kind of person can't be given access to the nuclear codes that, if used, would either end human life on earth, or damage it so completely it would probably be the end of life as we know it.
John Adams, with Jefferson and many others, helped create us as a country based on the rule of law. Trump has shown himself many times over to be a sort of personality that has no genuine respect for such notions of civilized government as "the rule of law." He might not be able to even define what the rule of law is. If president, he would become a law unto himself. Nixon did that, almost accidentally and blunderingly, in numerous small ways. Bush condoned torture and Obama is busy executing people without due process via our powerful new drones. Trump would, in poker terms, "see" these small acts of previous presidential lawlessness, and "raise" them brazenly and openly. Remember--Trump admires dictator Putin and hesitated before denouncing David Duke the white supremicist. Our rights of privacy, along with dozens of other kinds of rights, cannot be trusted to a President Trump.
The deeper disease in America than Trump, of course, is whatever has happened in millions of American minds to allow them to think that Trump could actually help the country. I'm not sure how we do something about that. But one crisis at a time, eh?
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