Donald Trump is running for president and he’s actually leading the pack of GOP candidates by a large margin. Neat. I love outsiders who shake things up. Does he have anything intelligent to say? Not so much, no. Here are his talking points.
1. Law enforcement is not powerful enough, says The Donald. Clearly the tanks, the automatic weapons, the impunity they enjoy when executing people on the street and the ability to mobilize 9,000 paramilitary troops on a few hours’ notice to shut down a major metropolitan area are simply not enough to do whatever job The Donald has in mind.
The fact is that we have too many cops and they have too much power. This is obvious and requires no further explanation if you follow the news at all. The police get tips via the Snowden-revealed NSA panopticon and use parallel construction to fake an investigative trail. They stop, frisk and arrest people on the skimpiest of justifications. They steal, rape and murder. They do all of this with near-universal impunity.
2. All illegal immigrants must go home now – because either we have laws or we don’t, says Trump. Forced death marches are nothing new. There was the evacuation of Phnom Penh, the Bataan Death March and the Auschwitz Death March, among other notable murderous rampages. But The Donald is thinking big! He’s gotta be number one, I guess. He wants to move as many as 31 million people out of North America – on a legal technicality.
Can you imagine the economic boost from 31 million government-mandated or -financed plane, train and bus tickets? Paul Krugman is kicking himself for not thinking of it first! And better make those tickets round-trip because The Donald will ramp up a contractor-led administrative process to bring most of the undocumented immigrants back again – with the right paperwork this time.
This is not just ludicrous. It’s fascist, in every sense of the word. It would imply wholesale destruction of property, economic upheaval and, inevitably, loss of life. But it sure would keep the contractors well-paid until the next war comes along.
He wants a border fence, too. Mexico, he promises, will foot the bill.
3. All the jobs have gone to China. That’s the same place where they are automating factories and laying people off. But, really, all the jobs are still going there. Donald says so. Not to the illegal immigrants! To China. Get it straight.
4. The Donald will make the country “great again.” Right.
Candidate Donald Trump sounds like an old school, law-and-order Republican mayor, someone like Philadelphia cop turned mayor, Frank Rizzo. More cops, get them dirty immigrants outta here and get our jobs back from China. This is the same kind of small-minded, break-with-reality nonsense that ignorant populists have been spewing for 40+ years. These pat answers are no more relevant or appropriate today than they were last century. But they have grown more dangerous.
To wrap up this foray into Trump’s delusional dreams of power, he claims that his opponents in the Republican primary are beholden to special interests but that he isn’t because he is self-funded. In fact, he admits that he is a special interest, since he has donated to politicians in the past and manipulated them to serve his interests. He even boasts about how easy it was.
There’s one good reason to vote for Donald Trump: cut the middleman out of the equation. Let’s hand politics straight over to the special interests. It won’t be cheaper but it might be more honest.
Photo by Fox.
